The Overview (Tuesday, March 22)
The importance of knowing our neighbors, the future of the GOP, and a challenge for Russian American pastors
Greetings from the midst of Spring Break. There are just a few weeks left in the semester, and then I get to start experiencing life on sabbatical, meaning I won’t be teaching again until January 2023. And while I know I will miss my students, what a blessing this time will be. God-willing, I’ll be presenting research at the American Political Science Association, observing some of my colleagues as they teach their classes, and yes, finishing my book, Uneasy Citizenship: Embracing the Tension in Faith and Politics.
Speaking of which, I’ve already started identifying spaces where I hope to spend a good amount of time writing. We don’t have a dedicated office at home, so I’m going to have to be creative in choosing spots to work. I’ll still have access to my campus office, but there’s always the temptation for distraction when I’m around my colleagues and students. If you have a go-to location where you get work done outside the house, I’d love some inspiration — feel free to leave a comment below.
Also, over the next few months I plan to share tidbits of my writing from the book on my Substack page. If you’re not subscribed and would like to be the first to get these updates, sign up here.
Anyway, here’s the Tuesday, March 22 edition of The Overview:
1. The American Enterprise Institute’s Daniel Cox argues that people need to do better at getting to know our neighbors. “The United States is a nation with an incredible amount of racial, political, religious and geographical diversity,” he writes. Importantly, however,
Diversity is not the source of our current problems. Instead, it’s that we have become deeply incurious about each other, no longer interested in getting to know even the people who live next door. We live in a nation of strangers. Even when we do talk to our neighbors we’re increasingly doing it online, using platforms like Nextdoor or Facebook.
It’s an easy trap to fall into. People are busy — with family, with work, with other commitments. But the trend toward neglecting our communities has real consequences for social cohesion. After all, we’re more likely to distrust and misidentify motives to people groups we don’t regularly encounter. This isn’t bigotry; it’s psychology.
How can we address this? Cox continues:
Where we live and how we engage in our community … offers opportunities to learn about and connect with people different from ourselves. New research I conducted at the Survey Center on American Life shows that Americans who live in close proximity to neighborhood amenities — such as libraries, coffee shops and public parks — have more diverse social ties. Even if you don’t live in an amenity rich area, a local spot in the community you go to regularly — a third place — can increase your likelihood of having more diverse connections.
So, as with anything pertaining to the biggest social and cultural challenges to America in the 21st century, the solution starts with us. That doesn’t make it easy, of course, but it does give us a place to start.
2. The National Review’s Rich Lowry says that Florida’s Ron DeSantis represents the “New Republican Party.” Notably, this isn’t so much about ideology as it is about brashness, about confidence. Lowry writes:
[This] is not to say that the [GOP] wasn’t socially conservative before (George W. Bush ran against gay marriage in 2004), or that it didn’t criticize the media (one of George H. W. Bush’s best moments in 1988 was slamming Dan Rather during a live interview). But there’s a new combativeness that is clearly a reflection of how Trump underlined the power of cultural issues and changed the rules around how you deal with controversy — by doubling down and hitting back harder.
Lowry sees DeSantis as a natural successor to the political style of Donald Trump, who effectively changed what it meant to be a successful Republican in many parts of the country. Out were developed policy positions and in were bombastic and unapologetic critiques of the status quo, political incorrectness be damned. Officials like DeSantis, Lowry argues, combines the best of Trump with a path forward for successful GOP governance:
Here is another vista, of a policy vision with a strong element of Trumpism that potentially might have broad appeal to GOP voters of all stripes without the distracting obsessions of the former president.
This gets at what could be one of the most persuasive arguments to Republican voters for Trump not running again — not that he needs to go away so the old party can be restored, but that he’s unnecessary because a new party has emerged.
As Trump continues to tease whether he will in fact run for president in 2024, it sure seems like people like Lowry are ready to move on. This isn’t because they’re fed up with Trump, but because, with DeSantis waiting in the wings, they don’t need him anymore.
3. Christianity Today’s Emily Belz highlights a difficult effort for Russian American pastors in speaking to congregants with interests on both sides of the Russia-Ukraine war:
Evangelical pastors in the US, leading churches where Russian Americans and Ukrainian Americans worship side by side, see the stark but quiet tensions between those who believe Russian president Vladimir Putin’s justifications for the invasion and those who are decrying the injustice of the war. Many have ties to both countries, but the war has highlighted some long-unspoken political divisions.
More:
The tension has been more overt in Ukrainian and Russian Orthodox churches in the United States. In New York last week, the Ukrainian Orthodox Cathedral of St. Volodymyr invited Russian Orthodox leaders to a prayer service for Ukraine along with New York’s governor. The governor came, but the Russian leaders did not.
When I think of divisions in the American church, what usually comes to mind are political and cultural disputes or boundary keeping on non-essential theological questions. But the tensions Belz writes about here seem far harder to grapple with. Pray for unity in Christ’s body, that believers would elevate our identity in Christ above all other things, and that this practice would lead us to seek hard truth and reject convenient falsehoods.