Correction (Oct. 2). In the process of getting ready for our third session, on Oct. 6, I reviewed the Hope/Humility Conversation Starter mentioned below. I was right when I suspected I’d added up my scores incorrectly and I didn’t really belong in the “Disciples” category. Turns out my “hope” score was 11, and my “humility” score was 14. The Conversation Starter is marked off in quadrants, and these scores place me in the “Cynic” quadrant (on the lower left) near the boundary line with “Exhausted” (on the lower right). This seems much more accurate!
Let’s try something new here. Well, maybe not so much brand new as trying out a new approach to a type of journaling I’ve been doing for a couple of years. Debi and I are starting a new book for Sundays@6, an online book discussion group we co-facilitate for our mainline Protestant parish church. The book is titled The After Party: Toward Better Christian Politics, by Curtis Chang and Nancy French, and it’s about how to get people of different political persuasions talking — civilly — to each other again.
Unlike other books we’ve taken up for Sundays@6, this one comes with a prepackaged curriculum with companion videos and discussion questions. Some of them are quite thought-provoking. So I’m going to journal on my personal reactions. As Flannery O’Connor once said (and I keep quoting), “I have to write to discover what I am doing. […] I don’t know so well what I think until I see what I say.” This week’s journal will be short, preceded by a long windup in which I think through some of the issues the book.
But first, one big caveat is in order (although it will be obvious to anyone who’s ever been a classroom teacher): Once we get under way, anything I’ve prepared — and anything I journal ahead of time — can go out the window. Sundays@6 is a discussion group, not a lecture!
Here’s the windup […]
In their publisher’s blurb, Chang and French make the case for the book like this:
For the exhausted, the hurting, and the faithful, The After Party helps reframe our political identity away from the “what” of political positions and toward the “how” being centered on Jesus.
If you feel like that has an evangelical Protestant ring to it, you’d be right.1 If you feel like it’s directed at a very real problem in American pop culture, especially during one of the nastiest, most racially charged political campaign seasons in living memory, you’d be right about that, too. After Party was written by evangelicals, for evangelicals, but, as Chang and French put it in the blurb, also for all “readers who feel despair about political divisiveness.”
At first it sounded churchy and preachy to my ears, sensitized (perhaps oversensitized) by hearing too many jakeleg preachers on the radio down South. But I got over it as I kept reading.
(One thing that helped me get over it: Sometimes they use words like “Christian” in what seems to me a dogmatic, exclusionary way; I don’t think it was intended, but it reminds me of stuff I heard from bible-thumping fundamentalists down home. So when I started feeling defensive, I’d think of the verse in Micah that says: “what does the Lord require of you but to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God?” Chang and French cite it prominently, and it’s central to their message of hope and humility. I think — hope — it’s something we all can agree on.)
In fact one of the things I hope to learn from Sundays@6 is a more nuanced understanding of evangelicals than I get from MAGA Republican pastors who write stuff like “No, Christians Cannot Support the Democrat [sic] Party” online, or the 500-watt, daytime-only radio stations of my youth. I’ve got baggage of my own, and I’d like to stop carrying it.
I think After Party offers an alternative vision by people who have fought in the culture wars and come out of them in a better place. It’s a project of Chang’s not-for-profit Redeeming Babel, which tried to persuade vaccine-hesitant evangelicals and “counter the toxic politicization of a public health solution” during the pandemic. That must have been exhausting.
In addition to Chang, instructors are Russell Moore, a “Never Trumper” who left the Southern Baptist Convention over his exposure of racial and sexual abuse issues; and David French, a New York Times op ed columnist and Nancy French’s husband, who got run out of a very conservative Presbyterian (PCA) church in suburban Nashville after he came out against Trump and they adopted a child from Ethiopia. Nancy French is a journalist in her own right with several co-authored or ghost-written books to her credit.
So the After Party folks know about the intersection of political and religious conflict from lived experience. And I think they might offer a viable alternative to the current name-calling and toxicity.
Chang says After Party, which consists of the book and an accompanying interactive video series, is designed to offer “a biblically faithful approach to politics that offers a hopeful alternative to the polarization currently besetting so many communities.”
Hope is one of the key concepts in After Party. The other is humility. (Remember that passage from Micah?) The series was designed for congregational small groups, and it’s nothing if not interactive. Explains Sadie Vanderzyden, writing for the online magazine Currents:
With an emphasis on hope and humility as the spiritual values of Jesus, participants are encouraged to fill out the Hope/Humility Conversation Starter Tool to understand which category they generally fall into: Combatant, Exhausted, Cynic, or Disciple. These profiles provide the structure for the rest of the material in the book. […]
Vanderzyden said the book and the accompanying small-group curriculum reflect the lived experience of the people who put it together:
Each one of the instructors occupies a quadrant. David French identifies as a Combatant. Russell Moore is the Exhausted, and Curtis Chang is the Cynic. Jesus himself is the model for the Disciple profile—and the goal in every aspect of the Christian’s journey, including in politics.
Vanderzyden, a marketing specialist at Ashland Theological Seminary in Ohio (affiliated with the Church of the Brethren), moderated a pilot discussion group in 2023. She reports:
Included in each chapter are reflection exercises that, in my opinion, vary in their usefulness. The more reflective, personal questions are absolutely essential to engage the material in a deeper way. For example, one of the reflection exercises asks you to recall a time in your life where you were wrong about something important. Remembering the process—from my strong conviction that I was right to the humbling moment where I realized I was wrong—was powerful. The exercise concludes by asking how you can take wisdom from that experience and apply it to how you relate to others vis-à-vis politics.
That exercise, in a later chapter, sounds like it might be made to order for me. Is it time to ditch my lingering antagonism to evangelicals? And how do I do that without undermining my political beliefs? My commitment to social justice? Vanderzyden adds:
Overall, I find The After Party material useful for Christian communities trying to see past the politics that so easily divide them. My only critique concerns the language of the quadrants. Instead of people who squarely fit into the categories of Combatants, Exhausted, and Cynics journeying toward becoming Disciples, I wonder if churches are instead full of combatant disciples, exhausted disciples, and cynical disciples all trying their best to follow Jesus in the thick of real life.
[…] and here’s the pitch
I think Vanderzyden’s exactly right about that!
When I took the Hope/Humility Conversation Starter quiz at the end of the book, I added up my scores in each quadrant. They put me, just barely, up on the upper right with the Disciples. No, I thought. That can’t be right! I added them up again. Same total.
But that doesn’t feel right. If I’m a disciple, I’m one of Vanderzyden’s combatant, exhausted and/or cynical disciples. I still spend too much time arguing with relative strangers on Facebook, although I think — hope — I’ve managed to douse the flame wars lately on my FB feed, and I’m exhausted. If there were a combination of questions that put me smack in the middle, sort of like Four Corners where Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado meet, I’d feel better about it.
[Correction (Oct. 2): After going back and adding up the scores correctly, I wound up in the lower left quadrant, the Cynics, but only one point on the x-axis (humility) short of qualifying for the Exhausted in the lower right. That sounds just about exactly right!]
For our first meeting, we’re reading the introduction. It talks about people who are no longer in our lives because of political differences. Among the reflection questions:
- Who do you no longer see at church, either because you’ve left or they’ve left?
- Who has disappeared from your social media feed because their posts and comments ere so disagreeable?
- Whom have you stopped inviting to your parties? Which parties are you no longer invited to?
- What are your feelings? […] anger, sadness, affection, guilt, curiosity, revulsion, insecurity, obsession, resentment, confusion, outrage, powerlessness, (Fill in the blank).
As I thought it over, I decided the Covid pandemic has been more disruptive at our church than politics. Several members of our congregation stopped going to services during the pandemic, and at least two of them were politically quite conservative. But several pillars of our church, who had seen us through a difficult merger of three smaller parishes, died of Covid or other causes. Our denomination, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, is about as middle-of-the-road as you can get. I’ve seen 2020 election stats estimating that 51 percent of ELCA members voted for Trump and 49 percent for Biden; I suspect the stats for our new blended parish would be similar.
Who do I no longer see in church? Until quite recently, when got the green light from my oncologist to start going out in public again after chemotherapy, the last church service I attended in person was Ash Wednesday in 2020, just before the pandemic hit. So when I think back, I can’t separate out politics from the pandemic. In fact, I think the pandemic affected us more than politics, even though we’re in a state capital where we’ve always worn our politics on ourr sleeves — and automobile bumpers.
One member who died during the pandemic, in fact, kind of typified everything I’d ever want to be when it comes to mixing politics and religion. Gene was a Norskie (which always helps in my book)! An MSW and a founding member of the psychiatry department at Southern Illinois University’s med school in Springfield, he worked with traumatized veterans and first responders, the LGBTQ+ community and anyone else who found themselves on the margins. You sensed for Gene, it was a spiritual calling. But his heritage was Norwegian pietist, Hauge Lutheran, and the faith of his fathers included the Republican Party. For the 4th of July, he always wanted us to sing the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” (Which as a Southern expat, I’d never heard in church before!) It seemed as natural as corn on the cob, and I guessed his Hauge Lutheran forefathers had voted Republican as soon as they got off the boat in the 1800s. Overall, I guess we’ll never get back to what we were before the pandemic. Life doesn’t work that way. But I think we’re still a purple, or center-right to center-left congregation, as we were before.
When I count up who has disappeared from my social media feed after squabbling about politics, I can be more specific.
I’ve lost three or four Facebook friends who gave their reasons, two of them because I posted content about Trump they found offensive and one because I asked him to stop militantly atheist comments that other FB friends found offensive. (I agreed with him on most political issues, however.) Again, none of this stuff is cut-and-dried.
Chang and French suggest that: “Some readers may struggle to come up with any names. If that is your case — if all your relationships are as intact as before, untouched by politics, that may mean the Big Sort got to you early.” Citing journalist Bill Bishop, they define the Big Sort like this: “Americans are […] increasingly living in locations where they’re surrounded by people who share their same beliefs” (Chang and French 11-12). That well may be the case, but I think our sort, using Bishop’s word, is pretty much middle-of-the-road, middle class mainline Protestant.
Afterword (Sept. 22). Welp, we met. And one of my hunches was right on target. Which means the other wasn’t! As soon as we got together at 6pm on Zoom, we went off in a different direction than I’d anticipated. A couple of them, actually. Nobody said a word about evangelicals.
That said, I still want to do something about that chip on my shoulder.
Notes
I use “evangelical” in British historian David Bebbington’s sense, as adapted by the National Association of Evangelicals. The NAE website identifies four pillars, or tenents: Conversionism, Biblicism, Activism and Crucicentrism, which it defines, respectively, as:
- the belief that lives need to be transformed through a “born-again” experience and a life long process of following Jesus
- a high regard for and obedience to the Bible as the ultimate authority
- the expression and demonstration of the gospel in missionary and social reform efforts
- a stress on the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross as making possible the redemption of humanity
Nowhere in Bebbington’s Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s, it goes without saying, are Donald Trump and the MAGA movement mentioned.
Links and Citations
Seth Brickley, “No, Christians Cannot Support the Democrat Party,” TruthScript, Feb. 3, 2024 https://truthscript.com/culture/no-christians-cannot-support-the-democrat-party/.
Curtis Chang and Nancy French, The After Party: Toward Better Christian Politics (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2024).
David French, “The day my old church canceled me was a very sad day,” St. Paul Pioneer Press, June 12, 2024 https://www.twincities.com/2024/06/11/david-french-the-day-my-old-church-canceled-me-was-a-very-sad-day/.
Paul O’Donnell and Bob Smietana, “Leaked Russell Moore letter blasts SBC conservatives, sheds light on his resignation,” Religion News Service, June 2, 2021 https://religionnews.com/2021/06/02/leaked-russell-moore-letter-blasts-sbc-conservatives-sheds-light-on-his-resignation/.
Sadie Vanderzyden, “REVIEW: The After Party,” Currents, Sept. 17, 2024 https://currentpub.com/2024/09/17/review-the-after-party/.
“What is an Evangelical?,” National Association of Evangelicals https://www.nae.org/what-is-an-evangelical.
[Revised — substantially! — and uplinked Sept. 23, 2024]
Ordinary Time 