Living in a Pluralistic World

Watch the American political system for a moment, and it quickly will become apparent that one of the most well-entrenched camps is secular atheists who want to completely eliminate every aspect of religion from the government. Naturally, there’s another equally vocal group: conservative Christian voters who want to turn the United States into a theocracy run underneath their particular view of Biblical principles and laws. There are plenty of groups along the spectrum between these two, as well as even more radical groups outside that spectrum, including fully fascist right wing advocates and those who want to convert the nation to a Marxist-communist system.

Watch: https://youtu.be/xQtS-wAkftI
Listen: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/crucibleofthought/episodes/Living-in-a-Pluralistic-World-e2o2c5f

In short, we’re a nation divided, at least in our political thinking.

That’s not particularly surprising, since America is a melting pot of cultures and traditions and religions with a huge geographic diversity. It’s functionally impossible to gather that many diverse people together without a lot of differences of opinion.

For 250 years, America has worked pretty well largely because (in my opinion, at least) people didn’t communicate much beyond their immediate geographic and cultural boundaries. Most everyone in a given community at least pretended to think alike, especially since they needed to get along with the people around them.

Then along came the internet, and not many years later, social media.

Now, people suddenly had unfiltered access to the thoughts and opinions and wishes and dreams of a few billion other people, most of whom thought very differently than them.

Chaos began to ensue.

It wasn’t long before some enterprising software engineers realized that people actually preferred to be siloed with others who think like them, just like the good ol’ days in Small Town USA, and The Algorithm was born. Social media quickly devolved to only showing people other opinions that largely already matched theirs, and providing handy block and mute and unfriend buttons to neatly get rid of those pesky contrary opinions.

And just like that, everyone went back to living comfortably in their silos and echo chambers.

…until social media mavens realized that there was money to be made, so large follower counts were valuable… followed shortly by enterprising people realizing that outrage was a really, really, really powerful tool to collect followers, all the better to make more money.

What happened then was the hyper-polarization of America. As soon as outrage became a tool, the most prolific and popular content on social media was… whatever was outrageous. And what makes someone more outraged than having their values or beliefs or tribe attacked or ridiculed?

I’d go so far as to say that the last ten years or so has been the decade of the otherification of America. (Yes, I made up that word myself.) We’ve collectively spent the last decade thinking of new and unique ways to think of those with whom we disagree as “those others,” and increasingly walling ourselves off from our fellow citizens, one issue at a time.

So what we now have, at the core, is a society with very few truly universal common agreements about how to live or how to think.

And it really looks unstable, like it’s all about to explode suddenly, like a social nuclear blast.

So what do we do with all this mess?

Conservative Christians will likely respond “we need to reclaim our religious roots. Stop letting the liberals run roughshod over our beliefs and our practices. Start enforcing some basic fundamentals in our legal system, and stop letting the pagans rule America.” That’s a core part of the rhetoric of the Republican Party today, especially many evangelicals who are willing to overlook all of Donald Trump’s misbehavior because he promises to do these things for them.

I used to believe this myself. How could I not, when this was the essence of the founding of America? I knew we are a Christian nation, after all, born in the crucible of the escape of our religious founders from oppression in Europe and England, desperate to come to the New World where they could worship together in truth and freedom.

Except I came to learn that little of that mythology of America is actually true. Sure, there are hints of those ideals in our founding, but the reality is far more complicated and diverse, and has a pretty nasty underbelly too, full of oppression and murder and slavery and plenty of deadly religious oppression right here in our own cradle.

And furthermore, it’s been 400 years since the Mayflower landed, and in that time, a lot – a huge number – of people have immigrated to America with very different backgrounds, very different cultures, very different religions.

In short, whatever grain of commonality may have existed in early America, there’s far more diversity today than commonality.

Whenever a group insists that America needs to be remade into its own image, that group is, quite frankly, a tiny minority.

Insist that it’s always been a Christian nation, and thus must be remade back into a truly Christian nation, and I’ll ask: which Christianity?

Roman Catholic, and its 73 books of the Bible? Orthodox and its 79 – or maybe 81 – books? Amish Christian and its pacifism? Fundamentalist Independent Baptist? Presbyterian Church USA or the Episcopal Church, and their support for LGBTQ rights? African Methodist Episcopal and their support for Black Lives Matter? Evangelical churches who insisted that vaccines are the Mark of the Beast? Calvinist TULIP believers? Or the Universal Reconciliation believers who don’t subscribe to the doctrine of hell? Catholic veneration of Mary, or Protestants who insist that Catholicism is essentially idol worship?

America may have Christian roots, but if all these denominations have such fundamental differences, which one of those groups gets to make the rules for everyone else?

No, we can’t let that happen, because as soon as we write laws mandating one of those groups is correct, the religious beliefs of the other 95% of America will be disenfranchised.

And that’s exactly why the First Amendment of the Constitution very clearly and concisely said that “Congress shall make NO law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Period. Christians in the 1700s on the other side of the Atlantic had seen what happens when politics climbs into bed with Christianity, and it wasn’t pretty, and they were determined to not let that happen again. And thus was born the First Amendment, when after five years of trying to wrangle together a nation based on the unamended Constitution, they realized they’d left out some pretty important stuff – like religious liberty.

But that does leave us with a rather thorny problem. This present mess of otherification is going to tear us apart very soon, unless we can figure out some tolerance for very diverse views.

In short, we’ve got to get really comfortable with plurality, really fast, or we’re not going to be a nation much longer, the Consitution and Amendments notwithstanding.

For all my frustrations with the evangelical church which birthed me, I still hold on to some things in my faith:

God is good.

God is love.

God doesn’t need my help, or any of our help, to preserve the Kingdom. The Kingdom IS advancing, and will not be hindered.

God nonetheless invites me to participate in advancing the Kingdom. It’s for my maturation, not for the good of the Kingdom.

But that Kingdom is NOT OF THIS WORLD.

And that means that the Kingdom is not of my NATION either. If America self-destructs, that won’t set back the advancement of the Kingdom one second. And conversely, if we “make America great again,” that won’t advance the Kingdom by one second either. Remember, the Kingdom is already in our midst, as Jesus told us.

So I really don’t see how I need to fight to Make America Great Again, or to chase imagined demonic people with false doctrine out of My America. I don’t need to participate in the otherification, of helping to build up the walls between groups. I don’t need to defend my turf against any kind of invasion.

What I DO need to do is to demonstrate the deep, rich, welcoming love of God to those around me. I need to disciple others into the way of Jesus. Yes, we vote for those who we see doing the same thing, who we believe would advance the Kingdom in our city and nation and world, but we’ve got to do it with utter integrity and righteousness leading the way, or it’s useless. No, it’s worse than useless. If the world looks at my behavior, looks at how I treat the others around me, and sees me building walls and othering people and walling myself off with this otherification, my witness is compromised, and I’m no longer representing God accurately, no longer being an ambassador of the Kingdom of light. Instead, even though my supposed goal was building the Kingdom, the effect would be tearing it down. And I don’t think that’s Christ-like.

I don’t reckon this will be a popular idea. Honestly, we Americans are far too much in love with “our” stuff. We want to keep everything we earn. We want safety and peace at nearly any cost. We want predictability of our lifestyles. We want comfort. I get it; I’m no different. But I’m beginning to see how those desires clash with the way of Jesus, who constantly kept talking about taking up our cross, about sacrificing our desires and our very lives, on behalf of others.

What others?

Is it maybe, just maybe, those who have been the target of all the otherification of our culture? The ones we would rather hide away, or get rid of, or repatriate with their homeland they fled to escape persecution or famine? The ones who are different than us, a different religion, or politics, or a different understanding of gender and sexuality?

I think so. Because Jesus also kept talking about relationship, about oneness, about representing the relationship between himself and God to a watching world, so that all would be saved as they saw that unity.

But what too many of us get wrong, I think, is that we want those others to become like us before we can be one with them. We want them to be Christians just like us. We want their doctrine to change to align with ours. We want their view of sex and gender and marriage to match ours. We want their politics to align with ours.

Sure, it’s easier to be one with someone just like you.

But that’s not the example Jesus set for us, called us into. He gave us the hard task of being one with people rather unlike us. Think about His disciples. He called together twelve guys who were very diverse. Some were quick tempered and impetuous. One was timid and skeptical. One was gregarious. One was a passionate leader. Two of them – momma’s boys – wanted to be in charge of the rest. One was a Rome-hating militant zealot. One was a tax collector for the hated Romans.

And yet Jesus expected these twelve men to become one with each other AND with Him. He didn’t demand any of them to change; He simply loved them as they were, and expected the same of them towards each other.

Obviously, to Jesus, “being one” didn’t mean “being identical.”

And so I really do think that’s the key in our pluralistic world today: we’ve got to stop trying to change other people, and instead to simply love them unconditionally and selflessly. Their comfort, their security, their rights, their flourishing, need to be our priority, instead of sacrificing theirs to keep what we think is ours.

We’ve all heard that famous quip “kill them all; let God sort them out.” Maybe the better idea ought to be “BLESS them all; let God sort them out.”

I think it’s pretty clear that you can’t participate in this oneness if you’re participating in the otherification that’s rampant today. I think it’s also pretty clear that you can’t participate in any kind of religious nationalism, any kind of insistence that only one way of thinking or being in the world is acceptable, and everyone else must be forced by the government to conform to your idea of “right and wrong.” Aside from a shocking lack of humility, it simply violates this entire ideal that Jesus laid before us, that our Kingdom is not earthly, and that we will often find ourselves living in oppression under a very unbelieving regime, yet we are supposed to bless it and honor it and seek to live at peace in it.

Yeah, America has been blessed with a few hundred years of peace and prosperity (well, at least the white upper-class people) but such blessings rarely last much longer than that in the history of the world, and we really shouldn’t assume it’s going to last forever just because America is somehow special. And watching our unity fragment so rapidly in the last decade makes me think it might possibly not be that much longer.

So here we are, all of us, in a situation that none of us really like, with this destruction looming in our faces, and we have to decide how to live together. Because if we do, maybe we can actually prolong this time of peace and prosperity – but only if we do it together, for every single person among us, and not assuming our religious or doctrinal or social way is the only way. We can’t keep up othering whoever disagrees with us.

As for me, I choose to live at peace with all men, and that means accepting that others will always disagree with me – even about this topic – but what will shine a light before my fellow citizens is not how purely and self-righteously I act to force God’s Kingdom into existence here on earth at their expense, but instead how graciously, how lovingly, how peacefully, how self-sacrificially I love them.

So that’s my challenge to you: join me in resolving to stop participating in this otherification of America, and start focusing on that John 17 ideal of being one with all of our fellow humans, no matter how different they are and always will be.