Neighbors We May Be

A Sober Accounting of Our Severed Kinship

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THE ANATOMY OF DISSONANCE

Cognitive dissonance is the psychological discomfort we feel when we hold conflicting ideas or assumptions, or when our actions don't match the values we profess.

For the past decade and a half, my dissonance has been developing regarding people who identify as Christian. These people exhibit a faithful pattern of religious pursuit and devotion in their lives, and profess the Word of God and the Gospel as the undergirding of their Christian worldview.

As one who also identifies by this worldview, I find the dissonance emerging in my failure to comprehend how, in this current American moment, the same perceived undergirding can manifest in such conflicting attitudes toward the state of our culture as defined by the current Federal Administration and its character and output.

How can I be at such deeply polar odds with others if we are genuinely rooted in the same Faith, the same Gospel? Is it really just differences of opinion that, in the end, don't qualify as essential?

“We have unity in what REALLY matters,” I have heard (and believed) for so long, “so we shouldn’t let little things like politics divide us, right?”

I have tried to dismiss the growing discomfort I've felt by digging deeper into my faith. And I don’t mean just digging deeper into the pattern of devotional routines, or more committedly immersing myself in 'doing life together' with a particular community within the Christian sphere.

I mean, I went on a pilgrimage, a journey to explore my faith beyond the confines of confessional assumptions of any community, foraging as widely as possible into the Object of Christianity–Christ Himself. This included regard for the totality of biblical testimony about Him, the historical context of His life and ministry, and confronting the witness of the earliest saints and their understanding of who He is, His nature, and His work. From there, I was guided forward in consideration of how the doctrines of His Ancient Church developed in the minds and expressions of the great saints and theologians from then until now, with particular interest in all the deformation and disunity wrought upon that ancient expression in the last half-millennium.

And while I claim in no sense to now be an expert on all of it, I will at least claim the range between enhanced and advanced in most of what I don’t have decent command of.

I did it all (as best I could) from what St. Ignatius of Loyola described as a state of Holy Indifference, which is to seek a genuine place of spiritual detachment from the self, its preferences and presuppositions, in order to freely choose whatever best orients us toward the greatest good—God Himself.

Looking back, the journey took me … no, led me … to a corner of the orchard that I would have never expected.

Now, here, I could not be more grateful, because the peace of this placement is richer and more substantive and real than anything I’ve ever known in my years as a Christian. While still steeped in glorious mystery, my Christian Faith is more tightly and intimately aligned with the fullness of its sacred truth, beauty, meaning, and Gospel hope than ever before.

But the discomfort comes from the undeniable recognition that I am further away than ever from a great many of the Christians in my life with whom I once shared a common language and a common pew just ten or fifteen years ago. A decisive majority of them, in fact.

It could be that you assume this is the natural result of moving from the evangelical context to the Catholic Church. There is no argument here that this is a contributor, to some extent. But the reality is that the furthering also includes fellow Catholics, while those I still sense are in proximity are both evangelicals and Catholics as well.

TESTING THE SOUNDNESS OF UNITY

So am I arguing that what accounts for that sense of furtherness is the current sociopolitical situation and the climate it has created?

I am.

“How can that be,” you may ask. “If we set aside socio-political views, aren’t we united by the kinship bond of our faith and our identity in Christ?”

The answer, as anguishing as it is to accept, and it has been for me, is that we are not.

“But what unites us is greater than our differences,” is the refrain I would parrot. Reminding myself, “The truth of Christ and the hope of the Gospel is greater and more important than anything else and should supersede differences in political or cultural ideas.”

While the latter part of that is true, the proposition that what unites is greater than what divides is an illusion.

Being honest with ourselves, we are obliged to confront a plain reality: our logic suffers from an internal flaw. This often follows a hypothetical syllogism (deductive argument) in the modus ponens form. That simply looks something like this:

• (Premise 1) If the Gospel stands above all else, then the unity it creates … being brothers and sisters in Christ … must be the greatest consideration.

• (Premise 2) The Gospel does, in fact, sit above all else.

• (Conclusion) Therefore, the unity in being 'brothers and sisters in Christ' is our greatest consideration.

If we accept the premises (at face value) to be true, the conclusion is what logic calls 'valid.'

Subsequently, we have long illustrated it this way: social-political differences are just the tip of the iceberg, our unity as brothers/sisters in Christ is the bulk.

However, as with so many things, we stop at mere validity. Presupposing the premises are true. Yet, if we want to be on the most reasonable footing, we don’t stop at validity. Rather, we press onward to assess if our deductive thinking is actually sound.

To do this, we must examine our premises beyond face value. And to me, in doing so, we are forced to go beyond the hypothetical that 'the Gospel' is the same for everyone who identifies as Christian.

It is not.

We need only to look at the 'gospel' of the liberal Protestant Mainline to see that, as a whole, it stands in varying degrees of contrast not only to that of historical Catholicism, but of heritage Protestantism and most evangelicalism.

Without spinning off into the deep waters of historical theological distinctions, which of course I am apt to do, the idea that because we both profess something called 'the Gospel' does not make it either realistic or factually honest to suggest that the gospel of many conservative white American Christians is my gospel.

Despite so much seeming commonality ... namely in that I am a white American, whose worldview is Christian, and whose socio-political leaning is conservative ... there is a chasm beneath the surface.

Therefore, it can only be that the conclusion we are unified as brothers and sisters in Christ to a greater extent than our socio-political differences is untenable and simply untrue.

What is true is that we are two separate species altogether, visibly mistaken for one another by the identity we both invoke.

We must turn our iceberg picture around: social-political differences are the bulk, while identifying as Christians is the visible bit, and sadly, all that we have in common.

INCOMPATIBLE OPERATING SYSTEMS

Meanwhile, at the core of us, there are incompatible operating systems. We might say that there are wholly separate BIOSes at the heart.

To frame the point, we might look at the concept of justice. On the surface, it is a shared term—a common code embedded in our respective systems. But when a cultural crisis executes the command, the underlying prompt is fundamentally different.

For one, justice is a retributive mechanism designed to protect the 'homestead' and maintain the order of a perceived moral cultural heritage. It is a tool used by the powerful to ensure stability.

For the other, justice is a restorative, prophetic mandate that acts as a preferential option for the poor, marginalized, and disadvantaged and a radical critique of power for the sake of status itself.

We both cite the prophet Amos, yet we are running two different algorithms. One 'gospel' views justice as the preservation of the status quo for the sake of the 'faithful,' while the other views it as the subversion of the status quo for the sake of the 'least of these.' The terms are identical, but the logic gates are set in opposite directions.

Our values differ because our ideas of virtue are misaligned. This means that the magnetic north of our moral compasses is not oriented to the same truth. In fact, our understanding of what constitutes truth to begin with, and our relationship to it, differ. And that divergence cannot be casually dismissed. 

In turn, I find ‘fellow Christians’ with whom I have long believed to have a deep unity, enthusiastically admiring things that I find profoundly grotesque, hastily justifying what I swiftly condemn, and readily defending what to me is readily indefensible. And I recognize fully that this viewpoint works the other way around.

Insofar as that is the case, while I honestly think I am proceeding along the Christian 'high road,' I am aware that other Christian readers believe they are as well. And because these roads are so fundamentally distinct, we cannot continue to act as if they are the same.

The dissimilarities are visceral. They exist at the core of us, not at the superficial level of just being 'different political opinions.' It is a wholly different worldview that only thinly aligns us with aspects of the Christian Faith. And I say thinly, with well-thought-out intention.

Inevitably, I reluctantly, yet firmly, accept the fact that while we use the term Christian in reference to our worldviews, we are not the same. We may both use that term to identify our undergirding, but there is a different substrate between us. One that is not shared.

If one foundation ever was, or ever will be common between us, one of us needs to abandon their ‘gospel.’ 

All this to say, I have come to the conviction that the Jesus we are giving our allegiance to appears to be two significantly different Incarnate Words.

It’s hard for me to feign unity in that. And there is something brutally unsettling for me there.

THE BOUNDARY OF THE GREATEST COMMANDMENT

Yet, I cannot shake Christ’s words:

Not everyone who says to me, “Lord, Lord,” will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, “Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name? Did we not drive out demons in your name? Did we not do mighty deeds in your name?” Then I will declare to them solemnly, “I never knew you. Depart from me, you evildoers” (St. Matthew 7:21-23).

Neighbors we may be, but brothers and sisters in Christ, it seems, we cannot … because this moment exposes what I find to be the mutual exclusivity of our worldviews and the 'gospels' to which we give allegiance.

We are often told that unity is found in the Greatest Commandment, but we forget its internal hierarchy. The second command—to love our neighbor—is not a standalone ethic; rather, it is a derivative of the first. If we have fundamentally diverged on the nature of the God we are called to love, the 'love' we offer our neighbor will inevitably spring from two different wells and look like two entirely different things: one that concerns itself with a neighbor's present well-being, flourishing, and dignity, and another that views eternal security as the only metric that matters.  

When the God of one gospel demands the preservation of power, and the God of another demands the relinquishing of it, we are no longer brothers kneeling before the same Father. We are simply neighbors living on the same street.

As such, for me, saying "Neighbors we may be" is not an insult. It is a sober acknowledgment of the second part of the Greatest Commandment’s boundary. It is a commitment to the baseline of human decency and civil charity, even while admitting that the spiritual kinship … the 'brotherhood' found in a shared First Commandment … has been effectively severed. We are confronted with the fact that, while we can share a sidewalk, we can no longer share an awful lot of fruit we once assumed was from the same harvest.

We are not even in the same orchard.

The only humble hope I have is this: I trust in my heart that for my part, with the best I know how, with whatever modicum of wisdom I may have, I have given my finite and fallibly human all to seeking the true Him, in Holy Indifference.

My prayer is that you have and are too. For that is where we are unified, as slender a thread as that may now be.