Cleanliness is next to godliness.
Forgive and forget.
Growing up in my conservative, mostly evangelical, rural Texas town, I went in search of accepted truisms within the Bible—only to find they’d never been there in any respect. Gradually, I got here to comprehend life might be more complicated than those sayings allowed, and yet I’m still surprised every every so often after I find myself clinging to some pithy proverb with the spiritual ardor that must be reserved for chapter and verse.
This too shall pass.
God works in mysterious ways.
I walked the aisle of my Baptist church after I was nine years old, accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior, and never looked back. I used to be energetic in Girls in Action, Bible Bowl, and my best friend’s charismatic church youth group. I attended Baylor, a Christian university. Everywhere I turned, I saw individuals who looked like me, talked like me, thought like me, and worshiped like me.
You are the corporate that you just keep.
Birds of a feather flock together.
I assumed that form of flocking was biblical within the prescriptive sense. Didn’t the Bible exhort us to not forsake the gathering of the saints (Heb. 10:25), placing a high value on “doing life with” like-minded people? Living in such a homogeneous world appeared like the natural order of things. I couldn’t yet see the shadow side—how easily we slip into idolizing our own reflections, mistaking the familiar for the right and the customary for the righteous.
Today my pondering is more complicated. Now that my eldest is an adolescent, I see the advantage of encouraging her to flock with friends who share our values or faith. There are not any guarantees in parenting, but the corporate children keep, especially at such an important age, indelibly shapes who they develop into. Yet in her large public middle school, I already see the underbelly of the flock. The very normal, human impulse to be with like-minded friends also tends to mean self-sorting along social, racial, class, and cultural lines. Of course there are exceptions, but self-segregation is the operative norm in American schools.
That childish tendency becomes a more significant issue if we don’t “put the ways of childhood behind” us in maturity (1 Cor. 13:11)—if we default to superficial homogeneity as an alternative of reconciliation in Christ (Eph. 2:11–22) or, worse, mistake sinful self-sorting for God’s will.
The temptation to that error is robust. At every turn are signs of polarization: red versus blue, urban versus rural, secular versus religious, us versus them. Algorithms serve up the news we want to listen to, virtually assuring us of our own rightness. Everything becomes political, and the lines between us have cracked into chasms, a lot in order that “most Democrats and Republicans live in levels of partisan segregation that exceed what scholars of racial segregation consider highly segregated.” Even men and girls are drifting further apart. At every scale—from our nation to our neighborhoods to our churches to our homes—we’re self-sorting.
Birds of a feather flock together is usually true in practice. We may find it comforting too, an assurance that nothing’s unsuitable with the lives we’ve built alongside like-minded friends. But as Christians, such flocking should prick the conscience. On what ground is our commonality rooted?
A number of weeks ago, my pastor caught me off guard, exposing certainly one of those places where I assumed the Bible said something it doesn’t. We so easily misread Philippians 2, he said, where Paul enjoins Christians to be “like-minded, having the identical love” as Christ (v. 2) and “have the identical mindset as Christ Jesus” (v. 5).
When most of us think in regards to the word like-minded, my pastor continued, we predict of finding people who find themselves of a like mind with us. But that’s not what Paul wrote. He called us to evolve our minds to be like that of Christ.
The former centers our lives and relationships on ourselves, our preconceived notions, and our personal biases. The latter centers us on Jesus. The former is an updated idolatry—not the golden cow but our own visage hoisted on the altar. The latter is our “true and proper worship” (Rom. 12:1).
Make no mistake: Building a community around ourselves just isn’t the decision of our Savior. Christianity is a monotheistic religion, but we were never alleged to be a monolithic community. As Allen Hilton points out in A House United, the early church cut across class, ethnic, and spiritual lines: In Romans 16, “Paul has painted a wierd and wonderful family portrait, with aristocrats and artisans, shopkeepers and slaves, men and girls, Greeks and barbarians, worshiping together.”
In this fashion, Christians were unique within the Roman Empire. The early church drew people from diverse groups to collect in one another’s homes, awestruck at what God was doing amongst them as they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to one another (Acts 2:42–47). It is much too common to search out Christians who’ve lost that distinction today. Our congregations develop into flocks of like-minded people within the worst sense: We are united less by a typical love than by a typical enemy.
We might want responsible that dysfunction on political or religious leaders or on society within the abstract. But as Michael Wear writes in The Spirit of Our Politics, the mood of the age is a mirrored image of our own hearts: “Many of our most profound political problems reflect how our political institutions process and reply to the habits of the center which might be held, fundamentally, at the extent of the person.”
We could also be convinced our hands are unsullied by dirty politicking, but how often in our abnormal lives do we decide hostility over hospitality or contempt over curiosity? Feeling right(eous) and powerful is deliciously intoxicating, as I do know from experience. It’s ripe fruit from the unsuitable tree, and we’ve feasted until we’re sick.
If there’s one thing Americans agree on as we glance toward the 2024 election, it’s a shared feeling of dread. Few Americans need a rematch between president Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump, but this dread isn’t only in regards to the unpleasant political theater that may last for months. It’s also about deeper anxieties: How will we keep already-fragile relationships from becoming political fodder? How will we resist the pull to make the whole lot political? Are we bequeathing our youngsters the makings of a civil war?
As followers of Jesus, we have now a solution for this—if only we could remember it. Re-member: The word means “to think of,” but it surely also means “to place back together;” it’s an antonym of dismember. The church must live out each meanings of the word.
We have to think of the everlasting God in whom we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28), looking for to be more like-minded with him on daily basis. And we want to acknowledge how much we—as individual American Christians—have contributed to the dismembering of our society, succumbing to the temptations Jesus faced within the wilderness as we pursue our desire to be relevant, spectacular, and powerful no matter the fee.
As we repent for our part within the breaking, we must take up our part within the repairing, using “the old rubble of past lives to construct anew … [becoming] referred to as those that can fix anything, restore old ruins, rebuild and renovate, make the community livable again” (Isa. 58:12, MSG).
Trying to alter a nation’s trajectory may feel as futile as attempting to redirect an asteroid. But we will actually course-correct our own lives. When we’re like-minded with Christ, we are going to tackle the character of a servant. We will humble ourselves. We won’t be motivated by selfish ambition or vain conceit. We will look to the interests of others, looking for the “peace and prosperity” of the cities to which we thoroughly may feel exiled (Phil. 2; Jer. 29:7).
Our Lord who “rejoices to see the work begin” (Zech. 4:10, NLT) doesn’t despise our small beginnings. Nor should we. The season of Lent is upon us, and in a world that sometimes appears like it’s turning to ashes in our hands, possibly it’s time we repent.
Carrie McKean is a West Texas–based author whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Texas Monthly Magazine. Find her at carriemckean.com.
