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America is a riven society. Political divisions have been on the rise for years. The hole between the Republican and Democratic Events has grown in Congress, and the share of Individuals who work together with individuals from the opposing occasion has plummeted. Research inform us, “Democrats and Republicans each say that the opposite occasion’s members are hypocritical, egocentric, and closed-minded, and they’re unwilling to socialize throughout occasion strains.”
Many Individuals learn information or get data solely from sources that align with their political opinions, which exacerbates elementary disagreements not nearly insurance policies however about primary information.
So-called affective polarization—wherein residents are extra motivated by who they oppose than who they help—has elevated extra dramatically in America than in every other democracy. “Hatred—particularly, hatred of the opposite occasion—more and more defines our politics,” Geoffrey Skelley and Holly Fuong have written at FiveThirtyEight. My colleague Ron Brownstein has argued that the nation is “confronting the best pressure to its elementary cohesion for the reason that Civil Struggle.”
One would possibly moderately count on that Christians, together with white evangelicals, can be a unifying, therapeutic pressure in American society. In any case, the apostle Paul wrote that Jesus got here to tear down “the dividing wall of hostility” between teams that held profoundly totally different beliefs. “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they are going to be known as the youngsters of God,” Jesus mentioned. In that very same sermon, Jesus additionally mentioned, “I inform you, love your enemies and pray for individuals who persecute you.” Even when these objectives have all the time been unattainable, they have been seen as aspirational.
But in the primary, the white evangelical motion has for many years exacerbated our divisions, fueled hatreds and grievances, and turned fellow residents into enemies moderately than associates. This isn’t true of all evangelicals, after all. The motion includes tens of tens of millions of Individuals, a lot of them good and gracious individuals who search to be peacemakers, together with within the political realm. They’re horrified by the political idolatry we’re witnessing and the antipathy and rage that emanate from it. However it’s honest to say that this motion that was at one time outlined by its theological commitments is now largely outlined by its partisan ones.
FOR MUCH OF the twentieth century, evangelicals have been disengaged from American politics, partially due to the humiliation of the 1925 Scopes “monkey trial,” wherein one of many nation’s most distinguished evangelicals and politicians, William Jennings Bryan—a populist Democrat who ran for president thrice—prosecuted the case towards a high-school instructor, John T. Scopes, who was charged with violating Tennessee state legislation for educating evolution in colleges. Bryan, who additionally testified, received the case however damage his trigger. (Scopes was discovered responsible, however the verdict was overturned on a technicality.) Exterior of fundamentalist circles, Bryan and the motion he represented, which attacked the empirical findings of science, turned the article of ridicule.
Theology gave fundamentalists and evangelicals another excuse to maintain their distance from politics. Many church buildings and denominations pressured private piety over social engagement. The world was irredeemably corrupt, they believed; the position of Christians was to save lots of souls, not remake the world.
In 1965 a younger Unbiased Baptist pastor, Jerry Falwell, argued that the Church needs to be separate from the world. “We have now few ties to this earth,” he mentioned. The civic duties of Christians have been subsequently restricted: obey the legislation, pay taxes, vote. However that was about it. “I might discover it unimaginable to cease preaching the pure saving Gospel of Jesus Christ and start doing anything,” Falwell mentioned, “together with combating communism, or collaborating in civil-rights reforms.”
On the identical time, some important evangelical figures, such because the theologian Carl F. H. Henry, have been calling for cultural reengagement. “Whereas it’s not the Christian’s process to appropriate social, ethical, and political situations as his main effort,” Henry wrote, “he should lend his endorsement to remedial efforts in any context not particularly anti-redemptive.”
In 1973, about 50 politically moderate-to-progressive evangelical leaders, together with Henry, signed the “Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern.” It was meant to handle what they perceived because the hole between Christian religion and a dedication to social justice. Marjorie Hyer of The Washington Put up wrote on the time that the gathering “may nicely change the face of each faith and politics in America.”
What occurred as a substitute is that the Nineteen Seventies noticed the rise of the spiritual proper. It was a response to what conservative Christians thought of to be a complete collection of speedy, disorienting modifications in social and ethical norms. The Nineteen Sixties ushered within the feminist motion and the sexual revolution. There was Woodstock and the Stonewall Riots, the beginning of the Nationwide Group of Ladies, and a wave of campus uprisings.
Within the Nineteen Seventies a complete collection of points—the Equal Rights Modification, gay-rights ordinances, laws on Christian colleges, the IRS threatening to strip Bob Jones College of its tax-exempt standing due to its coverage towards interracial relationship, the 1973 Roe v. Wade determination legalizing abortion—satisfied many evangelicals and fundamentalists that their values have been being subverted, their lifestyle assaulted. Political activism turned a type of cultural resistance—and ultimately, they hoped, a method to cultural victory.
“The important improvement within the mid-Nineteen Seventies was mobilization, and on a nationwide scale,” the historian Mark A. Noll wrote in The New Republic. “As that mobilization befell, it reworked well-established traditions of evangelical and fundamentalist faith right into a political instrument.”
By the late Nineteen Seventies, Falwell, who a decade earlier had advocated separatism, was embracing political activism. Along with serving as pastor of Thomas Street Baptist Church and chancellor of Liberty College, which he based in 1971, Falwell was organizing “I Love America” rallies at state capitols. In 1979 he based the Ethical Majority, whose function was to mobilize conservative Christians towards “secular humanism” and what he later known as “the flood tide of ethical permissiveness.”
“We’re combating a holy battle,” he mentioned, “and this time we’re going to win.” He was hardly alone. Falwell counted as allies pastors, televangelists, and theologians; leaders of para-church organizations and “pro-family” ministries; Christian tv packages (like The 700 Membership) and radio reveals with an enormous attain (like Concentrate on the Household); and Christian political activists.
“The eruption of the Christian Proper was sudden,” in accordance with Frances Fitzgerald, creator of The Evangelicals: The Battle to Form America. “In 1980 they appeared to be all over the place, placing on big conferences and mass rallies, and giving interviews on secular TV reveals.”
“Low voter participation was an expression of a non secular place,” A. James Reichley, a scholar of politics and faith, informed The Christian Science Monitor in 1984. “However that modified dramatically within the early Nineteen Seventies, to the purpose that the evangelicals now are among the many highest individuals in elections. Not all of the first-time registrants are for Reagan and never all are being introduced in by the church buildings. However the church buildings are having a considerable impact.”
Main as much as the 1980 election, evangelicals tended to be extra Democratic than non-evangelicals have been. (Fifty-seven % of evangelicals described themselves as Democrats in contrast with 47 % of non-evangelicals.) In 1976, Jimmy Carter cut up the evangelical vote with Gerald Ford. Through the 1980 presidential election, nonetheless, Falwell pledged to mobilize voters for Ronald Reagan, “even when he has the satan working with him.”
Reagan defeated the incumbent Democratic president, Carter, in a landslide, successful about two-thirds of the evangelical vote. 4 years later, Reagan carried virtually three-quarters of the evangelical vote. The mass migration of evangelical and fundamentalist Christians to the Republican Celebration was nicely beneath manner. American politics was altering in profound methods; so, too, was the evangelical motion.
IN THE Eighties, the Presidential Biblical Scoreboard revealed by two church-related teams pushed evangelicals to evaluate candidates beneath the “biblical-family-moral” framework. However what was not less than as important as the problems that galvanized evangelicals and fundamentalists was the temperament, the solid of thoughts, that more and more outlined a lot of the evangelical, in addition to the fundamentalist and Pentecostal, world.
The rhetoric had turned apocalyptic. In 1980, Falwell mentioned that America was “floundering to the brink of dying.” A 12 months later, D. James Kennedy, the pastor of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and a number one spiritual conservative, informed 2,000 delegates at a joint assembly of the Nationwide Non secular Broadcasters and the Nationwide Affiliation of Evangelicals that evangelicals ought to improve their degree of political involvement as a result of “secular humanists have declared battle on Christianity on this nation and they’re progressing very quickly.”
In 1982, the theologian Francis Schaeffer, one among evangelicalism’s most essential public intellectuals within the latter half of the twentieth century, gave a speech wherein he warned that America “is near being misplaced.” He warned about “the Humanist conspiracy” and mentioned that if public colleges didn’t train creation in addition to evolution, that amounted to “tyranny.” In A Christian Manifesto, the guide that emerged from his speech, Schaeffer warned about an “elite authoritarianism” that might systematically destroy the Christian worldview. “It isn’t too sturdy to say that we’re at battle, and there are not any impartial events on this wrestle,” Schaeffer wrote.
Yr after 12 months, decade after decade, the identical themes have been repeated. America was all the time on the point of ethical collapse. The secular, progressive barbarians have been all the time on the gates. The menace was existential and never-ending. It was a zeitgeist of catastrophism.
This perspective catalyzed amongst evangelicals and fundamentalists an atmosphere of worry, the idea that disaster was simply across the nook, a way that those that didn’t share their views have been out to destroy their nation, their values, their youngsters. For a lot of evangelicals, politics turned a contest between the Youngsters of Gentle and the Youngsters of Darkness. They raged towards their opponents, whom they noticed much less as fellow residents than as their enemies. Politics turned drenched in grievances and demonization, virtually all the time aimed toward liberals and Democrats, particularly Democratic presidents. Evangelical leaders set the tone.
One instance: In 1994 Falwell bought a videotape that alleged that President Invoice Clinton had ordered the homicide of “numerous individuals.” (The Washington Put up reported that Falwell acknowledged on CNN that he had no impartial proof to corroborate the allegations. And none was ever discovered.)
The following Democratic president, Barack Obama, was accused of “paving the way in which for the long run reign of the Antichrist,” in the phrases of Robert Jeffress, a big determine within the evangelical world and pastor of one of many largest Southern Baptist church buildings within the nation. The then-president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Paige Patterson, affirmed Jeffress’s declare: “I perceive what Jeffress is saying.” This rhetoric was the coin of the realm.
Worldviews have penalties, each good and dangerous. Simply two days after the terrorist assaults on September 11, 2001, Falwell and Pat Robertson—a Baptist minister, spiritual broadcaster, founding father of the Christian Coalition and the Christian Broadcasting Community, and Republican presidential candidate in 1988—had a dialog on Robertson’s tv present The 700 Membership wherein Falwell mentioned, “What we noticed on Tuesday, as horrible as it’s, might be minuscule, if in truth God continues to carry the curtain and permit the enemies of God to present us in all probability what we deserve.” He added that the American Civil Liberties Union has “acquired to take lots of blame for this,” and Robertson agreed. Falwell went on to say:
I do know that I’ll hear from them for this. However throwing God out efficiently with the assistance of the federal court docket system, throwing God out of the general public sq., out of the faculties—the abortionists have gotten to bear some burden for this, as a result of God won’t be mocked. And once we destroy 40 million little harmless infants, we make God mad. I actually consider that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who’re actively attempting to make that another life-style, the ACLU, Folks for the American Means—all of them who’ve tried to secularize America—I level the finger of their face and say, “You helped this occur.”
To which Robertson responded, “Properly, I completely concur, and the issue is we now have adopted that agenda on the highest ranges of our authorities.”
For 3 and a half a long time, apocalyptic pondering, frustration, and fury helped outline the politics of evangelicalism and fundamentalism. The depth of the worry fluctuated, but it surely by no means absolutely waned.
My Atlantic colleague Tim Alberta, the creator of The Kingdom, The Energy, and the Glory: American Evangelicalism in an Age of Extremism, identified in an interview that after the Chilly Struggle ended, through the Nineteen Nineties, a decade of peace and prosperity, “a few of that panic begins to fall away just a little bit.” However what began to “journey the alarms inside evangelicalism,” in accordance to Alberta, was the top of the George W. Bush presidency and the election of Obama. Alberta factors out that parts of the white evangelical motion have been deeply uncomfortable with a Black president, with the leftward shift of the tradition, and with advances for homosexual rights and same-sex marriage.
All of this was taking place previous to Donald Trump’s look on the political stage. However it went to a complete new degree after he received the Republican nomination and the presidency in 2016. The spiritual proper didn’t change a lot because the individual the spiritual proper supported for president modified. He ushered in a complete new period.
THE ALLIANCE BETWEEN the spiritual proper and Trump—a nonreligious, thrice-married man who celebrated his infidelities within the tabloids, paid hush cash to a porn star, cheated on his taxes, unfold conspiracy theories, mocked POWs and other people with disabilities, and was discovered responsible for what the choose within the case known as rape—appears incongruous, and in some methods it’s. In any case, for years evangelicals insisted that good character was important in political leaders, and particularly in presidents. That was actually the case when evangelicals lacerated Clinton for his ethical failures.
In 1998, for instance, Gary Bauer, then the president of the Household Analysis Council, a star of the spiritual proper and a family-values crusader, wrote that “youngsters can’t be set adrift right into a tradition that tells them that mendacity is okay, that constancy is old style and that character doesn’t rely.” And he pointed to Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky: “The seamy information beneath public dialogue are shameful sufficient. However fascination with this story shouldn’t be allowed to obscure the deeper lesson these incidents impart. That lesson is that this: Character counts—in a individuals, within the establishments of our society, and in our nationwide management. In character is future. Our founders believed and set down in their very own phrases that solely a virtuous individuals may stay free.”
However as soon as Trump received the Republican nomination in 2016, Bauer, like many influential evangelical figures—together with Franklin Graham, son of the famed preacher Billy Graham; Jerry Falwell Jr., who was the president of Liberty College earlier than he was ousted amid scandal; Robert Jeffress; Al Mohler, the president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary; James Dobson, the founding father of Concentrate on the Household; Tony Perkins, Household Analysis Council’s longest-serving president; and Wayne Grudem, a theologian and an creator—fell into line behind Trump. In doing so, they embraced a person whose private, political, and enterprise ethics aren’t solely much more compromised and corrupt than Invoice Clinton’s; they’re unsurpassed within the historical past of the American presidency. For evangelical leaders and for these representing the motion, character now not counted.
“We sort of gave him—‘All proper, you get a mulligan. You get a do-over right here,’” Tony Perkins, the president of the FRC and an ardent Trump supporter, informed Politico.
In October 2016—a number of weeks after the discharge of the infamous Entry Hollywood tape wherein Trump bragged about his affairs and declared that whenever you’re a star, “You are able to do something. You possibly can seize them by the pussy. You are able to do something”—greater than seven in 10 white evangelical Protestants mentioned an elected official can behave ethically even when they’ve dedicated transgressions of their private life. 5 years earlier, when Obama was president, solely 30 % of white evangelical Protestants mentioned the identical. No group shifted their place extra dramatically.
The argument is often made that this was pragmatic. Evangelicals may not admire Trump, however he would ship on their coverage agenda, and that mattered most. Which may have been true for some, however a great deal extra was occurring as nicely.
The Calvin College historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez, the creator of Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Religion and Fractured a Nation, challenges the generally held assumption that the spiritual proper backed Trump for under pragmatic causes. She argues that Trump represented the achievement, moderately than the betrayal, of white evangelicals’ most deeply held values. Kobes Du Mez’s guide affords an account of 75 years of evangelical historical past, displaying how the evangelical subculture labored for many years to exchange the Jesus of the Gospels with an idol of rugged masculinity and Christian nationalism.
The help for Trump was “the fruits of evangelicals’ embrace of militant masculinity,” she argues, they usually condoned his “callous show of energy.”
In a 2018 interview with The Guardian, Jerry Falwell Jr.—who referred to Trump as a “good ethical individual”—described Democrats as fascists and “Brownshirts.” Tony Perkins informed Politico that evangelical Christians “have been uninterested in being kicked round by Barack Obama and his leftists. And I believe they’re lastly glad that there’s anyone on the playground that’s keen to punch the bully.” And in 2016 Pastor Jeffress informed NPR, “I’ve mentioned I would like the meanest, hardest SOB I can discover to guard this nation. And in order that’s why Trump’s tone doesn’t hassle me.”
White evangelical Protestants are actually among the many Republican Celebration’s most loyal constituencies. In 2020, Trump truly expanded his help amongst white evangelical Protestants, successful 84 % of their vote after having acquired 77 % 4 years earlier.
White evangelical Christians are essentially the most constantly dependable supporters of essentially the most polarizing and morally wicked president in American historical past. It has damage America, and it has executed large harm to the witness of the Christian religion.
THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT BEGAN, not less than partially, not less than for some, as a defensive response to the aggressions of the trendy world. It has ended up in a really totally different and troubling place. So how would possibly these of us who’re Christians, no matter the place we fall on the political spectrum, assist redeem this second? As I specified by my 2019 guide The Loss of life of Politics, most basically, it’s going to require a reshaping of sensibilities, a elementary rethinking of the “how” of politics.
First, Christians have to reacquaint themselves with the Jesus of the New Testomony, not the Jesus of the American proper (or left). The actual Jesus demonstrated a profound distrust of political energy and didn’t encourage his disciples to change into concerned in political actions of any type.
Probably the most significant emblem of Christianity is just not the sword however the cross, which is the antithesis of world energy. Jesus made clear again and again that his kingdom is just not of this world. And the New Testomony doesn’t present something like a governing blueprint.
The early Church didn’t hand out voter guides. What it did do, in accordance to the sociologist Rodney Stark, was create “communal compassion” and social networks; take care of the sick, widows, and orphans; welcome strangers and outsiders; respect girls; and connect with non-Christians. That’s how a tiny and obscure messianic motion within the second and third centuries turned the dominant religion of Western civilization. That’s the way it reworked the traditional world and the course of human historical past.
This doesn’t imply that Christians, Christian establishments, and church buildings ought to by no means beneath any circumstances be concerned in politics, as a result of politics has profound human penalties. It’s one enviornment wherein to pursue justice, which issues. What this does imply is that Christians have to assume a a lot totally different posture, to maneuver away from hyper-partisanship towards a extra indifferent and prophetic position, and to take extra critically than many do the thought of twin citizenship—the idea that we could also be residents of the Metropolis of Man however that our deepest loyalties are to the Metropolis of God.
A correct political theology would stop Christians, Christian establishments, and church buildings from turning into pawns in political energy video games. “The church have to be reminded that it’s not the grasp or the servant of the state, however moderately the conscience of the state,” Martin Luther King Jr. mentioned. “It have to be the information and the critic of the state, and by no means its instrument.” At present, far too many evangelical Christians—nonetheless admirable they might in any other case be and regardless of the various good works they might do—are instruments of a harmful motion and of a harmful former president.
Second, Evangelicals additionally have to develop a concept of political and social engagement that’s much more complete and cautious, mature and knowledgeable, textured and complex. On this respect, evangelicals and Protestants have a lot to study from Catholicism, which has laid out and constructed on ideas of social educating over many centuries. The cornerstones of Catholic social thought are human dignity; subsidiarity, which holds that nothing needs to be executed by bigger and extra complicated establishments that may be executed as nicely by smaller and less complicated ones; and solidarity, which means the social obligations we now have to 1 one other, with a particular concern for the poor and most susceptible members of the human group.
As Michael Gerson put it when describing Catholic social thought, “The doctrinal complete requires a broad, constant view of justice, which—when it’s faithfully utilized—cuts throughout the classes and clichés of American politics. In fact, American Catholics routinely ignore Catholic social thought. However not less than they’ve it. Evangelicals lack an identical custom of their very own to ignore.”
Till some comparable strategy begins to take maintain—and is transmitted from theologians and church leaders to the broader group of believers—the random, advert hoc nature of evangelical political involvement will proceed and doubtless worsen. There isn’t a authoritative theological assemble in place to test, channel, and refine uncooked partisanship cloaked in Christian garb.
A 3rd factor that should occur is for a lot of politically lively Christians to maneuver away from a spirit of anger towards understanding, from revenge towards reconciliation, from grievance towards gratitude, and from worry towards belief.
Ken Stern is a fair-minded liberal who spent a 12 months with individuals on the proper to higher perceive their worldview. (His guide Republican Like Me paperwork his journey.) Stern visited evangelicals in quite a lot of settings, and was impressed by the generosity he encountered. A number of years in the past, I met with him, together with the pastor of the church I used to be attending. He requested us why, if many evangelicals dedicate their lives to serving to others, does that not translate right into a political agenda? How is it that anger and aggression have change into the general public face of Christianity, whereas the various acts of kindness and charity, and the spirit informing these issues, are stored beneath a bushel, largely out of public view? Why do evangelicals constantly present their worst aspect moderately than their most winsome one?
We puzzled the identical issues.
In his 1997 guide, What’s So Wonderful About Grace?, Philip Yancey writes of asking strangers, “Once I say the phrases ‘evangelical Christian’ what involves thoughts?” He largely heard political descriptions, and never as soon as did he hear an outline redolent of grace.
Yancey wrote:
Grace comes freed from cost to individuals who don’t deserve it and I’m a kind of individuals. I believe again to who I used to be—resentful, wound tight with anger, a single hardened hyperlink in an extended chain of ungrace discovered from household and church. Now I’m attempting in my very own small approach to pipe the tune of grace. I achieve this as a result of I do know, extra absolutely than I do know something, that any pang of therapeutic or forgiveness or goodness I’ve ever felt comes solely from the grace of God. I yearn for the church to change into a nourishing tradition of that grace.
It’s that “tradition of grace” that may rework individuals’s hearts, and within the course of renew not simply the Church but in addition American society and American politics. However a “tradition of grace” doesn’t imply Christians ought to fail to criticize what deserves criticism or keep silent within the face of wrongdoing. Christians aren’t known as to be passive within the face of injustice and maliciousness.
The fourth factor Christians can do to strengthen their public witness and the state of our politics is internalize and act on the teachings from the parable of the Good Samaritan, which speaks to this second in a robust manner.
Within the story, a Samaritan comes throughout a Jew who has been overwhelmed, robbed, and left dying on the aspect of a harmful highway from Jerusalem to Jericho. After a priest and a Levite each ignore the wounded man, the Samaritan rescues him and, at his personal expense, nurses him again to well being. “Go and do likewise,” Jesus says.
On the time, Samaritans and Jews despised one another, and had few dealings—a first-century model of the political, ethnic, and non secular tribalism we all know too nicely.
The purpose Jesus, a Jew, was driving house is that we have to break down the partitions between us. We’re known as to like our neighbors—a class which, in accordance with the parable, contains those that are racially, religiously, ethnically, and culturally totally different than we’re—and to assist them of their want in essentially the most sensible manner, materially and bodily.
As a substitute, too many Individuals view the “different”—for some, that refers to refugees, Muslims, or Mexicans; for others, it’s rural southerners, gun homeowners, or spiritual fundamentalists—with a mixture of suspicion and contempt that’s consuming away at our sense of nationwide unity.
Christians can mannequin what it means to achieve throughout the divides that exist of their work settings, of their church buildings, of their social circles, and on social media. They’ll exhibit tolerance and understanding towards these with totally different life experiences. They are often intentional about discovering volunteer settings that put them in touch with individuals who have totally different political beliefs, pores and skin shade, nationwide origins, and sophistication standing.
There’s no magic wand we will wave to restore the breach. A nation’s civic and political tradition is modified by what we do in our every day lives—in our properties, colleges, communities, and homes of worship. And by loving our neighbors we take crucial first step. That’s what Jesus calls his followers to do, and what citizenship in Twenty first-century America calls for.
A LITTLE MORE THAN A DECADE AGO, my buddy Steve Hayner was going by means of the Gospel of Luke, and was struck time and again by the grace and embrace Jesus prolonged to these whom the spiritual elite had each cause (they thought) to kick to the curb. Folks on the low rungs of life, together with these with frailties and flaws, flocked to Jesus—not as a result of he preached ethical rectitude however as a result of he was keen to like them, to take heed to them, and to welcome them.
“I doubt whether or not God may have a lot to say about our political convictions ultimately,” Steve wrote to me on the time. “However I’m fairly certain that he may have one thing to say about how we cherished the least, the marginalized, the outcasts, the lonely, the abused—even when some assume that they’ve all of it.”
“Political convictions that lead towards redemption and reconciliation are almost definitely headed in the proper course,” he added.
This isn’t a prescription for a selected sort of political involvement. It’s actually not a highway map for coping with difficult public points. It’s, nonetheless, a mirrored image of how Christians ought to have interaction the world, together with the political world.
A profitable Christian political-social motion would require making the case for social order and ethical excellence with generosity of spirit, whereas providing a therapeutic contact to those that are struggling and dwelling within the shadows of society.
Politics is usually a extra noble enterprise when it’s twinned with religion, however solely religion correctly understood and correctly executed. Such a religion can be guided by the knowledge expressed by the Roman Catholic monk Thomas Merton: “A theology that ends in lovelessness can’t be Christian.”
This essay is customized from a paper in a forthcoming quantity on faith, civil discourse, and democratic renewal sponsored by Penn’s Perry-Collegium Initiative.
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