A Crisis of Disagreement and Identity
Two friends once travelled out to sea. Along the way, they struck a rock, and a hole formed in the bottom of their boat. As water began filling the boat, one cried out, “We must jump and swim!” The other responded, “No, we must try to fix the hole.” For an hour, they argued back and forth, longing to prove themselves right, until the boat filled with water, and they drowned. They were too far from shore to swim, and the hole was too big to fix. The sad part is that they had a radio beside the steering wheel that could have been used to call the Coast Guard for help.
We are living in a cultural moment where the art of disagreement has been lost, and the cost is profound. In many ways, we’ve even forgotten how to talk. One overlooked consequence of a society shaped by social media and smartphones is that words have become increasingly detached from their meanings. Honest communication has two inseparable parts: what you say and how you say it. The first conveys information; the second conveys emotion—how you actually feel. True conversation weaves both together. When one is missing, dialogue collapses into hollow diatribes: words that tear down instead of build up, that make enemies instead of friends, that spring more from hate than from love.
Debate has been an essential part of thriving societies since the earliest civilizations. Arguably, no other people debated as well as the Greeks. Aristotle expressed, “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”1 Similarly, Isocrates wrote, “Discourse is the leader of all our thoughts and actions.”2
Discussing differing views, face-to-face, allows a society to both progress and innovate. It moves us beyond talking points and biases, into the realm of human life, experienced in time and space. It calls us to understand both the perspective of another and the experience within which their perspective has developed. In short, it allows us to remain curious while increasing our understanding of fellow humans.
This begs us to ask: What happens to a culture when debate grows worthless and tribalism3 takes its place?
Aristotle writes, “For it is by debating that the truth is established, since the conflict of opposing arguments brings about a clearer understanding.”4 If you reverse-engineer his statement, untruths are established in the absence of debate. When humans turn to tribalism, fueled by our select news outlets and social media algorithms, we unknowingly begin to sever the fabric of community and truth.
It’s not just philosophy that recognizes the need for debate; Church history is built on the foundation of debate. For example, the Council of Nicea in 325 AD was convened in response to what is known as the Arian Controversy. Arius was one of the most prestigious and popular presbyters of the city of Alexandria. The bishop of Alexandria was Alexander, who clashed with Arius in a debate over whether Jesus was coeternal with God. Arius’ famous motto was, “There was [a time] when He was not.”5 This debate sparked widespread interest to the point that Emperor Constantine decided to call a universal council—that is, the First Ecumenical Council—where arguments were heard from both the Arian and the Alexandrian perspective.
The council concluded that Arianism was heresy and that Jesus is equally God, coeternal, and of the same substance. This is the first time a framework for Trinitarian theology was established. As the Nicene Creed states,
I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,
the Only Begotten Son of God,
born of the Father before all ages.
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father.
America itself is founded on the outcomes of vigorous debates. Some of the most notable are:
The Federalists vs. Anti-Federalists in 1787-1789 centering on whether to ratify the US Constitution to establish a strong central government or to protect against the establishment of such a government. The result was the addition of the Bill of Rights to the Constitution.
Abolition vs. Slavery in the 1800s, which ultimately led to the Civil War, resulting in the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, and the emancipation of slaves.
The Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s which included debates over segregation, voting rights, and equality. The outcome was the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965.
While there are undoubtedly many other debates that have shaped America, these examples serve as moments where people held strong opinions but were eventually moved toward progress.
There is value in disagreement. Disagreement is part of the human experience because every human is unique, comes from a distinctive background, and has a specific story. If everyone around you agrees with you and you are never challenged to think differently, then you live in an echo chamber that breeds division and stagnation.
Plato writes, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”6
Yet what the past few weeks—and indeed the last five years—have laid bare is that most Americans inhabit one-sided worlds, where like-minded voices endlessly affirm their opinions, and anyone who dares to differ is cast as an enemy. All the while, the ways of Jesus are maligned with political arguments, neglecting the teachings of Christ for the beliefs of a preferred political party. We view humans as pawns in a game where victory is determined not by compromise and peace, but by defeating the other player.
Like the two men in the boat with a hole in the bottom, we will drown in our attempts to draw the other to our side rather than live by humbling ourselves, listening, and meeting in the proverbial middle.
The problem is exacerbated in the Church by a general malaise toward Jesus and a lack of understanding of the faith we claim to have. The Evangelical Church has turned the gospel of discipleship into a gospel of cheap grace, the deadly enemy of the Church.7 It prefers raised hands, repeated prayers, and metrics over active participation in the good news—the εὐαγγέλιον or gospel—of Jesus. The message of Jesus wasn’t just “believe;” it was “follow.” You can believe and not follow, but you’ll never follow without belief.
As the Evangelical Church grew seeker-sensitive, it became increasingly indifferent to the way of Jesus. The result is a societal vacuum where the kingdom of God is designed to exist, but has instead made way for political power masked with Christian language.
Hosea 4:6 prophecies that God’s people perish for a lack of knowledge. So much in our day is said in the name of Scripture and Christ that neither Scripture nor Christ ever said, stood for, or would support. The space within, which is supposed to be filled with increasing knowledge, understanding, and practice of the kingdom of God, is instead filled with feel-good posts and carefully selected verses-of-the-day.
The Church is the anchor of society, modeling a way of living in peace with those who are different and calling others to do the same (see Hebrews 12:14, Romans 12:18, and James 3:17). This societal juncture can be an awakening and renewal, but only if it thrusts us away from political dogma, propaganda, and ideology, and toward human beings.
Nevertheless, history warns us that when the Church forgets this calling—when it trades its witness for political influence—the results are devastating.
Christian Nationalism and Faithful Witness
In 1933, Paul Althaus, professor of theology at the University of Erlangen in Erlangen, Germany, wrote, “Our Protestant churches have greeted the turning point of 1933 as a gift and miracle of God.”8 What was the turning point of 1933? The appointment of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany by President Paul von Hindenburg. Robert Ericksen comments on this statement from Paul Althaus, “It is important to note the enthusiasm in this statement. Hitler represented not just an adequate politician or the best choice of the moment, but a gift from God and even a miracle. It is also important to note that Althaus was almost certainly correct in claiming to speak for Protestants in general.”9
There are multiple accounts of pastors joining the Nazi party,10 and editorials, such as those written in the national Lutheran newspaper, using prophetic scripture to indicate God’s providence and blessing for Germany through Hitler’s rise to power.
Pictured below is a church in Germany, around this time, sporting a swastika under Jesus on the cross.
And the entrance of another church whose sign has a cross on the right and a swastika on the left.
If this sounds familiar, it is because modern America has also seen the merging of politics and religion as a gift from God. One article by NBC News quoted a ‘celebrity evangelist’ as saying, “There’s a different dialogue about spirituality happening in America, and with Donald Trump, God has given permission to take it right to the White House.”11
Christian Nationalism is a political and cultural ideology that seeks to merge a particular vision of Christianity with the identity, values, and governance of a nation. It sees a country as having a religious mandate. The problem is not a government shaped by the teachings of Jesus; the problem is when the teachings of Jesus are warped and shaped by the ideas of a government. I grew up pledging allegiance to both the American flag and the Christian flag before our morning classes began. In almost every church across the country, the American flag is prominently displayed alongside worship, the Word, and the Sacraments. I love America and am so thankful to live here. I have great national pride in family members who fought for our freedom. Yet, I also see the damage Christian Nationalism has caused to the Christian faith and the coming kingdom of God.
Nancy Duff asks, “When the American Flag is given a prominent place in many Christian sanctuaries and the will of God is believed to coincide with the goals of [a political] party, have Americanism and Christianity become almost the same thing; or, at least are they understood to be compatible partners in a common mission?”12
What do we do when policy and Christian ethics collide? Does the Church stand up to what it is fundamentally against, regardless of what side of the aisle it comes from? Or, does it move the line of what it is against just beyond the policy in question?
How do we handle treating aliens like dogs when Leviticus 19:33-34 says, “When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the native-born among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.” How do we respond to death and war when the prophet Isaiah, in Isaiah 2:4, envisions a day when, “They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation; neither shall they learn war any more.”
Karl Barth writes, “What is Christian is secretly but fundamentally identical to what is universally human.”13 The line the Church cannot cross is where Christianity moves from being for all humans to being for some humans within a particular governmental system.
Regarding Germany’s Christian Nationalism, Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes, “[We have] gathered like eagles round the carcass of cheap grace, and there we have drunk of the poison which has killed the life of following Christ…The result is that a nation became Christian and Lutheran, but at the cost of true discipleship. The price it was called upon to pay was all too cheap. Cheap grace…won the day.”14
Christian Nationalism resulted in the German Protestant Church’s complicity in the Nazi Party’s killing of approximately 6,000,000 Jews. The Deutsche Christen of the German Church passed the Aryan Paragraph in September of 1933, which removed pastors and church leaders of Jewish descent from their positions, to prove the church’s loyalty to the new Nazi state.15 Orthodoxy became secondary to political influence and power.
The call of both John the Baptizer and Jesus is to repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near. Repentance, or μετανοέω, means to change your perspective—how you think. The language of “kingdom of heaven” was in direct opposition to the kingdom of Rome. John and Jesus are saying, “It’s time to change how you think about everything because a new kingdom is here and that kingdom will be what your allegiance is to.”
It’s time the church divorces itself from the influence of government and turns back to its sole influence in Christ, the Son. We are called to pray for and honor our country and leaders, but we are not called to conform our faith to the pattern of their ways.
The Way Back Home
John M. Perkins remarks, “I believe that there is a vision-shaped vacuum in the soul of the church that will not be satisfied by man-made strategies or philosophies, but only by His vision of the church victoriously fulfilling the divine mandate.”16 This ‘divine mandate’ is living out what it means to be humans made in the image of God, following the ways of Jesus into his kingdom, until “the earth [is] filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea” (Habakkuk 2:14).
When the people of God were exiled to Babylon for failing to heed the prophets’ warnings, they lamented, “By the rivers of Babylon—there we sat down, and there we wept when we remembered Zion. On the willows there, we hung up our harps.”17 Humans are strongly inclined to keep doing what is comfortable until proven detrimental. Cheap grace ends at the symbolic shores of Babylon. Yet the call of Jesus remains: “Repent and follow me.”
As the world pressures us to double down on our biases, cling to political allegiances, and silence conversations with those who differ, now is the moment to return to Jesus. It is the time to recommit ourselves to authentic discipleship, growing in faith and deepening in understanding; to remember that the Church is not an arm of America—or of any earthly government—but the living embodiment of God’s kingdom.
We must learn to debate well; to have differences, and those differences make us stronger. We must move beyond a keyboard or phone and into the spaces where we can look each other in the eyes and witness the story behind our words. We must remember that we are all human beings, made in the image of God, who are on the same team. You never truly win a fight with another human being, because we are all pieces of a larger humanity. If one loses, we all lose.
Surround yourself with people who are different than you; who challenge you to become a better person and carry different opinions on things. Differences allow us to progress as a people.
Finally, become deeply rooted in a church family that embodies these ideals and honors the space for people from all walks of life to experience the kingdom of God; a church family that values discipleship and active participation in the gospel more than hype, metrics, or politically correct theology.
Augustine of Hippo wrote, “The earthly city has created for herself such false gods as she wanted, from any source she chose—even creating them out of men—in order to worship them with sacrifices. The other city, the Heavenly city on pilgrimage in this world, does not create false gods. She herself is the creation of the true God, and she herself is to be his true sacrifice.”18
Maybe this isn’t the end of civilization, but the beginning of a new spirit within our civilization. One where the kingdom of God reigns in the hearts of God’s people and the kingdoms of this world become the kingdoms of our LORD and of his Christ.19
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1094b24, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 1729.
Isocrates, Antidosis 254, in Isocrates, Volume II, trans. George Norlin, Loeb Classical Library 229 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929), p. 339.
Tribalism is a strong loyalty, identity, or allegiance a person feels toward their own group, often expressed in opposition to those outside it. At its core, it is “us versus them” thinking.
Aristotle, Topics 100a18–20, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 167.
Justo L. Gonzalez, The Story of Christianity: The Early Church to the Dawn of the Reformation (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), p. 184.
Plato, Apology 38a, in Plato: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus, trans. Harold North Fowler, Loeb Classical Library 36 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914), p. 121.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (New York: Touchstone, 1995), p. 43.
Paul Althaus, Die Deutsche Stunde Der Kirche, 3rd ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1934), p. 5.
Robert P. Erickson, Complicity in the Holocaust: Churches and Universities in Nazi Germany (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 38.
Erickson, Complicity in the Holocaust, p. 38.
“Evangelical Leaders Celebrate Trump’s Victory as a Prophecy Fulfilled,” NBC News, 7 November 2024, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/trump-wins-election-evangelical-christians-celebrate-rcna178946.
Nancy J Duff, “Locating God in All the Wrong Places: The Second Commandment and American Politics,” Interpretation 60.2 (2006): 182–93, p. 186.
Karl Barth, Christ and Adam: Man and Humanity in Romans 5 (Collier Books, 1962), p. 111.
Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, p. 53.
Erickson, Complicity in the Holocaust, pp. 26-27.
John M. Perkins, One Blood: Parting Words to the Church on Race and Love (Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2020), p. 40.
Psalm 137:1-2.
Augustine, City of God, Penguin Classics (London ; New York: Penguin Books, 2003), p. 842.
Revelation 11:15.