Keep the Faith: Can we love each other? That is the question

For a while I’ve been asking myself the same set of questions: When did things get so contentious? How did the public and private discourse get so polarized? And, I know I’m not the only one. Most everyone is tired of the situation, but it’s hard getting off this merry-go-round. The irony is that though it may seem as if we’re irreconcilably divided, the people who study such things say we are not as far apart than we think, even on some of the most contentious issues. Most people are in the middle. Most are open to compromise and would like to find a way back.

Part of what makes this current period difficult to understand is that so many things seem very new. There’s the usual temptation to characterize our time as the worse ever, or at least as an epic turning point, but apart from the difficulty in measuring such things, it’s not very likely. Some of this may be true, but most likely not. There can be little doubt that almost no one understands what we’re living through. The economy fluctuates wildly. While great wars are fewer, smaller wars and domestic conflicts grow. Local hostilities, mass shootings, individual murders and suicides are almost commonplace. There are the pandemics, mystery viruses, and a general feeling that not all is well. And climate change makes itself evermore present.

However, there is one thing where there is consensus. Starting sometime in the late 1960s and early 1970s one could discern a shift away from a general concern for the common good toward a growing prioritization of the personal. Again, one shouldn’t overstate it, but the trends are there. Gradually benefits, that because of the labor struggles of the New Deal era, were considered just basic for a salaried employee, now became either optional or privatized. Pensions became 401k’s. Health plans came with restrictions and steep co-pays. Benefit qualifications, such as they were, required a 40-hour plus position. The gig economy was born. At the same time wealth was increasingly concentrated — in fewer people at the top, and in corporate earnings. What we’re experiencing is less sharing of the productivity produced by all workers.

This shift is evidence of other things going on in our society. What might help as we search to find the source of the change are the words of a social science maxim: If you’re trying to understand a phenomenon, the denial of reality is a bad place to start. In other words, you need to put aside all of your preconceptions and prejudices, and then try to see what you’re studying as neutrally as you can.

From where I sit, we have a serious spiritual problem. It’s rooted in the way we understand and interpret the two main stories we Americans tell about ourselves. Everyone’s familiar with them. One is the story of the rugged individualist. The person who by sheer determination carves out their destiny. Another is the barn raising. The entire village comes to help the neighbor in need.

These two themes run vividly in the American imagination. Which is most prominent waxes and wanes given the circumstances, but they usually balance out over time. Right now, the ‘rugged individualist’ is in the ascendancy. The form it takes can be seen in the arguments around guns, taxes, regulations, race, and even (in a backhanded way) reproductive rights. And though our American take on the pull between the individual and the group seems unique to us, it is not new. As long as people have been given to thought and reflection, they’ve been trying to balance the two.

St. Paul grappled with this dynamic throughout his ministry, and perhaps nowhere more openly than with the Corinthian community. Corinth was a city that we twenty-first century people would be very comfortable in. It was an anything-goes kind of place. The new Christian churches being set up in the cities of the Roman world were a varied lot. Depending on the city a congregation could be made up of Jewish converts, Gentiles who were attracted to Judaism and studying to convert, and outright pagans embracing Christ. One of the first question, one that St. Paul and St. Peter disagreed strongly about, was what to do with Jewish practice and the Mosaic Law. If you want to put it in our context, the tension between a traditionalist understanding of law and constitution, and a broader and more expansive understanding of individual rights.

Some of the members of the Corinthian community were engaging in practices and lifestyles that many, including Paul, considered inappropriate. Their defense was that they were free from the Law, in Christ. The “I can do what I want as long as it doesn’t hurt someone else” argument. St. Paul, who had been one of the strictest adherents to the Law, countered with: “All things are lawful,” but not all things are helpful. “All things are lawful,” but not all things build up. Let no one seek his own good, but the good of his neighbor (1 Corinthians 10:23-24). He shifts the “rights” argument; in fact, he turns it on its head. It’s not all about you, rather it’s very much about the effect you have on your neighbor.

In the 1930s, the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr published Moral Man and Immoral Society. He offered a critique of political discourse and theology that is important for our time. He said that when people make claims on the basis of rights — however just those claims may be — the claim will likely impinge on the rights of others. Justice will be hard to find. However, if the principle of love, rather than rights, is invoked, very often justice will be found. How to find love? That’s the question.

I’ll offer this important example, the conundrum of abortion. As it has been presented, it pits the rights of one party (the mother) against the rights of the other (the potential life). Absolutes at loggerheads. Justice eludes. Law and courts fail. And, abortion is not the only problem that requires a different kind of method for a solution. The so-called Culture Wars intend to drive wedges and divide. To find our way back to a place where we can talk to one another respectfully may help us to reconcile and love. Then we might find a way forward.

Fr. Nicholas Apostola is Administrative Vicar of the Romanian Orthodox Metropolia of the Americas, and former parish priest of St. Nicholas Orthodox Church in Shrewsbury.

This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: Keep the Faith: Can we love each other? That's the question