The Election, Your Spirituality, & the Soul of our Nation #21: Tribalism, and Losers

In the August issue of Christianity Today, Russell Moore gifted us with a wise article entitled “Your Party Will Not Win This Election.” He doesn’t know you, or your party. But he’s spot on. No one will win. The pseudo-winners will imagine all will now be well, and that the fools whose party would have been the ruin of everything will just slink off somewhere.

But they will not go away. And they are still citizens. They aren’t actually fools. In a representative democracy, as in the Kingdom of God, everybody matters and should be heard, enfranchised, represented, and included.

Moore’s most piercing insight, to me, is that increasingly candidates, parties and voters “aren’t so much about specific issues as they are about tribal identity.” We’re with these guys, and we loathe those guys. Someone tells you that your tribe now thinks this, and we holler Amen! – whatever it may be. We exist not for this or that good so much as to be sure those guys of the other tribe don’t get whatever it is they’ve been told they should like. It’s all about identity – even if your party gets annoyed about identity! We’re left then with outrage, or a victim mentality, or the sneer of the bully on the playground who won the dodgeball game by creaming the other kid.

How to maintain or even develop some spiritual equilibrium during these times? How to be holy and godly? How to be a constructive force for the healing of the Soul of our Nation? We begin by naming very clearly that right now there is no Messiah on earth leading either party. The real Messiah is above, beyond, and pleading with those of both parties, not just to strive to win, but to realize there is a better way, a more holy existence.

Lacking a genuine Messiah, both tribes might confess it’s time to shed that tribal identity, that tribal alliance, and find a new, better tribe. Tribalism is only evil if it’s a bogus tribe that can’t really deliver, and if it shivers and condemns those not in the tribe. Christianity quite clearly is designed to be a tribe, the tribe. We have an identity. To calm down, to be the hands of feet of Christ, to heal the nation’s soul, we who claim allegiance to our true Messiah need to ask Who are we? Why are we here? What tasks has God set before us?

We do not know who will win this election – besides the humbling truth that no one really will. We do know who we are and why we’re here. We are followers of Jesus Christ, who spoke of and lived out a goodness, a peaceful attentiveness to God and others, a healing presence, a guy who puzzled and drew the rage of the politicians who’d won, a friend to those who were nobodies that nobody listened to. Ours is to be like him, to join hands with all kind of people and pray, and serve.

I love it that, during our relief labors in the wake of Helene, we didn’t ask recipients how they planned to vote, or if they were even Christian. And the “we” who labored? Many were our own United Methodists, but we also had Christians of other stripes, and Jews, and Muslims, and the physically and mentally challenged, and quite a few avowed atheists. God’s work transcends all markers and identities and divisions, for God embraces all, always. In this, I see a clue to the healing of the Soul of our Nation.

Let me quote the conclusion to Russell Moore’s article. We fantasize that an election will be “the vindication of who’s right and who’s wrong, separating sheep from goats, a final and definitive victory. If that’s what we think winning is, none of us will win. We will just descend more and more into resentment and outrage. We will turn on those we counted on to give us what they never could, or we will sheet in our fantasies of ‘next time.’ No one will win this election, ultimately” – and then he hopefully reminds us, “No one will lose this election either. Maybe we should ask whether we are seeking something where it can never be found, and ask ourselves whether we should be looking Somewhere else.” Indeed – and whether we should resign from our tribe and re-join the One True Tribe, those who together look to God.