The polarization of our contemporary cultural conversation has resulted in the loss of confidence in democratic liberalism even as democratic liberalism provides the structures by which it is possible to complain about the polarization. Without a common civic morality to restrain large consumer forces, the public square is not only empty but also alienating. People tend to look for social reinforcement of their own self-identity in homogeneous communities when there is not a set of shared goals promoting the common good. Ironically, the greater the yearning for a common good, the more suspicion there is about any one group imposing its sense of the common good on others. The fracturing of the sense of belonging to others becomes the dominant paradigm. “If you are not for me, on my terms, then you are against me.” But the more tribal the search for self-identity is, the more polarized our common life becomes and the greater our tendency toward conflict. Without a larger perception of the common good, or at least of some form of commonality among all our differences, our social polity is doomed to failure. It is not an accident that democracy itself seems tenuous in an age of global capitalism, corporate corruption, identity politics, and theocratic terrorism.
An important irony is the ever-growing disparity between the descriptive diversity of contemporary culture and the actual homogeneity of the communities in which we experience day-to-day life…. Under the pressures of pluralization, we tend to socially migrate to safe havens of unity. Social conservatives tend to listen to socially conservative commentators. Social radicals tend to read other social radicals. We migrate toward homogeneous communities as a response to the increase of diversity around us.
Matthew Crawford argues this point persuasively in The World Beyond Your Head. He points out how beneath all the rhetoric around freedom, choice, individuality, self-expression, and self-actualization, we are actually manipulated consumers, addicted to our tech and prone to groupthink. For all the apparent diversity, we inhabit a mono-culture. As Crawford demonstrates, the task of “becoming an individual” is not as simple or straightforward as we might assume.
Richard Lints, on the experience of diversity in modern life:
We are ever more conscious of diversity—not only in terms of Christian worship but across a broad array of factors: we encounter diverse political communities, ethnic and racial communities, vocational and economic communities, even communities with passionate diversity of sports loyalties. Our social contexts are pluralized in countless directions and experienced at many levels. The “contemporary” is often marked out from the “traditional” purely by the plurality of experience, with the contemporary connoting a much higher volume of diversity—diversity of music, of religion, of vocation, of culture, of language. Tension in each of these spheres arises as different communities bump into each other.
C. S. Lewis in The Great Divorce (quoted in Lints' Uncommon Unity):
Life is not like a river but like a tree. It does not move towards unity but away from it and the creatures grow further apart as they increase across time.
There’s an apologetic for Protestantism buried within that quote, for the person skilled enough to unearth it. Bavinck has similar things to say in some of his works. At some point I’d love to put them (and others) in conversation on this topic.
Currently reading: Them by Ben Sasse 📚
Alan Jacobs, quoted in the same report:
Very few churches overall are really interested in Christian formation. They know that if they demand a level of Christian formation of people, if they demand spiritual disciplines from them, if they demand serious study from them… they’re afraid that if they do that then the people will not be entertained and will go somewhere where they are entertained and where they are affirmed and where they’re not asked to think hard thoughts and practice difficult disciplines.
Mark Noll, quoted in the “Faith and Healthy Democracy” report with these surprising words (though perhaps they shouldn’t be):
I do not think that Christian believers, particularly in a large culturally pluralistic society, should ever expect to have Christian unity on public policy. Christian values need to be expressed and worked out in life situations. Life situations are always colored by historical forces, cultural assumptions, social realities. And because historical forces, cultural values, and social realities are going to be different for different communities, Christian teaching by its plentitude is going to nurture in different ways communities that have these historical, cultural, and social differences.
