TaxProf Blog

Paul L. Caron
Dean





Sunday, April 7, 2024

NY Times Op-Ed: Don’t Let Our Broken Politics Mangle Our Faith

New York Times Op-Ed:  Don’t Let Our Broken Politics Mangle Our Faith, by David French (Author, Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation (2020)):

French (2024)In 2007, I had a conversation about the culture war with the evangelical pastor Tim Keller that I’ve never forgotten. Keller, who was the founder of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, died last year, a devastating loss.

Keller was describing a change in his church’s young adults. “I’ve long seen friendships flourish across political differences,” he told me. “Now I see that disagreement often ends friendships.” As he put it, what he was seeing was a change from a culture in which younger Americans were intolerant of cruelty and tolerant of good-faith political differences to a culture in which people were intolerant of political differences and tolerant of cruelty — so long as that cruelty was aimed at the right targets.

Keller wasn’t just describing young Christians. He was seeing the change everywhere. Your political or theological positions were becoming the primary measure of your virtue, and your conduct was a distant second. According to this ethos, being for or against abortion rights, for example, defines you far more than the way you treat other people.

Hidden within comments like that is an assumption — that her point of view was so obviously correct and mine so obviously wrong — that my pro-life position created an irrebuttable presumption of bad character. ...

What can be done? It’s not enough to simply decry our political and religious problem. It’s necessary to try to articulate a better way. That’s why I worked with my friends Russell Moore, editor in chief of Christianity Today, and Curtis Chang, host of the “Good Faith” podcast, to create a curriculum for church groups to articulate a profoundly different approach to politics, one that emphasizes the means of our engagement just as much as the ends we pursue.

The curriculum is called The After Party, it’s free, and while it’s aimed at Christians, I believe its key principles can resonate with people of good will from other faith traditions as well. At its root is an obvious scriptural reality that I hadn’t fully understood until I was well into my (quite partisan) early adulthood — that scripture speaks much more to how we treat our neighbors than it speaks to the policy goals of our political engagement.

Wrong is not a synonym for evil, and right is not the equivalent of righteous. As the Apostle Paul made clear in his first letter to the Corinthian Church, I can purport to speak and act as a Christian, but if I “do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.”

[Micah 6:8 is] ... the central verse of the After Party curriculum — “He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” Christians can’t shrink from confronting injustice, and we must engage with humility and kindness.

In many ways, humility is simply a recognition of reality. We’re imperfect people with imperfect knowledge and wisdom. Even on issues on which we feel that burning moral clarity is necessary, understanding complexity should give us pause.

You may believe that the United States has a moral obligation to ameliorate the effects of hundreds of years of legalized, violent racial injustice, and yet also understand that how to do so is an extraordinary complex and difficult question, one that requires an immense willingness to listen to others and learn from our own mistakes.

You may believe that unborn children are people who deserve a chance to live outside the womb and yet also understand that there are complex questions regarding the proper role of the state, the interplay between maternal and fetal health, the actual reasons people seek out abortions and the justice of a primarily punitive response. People of good will can come to different conclusions, and it’s worth hearing their reasoning.

Our most basic human experience teaches us that kindness is indispensable in human relationships. Our cruelty can end relationships before they start. Our cruelty broadcasts arrogance. It creates the condition for conflict as our targets justifiably defend themselves against our aggression. It removes the possibility of persuasion as people dig in against unfair and malicious attacks.

I’ve spoken about these obligations in countless churches and Christian schools, and the objection is always the same. Kindness and humility are the path to surrender and defeat. They’re signs of weakness in the great struggle against the presumed enemies of the nation and the church.

It’s an odd objection coming from biblical literalists. The relevant verses that command our kindness, humility and love are not conditioned on political victory. We don’t pursue those virtues only until they don’t work to achieve the outcomes we want.

It’s also an odd objection in the American context. After all, American history contains shining examples of Christian activists who placed justice, kindness and mercy at the center of political engagement. The civil rights movement wasn’t exclusively Christian by any means. People of all faiths and no faith joined to demand liberation from Jim Crow, but the Christian faith was at center stage in Martin Luther King Jr.’s arguments and, crucially, his tactics. Christian means were married to Christian ends.

Editor's Note:  If you would like to receive a weekly email each Sunday with links to the faith posts on TaxProf Blog, email me here.

Other op-eds by David French:

https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2024/04/ny-times-op-ed-.html

Faith, Legal Education | Permalink