I grew up in a small evangelical church in California’s Central Valley where there were more blue collars than white. About 25 families filed into the pews each Sunday; they were loving, generous, and thoughtful. We camped the Sierra Nevadas, backpacked Yosemite, and set crab traps in Half Moon Bay. We studied the Word, shared meals when misfortune struck, and made more after-church trips to Taco Bell than any human being should be able to withstand. It was evangelicalism of the sunny California variety that wore its conservatism with T-shirts and surfer shorts and a breezy, convivial disposition.
When I think about that church, imperfect though it was, I am immensely grateful. It inoculated me against the poisonous caricature I would hear so often in the years following—especially in secular universities—that evangelical churches were fortresses of ignorance and prejudice.
When I left academia in 2009, it was partly out of disillusionment. The humanities departments seemed less interested in intellectual inquiry than ideological conformity. I distinctly remember a doctoral seminar where one of my colleagues dismissed the entire history of Christian missions as nothing but rapacious colonialism. There’s much to lament in that history, I agreed, but surely there were some missionaries, some of the time, who had some good intentions?
As a matter of intellectual honesty, it seemed the least my interlocutor should accept. Instead, she had me hauled in front of the professor for the thought crime of “defending an evil institution.”
This was only one in a long series of such experiences. Too many lectures felt like recruitment for political programs, too many seminars like competitions for who could be the first to take offense. Advance a thesis that defied the trends sweeping through the humanities departments, and no amount of evidence and argumentation were sufficient; advance a thesis that served a favored cause, and very little evidence and argumentation were necessary. After all, once you have abandoned the concept of a unitary truth, why not choose a story that serves your tribe? Who cares about accuracy when you can deliver “justice”?
So I left academia to help launch a new media enterprise. It’s ironic now to remember the idealism that accompanied the emergence of the blogosphere and social media in those years. The digital landscape was a wide-open expanse where we could reimagine a public conversation that was charitable, informed, and willing to challenge partisan conventions. Perhaps Christians could shape a form of public engagement that simultaneously defended Christian values and exhibited Christlike virtues. Perhaps social media could be what the university should be: an open marketplace of ideas where the best arguments win on the merits.
Over the years that followed, however, new media businesses established financial models that incentivized the worst in human behavior. The road to wealth and influence led through virality, and the surest path to virality was to stir up tribal animosities. Technology ethicist Tristan Harris calls it a “race to the bottom of the brain stem.” Affirm your audience’s prejudices and presuppositions, stoke their fears, heap scorn on the other tribe, and you collect a passionate and growing following, which you can monetize through speaking and writing engagements.
Put differently, the quickest way to build a readership was not to establish expertise and credibility over a long career of faithful work, but to achieve viral fame by playing into the tribal antipathies of one group or another. What started as attention harvesting became rage farming.
In the early years of virality culture, the dividing lines cut between large groups of people, such as conservative evangelicals and progressive mainliners. Eventually, it became clear that social media platforms could increase engagement further and deliver more finely targeted advertising (which is to say, make more money), by funneling readers into ever-narrower subcategories. Larger communities of common conviction became divided and subdivided into warring camps; each camp was served by its own information sources and united in shared hostility to those around them. The anger we feel for so-called betrayers of our tribe is far greater than the anger we feel for those who never belonged to our tribe in the first place.
So we arrive where we are today, where evangelicals are bought and sold in the scorn markets and pitted against one another for profit. Where writers and readers alike are addicted to the dopamine of division. It is like the humanities departments where I once lived and worked.
Everything is reduced to the political. Facts don’t matter if the story serves your tribe. Careers are made not by loving and understanding others but by mocking and mischaracterizing them.
To be clear, Christianity Today has never argued that Christians should withdraw from political life. Although the dead are not raised by politics, the living are served by it.
The problem is not when the Christian is in the conflict. The problem is when the conflict is in the Christian. Our engagement with one another and with society should follow the pattern of Christ and not the culture.
Christianity Today has never fit neatly into anyone’s political agenda because we are more committed to the kingdom of God than to the interests of any party or country. This frustrates those who would patrol the boundaries of political conformity, but we view it as essential to our calling. And we decline to participate in the outrage cycle.
Our calling is to advance the stories and ideas of the kingdom of God. We tell those stories when they are encouraging and when they are hard. We invite orthodox Christian voices to make their arguments for contrary points of view. We seek to understand and exemplify what it means to follow Jesus in our time. CT is comprised of directors, executives, staff, writers, and readers who hold different political stances. We view this as a strength and not a weakness.
One of the songs we sang in that church in California’s Central Valley was “They Will Know We Are Christians by Our Love.” Experiencing the love of the body of Christ left its mark on my soul. As Jesus said in John 13, “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (v. 35). And as he prayed to the Father in John 17, it is because of the unity of the church that “the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me” (v. 23).
This is a weighty thing. The love we show one another, the unity we show to the world, bears testimony to the divinity of Christ and the reality of the love of God. The Church bears the image of Christ to the world, yet today that image is contentious and fragmented.
The kingdom of God is always confounding the expectations of the world. It takes what the world has turned upside down and inverts them back to their right order. It lifts the humble over the proud, the meek over the mighty, the powerless over the powerful. It is profoundly countercultural.
Perhaps the most countercultural thing Christians can do in this present moment is to refuse to demonize one another. Christians with sound hearts and minds will reach different conclusions on what love requires of them in the upcoming election. Support whom your conscience bids you support. But let your first love be your first love, and let our love for one another be our witness to the world that Christ is alive and at work among us.
Timothy Dalrymple is president and CEO of Christianity Today.
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