The political polarization of American society, impossible to ignore on Election Day, cuts across state lines, through families, and even into local congregations. Polarized America has polarized the American church.
The average American Christian can’t do much to reduce that polarization on the national scale. Yet Christians should be able to reduce polarization-induced tensions within the body of Christ. Understanding the causes and consequences of this division can help us move toward cures.
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt is currently best known for his work on childhood screen use and social media. But in his 2012 book, The Righteous Mind, Haidt discusses six elements of what he calls the human “moral matrix,” the set of moral foundations that act as guides to our moral decisions.
Backing this concept with careful research, Haidt lists six such moral foundations, or values:
- Care for the vulnerable in society
- Equality for everyone
- Proportionality in reward and punishment
- Loyalty to one’s family, country, or other groups
- Authority and respect for it in our leadership and institutions
- Sanctity as a sense of respect for the sacred
The root problem of American polarization, Haidt contends, is that political and social liberals tend to base their moral judgments on the first two of these—care and equality—while conservatives, like most people elsewhere in the world, tend to hit on all six.
This is all on average, of course. But on the national scale, these deep moral differences make it nearly impossible for liberals and conservatives to understand each other.
Arguments that hinge on sanctity or authority make little sense to liberals, for whom these are not high values. Meanwhile, views grounded solely in care and equality—to the exclusion of proportionality, loyalty, authority, and sanctity—will seem wildly imbalanced to conservatives, to the point that they begin to discount care and equality in elevating the other four values.
Inside the church, the consequences of this often-unnoticed moral divide are serious and numerous. Chief among them is radical self-selection. Self-selecting behavior begins outside the church, where we sort ourselves into different careers, neighborhoods, and social groups based on our politics. But it flows into the church too, and we self-select into fellowship with people whose social and political views are close to our own.
Some may argue that this self-selection is nothing more than Christian discernment. It’s true that any meaningful movement to counter polarization and move toward Christian unity must inculcate a deeper, purer Christian faith. But by sorting ourselves into groups with people whose politics are just like ours, we close off opportunities for relationship, dialogue, understanding, and healing.
Christians are not to live in fear (Luke 12:4–5, 1 John 4:18). But when the church becomes polarized like the world around us, we become fearful. We monitor who’s on our side and who isn’t. We fear admitting others from the wrong side into our congregations, small groups, and other institutions. We may even engage in ugly speech and actions toward those on the other side—or excuse sin on our side because we fear moral isolation and ostracism.
So how can we choose faith over fear? What do we actually do with knowledge of Haidt’s moral matrix? And how can we be ministers of reconciliation (2 Cor. 5:18) after this Election Day?
We call American Christians to make two commitments: (1) to embrace a full Christian orthodoxy that includes addressing the blind spots in our own moral matrices and (2) to love and understand our political enemies.
Each of the six moral foundations has strong biblical underpinnings found throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, in the teachings of Jesus himself, and in the rest of the New Testament church. And that means we as Christians can and should value all six of them, not only those that resonate with us or synchronize with our life experience.
With respect to equality, for example, Genesis 1:26–28 says all people are created in God’s image. Proverbs 22:2 states that the rich and poor are equal in the eyes of God. And Paul states clearly in Galatians 3:28 that “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
Likewise, the mandate of care for others is ubiquitous in Scripture. Both testaments demand care for society’s most needy and marginalized, including the hungry, wounded, sick, and oppressed (Isa. 58:10, Ps. 147:3, Matt. 10:8), as well as the elderly (Lev. 19:32, James 1:27), the foreigner (Lev. 19:34, Ex. 22:21), the orphan (Ex. 22:22, John 14:18), and the poor (Zech. 7:10, Ps. 82:3, Luke 14:13).
Politically conservative Christians must understand: The equality of human beings and care for the marginalized cannot be discounted within Christian orthodoxy.
But the work on the other side is equally difficult. Politically liberal Christians must understand that proportionality, loyalty, authority, and sanctity cannot be ignored. Social scientists tell us these virtues are upheld nearly universally by humankind—it’s Western liberals who are the oddity here. More importantly, these virtues deeply matter to God and are also ubiquitous in Scripture.
Liberals have made it their business to question authority, but any productive human endeavor is virtually impossible without some type of authority structure, as the Bible repeatedly recognizes (Mark 6:7, Rom. 13:1, 1 Pet. 2:13). Scripture often speaks to loyalty, too (e.g., Ruth 1:16–17, 1 Sam. 18, Prov. 17:17). Jesus even taught us that true love looks like extreme loyalty: laying down our lives for our friends (John 15:13).
Liberals tend to emphasize God’s grace, but Scripture always holds grace in tension with proportionality, the congruence of reward with merit (Rom. 2:9–10), which is the foundation for all notions of justice. Indeed, Matthew 25:31–46, a passage frequently cited by politically liberal Christians, strongly links the judgment of God to proportionality, as does the rest of the chapter.
Likewise, in conflicts between equality and sanctity, politically liberal Christians will gravitate toward the former. But Christian faith frequently demands deference to the latter (Ex. 20:11, 2 Sam. 6:3–8, John 17:17), sometimes even when we don’t fully understand the rationale. As part of reconciliation, politically liberal Christians must reassess their reliance on secular social movements as a basis for understanding goodness, beauty, and truth.
Grasping the full scriptural witness will help conservative and liberal Christians alike seek understanding across divides.
That requires listening to those on the other side, taking in their stories and seeing how that background has shaped their values. For some politically conservative Christians, for example, this may mean recognizing the existence of genuine injustice—past and present—in America. Across the political spectrum, it will mean remembering that our own moral foundations would likely be different if we had different upbringings and communities.
The earliest Christians were an extremely politically mixed group. They ranged from Simon the Zealot, who was bent on expelling the Romans from Israel, to a community of conservative fisherman, to tax-collector-for-the-Romans Matthew. Yet they came together and “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer” (Acts 2:42). And they changed the world.
By choosing the comfort of radical self-selection in a polarized time, we not only forgo the kind of fellowship embodied by that first community of Christians. We also miss the opportunity to worship and pray with believers across our own political divides. And if prayer is the Christian’s most powerful instrument for healing and reconciliation (James 5:16, Eph. 6:18), that is a grave loss.
On this Election Day and beyond, we can pursue reconciliation while holding true to our political convictions and even seeking to persuade our siblings in Christ to share them. We can be people of grace, truth, and prayer no matter how polarized our world becomes.
Matt Beech is reader in politics and director of the Centre for British Politics at the University of Hull (UK) and senior fellow at the Institute of European Studies at UC Berkeley.
Bruce Wydick is professor of economics at the University of San Francisco and research affiliate at UC Berkeley’s Center for Effective Global Action.
