The mission of Issues in Perspective is to provide thoughtful, historical and biblically-centered perspectives on current ethical and cultural issues.

It is now conventional wisdom to argue that America is more polarized as a society in 2024 than it has been in its history, save the decade of the 1850s right before the Civil War.  Why?  There is no simple answer to this important question, but it is quite important as Christians that we seek to understand the nature of this polarization.  The columnist and recent convert to Christianity, David Brooks, offers a most helpful analysis and overview of our polarized society.  He writes:  “I travel a lot. Just over the last several weeks, for example, I’ve been in some rural and redder parts of America (in Idaho, Kansas, Nebraska, Ohio, Texas) and some bluer parts (in California, Illinois, New York). My overall impression is that the social, economic and psychological chasms between these two zones are wider than ever.”  Brooks explores the nature of this “chasm” and how crucial it is in understanding America in the early 21st century.  He observes that “we’ve always had vast inequalities in America, but it used to feel like inequality within a single society. Now it feels like separate societies with almost no social exchange between the two. In parts of the country with fewer college graduates, the towns often look shabbier, they’re poorer, the effects of the opioid crisis are evident, the young are leaving, obesity is more common, the zeitgeist is grimmer, civic life is hollowed out.”  He then summarizes the complexity of this “chasm.”

• Since the 1970s, “finance, consulting and tech rose while manufacturing shrank. According to the St. Louis Federal Reserve, manufacturing made up 28 percent of America’s nominal gross domestic product in 1953. By 2015 it was 12 percent, and today it is lower still.  During these decades most of us in the news media, government, the academy and other sectors developed a distinct, educated-class way of seeing the world. We assumed, for example, that the best way to expand opportunity and boost growth was through better schooling. The Bushes, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama all produced important education reforms. The thinking was simple: If we invested enough in human capital—through preschool, community colleges, research universities and beyond—we could prepare the next generation for the high-tech and service-sector jobs of the future. This idea is certainly central to the way I’ve seen the world over the last few decades.  We were basically telling people in manufacturing regions to get out and shift to services. In a provocative 2023 essay in American Affairs, David Adler and William B. Bonvillian laid out the trends: The vocational education system withered. Financial markets rewarded outsourcing. There was a growing disconnect between the American innovation system and the American production system. That is to say that while America produces new ideas, it has not made similar advances in producing breakthroughs in manufacturing processes. In the mid-20th century, America led the world in building cars and ships, but, Adler and Bonvillian write, ‘As the mass production era was succeeded by new waves of manufacturing advances, America would no longer be king of manufacturing.’”
• “Economically, this shift from manufacturing to ideas made total sense. Let workers in low-wage countries work in factories. Americans will graduate to high-wage information-age jobs. American society will prosper as we do what we’re best at. And indeed, the American economy is the strongest big economy in the world. High-income manufacturing nations like Japan and Germany are stagnant, as American wealth just keeps growing.  But sociologically, politically and culturally, this shift from brawn to brains has contributed to the vast chasms we see today. Places where highly educated information-age denizens gather are gleaming, while many other places are desolate. The people who have the kinds of abilities that make for school success are thriving; people with other kinds of abilities are not.”
• “This state of affairs has produced a seismic shift in how people in both parties think about public policy. The old bipartisan education-can-save-us mantra is falling into the background. A new bipartisan we-need-to-rebuild-manufacturing mantra is taking hold. Though his wife is a teacher, Joe Biden has not been an education president. He’s been an industrial policy president. He’s tried to use hundreds of billions of dollars to help America build things—through big infrastructure projects and in factories.  [Jake] Sullivan [National Security Advisor], gave a speech at the Brookings Institution laying out the economic mistakes the Biden administration has tried to correct. He argued that while pursuing economic efficiency, America had let entire supply chains of strategic goods, like microchips, move overseas. He argued that it was a mistake to believe that the type of growth a country achieved didn’t matter. It was a mistake to believe that if the financial and tech sectors drove wealth creation, then it didn’t matter if infrastructure atrophied. He argued that when a large nonmarket economy like China’s begins to dominate the world through brute force, then market economies need to change their policies in response . . . In other words, industrial policy: The government chooses key sectors that will spur economic growth and enhance national security. The government supports those sectors with direct subsidies, tax credits, trade protections and other measures. The government isn’t just educating people; it’s shaping the economy in a much more aggressive way. As the economics writer Noah Smith has noted, if the 1930s brought us the New Deal and the 1980s brought us the free-market Reaganism, today we are entering an era of ‘New Industrialism.’”

However, the depths of this polarization go beyond economics, finance and an industrial policy.  Following the recent book by James Davison Hunter, Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America’s Political Crisis, identity politics adds an additional insight into the nature of our polarization.  Hunter “reminds us that a nation’s political life rests upon cultural foundations. Each society has its own way of seeing the world, its own basic assumptions about what is right and wrong, its own vision of a better world that gives national life direction and purpose. Culture is the ocean of symbols and stories in which we swim.  American culture, Hunter argues, was formed within the tension between Enlightenment values and religious faith. America was founded at the high point of the Enlightenment and according to Enlightenment ideas: a belief in individual reason, that social differences should be settled through deliberation and democracy, that a free society depends on neutral institutions like the electoral system and the courts, which will be fair to all involved.  But over the centuries many Americans have also believed that America has a covenantal relationship with God—from Puritan leaders like John Winthrop on down. The Bible gave generations of Americans a bedrock set of moral values, the conviction that we live within an objective moral order, the faith that the arc of history bends toward justice. Religious fervor drove many of our social movements, like abolitionism. Religious fervor explains why America has always had big arguments over things like Prohibition and abortion, which don’t seem to rile other nations as much. As late as 1958, according to a Gallup poll, only 18 percent of Americans said they would be willing to vote for an atheist for president.”  David Brooks further summarizes and applies Hunter’s analysis to further explain this polarization.

• “Each generation, Hunter continues, works out its own balance in the tension between Enlightenment liberty and moral authority. In the 20th century, for example, the philosopher John Dewey emerged as the great champion of Enlightenment values. He believed that religion had been discredited but that a public ethic could be built by human reason, on the basis of individual dignity and human rights. He had great faith in the power of education to train people to become moral citizens . . . The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr thought this was naïve. He believed that Dewey underestimated the human capacity for sin. He believed that you can’t use science to answer questions about life’s ultimate purpose and meaning. He dismissed the idea that with just a little more schooling, we would be able to educate people out of their racism and selfishness or that secularism could address life’s deepest problems . . . over the decades, most Americans lived with one ear attuned to the doctrine of Dewey and the other ear attuned to the doctrine of Niebuhr. If you want to see these two traditions within one person, look at Martin Luther King Jr. He used a Christian metaphysics to show how American democracy could live up to both Enlightenment and divine ideals.  Unfortunately, Hunter notes, this fruitful cultural tension died with King. Starting in the 1960s, America grew less religious. Those who remained religious were told to keep their faith to the private sphere. American public life became largely secular, especially among the highly educated classes, producing what the First Things editor Richard John Neuhaus called “the naked public square.” By 2020, 60 percent of Americans said they would vote for an atheist for president.”
• “At the same time, science and reason failed to produce a substitute moral order that could hold the nation together. By 1981, in the famous first passage of his book After Virtue, the philosopher Alasdair Macintyre argued that we had inherited fragments of moral ideas, not a coherent moral system to give form to a communal life, not a solid set of moral foundations to use to settle disputes. Moral reasoning, he wrote, had been reduced to ‘emotivism.’ If it feels right, do it. In 1987, Allan Bloom released his mega selling The Closing of the American Mind, arguing that moral relativism had become the dominant ethos of the era.  In other words, Americans lost faith in both sides of the great historical tension and, with it, the culture that had long held a diverse nation together. By the 21st century, it became clear that Americans were no longer just disagreeing with one another; they didn’t even perceive the same reality. You began to hear commencement speakers declare that each person has to live according to his or her own truth. Critics talked about living in a post-truth society. Hunter talks about cultural exhaustion, a loss of faith, a rising nihilism — the belief in nothing. As he puts it, ‘If there is little or no common political ground today, it is because there are few if any common assumptions about the nature of a good society that underwrite a shared political life.’”
• “Was there anything that would fill this void of meaning? Was there anything that could give people a shared sense of right and wrong, a sense of purpose?  It turns out there was: identity politics. People on the right and the left began to identify themselves within a particular kind of moral story. This is the story in which my political group is the victim of oppression and other groups are the oppressors. For people who feel they are floating in a moral and social vacuum, this story provides a moral landscape—there are those bad guys over there and us good guys over here. The story provides a sense of belonging. It provides social recognition. By expressing my rage, I will earn your attention and respect . . . The problem with this form of all-explaining identity politics is that it undermines democracy. If others are evil and out to get us, then persuasion is for suckers. If our beliefs are defined by our identities and not individual reason and personal experience, then different Americans are living in different universes, and there is no point in trying to engage in deliberative democracy. You just have to crush them. You have to grab power and control of the institutions and shove your answers down everybody else’s throats.”

In this climate, Hunter argues, “the authoritarian impulse becomes impossible to restrain.” Authoritarianism imposes a social vision by force. If you can’t have social solidarity organically from the ground up, then you can impose it from top down using the power of the state. But in this world . . . “politics is seen as a form of total war.”

What then is the role of the church in this polarized society?  What does it mean to be an evangelical in 2024? What do the terms evangelical or evangelicalism mean?  Historically, these terms have had doctrinal or theological content.  Therefore, historian George Marsden writes of evangelicalism as a “conceptual unit that identifies a broader set of groups possessing common traits.”  He specifies five salient beliefs:  “1) the Reformation doctrine of the final authority of Scripture; 2) the real, historical character of God’s saving work reported in Scripture; 3) eternal salvation only through personal trust in Christ; 4) the importance of evangelism and missions; and 5) the importance of a spiritually transformed life.”  British historian David Bebbington similarly characterizes evangelicalism as having four doctrinal characteristics (called the “quadrilateral”):  1. Conversion; 2. The Bible, “the belief that all spiritual truth is to be found in its pages.”  3.  Activism, or the dedication of all believers, especially the laity, to lives of service to God, especially in sharing the message and taking that message far and near; and 4.  “Crucicentrism,” the conviction that Christ’s death on the cross provided atonement for sin and reconciliation between sinful humanity and a holy God.”

Historian Thomas Kidd of Baylor University, in his book Who is an Evangelical?, argues persuasively that evangelicals cannot be defined by their race, political party, their ecclesiastical history or their religious culture.  As with Marsden and Bebbington, evangelicals must be defined as those who agree with doctrinal truths.  As he surveys the history of evangelicals, he correctly includes large numbers of black Christians, along with growing numbers of Hispanic Pentecostals, all of whom share the same foundational doctrinal positions.  Thus, to be an evangelical in the United States in 2024 with the doctrinal focus affirmed above does not mean that an “evangelical” is a mere subset of the Republican Party.  Evangelicalism is a racially diverse movement defined not by politics but by theological truth and the life-transforming Gospel.

It is clear that evangelicalism has an identity crisis.  Is evangelicalism a 21st century movement that totally identifies with Donald Trump and is thereby experiencing the corrupting effects of political power on the movement?  Or is evangelicalism a movement that identifies with a set of theological propositions (see Marsden and Bebbington), which transcends racial differences, cultural differences and, most importantly, politics?  If 21st century American evangelicals cannot answer the second question affirmatively, then I would plead with them to begin using another label.   They are turning their backs on a movement with a life-transforming, biblically-centered heritage—unified by doctrine, not by a political party.

Two concluding thoughts:

1. Some Christians think that by marshaling a Christian voting bloc they can establish Christ’s kingdom on earth.  We dare not confuse the external and limited good that political power can achieve with the internal and infinite good that God’s grace produces.  Further, we cannot buy into what the late Chuck Colson called the “political illusion,” the notion that all human problems can be solved by political institutions.  It is idolatrous to believe that, for the Bible declares that the root problem of society is spiritual.  What the Christian seeks through government is justice, not power.  The task of spiritual transformation is for the church, not the state.
2. The church is the agent of God’s power in the world.  The church is inextricably linked with the death, burial and resurrection of Christ, through which evil was defeated.  Robert Webber writes: “This new view of life belongs to the church because Christ, the head of the church, is inseparably linked with it.  His power over sin, death, and the dominion of the Devil now belongs to the church . . . The church acts in the name of Christ to witness through prayer, preaching, baptism, communion, lifestyle, and other means proclaiming that Satan is now doomed.  The church is a corporate body of people who know Satan as a deceiver and liar.  He has no ultimate power over them and their lives.  Consequently, the church is a threat to Satan.” Satan truly hates the church and seeks to destroy it.  Satan seeks to produce heresy in the church, discord in the church, to re-order the church’s priorities and to get the church to cultivate faith in power, in wealth and in human authorities, not in Christ.  Anything that seeks to get the church off focus becomes a tool of Satan.  For that reason, the church must be vigilant, on guard and dressed with the whole armor of God.   The witness of the church in this age is to expose evil and to be the agent of reconciliation to God.  That is the nature of the Gospel.  That is the nature of being salt and light.

See David Brooks, “Recipe for a Striving America” in the New York Times (5 October 2024); David Brooks in the New York Times (12 July 2024); Thomas S. Kidd, Who is an Evangelical?  The History of a Movement in Crisis and Evangelicals: Who They Have Been, Are Now, and Could Be, ed., Mark A. Noll, David W. Bebbington, George M. Marsden.