According to Bill Bishop, author of The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-minded America is Tearing UsApart, “In 1976, less than a quarter of Americans lived in places where the
presidential election was a landslide [meaning a greater than 20% difference
between the winner and the runner up]. By 2004, nearly half of all voters lived
in landslide counties.” That trend has continued since, and this, despite the
fact that two of last three elections have been neck and neck.
The argument of Bishop’s book confirms with some more rigorous data, what many of us already intuit anecdotally, our country is now more polarized than perhaps any time since the Civil War. And the polarization is as much a geographical and sociological phenomenon as it is an ideological one. Believe it or not, as far as the data can show, just 40 years ago, you would have very little idea what political party a stranger was going to vote for simply based on whether they were a school teacher or a roofer or whether your conversation was taking place in Austin, Texas or Hays, Kansas. But the last 40 years have shown that people whose beliefs, political, religious, or otherwise, lean a little bit in one direction will tend to find people who think like them, thus having their own beliefs confirmed and confirming those of the other, which then pushes each into a slightly more extreme position in a mutually reinforcing cycle.
Anyone who isn’t disturbed by this trend hasn’t been paying
attention. Regardless of how convinced I might be that my own side is the
correct one, everybody loses in a gridlocked system where the smallest
everybody-wins decisions don’t get made and the biggest decisions just drive
the wedge deeper between the two poles.
I say this because more and more, with each passing
election, the state of our “union,” reveals the wisdom of a God whose strategy
for the world assumes that if you can at least keep them coming to the same
dinner table, you’ve won half the battle. In fact, in a political climate
where, statistically speaking, we don’t even argue with each other anymore, we
just flee the conversation and head to the next town over where the people look
and think more like ourselves, getting us to break bread together, in spite of
our disagreement, may just be the whole battle. Maybe, for our heavenly parent,
getting us to the same dinner table isn’t some means to a greater end; maybe it
is the end.
And not only is gathering as a group of the non-likeminded
less and less common, it may turn out to be more revolutionary than it first
appeared. In God’s wisdom, there seems to be an outcome “in the fullness of
time,” when erstwhile arguers play nice together, that is greater than the sum
of the dinner party’s parts.
Speaking to Jews and Gentiles, a far more visible and
seemingly permanent division than conservative and liberal, Paul writes to the
Ephesians, “For [Christ] is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups
into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between
us…that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus
making peace, and might reconcile both groups to God in one body” (Eph.
2:14-16).
If people who cluster in like-minded groups tend to
reinforce and amplify each other’s beliefs toward more extremity, is the
opposite not also true of those who intentionally gather with those who think
differently?
In many ways, my congregation, St. Stephen Lutheran in
Longwood Florida is an impossibility. In a national context where the only
growing churches are those that openly declare themselves red or blue,
oftentimes from the pulpit, we are growing a community where conservatives and
liberals sit side by side and pass the peace with each other every single week.
Whereas the fastest growing churches in our context are
those that define themselves as the lifeboat of the saved in a world that is an
agitated sea of the damned, we are growing in numbers and vitality because of a
proclamation that all means all—that in Christ God saves the world. Period.
When it seems that every congregation has to stake its claim
and say, “ours is the bleeding heart church” or “ours is the ‘I got saved’
church,” around here, we openly confess that it’s not our church at all, so long as Jesus is Lord. And so long as the
tomb is empty and our God can raise the dead, who cares whether they themselves
are right. We don’t gather here because we’re right. We gather here because God
is righteous, and because we got a
dinner invite.
It’s looking more and more like it will be neither the ideas
of the right or the left but a dinner invite that will save this society.
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