The Overview (Monday, November 30)
Christian witness from the margins, partisanship and polarization as unique crises, and the Supreme Court weighs in on pandemic restrictions and the First Amendment
It’s hard to believe even as I write this, but it’s true all the same: John Brown University made it through its Fall 2020 semester without any COVID-related interruptions.
If you had asked me at the beginning of August, as we were preparing to welcome students back to campus after five months away, how long I thought we’d be on campus before having to take a break of some kind, I would have been pessimistic. In fact, as my colleagues and I watched the valiant efforts of so many in our midst prepare for campus life during a pandemic, all to maximize our chances of staying together and avoiding the financial cataclysm of having to send students home again, I had October 1 in mind; if we could make it to October, then I’d be happy. Any date beyond that would be a bonus.
Of course, my outlook was off by, oh, half the semester. Students, faculty, and staff more than answered the call, wearing masks, maintaining distance between each other, and taking other precautions designed to keep us together for as long as possible. And while we did have cases on our campus, the plans we had put in place over the summer held up nicely, with infected individuals quickly isolated or sent home until they recovered, and those possibly infected rapidly quarantined or sent home until it was clear they were safe to return to the community.
It’s hard to reflect on this past semester and not come to any conclusion other than we were incredibly blessed. Whether we will have similar successes in Spring 2021 remains to be seen (let the countdown to February 1 begin), but I’m certainly more optimistic than I was at the beginning of this academic year.
With that, here’s the Monday, November 30 edition of The Overview:
1) Writing in First Things, Bruce Ashford suggests several ways Christians can think about our public witness in an era in which we are increasingly operating from cultural margins. Ashford, a theologian and author of several books on faith and public life, argues that Christians are especially situated to reintroduce who God is to a skeptical culture and focus on decentering self in an age of expressive individualism, among other things. “As America’s roots in Christianity are severed,” he writes, “we must unify and learn to minister effectively, even from the margins.” And ICYMI, I wrote about public witness last week for this very site.
2) Patrick Pierson, writing for Mere Orthodoxy, details the pitfalls of “dogmatic partisanship” and the dangers it poses not just for Christians, but for the social order in general. “We’re currently stuck in a prisoner’s dilemma of sorts,” Pierson argues, “in which we would all be better off if both sides opted to lay down their sacred cows in search of shared solutions, but nobody wants to get the sucker’s payoff and be left holding the bag.” Rarely have I encountered a better, more succinct explanation of why such rampant partisanship rages on. And for Pierson, the consequences are enormous:
Without an honest, open, bipartisan dialogue about the fundamentals—what kind of society we want, and what it requires of each of us—all the activism in the world isn’t going to move the needle very much. The result? A world in which the only aspect of cultural life we hold in common is a penchant for cancellation, with minimal effort devoted to offering alternative visions of a shared civic life marked by the common good.
3) Shadi Hamid, a research fellow at the Brookings Institution, reflects with vulnerability on the temptation of political polarization. This sort of polarization, as he describes it, does not cease following a contentious election. Instead, it tempts us to punish the opposition for their betrayal of American values, which are coincidentally also our values. “Part of me longs to let go and give in to the temptation of wishing for nothing less than a pummeling of the GOP,” Hamid admits. “There is, of course, a catch: doing so would violate the very principles I have insisted on for the past four years.” He continues, recognizing the fragility of such a desire, “One side cannot hope to conclusively defeat the other in a nation as diverse and divided as ours. "They" are not enemies; they are (merely) opponents. They are our fellow Americans, for both better and worse.”
4) Writing for Christianity Today, Washington University law professor John Inazu explains the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision to strike down New York City’s pandemic-related restrictions affecting places of worship. Inazu argues that while the Court’s finding—that church is, in fact, an essential activity worthy of the most generous legal protections—is undoubtedly a good one, the decision does not give churches a blank check to operate without any changes going forward. “The constitutionality of other orders,” Inazu writes, “will depend upon local context and the degree to which restricted activities share comparable characteristics.”
5) On Thanksgiving, Pope Francis published an op-ed in the Washington Post urging caution among people of faith as they consider how to worship during the pandemic. The Pope warns, “It is all too easy for some to take an idea — in this case, for example, personal freedom — and turn it into an ideology, creating a prism through which they judge everything.” He encourages people to be creative in how they approach their responses to the pandemic, characterizing this unfortunate situation as a means of building solidarity with one another; solidarity, according to the Pope, “is more than acts of generosity, important as they are; it is the call to embrace the reality that we are bound by bonds of reciprocity.” The op-ed’s timing, while coincidental, is noteworthy when contrasted against the Supreme Court’s Court’s aforementioned order, in which four of the five justices striking down the restrictions—Alito, Barrett, Kavanaugh, and Thomas—are Catholic.
Jonah Goldberg keeps referencing the idea that in our presidency-driven age, we have turned "government" into the "state," meaning that what used to be mundane politics is now more driven by religious overtones in which our whole lives seem caught up in who "rules" us and which "side" is winning. It's a throwback to a monarchical age in which it really, really mattered whether the king was a Catholic or a Protestant.