Photo: A pro-choice and an anti-abortion demonstrator confront each other outside the Supreme Court in 1989, Washington DC (Flickr: Lorie Shaull)

For the last 40 years, the abortion debate, as currently framed, has raised huge sums of money for non-profits and political organizations, especially those on the right. It has also provided leaders of both parties with a simple issue around which to mobilize voters: for Republicans, the rights of the unborn, and for Democrats, the rights of women.

But the conventional debate has a dark side, a set of side effects and unintended consequences that we believe citizens of moral conscience need to know and pay attention to.

For example, each side, by providing us with a short-cut to a sense of moral superiority, also gives us a weapon with which to demonize and even dehumanize our counterparts. When we render our opponents the evil enemy, we risk becoming a house so divided that our nation becomes ungovernable. When one side frames ethically complex issues as simplistic moral absolutes, then negotiation, the heart of politics in a democracy, becomes moral compromise. And when the other side frames abortion as if it were a simple legal and medical matter with no moral dimension, adherents render themselves insensitive and incomprehensible to their counterparts.

We’re left with polarization, paralysis and mutual vilification, right at a critical moment when so many other serious problems demand our unified attention: runaway climate change and economic inequality, unchecked gun violence, the need for immigration reform, and a resurgence of racism in its many ugly forms.

That’s why more and more of us are waking up to this realization: The current framing of the debate is wounding our nation and may in fact become our undoing, dividing us so deeply that in seeking to win elections, we lose our nation’s soul.

As religious leaders, one Catholic and one Protestant, we see the great harm the old abortion debate is doing, both to our national politics and to our religious communities. That’s why we would like to invite politicians, religious leaders and citizens in general to turn away from the rhetoric of mutually-assured destruction and reframe the abortion debate in more productive terms for the future.

A “Next Generation Abortion Conversation” would have the following ground rules:

First, we would stop demonizing each other. We would acknowledge how seductive it is for each side to consider itself morally superior and reduce its opponent to the level of moral filth. We would face the harm that kind of pride can do, both politically and spiritually. In our combined 120-plus years of life experience, neither of us has ever met a single supporter of abortion rights who hates babies, supports infanticide, or who has a “the more the better” attitude toward abortion. Nor have we ever met an abortion opponent who hates women and wants to throw mothers in jail for seeking an abortion. No doubt, such extremists may exist, but we have yet to meet any, and we can no longer let the debate be framed and fought from the extremes.

Second, we must acknowledge that there aren’t only two positions on abortion. It would be more accurate to say there are five, with purists on either end of the spectrum, and in the middle, three groups that account for the majority of us, those who are against abortion but do not want to criminalize it, those who support abortion rights but who would like to see abortion rates reduced, and those in between who see wisdom (and problems) on both sides. If we get beyond the old two-sides framing, we can drop the old pro-life versus pro-choice binary entirely. The fact is that life and choice are not mutually exclusive, and in a democracy, we can hold our own moral convictions about life and choice, rooted in our religious traditions, without feeling that others should be forced to live by them.

Third, we must shift the debate from making abortion illegal to making abortion less and less necessary. The truth is that we can both reduce abortions and protect vulnerable women from having politicians (who are mostly wealthy, white and male, by the way) interfere with one of their most personal moral decisions. Abortion reduction rather than criminalization is a goal that nearly all of us can agree to.

And there’s great news in this regard. We’re already succeeding at reducing abortion rates, and we already know what will reduce them even more. If we shift our energies in the direction of abortion reduction, focusing on the causes and conditions that lead to abortion, everyone will benefit.

For 40 years, our nation has been torn apart by one framing of the abortion debate. It’s time for a new generation to address the issue in a new and wiser way.

Patrick Carolan is the Catholic Outreach Director for Vote Common Good. He was executive director of the Franciscan Action Network since 2010 and is a co-founder of the Global Catholic Climate Movement.

Brian McLaren is an author, speaker, activist and public theologian. A former college English teacher and evangelical minister, he co-leads the Common Good Messaging Team, part of Vote Common Good.

(A version of this story appeared in the Jan 24-Feb 6, 2020 print issue under the headline: It’s time to change the abortion debate in America.)

We live in a time of conflict and polarization — in the church in its various forms and in the world at large. In fact, our religious and secular challenges are so enmeshed as to be inseparable. 

In the world at large, the planet is in crisis. From global warming to the great global insect die-off, from the impending tsunami of extinctions to multifaceted ecosystem collapse, the earth is suffering under the burden of too many people demanding too many resources while pumping out too many wastes. As Pope Francis said in Laudato Si, we are sowing filth and destruction into the earth rather than life and beauty.

The poor are also in crisis, as a tiny minority of super-rich global elites control a larger and larger percentage of power and wealth, leaving the poor farther and farther behind to survive on leftovers. Simply put: the wealth rises to the top and the troubles (what economists call “externalized costs”) trickle down to the folks at the bottom of the economic pyramid.

In addition to the crises of the planet and the poor, we face a crisis of peace. Arrogant nationalism, ignorant racism, shortsighted militarism, and post-truth propaganda empower the Putin’s of the world to bomb innocents into rubble while the NRAs of the world proliferate guns. As we pump more and more weapons of increasing kill-power into human societies, as we dump more and more carbon and other pollutants into our skies and seas, as we redistribute more and more wealth and power away from the struggling masses and toward the elite upper classes …  we create a perfect recipe for misery, for us, for our children, and for generations to come. 

We could wish that the leaders of our Christian faith were paying attention to these crises. A few are. But many — too many — are obsessed with preserving their power, protecting their privilege, and perpetuating their institutions. They obsess over liturgical gnats while ignoring existential threats, and we wonder why younger generations are turning away!

The young see our churches as being fueled by theologies of separation, shame, punishment, and damnation. They experience our liturgies as being obsessed with individual salvation, appeasing a demanding God so our individual souls can assure their ticket to heaven when we die. They encounter our institutions as being more concerned with their own power, privilege, and survival than with the common good. Many feel frustration and hopelessness. 

Younger generations know the reality articulated early in the last century by Teilhard de Chardin: “Evolve or be annihilated.” They know the reality articulated late in the last century by Thomas Berry: “We will go into the future as a single sacred community, or we will all perish in the desert.” 

When they read the gospels, they hear a resonance between Teilhard’s call to evolve and Jesus’ call to repent. And they hear a resonance between Jesus’ good news of the kingdom of God and Berry’s “single sacred community.”

When they hear or recite the Lord’s Prayer, the prayer most frequently prayed by every denomination of Christianity, they hear the words, “Thy kingdom come; thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven.” They see what so many of us miss: Jesus’ prayer is not an evacuation plan, praying to get our individual souls from earth down here to heaven up there. This prayer is a transformation plan, bringing God’s good will down here to earth from up there in heaven. The prayer asks us, “How do we join Jesus in his concern for God’s good desires to become actualized on earth?” The prayer directs us to address this world and its injustices, joining God in God’s healing work within this world. 

The Sufi teacher Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee says, “The world is not a problem to be solved; it is a living being to which we belong. The world is part of our own self and we are a part of its suffering wholeness.”  Younger generations wish they could say more in our Christian communities helping to lead the way to bring healing and hope to this “suffering wholeness.”

We have a proposal that addresses both the crises in the world at large and the crises in the Christian church: the possibility of a Franciscan Renaissance.

The first biographer of St. Francis, Thomas of Celano, described Francis’ return to God as reclaiming that which would free him both from a sinful nature and from a perverted society which was Christian in name only. Thomas of Celano could just as easily be describing the state of our world and religion today. 

Neither of us are professed Franciscans. Our deep love and understanding of Franciscan spirituality came from our work and relationships with Franciscan sisters and friars in the US and across the World. When we talk about a Franciscan Renaissance, we are not referring to otherworldly piety and escapist rituals or propping up the status quo of Franciscan institutions. Rather, we advocate a Franciscan Renaissance centered in the spirit of St. Clare and St. Francis, embodied in their examples, further explored in the works of brilliant Franciscan theologians like Blessed John Dun Scotus. 

This renaissance is needed because dominant forms of Christianity are stuck. The Catholic Church is stuck; all the many forms of Protestantism are stuck. Whether you are Catholic, Evangelical Protestant or Mainline Protestant you’ve probably watched with horror from a distance as many of your leaders and fellow members were so easily sucked into Trumpism. It breaks your heart to see how many Christians have wandered into white supremacist backwaters, into QAnon and other conspiracy theories, where they’re in many ways ruled by nostalgia, dreaming of a mythical idyllic past when life made more sense to them. 

Yes, there are beautiful pockets of light and growth and redemption in all our Christian traditions. But so many are stuck in deep ruts, hardly able to see outside. Even when they know they’re in trouble, it’s so much easier to live in denial and keep on with liturgy as usual. Along with ruts of routine, so many of us are stuck in our silos, just worried about our little group. So, Lutherans are worried about renewing Lutheranism and Presbyterians are worried about renewing their Presbyterianism, just as Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox can act as if their group is the only group that matters. 

Every week, more and more people, especially young people, leave the stuckness and stagnation, joining the 70 million-plus adult Americans who grew up going to Church but who no longer do. The failure of retention of younger generations brings us closer every day to what we might call a demographic cliff. 

If Christianity were in trouble only because it’s stuck in ruts of routine and silos of sectarianism, that would be bad enough. But we also have to acknowledge that there are dominant forms of Christianity that have become dangerous. Too many preach that Jesus is coming soon, so we don’t need to worry about the environment. Too many preach, ‘The Bible says that the end is going to be terrible, that things are getting worse. That just tells us that we are closer to the end. And after that it is heaven and then we will all be able to party.’ Too many preach an intoxicating cocktail of Christianity and white supremacy, Christianity and nationalism, Christianity and unregulated capitalism. As a result, the earth suffers, people of color suffer, the poor suffer, and ultimately, everyone suffers.

The words of the prophet Jeremiah (8:8) echo in our ears: 

“How can you say, “We are wise, 

for we have the law of the Lord,”

when that law has been falsified 

by the lying pen of the scribes?” 

The vision of Francis and Clare are exactly what we need at this moment of peril and opportunity. Why is that legacy so precious at this moment?

First, at this time of ecological crisis, the Franciscan legacy is powerfully ecological. Living as we do at the precipice of an environmental catastrophe; we need a spiritual vision that integrates love for God and love for our neighbor with love for the earth — exactly the vision of St. Francis and St. Clare and the movements that they gave birth to. 

Francis’ famous friendship with a wolf and his preaching to the birds are easily reduced to cute little tropes, birdbaths if you will. But the ecological vision of Francis was about more than birdbaths. It was about the interconnectedness of all creation, so that we see every creature as sister or brother. As Sr. Ilia Delio OSF wrote in her book, A Franciscan View of Creation, “Francis’ respect for creation was not a duty or obligation but arose out of an inner love by which creation and the source of creation were intimately united…” Francis saw himself as part of creation, as being in relationship with creation, and not having dominion over creation or even stewardship of creation.  

Second, in this time of violence, this time of school shootings and war in Europe, this time when many politicians seem to believe that the more guns, we have the safer we’ll be, or the more bombs we have the safer we’ll be, we need St. Francis’ message and example of nonviolence as never before. If we follow the path of maximum armament … believing that we can never have too many guns and bombs … we will discover that this is a suicidal trajectory for our species: as Jesus said, “Those who live by the sword will die by the sword.”  We need a spirituality that is deeply nonviolent not just in words but in our action. 

It is difficult to preach nonviolence when so much of our religion is focused on the wrath and fear of God. In fact, to many Christians today, world salvation means being saved from an angry God. Carl Jung, one of our greatest 20th century psychologists, once said, “If our religion is based on salvation, our chief emotions will be fear and trembling. If our religion is based on wonder, our chief emotion will be gratitude.”  Over the centuries, many forms of Christianity have become religions of fear. But Christianity wasn’t always like that. It began as a nonviolent peace movement, a community known for love, a community gathered around a table of fellowship and reconciliation, a people armed with the basin and towel of service, not the bomb and gun of violence. A Franciscan Renaissance would invite us to become, in the language of St. Clare, not violent warriors, but nonviolent mirrors of Christ for others to see and follow.

Third, in addition to being ecological and nonviolent, the Franciscan vision is deeply economic. Today, a larger and larger percentage of wealth is being concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer individuals and families. In spite of calling ourselves democracies and free market economies, many of our nations are returning to a kind of feudal oligarchy, where a small number of powerful families exert great power over governments and collaborate with transnational crime syndicates … all while collaborating with religions that give them cover. St. Francis arose in the early stages of modern capitalism, and he saw its potential dangers. He exemplified an alternative value system where the poor, the leper, and the outcast matter more than money, luxury, and power. Our current economic model places no intrinsic value on creation, except as a source for raw materials that we consume. In so doing, it reduces us to consumers, and values us based on our productivity measured in money.  A Franciscan renaissance would help us “redeem” — which means to re-assess and revalue — everything, so we rediscover the priceless beauty of the earth and its creatures, including our neighbors and ourselves.  

Fourth, we live in a time of exclusion, division, classism, racism, and religious prejudice. We need the example of St. Francis and St. Clare, who clearly modeled deep inclusiveness and solidarity. In the iconic paintings of St. Francis embracing a leper, we do not see a shallow inclusiveness that says, ‘We’re elite and we’re going to bring a few of you as tokens into our exclusive club.’ No, we see in St. Francis profound solidarity with the last, the lost, and the least, with the other, the outcast, the outsider, and even the enemy. In this spirit of solidarity, I see that my life and your life are interconnected. I refuse to settle for my own happiness, because my life is in solidarity with yours as my neighbor. 

The relationship between Francis and Clare modeled this: we’re all equal — male and female, rich and poor, healthy and sick, well-clothed and clothed in rags, Pope and Bishop and lay person. Francis even teaches us to refuse to discriminate between Christian and Muslim, Jew and Atheist, for we all are beloved by God. We see this interfaith solidarity when Francis ventures without weapon or threat into the Sultan’s camp in Egypt, bearing a message of peace – a heart for peace. This vision has been tragically lost in so much of our Christian faith. More than ever at this moment, we need the vision of Francis and Clare for an interfaith solidarity. 

We have experienced this inclusive solidarity. Neither of us are professed Franciscans but we both have been welcomed within the Franciscan community. Not only that: in our work and travels we both have encountered Muslims, Jews, Hindus and even atheists who have a deep respect for St. Francis, his life and works. A Franciscan Renaissance will expand beyond the traditional three Franciscan orders to a fourth order — of Franciscan-hearted people.

A Franciscan Renaissance would be ecological, nonviolent, economic, and inclusive. It would also be creative theologically. Too many Christians still imagine God as a big white guy on a throne in the sky, a cosmic dictator and Zeus-like despot and who will subject people to cruelty if they don’t honor his magnificence appropriately. Looking back over the last eight centuries, it is clear that the Franciscan theological instinct was right, and we need it more than ever. 

The prevalent theology during the time of St Francis was centered around the idea of substitutionary atonement. In this view, the purpose of Jesus’ incarnation was to suffer and die as a sacrifice to appease an angry God. But for Franciscans, Jesus didn’t come to appease an angry God; he came to reveal a loving God, as Sr. Ilia Delio, OSF, says in her book, Franciscan Prayer: prayer “begins and ends with the Incarnation. It begins with encountering the God of overflowing love in the person of Jesus Christ and ends with embodying that love in one’s own life, becoming a new Incarnation.” This fresh vision of God leads to a fresh vision of everything everywhere. 

Thomas Berry wrote in The Dream of the Earth. “The deepest crises experienced by any society are those moments of change when the story becomes inadequate for meeting the survival demands of a present situation.”  We are experiencing that crisis today, in the world and in the church. A Franciscan Renaissance will not come easily; it will be costly, challenging, even disruptive. After all, if renewal were cheap, easy, and convenient, it would have happened already. If we are willing to count the cost, commit to the challenge, and persist through obstacles, we can be agents of a true Franciscan Renaissance.

 Rev,. Fosdick was a leading liberal Protestant intellectual, a proponent of a Christianity that called for tolerance, open-mindedness, civil rights, and ecumenism. His forward-leaning writings and radio sermons reached millions at a time when two divergent versions of Christianity competed for the hearts and minds of the American Christian. It felt like a Kentucky Derby of faith, and the race has continued for a hundred years.

 In 1922, the fundamentalists were staging a comeback around the five fundamental doctrines they had published in 1910. But Rev. Fosdick activated the Protestant Mainline and the swelling social gospel movement gave them momentum to surge ahead. In 1925, the fundamentalists pulled out front in a show of political power by outlawing evolution in public school curricula in Tennessee. The Scopes Monkey Trial backfired and the fundamentalists again seemed to be falling behind into a period of public embarrassment and retreat.

The Mainline lead continued when the stock market crashed and most Mainline clergy had praise for FDR organizing the nation in love for neighbor. In fact, on October 6, 1930, Harry Emerson Fosdick greeted the nation from the cover of TIME Magazine. But conservative clergy were organizing against the New Deal and by the late 30s, they were laying the foundation for a new alliance between conservative Christianity and America’s corporate titans.

 With the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Protestant Mainline took the lead again as the party of patriotism and support for the war. By 1948, it was American Reformed theologian and ethicist, Reinhold Niehbur, on the cover of TIME Magazine.

 By 1954, the race was shifting. Billy Graham made his debut on the cover of TIME. His upbeat crusades were putting the fun back into Fundamentalism, which was rebranding itself as Evangelicalism.

 We could trace this race through the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s to 9/11, with the iconic TIME Magazine cover often signaling shifts in who had the lead. Then came Fundamentalism’s greatest win of the last one hundred years. Spurred on by anxiety, outrage, and animus, Fundamentalism became the warhorse on which Donald Trump staged his triumphal ride into Washington. And we might just interpret January 6, 2021, as an example of how far Fundamentalism will go to hold onto its lead.

 I am a refugee from the Fundamentalism Fosdick warned us about and I eventually found refuge in the Mainline. I had great hope that Mainline Protestantism could rise to today’s challenges, and I’ve worked hard writing, speaking and organizing, to encourage Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Lutherans, and allies to seize the moment.

 But a few years ago, a Mainline minister pulled me aside. “McLaren,” he said, “you’re so naive. You’re right: fundamentalists were rigid in their doctrines. But we Mainliners are just as rigid in other ways. We’re liturgical and institutional fundamentalists. You have high hopes for us, and I once did too, but when I look around today, I see most of us Mainliners are keeping busy micromanaging our own decline.”

 Thinking they’ve been winning all along, Mainliners have remained comfortable and complacent, allowing Christian Fundamentalism to metastasize by combining forces with its economic, political, educational, and constitutional counterparts. With increasing influence, they speed down the straightaway denying science, undermining democracy, subverting the Constitution, seeking to reverse a century of progress in social justice, and threatening our future by refusing to face the five fundamentals we all now face. Largely unimaginable in Fosdick’s day, these new fundamentals are no longer doctrinal, they’re existential: nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction; climate change and a multifaceted environmental catastrophe; a resurgence of vicious white Christian supremacy; a form of capitalism so successful that it is not only too big to fail, it is too big to control; and the concentrated power of a small cadre of global oligarchs who buy candidates, governments, and media outlets, and use them for their own kleptocratic purposes, including invading countries and threatening World War III.

 Over this last century, things have often gone, not as Rev. Fosdick hoped, but as he feared.

 Were he here today, I think he would challenge all non-fundamentalists — Christian and otherwise — with a very practical path forward. He would challenge us to wake up every day realizing that five fundamental threats are breathing down our necks. He would challenge us to out-think, out-organize, out-give, out-strive, out-love, and out-last our fundamentalist counterparts in the 21st Century. He would challenge us to start acting like we’re losing, because we are.

I am motivated to speak up by two loves: love for this precious earth and love for the Indigenous peoples in whose ancestral lands I have lived my whole life.

I was born on Turtle Island—the descendant of immigrants, settlers, and colonizers; but so much of this land’s history was hidden from me as a child. For example, I was unaware of the Doctrine of Discovery and its brutal aftermath until I was around fifty years old. 

Now my life has been enriched through the writings and friendship of Native Americans, and I joyfully honor the Indigenous Peoples who stand as stewards of this precious earth, its waters, and its living creatures, all of which are beloved creations of God. I lament the tragic history of wrongs against my Indigenous siblings, and I join them in their wise opposition to Line 3. 

The Line 3 pipeline is the work of North America’s largest pipeline company (Enbridge), which is responsible for the largest inland oil spill in U.S. history (1.7 million gallons). Each day for the next forty years and more, Enbridge plans to ship a million gallons of pollution-heavy, climate-destabilizing crude and Canadian tar sands oil into the US. This project will make big profits for Enbridge, but it will mean heavy costs for all of us, as it further intensifies global warming and unleashes a wide array of harms to human health and to our precious, fragile planet at this critical moment in history.

Not only that but Line 3 once again violates treaties made with Indigenous Peoples. In the US, it crosses the lands and precious waters of the Anishinaabe people without their consent. The United Nations’ International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) has spoken against the pipeline as a violation of the human rights of the Anishinaabe people and urged the US government to stop it.

As a Christian thinker, writer, teacher, and former pastor, I invite my fellow Christians and other people of faith and goodwill to put the long-term well-being of our neighbors—and our planet—above the short-term profits of powerful corporations like Enbridge.

READ: Women of Faith Can Help Advance Climate Justice

I call upon political leaders—especially President Biden, Senators Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith, and Governor Tim Walz—to put a stop to this pipeline as an expression of their commitment to human rights, human dignity, treaty integrity, and ecological responsibility. I stand with Lt. Governor Peggy Flanagan, an Ojibwe woman who has spoken out against Line 3. I affirm that this is not simply a political matter, but a moral one, rooted in our mandate to care for the earth (Genesis 2:15) and to love our neighbors, especially those who have been victims of injustice (Isaiah 1:17). 

If you would like to add your voice, here are five simple steps you can take right now.

1. Forward this message to others via social media. You might also take a picture of yourself holding a #StopLine3 sign. Tag @potus, @govtimwalz, @senamyklobchar, @sentinasmith. Add #StopLine3 in your message.
2. Stay informed here and on Twitter: @ResistLine3. 
3. Vote for candidates who take First Nations and Native American concerns seriously, and join indigenous peoples in caring for the earth and protecting its waters.
4. If you live in Minnesota, contact your representatives and ask them to stop Line 3.
5. If you are a Christian, read the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5 – 7), reflect on God’s concern for “the birds of the air” and “the wildflowers of the field,” and open your heart for guidance on how you can respond to the Climate Emergency and Indigenous struggles to defend our common home.

Early on, I learned this discouraging fact: the vast majority of voters stay loyal to their party and its candidates, year after year, decade after decade. All of the billions of dollars spent on campaign ads and other forms of electioneering only shift a small percentage of swing voters.

That surprised me because I had a lot of anecdotal evidence of people I knew who had changed, starting with myself. But I realized that my circle of friends and I were outliers. Most people vote as loyal members of their ingroup, world without end, amen.

I wondered why so few people change their minds. I started researching the literature on unrationality and bias and eventually wrote an extended essay on the subject, called Why Don’t They Get It? (Overcoming Bias in Others— and Yourself), which eventually led to a podcast called Learning How to See. That research then led me to study authoritarianism, leading to another extended essay called The Second Pandemic: Authoritarianism and Your Future. Through these studies, interactions with others, and personal reflection, I began to better understand why we remain so persistently and deeply divided.

When you study bias, you have to learn about brain science. You discover that our brains are very efficient, meaning that they don’t want to waste energy in their quest to keep us alive. And in order to conserve energy, they develop certain shortcuts that happen so fast we aren’t even conscious of them. Authoritarian leaders learn how to manipulate us for their advantage by these mental shortcuts.

One of those shortcuts is called confirmation bias. When a new idea comes along that fits in comfortably with what we already think, our brains welcome it. When a new idea comes along that will upset what we already think, our brains get nervous. The brain realizes it would take a lot of energy to rethink our current assumptions. So it gives us a bad feeling about this new idea before we are even conscious of it, before we even consider whether it might
be true.

Another shortcut that our brains employ could be called complementarity bias. If you like me, if you flatter me, if you make me feel good, my brain says, “Ahhhh. I can use some encouragement from a friendly person.” So I relax and welcome what you say. But if you challenge me, if you appear angry with me, if you don’t seem to agree with me and like me, my brain gets nervous. It says, “This person is going to upset you, and that will take a lot of energy, so I’m just going to give you a bad feeling about them so you won’t let yourself be bothered with them.”

Let me mention one more, community bias. Our brains know that we depend on our belonging groups for security. So our brains monitor our behavior to be sure that we don’t get into too much trouble with our belonging groups. If we were to get kicked out, our lives would grow complicated, which would take a lot of energy and threaten our well-being. So our brains monitor our behavior, including what we say and even what we think, and if we are about to think or say something that would get us in trouble with our belonging group, the brain says, “That’s a bad idea. Don’t think that. It could get you in trouble.” It gives us a bad feeling about that thought so that we will not need to go find a new belonging group.

READ: How Mormonism Can Save America

Put those three biases together — confirmation, complementarity, and community — and then add ten more equally powerful biases, and you can see why we humans tend to flock with birds of a feather who confirm what we already think, who make us feel good about us and nervous about them, and who value division as a marker of in-group identity. Because of our biases, attempts to bring people over to “our side” often have the opposite effect: hardening both us and them in our postures of mutual hostility so that eventually, we humans typically hardly know who we are until we know who we are against.

Sexism, racism, classism, ableism, regionalism, religious bigotry, partisanship, and many other -isms flow from this common feature of human thinking. In large part, that’s why we become so persistently polarized, and that’s why our divisions can intensify to the point of mutual fear, hatred, and hellish violence.

And that’s why [How to Heal Our Divides: A Practical Guide] is so important. The Apostle Paul once wrote, “If…you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another” (Galatians 5:15 NRSV). In other words, the strategy of identity-by-hostility can easily lead to mutually assured destruction.

In this volume, Brian Allain has brought together a diverse team of creative practitioners of un-division. All of these practitioners are translating peace-making theory into practice on the street, in the neighborhood, and in the
human heart. Not only that, but they are developing and revising theory through their practice. That’s what makes each contribution so powerful . .  . If you read [the book’s] chapters with an open mind and heart — and especially if you read them with a group of friends — you will be more equipped than ever to join these practitioners in your own setting, doing your own creative work to help heal our divides.

Environmental genius Annie Leonard famously said, “There is no away. When you throw something away, it must go somewhere.” What is true in our physical environment is also true of our social environment. When we identify someone as alien, other, outsider, and enemy, we think we can throw them away. But there is no away; we are neighbors, and we can’t escape that fact. Eventually, we will need to learn what Dr. King said: “The only way to get rid of an enemy permanently is to make him your friend.”

This excerpt is from How to Heal Our Divides: A Practical Guide, edited by Brian Allain, and is republished with permission.

Brian was part of the clergy witness in Charlottesville, VA, as a tiki torch-bearing gang of neo-Nazis and white supremacists chanted hate. He rushed into the crowd after Heather Heyer was killed, offering comfort and help for the wounded. He saw in Charlottesville a violent alt-Christianity that threatened to spread. And it did.

 These past four years have clearly emboldened people to express hatred freely and without fear of reprisal and accountability. It has been so hurtful to hear colleagues and loved ones who claim Christian values professing support for the former president when everything that he stands for contradicts Jesus’ lessons of love and justice. Nearly 47 percent of the country voted for our government to be led by someone whose hateful actions and inflammatory rhetoric brought us to the very edge of insurrection and totalitarianism. Most of these voters identify as Christian. Faith leaders and followers who see no conflict between their Christian faith and Trumpism have now been exposed and Jesus’ words ring truer than ever, “one’s foes will be members of one’s own household” (Matthew 10:36).

READ: Say ‘No’ to Christian Nationalism: Evangelical Leaders Statement

Sadly, most of these Christians believe in a white nationalist Jesus. He’s the one who cares more about outlawing abortion than freeing children in cages. He cares more about white people being able to live without rules than black and brown people being murdered by them. He cares about your beliefs about him and not how you actually live your life. He has been on full display over the past four years, culminating with the siege of the Capitol Building as people waved flags that read, “Jesus is my Savior. Trump is my President” and then beat Capitol Hill police with them. The white nationalist Jesus is a heresy to faith, to democracy, and to God’s very self and must be dismantled.

While healing is certainly necessary, simply going back to being “nice” to each other doesn’t solve any problems. Churches will be tempted to focus on reconciliation without truth-telling and change. Preachers will want to shift focus from complex social justice to simple dreaming about an afterlife or self-edification. That’s exactly the wrong thing to do. 

We need to rediscover the Jesus of history. Before reconciliation, we need truth-telling and that means Christians need to renounce white nationalism by rejecting white nationalist Jesus. Jesus of history is Jesus of Nazareth, a poor, Middle Eastern, brown-skinned Jewish peasant living in a Roman-occupied land, who spent his entire life proclaiming words of hope to people who found themselves in the same situation as him. If this is the Jesus that we proclaim in our churches week after week, it is impossible to follow a white nationalist Jesus. There can be only one Jesus, and he was a person of color murdered in the streets simply for proclaiming God’s kingdom, where the poor are blessed, not forgotten.

He was also the one who spoke truth to power by naming hypocrisy and calling for accountability and justice. Like Jesus, Christians are obligated to call to account the false gods and conspirators in and around government who violate the public trust. Our faith communities need to help truth-tellers among us break through intimidation and fear, and break their silence when they witness government wrongdoing. (It’s helpful to know we are not alone — a new project called Bearing Witness offers resources created specifically for faith leaders and communities.)

On Inauguration Day, like most Americans who care about democracy, we were relieved to see America’s flirtation with totalitarianism defeated. Inauguration Day signaled the beginning of a new era. We breathed a deep sigh of relief. We have already seen some positive movement on climate change, racial justice, LGBTQ+ inclusion, and economic equality. It does feel like a new day in our country, and we have much for which to be grateful.

Yet walk into most churches, and you’ll still see a portrait of a fair-skinned Jesus prominently displayed. Listen to the sermon, and you’ll hear platitudes about being nice people and most of the focus will be on confessing Jesus as Lord and Savior to get into heaven. In short, most churches proclaim and worship their made-up Jesus instead of the real one. None of us can allow ourselves to believe that white nationalism has left the church or lessened its attempt to influence our government. White nationalist Jesus remains our cross to bear.

“Besides this, you know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; the night is far gone, the day is near. Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.” — Romans 13:11-12

Advent is a season of waiting, a time for preparing our hearts to celebrate the birth of a baby who proclaimed “good news of great joy for all humanity.”

For centuries, faithful people have used this time to sweep out the stable of their hearts, to fill their inner manger with hay, to make sure there is room within them … not just to celebrate Jesus’ birth as a historical memorial, but to actually experience a new birth of Christ within them, spiritually, personally, experientially.

The first step in preparing is waking up.

The scriptures for this first Sunday in Advent join together to make this point.

“Wake up!” Paul says in Romans 13. “It might seem really dark, but don’t fall asleep. The new day is about to dawn!”

Jesus makes the same point in Matthew 24. He recalls the days of Noah, when people were partying like there was no tomorrow. They had no idea about the flood that was coming until the water was rising from their ankles to their knees to their necks.

However you interpret this text, the message is clear: Be awake! Be prepared! Don’t go on autopilot, or slip into numbness, or be complacent and unaware. Otherwise, you’ll miss your opportunity to experience “the coming of the Son of Man.”

I think a good paraphrase for “the coming of the son of man” is “the coming of a new generation of humanity.” Jesus is recalling a passage in the Book of Daniel where a “son of man” refers to both an individual and to a group of people who represent a new generation of humanity, a new kind of people who are living in a new way that pleases God. They’re the kinds of people who, in Isaiah’s words, want to make gardens, not war, so they melt down their spears and swords into pruning hooks and plowshares. 

Seen in this light, these passages are like a mirror in which to see ourselves.

Think about it. Some people today remain in sleepy denial about our environmental crisis. They party on through the night (or count their wealth week after week) without giving a thought to how we are impoverishing the soil, the oceans, our fellow creatures, and the climate upon which we all depend. A very literal flood is coming, and they are not preparing. When will they wake up?

We could say the same thing about economic injustice. Many people are simply trying to make a fast buck (or billion) for themselves by any means possible. They’re oblivious to the growing gap between a super-rich super-elite few and the many of us who are often left to pick up the pieces after their schemes fail. They don’t realize that whenever a few hoard luxuries while the many lack necessities, instability will result … with petty crime, organized crime, political corruption, mass migration, war, terrorism, and civil war. When will they wake up?

We could say the same about weapons proliferation. Our world is being flooded with more and more dangerous weapons, from assault rifles to biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons of mass destruction. Yet many people still think that the more weapons we have, the safer we will be. They will face a rude awakening later if they don’t wake up now.

If we wake up, we’ll see that there is “a new generation of humanity” being born all around us. A new generation of people who want to live responsibly and reverently with the earth, healing it rather than exploiting it. A new generation of people who want to help rather than exploit the poor and oppressed, and hold their oppressors accountable. A new generation that wants to build the conditions for peace rather than hate and bloodshed.

One such group is the Coalition of Immokalee workers. I’ve been privileged to be part of the Coalition’s movement for many years now. I’ve watched as a new form of social activism called Worker-Driven Social Responsibility has taken shape, building alliances among workers, consumers, and business leaders to improve working conditions and pay. It started in the tomato fields of Florida, and now the movement is spreading to other kinds of farm and factory workers around the world, nonviolently freeing people from poverty and exploitation. This is a really hopeful sign, reflecting a new generation of humanity, a new way of doing business, a new day. It would be a shame to sleep through the revolution …

Kind of like forgetting to prepare for Christmas, and missing all the joy!

Prayer: Living God, help us not to sleep-walk into trouble. Help us wake up and prepare for the new day, the new day Jesus’ birth is meant to signify for us all, a day of “good news of great joy for all humanity.” Amen!

Learn more about how workers in other industries and supply chains are adapting the groundbreaking Worker-Driven Social Responsibility model to achieve advances in human rights —  from protecting the safety of over 2 million garment workers in Bangladesh to guaranteeing the rights of Vermont dairy workers in Ben & Jerry’s milk supply chain to protecting fashion models!

Searching for a gift that matters this Christmas? When you make a donation to the Fair Food Program in honor of someone, your gift goes to protect and advance farmworkers’ human rights. And the Fair Food Program has beautiful holiday cards you can print or which can be emailed. Give a gift of justice, respect, and hope today. 

1. The pain is getting bad enough that it might get better.

We’ve all heard the saying that people won’t change unless the pain of changing is surpassed by the pain of not changing. Sadly, the people who are suffering most under this immoral regime are the minority. But when the white majority either feels the pain of their neighbors (such as the pain of children being kept from their parents in cages) or feels pain directly themselves (such as the economic consequences of trade wars, or the disturbing realization that Trump is more responsive to Putin than to his own people), change for the better could come fast.

2. Our systems have gotten stuck enough that they might move forward.

Stuck systems have played into the GOP dream of shrinking government to a size it could be drowned in a bathtub. In other words, if they couldn’t kill government (and thus leave big businesses unaccountable), they could paralyze it. But when enough people start needing the government to actually function, they could throw their energies toward candidates with an actual constructive vision.

3. Our strategies have become negative enough that they might turn positive.

Perhaps it will take more mass killings to scare us away from murderous rhetoric. Perhaps it will simply be that the meanness of discourse online and on mass media will trip some faint warning system that makes more of us say, “That’s too far! Enough is enough!” Either way, we may reach a point where we demand not only morally desirable ends but also morally defensible means — including rhetorical means — to achieve them.

4. People are divided enough that they might come together.

Many Americans are possessed by a fear that the other side might win. But there’s another fear lurking out there, a fear that we could become so splintered and fractious that chaos could be unleashed. When that fear happens, we may see movement toward seeking win-win collaboration instead of win-lose competition.

5. Our challenges run deep enough that we might turn inward.

Most Americans still seem to be at the stage of blaming either an individual or a party for our national problems. Replace them, we think, and everything will be OK. But eventually, we may come to see that beneath our political and economic symptoms there lies a spiritual problem, on the level of consciousness, on the level of the deepest stories we live by, on the level of shared virtues, values, and vision for a desired future. If we try to solve our problems on a political or social level only, without addressing the deeper spiritual dimensions, we will probably never experience our needed breakthrough.

Of course, the word “might” in each statement is a reminder that things might get worse, much worse, before they get better. And to be frank, sometimes some things get so bad that they never get better.

But if we don’t panic, give up, over-react, under-react, and otherwise miss our moment for goodness and greatness, that word “might” holds the possibility of better days ahead.

Many of us have come to see that our American experiment is driving toward a dead end. But not enough of us realize it yet, so we haven’t yet hit the brakes. If we keep speeding forward, we may experience something far worse than mere political upheaval: we or our children may face civilizational collapse.

We moved from the medieval/feudal world to the modern/capitalist world about 500 years ago, and that modern/capitalist/communist world has been based on an extractive and exploitive economy — extracting natural resources from the earth’s ecosystems at a faster rate than they can be renewed, and exploiting the labor of the majority so that elites can live in unimaginable ease and luxury.

This system is unsustainable, and as it collapses, many will try to patch it back together and fix it. They will be driven by nostalgia and resentment rather than creativity and courage.

For a just, generous, and regenerative way of life to emerge, we will need to let the pain of the present launch us toward a better future.

It’s not too late to chart a different course. If we shift from self-interest and party-interest to the common good, we can create new systems that help us move forward. We can discover positive strategies that have fewer unintended negative consequences, with more long-term common good benefits.

No matter how different we are, or appear to be, we share our common origins, common destiny, and our common experience of suffering and hope. That’s why, even when doing so feels like such a small thing, we should vote, and vote for the common good. It’s the least we can do … and the least is better than nothing. Much, much better.

Hitting bottom is, in fact, what happens when the pain of remaining in denial exceeds the pain of admitting we are in trouble, that we are not well, that we have lost our way and our sanity, and that we need help.

We Americans, as a nation and culture, remain in denial about our twin addictions and the degree to which they have robbed us of our sanity. What are those addictions?

First, we remain in denial about our addiction to weapons — both personal weapons and militarist ones. As weapons addicts, we believe that the more weapons we have, the safer we are, which is statistically untrue.

Regarding personal weapons, we have 5 percent of the world’s population and about 42 percent of the world’s private guns.

Militarily, our military is larger than China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, France, the U.K., and Japan combined, requiring about half of discretionary federal spending. Five of these seven countries are our allies!

Second, we remain in denial about our addiction to whiteness and white supremacy: America seeks safety by keeping violent white men in charge. We have demonstrated this addiction throughout our history, especially in the depth of ongoing American cruelty and injustice to the Native Peoples and to African Americans who were enslaved and then subjected to American apartheid, mass incarceration, and other forms of systemic racism.

These twin national addictions to weapons and white supremacy are inextricably interwoven, like an addict who uses both alcohol and narcotics. Until Americans face our twin addictions, we will continue to demonstrate insane behavior, defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

Recovery is a spiritual process, and facing our denial is a deeply spiritual act. For that reason, let’s end our national denial about our twin addictions to weapons and white supremacy.

Let’s begin a spiritual process of being restored to sanity.

Let us ask our spiritual leaders to lead in this process, and where they fail to lead, let us all be leaders.

We can start by saying something like this — whether in an in-person conversation or online post: “Any of us familiar with the addiction recovery process know that until we overcome our denial, we still haven’t hit bottom.”

That’s why the Trump Administration has made a concerted effort to not publicize it, to not do outreach. It’s cut the enrollment advertising budget by 90 percent and the enrollment period by half. Having given up on Repeal and Replace, the Trump Administration and the GOP have moved onto Sabotage the Sick.  

Sabotaging open enrollment is a goal of the Administration which wants to be able to wag its finger and say, “See, people aren’t signing up, Obamacare isn’t working.” Lower enrollment numbers will shape the healthcare debate going forward. This concerted effort to sabotage is meant to weaken the insurance market, undercut affordable access, and raise the cost of health insurance for millions of us.

We cannot let that happen.

READ: Keep Standing Up for Health Care: It’s Personal

When I moved to Florida eight years ago, I was a self-employed person in my 50’s and couldn’t get health insurance because of a pre-existing condition. Neither could my wife. Our problem wasn’t that we were poor — I am an author who works with clergy and congregations around the country, and my wife is a realtor. We were middle class, making enough income to get by and save a little for retirement. Our problem was that every healthcare company would reject us as self-employed persons with pre-existing conditions. That’s why we were so grateful when the ACA passed. Millions of Americans have benefited, including my wife and me. 

Yes, the Affordable Care Act has problems that need fixing. Even its most stalwart supporters have known its passage was an important step, but not the last step.

The core of the problem rests in many rural counties where there is not enough volume to make the “business” of health care successful. So where I live in southwest Florida, for example, we now have only one healthcare provider and rates have risen. But if the Trump Administration is successful in lowering enrollment, rates rise even faster and push the system toward collapse.

Religious leaders like me know something that our politicians don’t. We minister to the sick, the dying, and their families. We walk with people whose spouses or parents have Alzheimer’s or other debilitating diseases. We know what happens to parents with a son or daughter struggling with an opioid addiction, mental illness, or childhood cancer. And we have prayed and wept with people denied affordable health care due to a pre-existing condition.

We know these people aren’t lazy. We know they aren’t bad. We know they simply need help.

Take, for example, opioid addiction, a tragic epidemic in many rural areas. The president has made official declarations (two so far) acknowledging that opioid addiction is a public health emergency, but talk is cheap (literally). Not only do his proclamations come with no funding, his proposed budget cuts federal spending on the opioid crisis, reducing funding by $97 million, and he’s eliminating successful programs like the anti-heroin task force. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 91 Americans die every day from an opioid overdose. The ACA includes substance abuse and mental health treatment as essential benefits.

It’s hard to imagine what would motivate politicians to sacrifice the sickest and poorest first, yet provide tax breaks to the richest of the rich. Taking health care away from seniors, people in poverty, expectant mothers and people with disabilities is not pro-life; it’s just plain wrong. That’s why health care has become an issue for the faith communities across the country, because we believe God cares for the sick and forgotten. Whether or not they are on the right or the left, we believe health care is not a privilege for the rich, but rather a responsibility that we all share. 

READ: #Faith4Healthcare: On Being One with the Vulnerable

We know that the ACA can help millions of people get the care they need, and we need to make sure they know that, too! So we have a plan: #SoulsToEnroll. Every house of worship is invited to help get the word out that it’s time to enroll in health care. Free resources are available at www.networklobby.org/enrollment. 

Americans are not “exchanges” or “markets.” We are lives that literally depend on politicians putting human beings above ideology and putting the common good above partisan bickering.

Proverbs 3:27 states, “Do not withhold good from those to whom it is due, when it is in your power to act.” Congress has the power to act. Our governors have the power to act.

The ACA has drastically reduced the number of uninsured adults in our nation, and we cannot allow that progress to be undone. And it’s not just some unnamed theoretical person we’re talking about.

It’s my wife. It’s me. It’s all of us.