Fr Robert Hendrickson

Dear Friends in Christ,

A Pew study came out not long ago that found that of 14 advanced democratic nations surveyed, the United States has the most politically polarized response to Covid-19. Whether the question is about severity, mitigation, risk, or any other aspect of the pandemic, the most predictable way to assess how someone would respond to questions regarding it is their political identification.
This has become worse and worse over time.

People lament the polarized nature of our politics but I’d argue the challenge is actually the politicized nature of our polarization — differences are inevitable — but now those differences are increasingly being weaponized and used to galvanize reactive identity politics. It is no longer enough to simply be one thing, we are now being pushed harder and harder to dislike someone else because they are not us.

In the past those differences fell along class lines more often than not. Of course, given our nation’s racial history, class lines also overlapped heavily with racial lines too. What we see now though is that everything is falling along a politicized divides. The car you drive, shows you watch, religious attendance, education, and much, much more are all being politically sorted in ways that are increasingly predictive and proscriptive. They predict political identity and proscribe compromise because when we talk about political compromise now what we are actually talking about is identity compromise.

That is the kind of compromise almost no one is willing to make.

This is where the Christian vision undoes all the increasingly neat packaging of modern identity. Jesus doesn’t ask us what party we are before we follow him. He doesn’t sort us by anything other than our willingness to give up all that we are to become all that he calls us to be. He asks us to be ready to turn our back on old divisions to find a new unity in him. He is asking us not to make religion another badge of tribal division, but for our faith to become a way by which we are more deeply knit together with people with whom we see no other way to come together.

His challenge to us is not to be defined by what we consume but to be shaped by the love which consumes us. That’s a tall order in an ever angrier, ever more divided culture. But it’s work worth doing, a way of being worth striving for, and a kind of faith that is worth being our true identity.

Yours in Christ,

Fr Robert