Some colleagues and I happened to be meeting in New England this week, so we drove slightly bit north to a small village in Vermont called St. Johnsbury, right in the road of the totality of the solar eclipse.
Even before the sky darkened, I used to be mesmerized by the people gathering within the town square, each with a way of anticipation and excitement over the shared experience. We ended up standing on the front lawn of somebody’s house, eating sandwiches while we waited for the sun to cover. The homeowners sat on their stoop and weren’t only unperturbed by our camping out on their property but seemingly having fun with the possibility to welcome people to their place.
Several articles this week noted how the eclipse looked as if it would have the effect of bringing out kindness and connection, almost the best way a natural disaster would, except in collective wonder as an alternative of in common suffering or fear. Not only that, some studies are showing that this type of neighborliness and openness is way more common than we predict, eclipsed behind the maelstrom of division we see on social media and on cable news.
Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen describe our sense that the country is hopelessly and irreparably divided as “America’s reality distortion machine.” Most people aren’t fringe-right Christian nationalists or fringe-left campus activists. Those fringes, though, are amplified not only by the character of our media but in addition by the incentives of politicians to cater to the extremes.
A pair weeks ago on my podcast, I asked social psychologist Jonathan Haidt among the questions I’d received from listeners because the last time we’d talked, certainly one of the first ones being a matter from school administrators concerning the use of smartphones of their classrooms.
The problem, several of those administrators said to me, is just not that they receive pushback from the kids once they suggest banning phones during class hours but as an alternative that they receive opposition from the parents. Haidt, though, pointed to research showing that, typically, upward of 80 percent of oldsters are fully supportive of colleges carrying out such measures.
The key, he said, is that nobody ever hears from the parents who’re supportive. The schools get calls and emails and visits from the outraged parents afraid of their child being unable to be in contact with them at a half-second’s notice.
Haidt’s statement rings true to me. Very few people think to contact their child’s principal to say they’re blissful with the best way the college is being run. Very few people email their pastor to say that the church is benefiting them spiritually.
Part of that’s for a similar reason that news services don’t run stories about all the homes that don’t burn down or about all of the bank CEOs who don’t embezzle money or all of the evangelists who don’t have affairs. We are likely to take such things as a right, and when something goes rather well, we assume that it’s obvious and doesn’t even should be said.
I caught myself realizing this tendency in myself a couple of weeks ago once I was saying to a bunch of individuals in one other state how awed and grateful I’m for my church, for the Christlike vibe there, for a way I’ve never heard anyone say a critical word of any kind concerning the pastor, for the best way my very own sons respect and love their youth pastor. It struck me that while I often say these items about our church, I rarely say these items to the leaders at our church. I are likely to unconsciously assume that everybody just knows how good the congregation and its leadership are.
In any environment, from a college to a church to a neighborhood to a rustic, the normies are likely to go on with their lives, without saying much. When indignant fringes emerge—on a campus or inside a ministry or in a political party—normal people often assume that if we just get really still and check out to maintain the Eye of Sauron off of us, then the fad will magically cool down by itself.
The fringes know this. They know that the remaining of us will start getting exasperated with the college board member, the chairman of deacons, or the tenants’ association president for the very undeniable fact that they draw fire from the fringes. Why are they so controversial on a regular basis? the normies sometimes conclude and begin to recoil. What we don’t realize is that this type of mentality is strictly what extreme fringes count on with the intention to wreak havoc.
Every time one other study comes out about how we actually will not be as polarized as we seem, I worry that folks will conclude that because of this polarization isn’t real . When the individuals who prize kindness and civility and decency and norms go quiet, though, the fringes turn out to be less fringy. People start to mimic what they see as “normal,” and if what they’ve seen as normal is crazy, the crazy soon becomes normal.
For Christians, this has implications for our witness. For a complete generation or more, we’ve taught church members and the subsequent generations the way to contend with a culture that’s hostile to them. Sometimes this is completed in a very good and biblical way, rightly emphasizing that following Christ is expensive and that we should always be prepared to be rejected, just as he was.
The problem is, without the balance of the Bible’s simultaneous emphasis on common grace, we find yourself not with countercultural Christians but with paranoid ones.
If you expect your neighbors to hate you, you’ll almost inevitably, preeminently armor up in a protective crouch. Imagine if someone sets you up on a blind date with the words This person is likely to be the love of your life—or they is likely to be an armed stalker who will chase you to the sting of the grave. That would change the conversation.
The final result is that, steadily, Christians in secular spaces have a insecurity, with a form of inferiority complex concerning the gospel they carry. Yes, the gospel is countercultural, a two-edged sword, a scandal to the world, a contradiction to the establishment. But the gospel can also be genuinely excellent news—chatting with the primal hopes and fears embedded in human psyches.
Often, the neighbors we assume hate us aren’t pondering of us in any respect—they don’t even know we’re there. If those that really consider that their neighbors might well be their future brothers and sisters in Christ—that the gospel really can renew any heart, reconcile any person—are in a defensive crouch, then the one Christians their neighbors will see are indignant individuals who would, like Jonah, be furious to see their enemies seek grace.
In reality, many unbelievers—especially some who’re in essentially the most disenchanted, nonreligious spaces—are interested in what motivates religious people. Some of them are greater than curious. They are attempting to assume what it could be prefer to be the form of one who seeks a God who might love them, to have an atonement that frees them from guilt and shame.
Sometimes those curious people seem essentially the most wanting to argue against Christianity. The closer they arrive to asking What if it’s true? the more vigorously they fight to argue themselves away from that brink.
When we expect robotically that our neighbors detest us, we are likely to see every potential conversation about spiritual matters to be a contest of irrefutable arguments. We try to search out the series of pithy zingers that might show that unbelief is irrational. Sometimes encounters over spiritual things are arguments like that, but they’re rarely one-time confrontations that somebody wins by audience vote like a university debate.
And the concept such conversations must be like that may cause us to go silent until we feel that we’re adequately prepared to reply any potential query about philosophy or archaeology or ancient Near Eastern history. No one ever feels adequate to demolish every potential argument, to reply any conceivable query. Such a mentality silences the form of individuals who, within the Gospels, have the type of witness that’s essentially the most powerful—the type that claims, Come and see.
The country is kinder than what we see in our politics and our media. The reality is distorted, to make sure. But the more we normalize that polarization, the more real it becomes.
The more we robotically assume our neighbors hate us, the more we’ll begin to preemptively hate our neighbors. Jesus told us that it’s insane to light a lamp after which hide it under a bowl (Matt. 5:15). In many cases on this crazed, indignant time, that light may be eclipsed by something else. But an eclipse that goes on too long is indistinguishable from night, and an evening that goes on too long is sort of indistinguishable from death.
Your neighbor might hate you—but probably not.
Russell Moore is CT’s editor in chief.
