I’ve noticed something in congregational life. When a question comes up that challenges long-held beliefs or traditions, anxiety can spread quickly. People sense that more than just opinions are at stake. For some, this affects how they read scripture. For others, it reaches all the way down to the map they’ve used for years to make sense of what faithfulness requires.
Then someone speaks up, and it’s no longer theoretical. They mention their granddaughter. A story is told, and the question has a face now. People who came ready with an answer start choosing their words more carefully. No one is entirely at ease, but there is a new kind of care in the room.
I’ve also seen how quickly that care can dissipate. The very same question, heard through a political lens, can shut down conversation almost at once. People brace themselves. Some withdraw while others settle in. The discussion has been sorted out before it begins.
Jason Edwards
I remember sitting one-on-one with a church member, offering what I thought was a careful, Scripture-shaped response to a particular concern. Their reply was, without hesitation: “I don’t care what the Bible says. You can make the Bible say whatever you want.”
Later, the deeper concern came into view. It was partisan politics.
Even face-to-face over a cup of coffee, their filter was fixed in place. Scripture had been set aside before it could be heard. It doesn’t take long for a question to be folded into categories formed elsewhere.
We don’t come to these kinds of conversations unformed. We learn what to fear and whose voice to trust over time. Words such as “democracy,” “freedom,” “nation,” “justice” and even “Scripture” rarely appear without baggage.
Democracy is always more than its documents. It lives, or fails, in the habits people carry into ordinary life. A system can be carefully built and still come apart in the hands of people who no longer know how to share a life with those they did not choose.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “The person who loves their dream of community will destroy community, but the person who loves those around them will create community.”
He was writing about Christian life together. He knew how easy it is to become attached to ideas of common life that ask very little of us because there are no actual people in it. Real people change the terrain. They do not fit neatly inside anybody’s ideal.
“A common life depends on whether we’ve learned how to live with those we didn’t choose without needing them to become something else.”
A democracy carries that same strain into public life, joining us with neighbors we didn’t choose and won’t always understand. Laws, institutions and procedures are important, but they cannot do the whole work. Virtues like patience, honesty and restraint are learned over time, in ways no law can require. What earlier Christians called prudence (the capacity to see clearly what a situation requires and to act well when no general principle can fully account for it) is exactly what democratic life asks of ordinary people.
In the end, a common life depends on whether we’ve learned how to live with those we didn’t choose without needing them to become something else.
I think of a moment from the 2008 presidential campaign. A woman at a town hall took the microphone and told John McCain she couldn’t trust Barack Obama because he was an Arab. McCain shook his head and took the microphone back. “No, ma’am,” he said. “He’s a decent family man, a citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues.”
The crowd booed. McCain had refuted a false claim he could have let stand and even benefited from. But notice what else he did. He corrected the woman without humiliating her and spoke of his opponent truthfully and with genuine kindness, while maintaining his own integrity in a room that was asking him to do something else entirely.
His answer was still problematic: He failed to correct the false claim that Obama was Arab, and he implied that being Arab and being decent were mutually exclusive. They’re not. That’s the kind of assumption that doesn’t survive an actual conversation at a family’s dinner table with children. But he made the attempt.
Character formation doesn’t produce perfect responses. It produces people who refuse to use a lie even when the crowd is asking for one and who manage, in the refusal, to treat everyone in the room with dignity.
“Character formation produces people who refuse to use a lie even when the crowd is asking for one.”
What forms people to attempt that? The answer has to reach deeper than civic education or political theory.
The Scriptures don’t offer models for a modern political system, they form people. Over time, they teach us to listen before speaking, to tell the truth without bearing false witness, and to treat the person in front of us as a neighbor rather than an opponent. They also unsettle the assumption that our view of things is as clear as we think it is.
That work shows up in ordinary places. Someone speaks more carefully because the person across the table is not an idea but a friend. A conversation slows down long enough for someone to say, “I may be wrong.”
Churches do not always live this way. Any pastor who has sat through a tense business meeting knows how quickly a congregation can become a place where people perform, withdraw or try to control the outcome. Faith language can be used to win arguments, and silence can be used to avoid them.
Years ago, driving through another city near the Fourth of July, I passed a billboard advertising a holiday celebration. The words were large enough to catch from the road: “Follow Jesus to the Flag.” I remember easing up on the gas as I went by. The sentence stayed with me. So did the order of it.
The Cross of Christ points elsewhere. It does not steady our fears by giving us control or securing our place. In the hours leading up to the crucifixion, fear speaks loudly and certainty closes ranks. Jesus does not answer in kind. He refuses to treat people as obstacles to be removed.
Christians return to that scene again and again. Over time, it changes what we expect from power and from one another. Fear doesn’t disappear, although it does lose some of its authority.
No society is sustained by procedures alone. It depends on the moral formation of the people living within it. The harder question is not only what kind of system we have, but what kind of people we are becoming inside it.
That question doesn’t have a quick answer. It takes shape in the way people treat one another when agreement is out of reach — in churches, neighborhoods and the ordinary places where no one guards the door.
A democracy can make room for that kind of life. It also can expose how fragile that life has become.
Discussion questions:
- The article suggests we do not come to public life unformed, that our political instincts are shaped long before we enter a voting booth or a public debate. Where do you think your own formation happened? What places, people or experiences formed how you listen, argue or treat someone you disagree with?
- McCain’s moment is offered as an example of democratic practice working, imperfectly, at some cost, in a room that wanted something else. Can you think of a moment, public or personal, where you saw someone do the harder thing in a disagreement? What made it possible, and what did it cost them?
- The piece draws a distinction between what laws and institutions can do and what character formation requires. Where do you think that line is? Are there virtues democratic life depends on that cannot be legislated, and if so, whose responsibility is it to form them?
- The article pauses at a billboard that read: “Follow Jesus to the Flag,” an image that assumes Christianity and American national identity are naturally aligned, that Jesus is somehow at home under one particular flag. Where have you seen that assumption show up, in church culture, in political language or in your own formation? What does the Cross of Christ, as the article describes it, actually point toward and what difference does that make for how Christians engage public life?
- The article ends by saying democracy can expose how fragile our common life has become (the shared practice of living with neighbors we did not choose, across genuine difference). Do you think that fragility is a failure of institutions, a failure of character formation or something else? And what, if anything, gives you reason to believe people still can learn to stay in the room with those they did not choose, rather than absorbing those distinctions into a false unity that was never really there?
Jason G. Edwards is a pastor and writer from Liberty, Mo., where he serves Second Baptist Church as senior pastor. Find his poetry, prose and blessings at jasongedwards.com.
Previously in this series:
What is democracy? | Caroline Smith
The church as school for democracy | Emily Hull McGee
Democracy as the practice of loving our neighbors | Mary Alice Birdwhistell
Democracy and religious freedom | Carol McEntyre