This article is Part One of a two-part series. Click here to read Part Two.
It may have seemed like the low point of American parliamentary politics when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tore to shreds—literally, not merely ideologically—her copy of President Donald Trump’s State of the Union Address in February 2020, but it’s not nearly the most dramatic thing that has happened on our congressional floor. It would be difficult to match the savage ambush of Julius Caesar in the halls of the Roman Senate in 44 BC, but one American politician came close some eighteen hundred years later. In May of 1856, as the nation was barreling headlong into the Civil War, Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina thrashed Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner with a cane right there in the Senate chambers, leaving him nearly dead. Sumner had just given a speech in which he accused Senator Andrew Butler—a relative of Brooks’—of engaging in an illicit affair with “the harlot, Slavery.” For this affront to both his family and the values of the South, Brooks caned Sumner until, as he himself put it, “I had punished him to my satisfaction.” The archives of the United States Senate mark the event as a symbol of “the breakdown of reasoned discourse.” Seems like an understatement.
But even with this sense of historical context, it’s hard to shake the feeling that American politics has become uniquely broken in recent years. In his book Democracy and Tradition, Jeffrey Stout writes that “the social practices that matter most directly to democracy . . . are the discursive practices of ethical deliberation and political debate.”[1] These ingredients—deliberation and debate—are in short supply in our hyper-polarized climate. This represents a dire problem, since democratic processes can only function properly in a discursive society where reasons are exchanged, scrutinized, and revised, and in which citizens are held accountable for their views. On one level, the divisions causing our institutions to seize up are nothing new. Political historians Kevin Kruse and Julian Zelizer have argued that American politics has been steadily polarizing along the “fault lines” of class, race, political ideology, and gender and sexuality since at least the 1970s.[2] And yet over the last two decades, the trend away from deliberative discourse toward a kind of scorched earth politics on both ends of the spectrum has accelerated at a staggering pace: virtue signaling and performative moral posturing, the outrage cycle and the politics of grievance, cancel culture—all exacerbated by our consumption of media carefully curated by algorithms explicitly devised to confirm the views we already hold. To get a sense of the breakneck speed of this cultural shift, try to imagine a Democrat winning the party nomination—let alone the presidency—with a traditional view of marriage, as President Obama did only twelve years ago. Or, conversely, what Republican would dare to (publicly) characterize Islam as “a peaceful religion, a religion that respects the other” as President Bush did little more than a year after the World Trade Center had been reduced to smoldering rubble?
On top of all this, we’re operating within a system that, unlike other Western parliamentarian democracies, actively disincentivizes collaboration. Because America is functionally a two-party state, politics has quite naturally devolved into a zero-sum enterprise. After all, there is no reason to reach across the aisle if the majority party can ram its platform through without having to build coalitions across party lines. As a result, to put it bluntly, we are living in an age of ideology where reasonable dissent even within one’s own party has become almost inconceivable. This kind of unreflexive tribalism is partially rooted in—and is without doubt perpetuating—a defective understanding of human nature. As First Amendment lawyer Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt put it, our civic discourse suffers from the great untruth that “life is a battle between good people and evil people.”[3]
So, the quest for ideological purity is badly disrupting our common life, in part because it is feeding our rapidly accelerating trend toward polarization. The demand is now not simply general support of a party platform, perhaps with some qualms, but total and pristine ideology—and that goes for both the Right and the Left. This is an especially difficult state of affairs for Christians who find themselves in a bind as they try to engage thoughtfully in the public square and to vote in ways consistent with the values of their faith. “Have you ever felt too progressive for conservatives, but too conservative for progressives?” ask Justin Giboney, Michael Wear, and Chris Butler, executives at The AND Campaign, an organization devoted to bridging the gap between biblical values and social justice.[4] It’s not a rhetorical question, and I suspect I’m not the only one who can identify with it. I’ve often felt myself stuck on the horns of an insoluble dilemma: no matter which party I vote for, I am compromising—and often directly violating—some of my core convictions as a Christian. But these are the only choices I have; it’s not actually possible for me to vote with a clear conscience.
Now, it’s not exactly novel or even especially helpful to note that our political discourse is dysfunctional. The more interesting question is why it’s dysfunctional and what can be done about it. This is a complicated question, and I am not a political scientist. I am a theologian, so I will frame the issue in theological terms. Part of the problem, I think, is that our common life—civic, public, political—is suffering from a defective anthropology and from a defective eschatology. In other words, we are out of touch with the kinds of creatures we really are and what we can really accomplish; we have subsequently mistaken our political commitments for a source of transcendence and we have begun to think of politics in religious terms, as our “justifying stories.”[5] By looking to our political ideologies as a source of our absolution and righteousness, we have tasked them with work they simply cannot accomplish.
What is needed is a sober appraisal of what politics is for and what it can reasonably achieve, which will require us to dismantle the kind of sentimentality—by which I mean our assumption that the world is uncomplicated and that our views are self-evidently correct—that has come to define American politics in both liberal and conservative forms. I’ll aim to do this through two theses:
Ideological purity is an illusion based on a defective anthropology.
Ideological purity is bad politics, since it’s making it increasingly difficult not only merely to speak to one another, but to contribute toward even marginal improvement of the common good.
We’ve come to think of compromise as a dirty word, a sign of weakness or, worse, ideological impurity. On this point we’ve got a great deal to learn from a pair of Christian theologians who struggled to negotiate impossible political choices through the bloodiest century of human history, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Reinhold Niebuhr. In different yet related ways, both Bonhoeffer and Niebuhr argued that compromise may be the only way to live a life of faithful engagement in a broken political system within a fallen world, as we shall see below. To mitigate the deleterious effects of polarization on our common life, we need to recover the lost art of thinking in degrees by introducing qualifiers like “better” or “more” or “less” into our political vocabulary.
Politics at Twilight
The first problem with the culture of ideological purity is that it wrongly assumes that it is always possible to occupy the moral high ground—and, not only that, it assumes that one’s party or tribe in fact does occupy the moral high ground on every given question. This view does not sufficiently appreciate the degree to which we are all implicated in unjust systems and structures. “None is righteous,” writes the Apostle Paul in a phrase borrowed from the Israel’s poet-king, David. And just in case we were wondering whether we, with our righteous views, might be a possible exception to the rule, he drives home the point: “No, not one.”[6] It’s a dire account of the human predicament, but it’s also not the final chapter of the human story. For the writers of the New Testament, the Christian life is lived at the intersection of two ages—the present age, which is ruled by sin and darkness, and the age to come, which has been inaugurated in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It’s not uncommon for these authors to characterize the former age as darkness and the coming age as light as Paul does in 1 Thessalonians 5:5–6: “For you are children of light, children of the day. We are not of the night or of the darkness. So then let us not sleep, as others do, but let us keep awake and be sober.”
The trouble is, Christians are tasked with living as daytime people even as the darkness of night still lingers over every human endeavor. In other words, although the dawn is breaking, it hasn’t yet illuminated everything perfectly. Here’s how the great pastor-theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it, writing from a Nazi prison cell, soon to be executed for his role in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler: “The action of the responsible person is performed wholly in the twilight which the historical situation spreads over good and evil; it is performed in the midst of the innumerable perspectives in which every given phenomenon appears.”[7] Bonhoeffer knew something that we’ve lost sight of: even our most righteous actions, such as defying a genocidal tyrant, are still constrained by finitude on the one hand and by guilt on the other. We are born into what Bonhoeffer called “the world of conflicts,” in which “action which is in accordance with reality is limited by our creatureliness.”[8] This is another way of saying that it simply is in the nature of human existence to be constrained by impossible situations where it is difficult to discern what is right and true and even more difficult to act on those judgments. To translate the predicament into our concrete American context: no matter whom we vote for, we’ll be endorsing some of our values but betraying others; every policy solves one problem but creates another.
We might be surprised by this, given Bonhoeffer’s context. If ever there were a circumstance in which one could be absolutely sure of the righteousness of one’s actions, surely resistance to the Nazi regime would be it. But Bonhoeffer didn’t see it that way. Since we are living in the twilight, he says, the responsible person “has not to decide simply between right and wrong and between good and evil, but between right and right and between wrong and wrong.”[9] For Bonhoeffer, this was no abstract philosophizing. On the contrary, to be human is to be in concrete situations where one may be forced to choose between what is “relatively better” and what is “relatively worse,” but under no circumstances is there a morally perfect choice.[10] In other words, responsible action in the world requires thinking in degrees, and that’s because freedom cannot be separated from guilt. Bonhoeffer pulls no punches on this point: “Every person who acts responsibly becomes guilty.”[11] Under the constraints of finitude and guilt, to do anything at all requires civil courage. Bonhoeffer was staring down a fascist regime, a situation that demanded an almost supernatural kind of valor. But as theologians Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz have noted, “we also need courage to make judgments and undertake actions at all, for in doing so we risk being wrong and doing wrong.”[12]
What is most remarkable about Bonhoeffer’s insight into finitude and guilt is the radical implication he draws from it. The recognition that each of us stands under judgment not only exposes the naivete of our claims to ideological purity and chastens our self-righteous ambitions, but actually frees us to be charitable with those whom we disagree. In effect, Bonhoeffer’s analysis reverses the great untruth of “Us vs. Them” by acknowledging our common creatureliness and fallenness. “The man who despises another will never be able to make anything of him,” wrote Bonhoeffer in the days before his execution. “Nothing that we despise in the other is entirely absent from ourselves.”[13] There is an uncommon charity in recognizing that all of us—Republicans and Democrats alike—are trying to make our way at twilight, straining our eyes in the dusk of finitude and sinfulness.
This resource is part of the series Kingdom Politics. Click Here to explore more resources from this series.
Notes:
[1] Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 293.
[2] Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer, Fault Lines: A History of the United States since 1974 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2019).
[3] Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (New York: Penguin, 2018), 70.
[4] See Justin Giboney, Michael Wear, and Chris Butler, Compassion (&) Conviction: The AND Campaign’s Guide to Faithful Civic Engagement (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2020).
[5] See David Zahl, Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do about It (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2019), 145.
[6] Romans 3:10
[7] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics (1949; repr., New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 245.
[8] Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 230.
[9] Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 245.
[10] Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 224.
[11] Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 237.
[12] Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz, Public Faith in Action: How to Think Carefully, Engage Wisely, and Vote with Integrity (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2016), 180.
[13] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (1951; repr., New York: Macmillan, 1972), 10.
Ryan Tafilowski is the Associate Pastor of Foothills Fellowship Church in Littleton, CO. He earned his PhD in Systematic Theology from the University of Edinburgh. Ryan is a member of the St. Basil Fellowship of the Center for Pastor Theologians.
