After President Joe Biden was elected in November 2020, his supporters felt a profound sense of hope, while supporters of Donald Trump felt quite the opposite. After last night’s election results, the tables seem to have turned. But my own deepest conviction, which I wrote about in response to the 2020 election remains: “Threads of a liberal consensus hang all around, but they simply are no longer strong enough to knit together the body politic. Reminders to ‘be kind,’ or the hope for a quiet life with just enough creature comforts and just enough distraction are understandable. But they are simply not enough.”
There is more that could be said, of course, but for whatever they are worth, I offer my thoughts from that time again now. They are deeply rooted in what I understand Christianity to be, and they rest on fundamentals of the Christian faith: a God who is Love and who chose to heal the catastrophe of sin through the mystery of saving solidarity. Perhaps they will be of some use even to those who don’t claim Christian faith.
The days are growing short at the end of what has been a dark year. The election here in the United States moves us forward into a new phase, but now we have to wonder: What will that phase hold? And, more importantly, who will we be in it?
The question is whether there is any center around which the American people can rally. Threads of a liberal consensus hang all around, but they simply are no longer strong enough to knit together the body politic. Reminders to “be kind,” or the hope for a quiet life with just enough creature comforts and just enough distraction are understandable. But they are simply not enough.
Many of those of us who have thought a lot about the past, and the complex ways that human life expands and contracts and changes, feel convinced: We are at the end of something. What is next, though, remains very unclear.
So, what then?
There is only one way forward now: a relentless commitment to build a broad culture of life on the ground of radical love.
I won’t propose labels, so much as commitments that could ground this form of life together. I believe we are called at the moment to several crucial tasks.
We are called to turn our attention to the most vulnerable, and face squarely a world in which so many lack basic necessities—food, water, housing, hope, community and connection. We must ask why this is, and listen carefully and seek responses together—at the national level sometimes, but likely more often in our own towns and neighborhoods. If the asking or the responding causes you to be labeled communist (or socialist or any other label), so be it.
As we dare to open our eyes and hearts to the many forms of exhaustion and pain around us, we must cultivate a practice of compassion, both individual and corporate, that includes a commitment to justice.
We are called to face squarely the spiritual poverty that upholds this system. Anxiety and loneliness have made us greedy and curved in on ourselves. In this shared spiritual poverty, our system benefits no one in the ultimate sense but diminishes and deforms us all.
We are called to ask not only about governmental policies but our own lives. We must hold our own possessions lightly and ask how it is that we can live for the common good.
Although we will debate various policies that might address suffering, we must recommit to a simple, nonnegotiable principle: We will hold human life sacred. Civilians are not “collateral damage”; state killing is never required; unborn children are to be cherished.
To these ends, we must make common cause wherever we can, with whomever we can. And in every case, without exception, our task is to love: that is, to will the good of the other without condition.
We are called to ground ourselves in the nourishment of worship, sacrifice, feasting, solitude and rest.
We are called to speak unapologetically of the character of life lived in the holy presence of God: humility, gratitude, compassion and joy.
The days are growing shorter. Hope is now an act of resistance. But if we are willing to repent and turn from our wicked ways, God can renew us, can bring light into our darkness and can even make us, together, to shine like the sun.
