Wrote this in an email to a pastor who was struggling with a nuanced theological issue, and I thought it might be a useful metaphor for the future:
What makes all this worse is that our current cultural polarization tends to pull people toward extremes. It’s as if we’re in a body of water with a whirlpool on the far left and a whirlpool on the far right, constantly pulling us in either of those directions.
If you’re “conservative” (politically or theologically), you’re always being pushed to be more and more conservative to prove yourself to other conservatives. If you’re “progressive” (again, politically or theologically), you’re always being pushed to be more and more progressive to prove yourself to other progressives.
There will always be another issue, and another, and another, where you haven’t taken the approved stance, haven’t been vocal enough, haven’t proven that you’re fully in line, and you’ll be hammered on it until you do, publicly criticized with whatever language that side deems most damning.
In conservative Christian communities, that often means labeling people as unbiblical, heretical, worldly, and the like. In progressive ones, it often means labeling people as exclusionary, bigoted, and steeped in privilege. Either way, it’s deeply uncomfortable, so most folks just allow themselves to slide ever more left or right to avoid the criticism—despite the fact that we all say we don’t want “slippery slopes” and we all should know that our faith isn’t ultimately about politics anyway!
And, on a separate note:
I recently read a powerful and well researched (but terrifying) book called The Chaos Machine by Max Fisher. It’s about the techniques social media is using to divide and polarize us and why they’re so effective. While the main concept was certainly no surprise to me, many of the specific examples were. It’s not a religious book, but I think many of the same principles are at play in the church, and that makes all of this so much harder.
