In this series
As someone who has written hundreds of thousands of words about faith and culture over the past decade, who has strained to understand this contradictory and baffling movement called evangelicalism, who has studied and dialogued about the rise of Christian nationalism in America, I’ve still found myself, again and again, at a total loss for words as the election drew near.
In my mind, the lyrics of an old Over the Rhine song play nearly constantly, like a heavy sigh: “I just don’t have much left to say. / They’ve taken their toll, these latter days.”
We are facing huge problems as a culture. Stories of violence and war blare from the headlines. Human life—of an embryo, a refugee, a Jewish or Palestinian child, or an immigrant—is devalued and left unprotected. It feels like we’re all exhausted by the past decade and the noise, chaos, polarization, and vitriol it has brought.
We are also facing huge problems as Christians. The evangelical movement has become unrecognizable to me, as many evangelicals hold seemingly inexhaustible loyalty to the MAGA movement. My theology hasn’t changed, but I am more confused by, alienated from, and concerned about American evangelicalism than I have ever been.
More broadly, I’ve never been as discouraged as I am now by the state of the American church, which often reflects the same polarization we see in American culture. And as I look around and speak to other writers, pastors, and leaders, it seems no one quite knows what to do. No one knows how to fix a culture and church that are so broken.
We are not in control of what happens in the election. We are not in command of international events. We cannot wave a wand and solve the problems facing the church. Many days it feels I can barely get dinner on the table, much less understand and help heal our hurting, complex, and multipolar world. But as I’ve sat with my own grief and anxiety about this stark reality, I’ve found hope and inspiration in the strangest of places: turtle rescuers.
I have slowly been reading Sy Montgomery’s Of Time and Turtles, which explores the lives of those seeking to rescue and rehabilitate what she calls “the most imperiled major group of animals on earth.” The book centers on Montgomery’s work at the Turtle Rescue League in Massachusetts, but it also touches on larger themes of patience and repair.
Many species of turtles, she explains, are at extreme risk of extinction. The dangers they face are nearly endless: dog or raccoon attacks, climate change and light pollution, cars and trucks that flatten slow-moving wildlife, development of nesting areas, and a black market where certain species go for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The problems are so big it feels almost pointless to try to help these creatures. Any response we can muster seems so paltry. Yet Montgomery finds a merry band of people, networked together across the world, who go to breathtaking extremes to save and rehabilitate turtles, one by one, shell by shell.
As odd as this connection may seem, this book has renewed my commitment to the local church. The problems these turtle rescuers face are huge—the threat of extinction! Global black markets! Climate change! Industrialization! Their cause seems almost entirely lost. Yet with fortitude and defiance, they take up their small works of repair and rescue every single day, with joy and a sense of purpose.
A Vision for Repair
Each story of a turtle released into the wild reminded me: Often, in the face of huge problems, all we have are small solutions, but that is where we start. That is how all creation can be restored, day by day, life by life.
As we face huge problems as a culture and a church, it’s tempting to look to big things for big solutions: national elections, mass movements, revolution, a spectacular revival, some intensely viral online message. I want something obvious and epic to bring a speedy resolution. I am impatient for change.
But Montgomery has reminded me of the virtue and necessity of change wrought by smallness, patience, and time. “Time,” she writes, “is what turtles have.” In his review of the book for The Washington Post, Jacob Brogan wrote that Montgomery’s rescue work demonstrates how “solid, slow things can endure.”
There’s a saying that began as a mantra in Silicon Valley but increasingly applies to our culture more broadly: Move fast and break things. This past year, as we’ve planted a small church and grappled with our bewilderment at how to be faithful in this cultural moment, my husband and I have adopted a mantra of our own: Go slow and repair things.
I don’t know how to solve the big problems of the world. I wish I did, but I don’t. And I don’t know how to repair a church in America that has become politically idolatrous and does not exhibit the fruit of the Spirit.
But I know we can go slow and repair things in the ways that we can, in the places where we dwell, in the institutions we inhabit, with the people around us. We can serve the needy and the disadvantaged in our cities and towns. We can seek faithfulness in our small, local congregations. We can help form churches that are humble, accountable, and a radical alternative to the world, to both the political right and the political left. We can think and read deeply, learn from the saints who’ve gone before us, and teach and embody a more robustly biblical, orthodox political theology. In our work, friendships, homes, and neighborhoods, we can take up the challenge of building something solid, slow, and enduring—something that can witness to Jesus and his kingdom, a kingdom not captive to American politics in any way.
This essay ends a series by the Evangelicals in a Diverse Democracy project, and in some sense, nearly everything about that project is small. It consists of people coming together in person to sit around a table, to pray, to debate ideas, to cry, to laugh, to eat. It involves forming friendships and shifting opinions. It is cultivating curiosity about how to better equip those in our pews, in our schools, and under our roofs to live faithfully and confidently in a world that we do not control.
This project assumes that a healthy community, especially one seeking to faithfully follow Jesus, does not resort to violence, coercion, or belittling of those who are different from us. And, therefore, it assumes that the enormous task of reknitting a healthy society and a healthy church is often slow, small, organic work.
This essay also comes on Election Day, a day when our country makes a big decision. I voted. And if you choose to vote, I hope you will vote for whomever you believe will best uphold democracy and seek justice for those who are vulnerable. I believe Christians can seek the common good and promote justice and mercy through American politics.
But even in this pivotal presidential election, voting cannot be the climax or sum of Christians’ political mission. It is likely not even the most important thing you will do today. The first social task of the church, as theologian Stanley Hauerwas often reminds us, is to be the church—an alternative community formed by Jesus that embodies a different sort of kingdom.
Allegiance to that kingdom is our truest political and social responsibility. Taking up the radical calls of the Sermon on the Mount to meekness, mourning, forgiveness, and love for our enemies will feel small and ineffective in the face of a convulsive world. But this, Jesus shows us, is the way of repair and renewal.
On the evening of January 6, 2021, just a few hours after rioters—many wielding Bibles, crosses, and other Christian symbols—stormed the Capitol, threatening violence and seeking to overturn a fair election, my editor at Christianity Today asked me to write out my thoughts. At the end of my essay, I said:
We have to take up the slow work of repair, of re-forming our churches around the deep, unchanging truths of the light of Christ. We must reconstruct communities where we can know and speak truth, serve the needy and the poor, love our neighbors, learn to be poor in spirit, rejoice in suffering, and witness to the light of Christ amid darkness.
This work will be frustratingly small and local, under the radar, and away from the headlines. It will feel paltry and unimportant in the face of the raging nations and widespread ecclesial and national decay. It will be long, risky, and uncertain.
Right now, I don’t have much left to say. But I can still say that.
The work we need to do is still the slow—and long, risky, and uncertain—work of repair. And we cannot accomplish this work merely through a vote. Rescue and redemption will not be won through any political party.
The daily work of becoming a new kind of people, a people marked by the mercy, grace, love, and humility of Jesus, is the work that must start again today and tomorrow and the day after that. It must go on day by day, shell by shell, life by life, whatever the results of the election. We must, by God’s grace, go slow and repair things.
Tish Harrison Warren is an Anglican priest, the author of several books including Liturgy of the Ordinary and Prayer in the Night, and the artist-in-residence at Immanuel Anglican Church in Austin, Texas.
