We are grateful to Sister Marianne Burkhard OSB for drawing out Catholic ecumenical dimensions of our theological project on justification by faith and justice seeking amid conflict. Pope Francis’s perception of the church as a “dynamic school of conversion” echoes the Prologue in the Rule of Saint Benedict: “[W]e intend to establish a school for the Lord’s service…. [As] we progress in this way of life and in faith, we shall run on the paths of God’s commandments, our hearts overflowing with the inexpressible delight of love.”

1 We appreciate learning that both Pope Francis and Saint Benedict see Christians as “works-in-progress,” manifesting faith in love (Galatians 5:6). We are also intrigued by Pope Francis’s understanding of tradition as amenable to better interpretation.

2 As “works-in-progress,” both the doctrine of justification and visions of justice seeking—the central ideas of Ordinary Faith—are also open to better interpretations!

One of us (Amy) is a Benedictine Oblate of St. Mary Monastery in Rock Island, Illinois, and has long noticed how profoundly Martin Luther’s contributions to the reformation of the church were shaped by his early formation in the Brethren of the Common Life. This late-medieval religious community recited psalms daily. Luther echoes this scripture-based piety in his Large Catechism, when he mentions meditation on the psalms as one of the daily devotions that interrupts the presumption and despair that can characterize Christian justice seeking in the world and re-centers Christians on God (in keeping with the First Commandment), a theme discussed in chapter 6 of Ordinary Faith.

3 Furthermore, Luther in his Small Catechism encourages both daily repentance and remembrance of baptism, which we discuss as recentering—moving back into a recognition of belonging to the Beloved Community, the space of primary Christian identity enabled through justification by faith. Thus Sister Burkhard beautifully highlights the kind of Benedictine practices of lectio divina (sacred reading) with scripture that have a family resemblance to scripture-engaged Protestant devotional practices. Likewise, the type of spiritual formation we advocate refocuses attention to one’s kinship within the Beloved Community in order to distinguish between justification by faith—one’s primary identity in Christ—and the work of justice seeking in both church and world—which is the implication of faith, but not identical to it.

Amy has heard first-hand accounts of what Sister Burkhard describes as the distinctive listening practices in her Benedictine community. The Benedictine Sisters live a spirit of mutual listening in their discernment processes, whether they regard personal-vocational questions, the direction of the community, or matters of property and building administration. The community values that every Sister speak her own mind fully before any major decision is made, from choosing a prioress to deciding to sell, relocate, and rebuild their monastery.

4 The discernment practice empowers every Sister to take responsibility for sharing her perspective. Owning one’s personal responsibility for shared leadership is expected; it is designed to discourage withdrawing from communal decision-making, or complaining as if from the sidelines. The process of consensus-based decision-making does not mean that every Sister’s preference determines the final decision, but the practice is supposed to make sure that her concerns and observations are taken into account as the details of the process unfold. As Sister Burkhard notes, this dynamic of mutual listening and speaking is itself a spiritual practice cultivated over centuries by a particular monastic order. 

We are grateful to Sister Burkhard for describing this Benedictine spiritual practice. Some caricature the practice of listening as a “progressive liberal idea” with its roots in the Enlightenment. But Sister Burkhard has given us the opportunity to underscore that devotional practices of listening have deep theological roots, with a long history of forming Christians attuned to meditative Bible study for personal and community discernment. These listening practices can also be understood as integral to the doctrine of justification. Thus in what follows, we sketch out the doctrine of justification (as we laid out in chapters 1 and 2 in our book) with a focus on listening as a sort of liturgy. 

We might ask first: why is listening significant in monastic and scripture-based pieties? “Listen” is the first word in the Rule of Benedict, as it echoes God the Father’s imperative during the transfiguration of Jesus, “This is my beloved Son; listen to him” (Mark 9:7): “Listen carefully, my son, to the master’s instructions, and attend to them with the ear of your heart.”

5 Likewise, Christian pieties cultivate listening to God’s word—in the liturgical use of the lectionary, in prayerfully listening for God’s word in the Bible. This familiar Christian ritual of listening for God’s word can be a spiritual template for ways to listen among Christians who disagree.

How does such listening relate to the doctrine of justification? “Justification is the article by which the church stands or falls” is a common Lutheran exclamation. Yet Sister Burkhard is right to note that the 1999 Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification bears witness to the agreement between Lutherans and Roman Catholics on the centrality of justification in their respective confessions.

6 Furthermore, the document itself is the fruit of a sustained dialogue that discerns “new insights” which allow for the lifting of mutual ecclesial condemnations, while still affirming the respective convictions of participating Lutherans and Catholics.7 The production of the document took time—over thirty years of dialogue, theological development, and personal relationships. It highlights that justification “is more than just one part of Christian doctrine. It stands in essential relation to all truths of faith” and is “an indispensable criterion which constantly serves to orient all the teaching and practice of our churches to Christ.”8 Listening for God’s word across different interpretations of scripture and tradition takes time and work. In the case of the JDDJ, the aim was theological: the unity of the church. 

Sister Burkhard’s focus on theology and spiritual practices spotlights the distinctive theological angle of our book: the Beloved Community is central to Christian identity. What it means to be a Christian is this very belonging to the community that is the effect of justification by Christ. This theological claim gives Christians the freedom to imagine and contribute towards greater flourishing within the Beloved Community, however revisable and transient any vision of flourishing might be. Beloved Community belonging frees Christians from feeling compelled to establish ultimate justice, which is left up to God. This Christian freedom from identifying one’s own position with ultimate justice diminishes aspirations of power that get charged up when Christians claim their identity to be equivalent to a particular justice-seeking position itself. A theology of justification-based community frees Christians to respond to a pull to create better forms of being in community together, in the here-and-now, in a way that interrupts any simple equation between Christian identity and aspirations of ultimate justice. 

All of this presupposes that debates about the nature of justice seeking take place when Christians on opposing sides of an issue stress different insights, or hold in their hearts and minds competing pictures about the shape of the Beloved Community. As Sister Burkhard mentions, in Christian debate heresy is not so much holding a false belief as holding onto a partial truth or insight without seeing it within a larger perspective. Historically, the heresy accusations that “hold” have often been about views that reject a consensus built upon generations of earnest debate. Orthodoxy, in other words, has to do with Christians who strive to listen to each other and then together work towards a position of agreement. Long-term listening to persons who disagree has its theological precedents—whether the earliest ecumenical creeds or the more recent JDDJ, from 1999. Christians routinely take part in such listening when they read scripture together to hear God’s word, participate in the liturgy, or come together for coffee hour. Sister Burkhard’s account of Benedictine listening is intriguing because it frames listening within a devotional setting that prescribes a pattern, a liturgy even, for listening and praying, responding and discerning. As we sketch out in the final chapter of our book, listening and story-telling, decentering and recentering, are spiritual practices that require intentional cultivation.

Sister Burkhard inspires us to reflect more deeply on how the doctrine of justification can frame and inform a theology of listening. The doctrine is structured by the theological claim that God’s word speaks forgiveness to the sinner, and through the speaking, effects a significant change in the identity of a person who is wounded by her own sins as well as by the sins of others. The divine word declares that the sinner is no longer a sinner, the sinned-against is no longer alienated by her woundedness. The sinner/sinned-against is now a beloved child of God. This identity switch is based on the divine work that forgives and repairs through the divine word of the gospel. Yet that word is not merely “alien,” imparted from outside the sinner/sin-wounded like a sticker attached to a window. Forgiveness and healing become a Christian’s internalized identity through listening. Listening is the instrument by which God’s word of justification by faith in Christ becomes a person’s identity. Yet even such listening is, according to Lutheran consensus, a divine gift. God creates the faith (that is, the listening) by which the word works the recognition and recollection of one’s baptismal identity within the body of Christ.

Crucially, the apparent passivity in hearing our identity as beloved children of God converts into activity. Luther writes in his 1520 treatise On Christian Freedom that the soul freed by Christ is freed to love the neighbor.

9 Passivity entails receptivity to the Holy Spirit’s uniting us to the body of Christ. Hearing grounds a Christian’s action in serving the neighbor in need. We must pay special attention to this pivot from passivity to activity, which showcases what we call in our book the transition from justification to justice seeking. The transition to actively seeking justice relies on the particular activity of listening to the neighbor. Listening to God’s word of justification thus grounds a practice of learning to listen to our neighbors’ stories of how they are harmed by us, how they are wounded by injustice, how both we and they require a justice that can inform our collective vision of justice seeking. 

 

We are grateful to Robert A. Orsi for taking us into the central challenge driving our book, namely that polarization between Christians represents, indeed, at some level, an ontological divide between two opposing viewpoints. By amplifying the apocalyptic perspective, Orsi underscores the problem of ontological incommensurability—which we note at the beginning of our chapter on abortion (ch. 4): this incommensurability does not just characterize the binary on a particular issue, as for example, either “pro” or “con” abortion, but points to two competing worldviews, two ways of thinking about the world as a whole that are incommensurable in all ways. In what follows, we reflect historically on the concept of “worldview,” and revisit how a baptismal theology can orient Christians in navigating the unnerving gaps between different senses-of-the-world by recalling—and living in light of—a yet larger worldview.

The term “worldview,” in German Weltanschauung (literally translated as “world-intuition”), has a distinctive and fascinating inheritance. The word originates in a philosophical discussion in the early nineteenth century having to do with the way in which the self as an individual apprehends the totality of the world in a holistic way that the self then “fills in” with rational claims derived from experience and scientific knowledge. Given that the world as a whole was not visible before Apollo 17 sent back images of planet earth from outer space in 1972, the world as a totality had to be constructed through speculative and empirical reason as well as the imagination. Thus “worldview” was the subject of a metaphysical positing, meaning its totality required a conceptual or speculative rational activity that was more than a daily experiential sum of its parts. Anschauung in German is translated as “intuition,” a term from the Romantic philosophical tradition having to do with a precognitive perception of the whole that involves both sensation (the senses) and an inner kind of sensing, or even “seeing” an ultimate unity. 

Yet the term Weltanschauung gradually lost its academic philosophical bearings and in the early twentieth century came to signify an entire way of thinking, being, and feeling that absorbs disparate aspects of “world” into a conceptually coherent and normative frame. Worldview came to signify religious, secular, technological, and even ideological frameworks that imposes norms on a shared cultural set of beliefs.

1 The Nazis popularized the term, using it to denote their exclusive vision for the world grounded on Nordic supremacy, legitimating violence in order to map their worldview onto the geography of Germany, Europe, and Russia.2

The significance of the contemporary and popular use of Weltanschauung is that it points to the possibility of different ways of perceiving the world as a unity. Different subjective standpoints result in different worldviews, which can be shared among individuals who either assent to or are forced to assent to them. Furthermore, worldviews can be “ontologically incommensurable” to each other. One worldview can absorb all empirical data into an imaginary, such that it conflicts with another imaginary that has absorbed similar data in opposing ways. We describe this ontological incommensurability in chapter 4 of our book by examining how the issue of abortion is absorbed into mutually different frameworks, each with their respective accounts of sex and gender, society, personhood, visions of justice, research results, and legal strategies to achieve one’s aims. We explain how even the language and vocabulary used to describe the phenomena at stake are so different from each other because their semantics are determined by the conceptual imaginary in which they are deployed. Incommensurable difference ends up precluding a meaningful discussion, which must be based on common terms. 

Orsi homes in on precisely this scenario—how can conversation even be possible? Is violence the only resolution? Weltanschauungen come with their respective conceptions of power. Does ontological incommensurability then inevitably slip into a situation of violent assimilation of the “other side”? Does this situation then erode the very conditions of democracy itself? The threat of authoritarianism looms, as academics and journalists today sound the alarm. This question that Orsi addresses is then the question of contemporary politics and the question of democracy— namely, can democracy present a political option simultaneously for different versions of justice-seeking without succumbing to the will to power represented by ontologically incommensurable visions of justice-seeking? Can we think about the conceptuality of Weltanschauung without immediately anticipating the zero-sum game of ontological incommensurability? Does ordinary faith help Christians think with this challenge and invite us to think realistically and critically about the will to power, including our own.

Justification by faith in Christ as the basis of belonging to a Beloved Community in which and for which we yearn for justice and flourishing: this dynamic within our book is a refresher, not a novelty. Justification by faith is an old-fashioned doctrine, yet it has the power to address our contemporary challenges because it reflects a Christian permutation of a historical truth: any religious tradition that abides over time does so because it offers a worldview that can catch and hold together across the specific visions of power and belonging that animate a nation or collective in a given time or place. History also teaches—Christian history especially—that any religious team can be vulnerable to getting worked out (and worked up!) in a way that supports one side of a binary. Orsi diagnoses this acute tension today between “MAGA mysticism” and those who are terrified of what a MAGA movement bodes for the future of democracy in the United States. While this is indeed a political incommensurability, both sides can also be mapped in relation to a polarized Christianity. And as theologians speaking to these particular times, we have resorted to justification by faith precisely as the ever-available Pauline idea that re-conceptualizes the contemporary political landscape by reminding Christians that they don’t need to immediately resort to ontological incommensurability, but already belong to a community that surpasses the binary: the unity of the Beloved Community. The apostle Paul might not have been worried about democracy per se, but from the church in Paul’s day to our own contested visions today, Christians can still access the theological resource for imagining that there is a unity in the body of Christ that already and always undercuts the binary of competing politicized Weltanschauungen.

Orsi also points out that a temptation to moral authoritarianism can take hold behind any picture of virtue—including today’s virtues from the left as well as from the right. Both sides of the political landscape are tempted to impose power rather than share it. Given our contemporary tendency to equate Christian loyalty with a particular political identity, the question is how we can theologically resist the temptation to swarm around a set of iconic ideas that function like a deity to whom we owe homage. The theology of justification is a start—a Weltanschauung that regards the neighbor, even the Christian who is in violent disagreement with us—as someone, like me, justified by Christ. Through this powerful Weltanschauung, Christ transforms us so we regard the enemy as friend, and as such offers us new possibilities for living into that reality. Furthermore, justification teaches us that belonging to Christ is our ultimate vision as Christians. This claim of ultimacy frees us from violently establishing our vision of justice-seeking as if it were the only one. If Christ is at the center of our Weltanschauung, then such idolatry must be resisted.

Remembering our baptism is a spiritual resource that we invite our readers to consider as a practice that lightens our heart-hold on polarizing group identifications—without necessarily giving up our particular perceptions and convictions about how the world ought to be. We belong to one another even when we advocate different political positions. Such is the reality that recollection of baptism invites Christians to ponder and to live out. This remembrance in faith interrupts our fearful demonization of a political opponent, by reminding us that this opponent, too, is justified by Christ. This interruption, which we call “recentering” in our book (ch. 6), in turn allows us to practice noticing all the textures of life we share amid and despite our political polarization. Those textures are malleable, even if they are not always neutral when regarded from an ideological lens—a lens attentive to dynamics of power and social analyses. But we might ask of any particular representation: does it “portray people as they actually are, full of complexity, or does it rely on easy stereotypes and simplifications?”

3 Realistic portrayals neither look away from our sin and limited identifications of one another, nor reduce one another to those features. We are each more than we behold through the lens of identity politics. From a Christian lens, we see another as a unique child of God.

There are inspiring examples of local communities that are already grappling with the challenge of regarding the opponent as a complex and fuller person. Groups like Braver Angels unite “red and blue Americans in a working alliance to depolarize America.” In Tel Aviv, MiddleMeets brings together Palestinian and Jewish students to practice talking openly about their perspectives of themselves and one another, mediated by texts about the Nakba, the Holocaust, and North American indigenous land acknowledgments.

4 These are just two examples of face-to-face conversations among those who regard one another as opponents, if not enemies.

To be sure, conversations like these require an admission that there is a tension—an ontological incommensurability. But the fact that those on opposite sides of a recognizable divide can talk and work together attests to a commitment that their respective worldviews are more permeable than fixed, open to revision based on efforts at mutual understanding. We believe that for Christians, remembering our baptism into the body of Christ is the kind of routine spiritual habit that helps to break the spell of the fierce and fearful allegiances that sustain polarization, providing a theological framing that frees Christian to collaborate in creating and revising pictures of a more just world.
Yet Orsi presses further, asking us to address what happens when the rubber hits the road: what if we—or the “other side”—insist on undermining the very conditions under which we can recognize each other as justified in Christ? What if the will to power so totally consumes us (or the other side) that we deny the other’s fundamental belonging, and possibly even the other’s right to have their own position? We have sought to remind Christians that our theology of justification by faith offers rich resources for perceiving less polarized ways of belonging. This includes enabling Christians to talk with one another across our own divisions—around race, gender, politics, and contests for political power within our churches as well as our nations. But the “rubber hitting the road” might just be facing the ways that Christians turn to authoritarianism and violence. In the face of this challenge, we invite fellow Christians to think more often and more deeply about how a theology of graced belonging is our ecclesial charism in a pluralistic world—enabling us to live out ever anew our vocation of being in but not of a polarized world. In the process, we resist Christian positions which insist on polarization and legitimate that polarization through violence.

We are grateful to Jason Springs for complementing the main theological points of our book with his work on secular scholarly approaches to social justice, conflict, and transformation. Theologians should take up quantitative research on dimensions of justice-seeking—for example the efficacy of nonviolent love (which Springs shows has a statistical edge of success over strategies marked by violent means)—in order to examine how theological models can provide orienting possibilities for social action. Springs’s interdisciplinary work has reciprocal benefits: for theologians who intend their models to have purchase in the real world that, as such, can be studied by scientists; and for sociologists and secular conflict experts who wish to encounter theology as a viable discipline that has considerable expertise in both modeling justice-oriented imaginaries and coming to a consensus over ideas that have emerged over centuries of theological conflicts.

Springs is right to ask for more reflection on what it means for Christians to recall our baptism while pursuing power to enact a particular vision of a more just world. This is a key question amid worries about the current shape of democracy. Democracy sets us on liberal grounds, which means 1) the separation of church and state, and 2) the co-existence of plural visions that can be negotiated without coercion by adherents of particular religions or political affiliations. But in the US, some religious perspectives are gaining political power in a way that calls the conditions of a liberal democracy into question. Springs draws attention to the issue at stake: either we strengthen liberal democracy by taking into account diverse religious voices in the political sphere, or we undermine it by insisting on a singular religious perspective dictating to the entire public. In our book we anticipate this either/or by beginning with justification by faith in Christ as the basis for ecclesial belonging, thereby siding with the approach towards strengthening democracy by offering what we take to be a process-oriented religious position for Christians in particular. This precludes perceiving any particular justice-seeking project as itself the mark of Christian identity. 

Springs asks us to address precisely how Christians can frame their particular and diverse visions of social justice in ways that exercise political power. If the presence of powerful religious voices in the political realm is indeed a challenge for conceptualizing how different voices can co-exist in a democracy, then faith within politics (the subject of chapter 5 of our book) requires additional thinking among Christians. Christians need to work out what democracy means and how it can be both strengthened and safeguarded on the grounds of both faith and political sensibilities. For Christians, we suggest, remembering our baptismal belonging is something to do not instead of, but amid, collectively organized movements to secure the power to enact justice-seeking changes through political means. 

Amy’s own theological thinking along these lines began during a class with political scientist Paul Wellstone at Carleton College, in a course on grassroots organizing and social change movements. (This was before Wellstone’s election to the US Senate.) In the course, the students read about civil rights and movements against militarism and poverty. They participated in a protest at Honeywell’s headquarters, and met with activists against homelessness. 

One of their assignments was to keep a journal of their responses. Amy recalls journaling about the words of the Lutheran worship liturgy that speak of the Lord’s Supper as “a foretaste of the feast to come.” These words offer a vision of reconciliation between divided Christians that anchors, in the sacramental sense, the ways in which we all regard our common belonging. How this vision guides the diverse actions of justice-seeking is the important point. Amy found herself thinking about the relation between this proleptic vision in the Eucharist and the practice of justice-seeking because the inclination of some of her classmates was to openly wonder if they should cut off ties with their Republican friends back home (not something Wellstone himself encouraged), and because she noticed that some seemed to enjoy the very act of protest itself, as if that joy were an end in itself. It seemed that some classmates were more concerned with identifying as justice-seekers than with justice-seeking itself, which ought to be pursued without casting aside those who did not seem to share the same activist identity. Clarifying our justice-related political orientations is a developmental stage to reckon with—something also to account for in a life of faith. Yet Amy had a hunch then—and now—that, for Christians, it makes a meaningful difference for how we participate in issue-oriented actions when we keep in view that we are already participating in a still-to-unfold reconciliation glimpsed around a shared meal. 

How might an awareness of baptismal belonging be a spiritual tool for reconciliation even amid organizing to address injustice? It spurs us to make efforts to see our neighbors justly, in their complexity. The humanizing of those with whom we disagree is an intervention that calls totalizing binary oppressor-oppressed worldviews into question. The challenge is not that we make distinctions between oppressor and oppressed as a tool of social analysis, but that we can be tempted to essentialize those distinctions with regard to entire categories of individuals and groups. A prominent worry animating our project is how personal and group identities (rather than temporary strategic coalitions) form around what we oppose. This sensibility of an inimical “us vs. them” assimilates a faith identity to “our” particular vision of justice, and ruffles our ability to humanize “them” as persons. This mentality also prevents collaborative justice-seeking across polarized worldviews.

The abortion issue is a case in point. Each side becomes morally incomprehensible to the other and might assume that its side alone represents an oppressed position. The side advocating for legalizing abortion suggests that women are oppressed when they are forced to give birth, while the other side portrays the fetus as oppressed. The narrative of either/or victimization sets up a binary in the political realm that demands the power of law to underscore its own position. Each side of the binary sets itself up as righting the wrongs suffered by its own side through state power. The challenge of the incommensurable requires a third way—one that can glimpse a larger horizon in which both sides can be heard to express important concerns. Democracy can be a space for politically legalizing collective values through a process that allows the concerns of all to be addressed without violence or bullying. The capacity for democratic deliberation is enhanced when we remember how faith-based identities are not themselves reducible to one side of a genuinely contestable vision of justice.

Being convinced of the rightness of our own ethical or ideological perspective is insufficient and, when it is the only politically relevant bearing, dangerous. Amy recalls a Marxist economist she knew who, when asked what he thought of the human rights violations in the Soviet Union, said, “What human rights violations? Those were [against] reactionaries.” We can become intoxicated with any dream of justice in a way that feeds injustice, falsehoods, or a resistance to recognizing the moral complexity at play in the issues or in the personhood of our opponents. Amy was reminded to see persons themselves, beyond the issues tugging us apart, during protests against the first Gulf War in Nashville. Those of us protesting the war recalled the mistakes of Vietnam war protesters in the late 1960s who had conflated what they saw as a flimsy argument supporting US foreign policy with a denigration of the actual soldiers who fought. So Gulf War protesters held signs that said, “Support our troops—bring them home.” Still, a mother of a soldier walked up to Amy to say that even if we were protesting policies and not soldiers, it did not feel that way to her. This mother was bearing witness, too—to a vision in which if her son died in that war, it would not be for naught. Amy kept holding her sign, but she also still hears the words from that mother’s heart. The point here is our advocacy for a public square that welcomes different approaches to justice, with reciprocal voices pressing each other for accountability, pursuing justice together with truth—including the truths of our affective ties to one another.

How might it matter for our respective justice-seeking projects themselves, then—to cultivate mindfulness about an already-yet-still-to-come Beloved Community while organizing for political power? We must be clear-eyed that power is inevitable in politics. But can we offer a theological perspective on power that might inform the model we have proposed in Ordinary Faith for depolarizing Christians on difficult ethical issues? Perhaps one place to begin is the incarnational model of power and its qualified rejection. Paul’s Letter to the Philippians offers an interpretation of the incarnation by specifying the Word of God’s relinquishment of divine power upon assuming human nature (Philippians 2:6-8). Paul frames this account of the incarnation in tropological terms, meaning that this way of understanding the incarnation is a model for Christians to follow. 

In other words, Christ frees Christians to give up a certain sort of power-seeking in politics—namely the divine power to have dominion over others—in order to make use of power to promote justice as an expression of neighbor-love. This is not disempowerment, but a model for pursuing power in a way that does not claim power for one’s own side as a life-preserving end in itself. Instead, even in justice-seeking we perceive our political opponents as neighbors from whom we have something to learn. As Springs suggests, more effective policy ideas emerge when political opponents move beyond mutual demonization to really listen to what is at stake for one another. One example is the mutually transformational synergy Springs describes as possible when anti-racist activists and those who politically express white grievance (described in Metzl’s Dying of Whiteness) think together—as Poor People’s Campaign leader Rev. William Barber II has been encouraging.

1

We note that we are uncomfortable with strategic nonviolence as itself an orienting worldview. Springs refers to Barbara Deming’s proposal of strategic nonviolence, which might be described along the lines of “I am protesting against your own position for your own good.” This perspective too easily disguises a bias towards those in power determining what justice looks like for those with less power. Does Barbara Deming’s strategic nonviolence suggest there is nothing of policy substance to learn from the opponents one loves by seeking their transformation? Women have long heard “this is for your own good” when confronted with resistance while pursuing their own sense of calling, wherever it conflicts with their loving opponents’ sense of a biblically mandated call for women to be wives and mothers. 

More broadly, perhaps every attempt at convincing those on the other side of an issue comes off as gaslighting, insofar as it makes one’s opponents doubt their own moral intuitions and convictions, or regard them as damnable and shameful. Luther’s own understanding of faith as represented in neighbor-love can be misinterpreted along these patronizing lines. What would justice look like if those in power listened to those who are badly in need of justice? Springs addresses this concern elsewhere, noting that cultivating “practical wisdom” helps especially those with less power to know when it is effective to empathize with their oppressors and when it is self-destructive to do so.

2 Such practical wisdom can be as simple as the reminder that all persons are children of God (1 John 3:1). Only with this sort of recognition might those on different sides of a relative power imbalance empathically listen to another’s cry for justice.

Perhaps strategic non-violence is only patronizing when it is practiced with the assumption that there is (or ought to be) consensus about the shape justice takes for a given issue—when in fact what counts as just or unjust is precisely what is under debate. The “for your own good” motive for justice-seeking assumes, after all, knowledge about who is the victim and how the victim’s justice can be achieved. The abortion issue is again a case in point. Each side bases its respective justice-seeking on alleviating injustice for the one they perceive to be the most oppressed (the fetus, or a pregnant person), prompting incommensurable views on the victim/justice relation. Yet a theological way forward might be to deconstruct this binary by placing both sides within a vision of mutual belonging. This vision enables those of us who are pro-choice with regard to legal policy to step back from a desire to shut down the voices of protest among those who value the life of a fetus above any consequences that flow from denying women the ability to choose safe, legal abortions. We simultaneously advocate for laws that do not bully pregnant women into having no legal option but to live by the creed of a gender essentialism in which a woman must put the life of an unborn fetus above all else, even her own or her family’s well-being. In other words, the way forward as we see it is mutual recognition of belonging to the body of Christ among Christians who advocate for different legal approaches to abortion. This perception should not dampen the impetus to voice our own takes on what constitutes justice, but it hopefully shifts the attitude of engagement from a spirit of “I am protesting your approach for your own good” to one of “I know we are both pursuing values we hold dear; here is why I believe mine ought to shape public policy.” 

Springs poses vital questions, and we appreciate how he has taken our ideas into his own ethical work. We hope that our call to recenter in our baptismal identity will remind Christians to recognize our political opponents as members of our own (difficult) family, rather than as enemies to disempower. Christian belonging invites us to bear with our own and one another’s short-sightedness and insights (and all manner of affective states), even as we seek to better understand the world more richly as it is, and exercise our civil and political muscles toward creating what it can become. 

As our responses above suggest, there are larger questions to ponder in relation to our dreams for the Beloved Community. The first concerns the kind of social justice pursuit at play. Is it one in which there is a shared sense of the common good, but differing assessments of the degree of the problem and how to get there? This is the case among those who agree that racism is a sin, but disagree about how systemic or widespread that sin remains, and about how to create truly egalitarian policies. But a second kind of context for social justice pursuit involves political opponents with incommensurable views about the nature of the common good, of sin, and of who exactly counts as oppressor and oppressed. A theology of baptismal belonging can inform the spirit and practice of social justice activists who operate where there is consensus or dissent about the telos of justice to be sought, and serve as corrective to those who insist on legitimating political power by appealing to God’s moral order. In fact, such belonging, we think, contests the posture of those who claim to know exactly what sin is and vilify their opponents in an authoritarian manner.

This consideration of power opens into further questions about democratic or authoritarian forms of government in relation to justice-seeking. We wrote our book with the assumption that a democratic form of government provides a more capacious possibility for the condition of having proponents of different justice visions meet and negotiate. Social justice and peace movements presuppose political opponents and the effort to persuade them. We suggest that a theology which conditions belonging for Christians on justification by faith (not on our particular views on justice) can be one worldview-shaping “power” that orients Christians toward promoting democracy and a constitutional republic as a larger end within which we pursue our movements for social justice. Pragmatically, that means defending our political opponents’ right to challenge us, as well as resisting efforts to shut down the possibility for us and our opponents both to have a voice together at the governing table.

 

We thank Rachel Contos for engaging with specific themes in our book through her theological lens as an Orthodox feminist theologian and activist. We concur that patriarchal structures in Christianity prevent women from being heard as religious leaders. Yet as educated religious leaders, we do have contributions to make to church and world, especially on the ethically urgent topics we lay out in our book (chapter five on abortion and chapter six on faith in politics). Moreover, as theologians, we are interested in articulating theologies that recognize the charisms of religious leadership as not exclusive to men. Indeed, a theology of belonging that shifts Christian identity from political or ethical positions to grace in Christ gathers up all those called and anointed by God (cf. Joel 2:28-32). 

We are also aware that while our theological arguments reflect a particular Protestant tradition, they require the expertise of other theologians from their respective traditions to draw out the implications of our model. For example, Contos kindly reminds us to acknowledge the diversity of US Orthodox Christian perspectives on issues such as abortion and LGBTQ rights. Christians today (Protestants, Roman Catholics, Orthodox) disagree among themselves on similar ethical issues. Contos’s reminder strengthens our hope that theologians from different confessional backgrounds might contribute to our common theological project in using theology to inform ways of framing, understanding, and articulating justice-seeking on issues familiar across the Christian and political landscape. 

Furthermore, Contos draws our attention to our use of the term “icon,” which figures significantly in an Orthodox Christian imaginary, and proposes that we use “idol” instead. We welcome this sort of response, which helps us better understand how our word usage is heard in a different confessional semantics. We did at times use “icon” in our book to refer to prophetic persons claiming a “here I stand” posture in the way some speak today of a prominent figure as an “avatar” of an entire movement; such a person is seen in this sense to bear sacred authority. We could deem such a figure an “idol,” as Contos suggests, but only after a critical reckoning. A similar caution, we concur, would thus be required about deploying the word “icon” in a neutral or critical sense. This sort of ecumenical discussion is one we hope will continue wherever affinity is found with our Protestant but ecumenically oriented theological project. 

We want to add a historical supplement to Contos’s connection between the Orthodox theology of salvation, captured by the Greek term theosis (divinization), and the Lutheran theology of justification by faith. In the 1970s the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland engaged in ecumenical conversations with the Russian Orthodox Church on this very subject. While there are geographical and historical reasons behind Finnish-Russian relations, Finnish theologians were especially oriented to ecumenism with the Russian Orthodox Church because it offered the opportunity to initiate a revisionist account of Luther’s understanding of justification. Tuomo Mannermaa, a leading Finnish theologian, contrasted the forensic idea of justification privileged by German Lutheran theologians with another perspective, one that took seriously Luther’s own appropriation of medieval philosophy in his theology. The interpretation of Luther that emerged discussed justification as the indwelling of Christ in the believer through faith. Rather than a declaration spoken as true and remaining external to the believer (the forensic view of justification), the indwelling of Christ through justification by faith effects a “real-ontic” shift in the believer herself. Seen this way, faith means “Christ present in faith,” which then allows for a natural transition to works of love.

1 The connection to a patristic and Orthodox account of divinization is made clear by this notion of Christ’s presence in the soul. 2 This Finnish research, taken up by Mannermaa’s students Eeva Martikainen, Antti Raunio, and Risto Saarinen, has been productive for scholarship on Luther’s medieval inheritances. While theological differences remain between Lutherans and the Orthodox on soteriology, the above dialogues have brought more awareness that Luther’s own medieval preponderances afford mutual understanding on a topic as important as the grace that welcomes one into the Beloved Community.

Contos reminds us, moreover, that theosis, like the Finnish version of justification in relation to works of love, also involves action—including that of entering the sphere of ethically fraught political contestation. She refers to Aristotle Papanikolaou’s work in The Mystical as Political, in which theosis as divine-human communion extends into the political sphere.

3 The political is what Papanikolaou calls the “secular” realm in which Christians can practice a particular sort of asceticism: stepping back to discern with others the exact nature of neighbor love within political decision-making, especially in a participatory democracy. Papanikolaou also contrasts a “politics of bullying” (based in insecurity, not actual faithfulness) with a politics of the mystical that seeks a greater communion through seeking a deeper, shared vision of justice. 4 We hear the relevance of Contos question: how can we deeply listen across a political divide, while acknowledging real power differences? We address this question of power at length in our response to Jason A. Springs. 

Here we want to speak to Contos’s related question about how to theologically appraise strategic polarizing in issues-based community organizing: is there a place for, as Contos writes, “organizing tactics and militancy within the ordinary faith community, justified by faith, working toward justice-seeking?” Power here is intrinsic to the strategy of framing a particular perspective on an issue. Contos uses the example of how Saul Alinsky-trained organizers might coin phrases (like “predatory lending” to portray a specific approach to a policy issue as the only morally compelling one. The strategy involves a conscious obscuring of the issues that might be at stake for those who oppose the policy aim of the organizers. Supporters of exorbitantly high interest rates at payday lenders might argue that those rates are justified by high default rates, but that they still provide valuable services to those who can pay before those interest rates kick in and who would otherwise not have access to banking at all. But activists who oppose high interest rates for poor borrowers construe this as “predatory” lending because the poor are much more vulnerable to having to repay their loans with those high interest rates. Is a non-polarizing ordinary faith incompatible with this sort of issue-specific polarizing rhetoric?

While interest-based organizing obscures conflict by attempting to bring on board as many as possible by targeting something that all can agree on—and predatory lending for most people is something we agree should be avoided—our project on ordinary faith focuses more on engaging conflict where it reflects a deeper moral divide. We drew on Amanda Ripley’s distinction between high conflict and good conflict to highlight a distinction about how we go about spirited disputes with one another.

5 Our theological method follows her recommendation that we move from high conflict—meaning intractable and incommensurable—to good conflict, wherein we view our opponents as people of goodwill. Our approach presupposes that Christianity has always been a religion inflected by conflict; there is no time in the history of Christianity without conflict. Thus we seek to figure out the way forward—by honoring good conflict that includes the best views of as many as possible as generative for justice-seeking. So we might home in on the ethical angle of Contos’s question: is ordinary faith compatible with an activist strategy intended to call into question the moral legitimacy of any opposition to the organizers’ agenda?

Amy had training once in a Saul Alinsky style of organizing at a time when Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood was part of a congregation-based community-organizing effort. The militancy that was taught was intentionally circumscribed: it presupposes finding common ground and a winnable ask. Organizers gather community input about local concerns, then select from among them a particular problem (and its solution) that they can name in such a way that those who oppose the solution would appear to be defending the indefensible. Key, however, is the presupposition that common ground in the form of shared values is present behind any winnable ask. Power is then built by moving from one winnable ask to another, perhaps harder ask. An organizing campaign’s agenda will most likely not acknowledge the moral complexity of an issue. But complexity can be embedded in the process of identifying winnable issues on the path of change sought by the organizers. All of this suggests that militancy in community organizing might be the most effective way precisely on issues on which there is already some sort of moral consensus—even if there are costs to living up to that consensus (like raising taxes to raise the pay for childcare workers) that might make some morally justifiable asks hard to achieve in practice.

Moreover, militant strategic organizing per se need not be a barrier to mutual conversation and compromise among stakeholders and decision-makers about policy. While writing Ordinary Faith, Amy interviewed Nick Yelverton, the legislative liaison for the University Professionals of Illinois, on how conflict is managed in the Illinois state legislature. He said you are trusted as a legislator across the aisle if you are true to your word, if you negotiate in good faith so that others know where you stand and where you can or can’t give on a particular position. The same dynamics characterize negotiations across divisions within a particular political caucus. In other words, there is a matter-of-factness about strong differences on policy issues; when one communicates them directly, one can inspire trust even amid conflict. We think it is important to cultivate habits of citizen engagement among more people so that even those who are averse to any conflict in political deliberations can ease into participation in these processes. 

That said, we might also be vigilant about distinguishing between intentionally polarizing discourse that is practiced for strategic ends (to induce taking sides when there is a presumed moral consensus, as in the predatory lending example) and polarization that reflects something closer to real moral incommensurability, as in the abortion debate. “Pro-life” and “pro-choice” discourse is a form of strategically militant rhetoric that also reflects a tension between worldviews with seemingly incompatible moral perspectives on a cluster of questions, from who or what counts as a “person,” to whose life counts more (and in what way), to what it means to support life (e.g., does being pro-life mean financially and medically supporting born children, or only supporting forced births?). Here ordinary Christian faith recalls our justification by faith in Christ, rather than our justification in God’s sight on the basis of which side we come down on an intractable moral issue.
The question of power remains acute here: is the pursuit of the power to establish legal norms the only recourse when it comes to issues where we experience a profound lack of common ground? We invoke another option, one with a theological basis: a recentering among Christians in our shared belonging to the Beloved Community that deflates our power aspirations by having them reconfigured in and by Christ. This theology of recentering ordinary faith invokes spiritual practices, one of which is the recollection of one’s baptism—a habit that we who are Christian need to cultivate as intentionally and frequently as our habits of civic engagement. Recentering practices can interrupt power plays. Remembering our common baptism pulls us back from demonizing those who convincingly offer an opposing point of view. This cultivation of spiritual practices does not mean we give up advocating for the positions we each regard as more just. Power is inevitable in politics. But it does mean we can learn to understand how power is a tool we can use toward the goal of a more capacious common good. For starters, we can learn to find morally compelling dimensions to our opponents’ stories that we then take up into our own positions. In the process, we might also gain clarity on the very issues on which we most disagree—the ones we will be pondering and disputing for a long time to come. Contos’s vision of theosis—divinization—offers to ordinary faith a compelling rationale for believing in the transformation of power precisely as Christians make use of it in political decision-making. 

 

André Munzinger’s response offers insight into theological, political, and metaphysical considerations relevant to a discussion of ordinary faith in a society that is predominantly secular, such as Germany. As André points out, German church membership in both Protestant and Roman Catholic confessions has been rapidly declining. Furthermore the “middle” has considerably more political traction in Germany than it does in the U.S. Thus the central question of Ordinary Faith that we discuss in relation to a more religiously and politically polarized country like the U.S.—namely the question of how religious commitments drive political justice-seeking—requires reframing for a country in which the state is largely responsible for achieving social justice through secular political means. 

As André notes, the national churches largely ally with political trends such that “the influence of the churches on society is radically changing”—and declining. Rather than religious commitments informing political action, religious commitments in Germany follow political action; the “majority of German votes still remain very much indebted to a democratic debate about a reasonable middle ground,” according to André. Many Christians in Germany already engage the political middle that is committed to democratic practices, while the far right promotes an anti-democratic platform. In other words, while North American polarization has to do with the correlation between Christianity and politics on the range of issues associated with culture wars, the German context is characterized by political (and not religious) polarization between the majority of supporters of democracy and the “Alternative for Germany” (AfD), the party based on, as André notes, an “anti-immigrant, anti-European, nationalistic and antidemocratic platform.” Even some pro-democracy grandmas have taken to activism to challenge the political far right.

1 How can ordinary faith contribute to securing democracy in the face of anti-democratic ideology, which is a contemporary German political challenge, if not a European (and possibly global) one? 

This is indeed an urgent question. As we affirm in Ordinary Faith, we believe it to be more advantageous to promote democracy as the political condition that offers the best possibility of citizens working together amid differences for the greater good. Our theological rationale for this political commitment has to do with our understanding of orthodoxy and heresy. Historically, orthodoxy is inclusive of the best arguments from all sides, while heresy is an abrupt foreclosing of arguments we initially think we disagree with. As North Americans, we are of course not equipped to tailor ordinary faith to the German context. This is a task for theologians working in Germany, though it would be mutually edifying to compare different applications of ordinary faith in differently polarized landscapes. 

In his response, André asks us to expand on three philosophical and theological concepts: the universality of human nature, individuality, and the role of the “Spirit-led community” engaged with the “idea of humanity as a whole.” We admit we are intrigued by this request for explication of precisely these concepts. In fact we are curious as to why André thinks that these particular concepts might be relevant for addressing the political challenge that threatens democracy in Germany. The tack André chooses seems to us to be more metaphysical than theological, insofar as the theology we advocate in Ordinary Faith is hewn to the ethical storms of our day. It seems to us that André is addressing a possible conversation in Germany that theologians are establishing with secular interlocutors, hence the metaphysical perspective. Furthermore, they presuppose an interest in a conversation among specialists. We underscore that the questions motivating Ordinary Faith are rather different. Our interlocutors are Christians who make political arguments on the basis of Christian belief. Hence, our theological aim is more pedagogical than theoretical. We make constructive use of theology as an educational tool to facilitate better theological thinking about justice issues on the basis of the doctrine of justification. We thereby hope to promote the possibility of ordinary Christians, not only specialized theologians, talking with each other in their respective pews and across the aisle.

It would be interesting to compare notes on the theologian’s responsibilities in different political situations. Why would it be important to address the theoretical questions of individuality, universality, and humanity? To whom would these questions be interesting? Again, we can imagine that theologians would pick up these topics in conversation with secular interlocutors (whose numbers are growing). But does this approach do justice to the explicitly theological perspective that theologians deploy in view of these questions? If, as André recounts, churches in Germany have a waning socio-political influence, is this perhaps a result of theologians focusing on these questions, invoking abstractions? Developments in German theology hint at an emerging discontent with “abstract theology.” The research initiative on “inductive theology” by Privatdozent (PD) Dr. Frederike van Oorschot in Heidelberg and Dr. Lea Chilian in Zurich attests to the perceived need for theologians to engage with the empirical sciences in order to articulate theologies responsive to lived experience. We have also heard that the phrase “und Gegenwartsfragen” (and contemporary questions) is appended to job descriptions in systematic theology, which suggests that theologians should specifically address the urgent issues facing German society. André notes the challenge against democracy posed by the AfD. How would theologians address this issue as theologians? We agree with Oorschot and Chilian that theologians need to be in conversation with scholars using inductive methods to figure out historical, sociological, geographical, political, and religious causes for democratic practices and anti-democratic tendencies. 

 

Furthermore, we suggest that our own commitments to theology as a storytelling discipline, with a responsibility to address real world conflicts, can be used to generate creative solutions. When Christians make use of a story-infused theology, they can think more capaciously about the human experiences that are relevant to ethical decision-making. In our book we are committed to the idea that individuals work out their ordinary faith in their particular communities. While this claim might presuppose a vague universal concept about the relational nature of human personhood, we take the particular as the place in which Christians exercise their responsibility towards justice-seeking. The vision of justice-seeking will be shaped by context-specific, socio-political, and religious inheritances; the U.S. context, for example, must grapple with the legacy of the enslavement of Africans and the destruction of indigenous populations, in a way that might not be as significant for Christians working in regions elsewhere. We assume that in Germany, too, Christians could work out their respective theological framing for dialogue and justice-seeking in relation to particular political tensions.  

Moreover, insofar as an interest in the universal is about developing concepts and perspectives that hold water from Singapore to Ghana to Germany, we suggest also that “doing universality” can be done through engaging with one another across and within the particular theological or doctrinal perspectives of the world’s various religions (as well as with robust naturalistic accounts, where traditions and communities form around them). Indeed, Friedrich Schleiermacher, the early nineteenth-century theologian who theorized the relation of theology as a historical discipline to universal concepts of human becoming in his philosophical ethics, also understands ”universality” from his situated perspective as a theologian of Christianity. The universal can only be worked out in tentative and revisable ways through painstaking and difficult discussion among particular interlocutors. In this we can only agree with Schleiermacher: that conversation between those who disagree is difficult. 

That said, in the spirit of Schleiermacher and in response to André’s curiosity about global religions, we can find parallels in other religious traditions to our own argument about justification by faith (as the ground of belonging) and justice-seeking as a contentious commitment that flows out of justification by faith. If we approach the question of “doing universality” from within religious traditions, we might begin by noticing parallel perspectives on the relationship between a doctrinally based religious identity and the ethically oriented pursuit of justice. Here we have in mind established world religions whose intellectual traditions have developed over centuries, although adherents of new religious movements might also work with their own inheritances and innovations to describe their conditions of belonging in relation to justice-seeking debates. Our larger point is that what we call ordinary faith for Christians has parallels within other religious communities.
Take Zen Buddhism as an example. In 2022, while Amy was sharing lunch with Zuiko Redding, who was the roshi at the Cedar Rapids Zen Center, Zuiko interestingly expressed concerns similar to those in our book. Zuiko had noticed a tendency of some in the local Buddhist sangha to sometimes speak in ways that suggested being Buddhist itself was identical with advocacy for social justice and anti-racism work. (Some U.S. Buddhists might have made the turn to a non-Western religion because they think that Buddhism is free of Western imperialism, patriarchy, and racism.) Zuiko countered the idea that Buddhism is equated with progressive social justice activism by noting that Buddhists are rightly defined by being centered instead on core insights about the human condition, and from there moving toward seeking right relations, individually and socially. In Zuiko’s own words, in an email on August 9, 2022

2: “here are a couple of thoughts on some American Buddhist temples and their emphasis on social action”: 

The Buddha himself engaged in social action by ignoring caste in the sangha and through many other acts. However, his main mission was to engage social action through changing spirits, by teaching us to see the nature of reality and how we create suffering for ourselves and others by holding onto ideas that center on our wants and needs. Letting go of these and seeing the suffering already in the world, we feel compassion and naturally want to work to relieve that suffering. In modern times we may, especially in some American Buddhist temples, have gone too far in the other direction. Encouraged by the teaching of compassion, some temples focus more on social action—working against racism, taking action on climate change, and many other issues—than on building the Buddha’s foundation that leads to social change. If we worry more about how to attract people of color than we do about letting go of our ideas and prejudices, we aren’t doing much more than the average capitalist corporation. We become anti-racist when we can speak and advocate from a firm spiritual foundation rather than when we develop pages of policy. The Buddha didn’t have a written policy. He just accepted whoever came and invited them into the sangha as an equal.

Buddhists can envision social justice, but Buddhism is not reducible to a progressive policy statement. Zuiko felt strongly about disentangling the core commitments of Buddhist spiritual practice from the ethical posture and actions a Buddhist might take to achieve justice goals. In U.S. Buddhism, as in U.S. Christianity, there seems to be significant social pressure to identify individually and communally around a set of ethical and political perspectives (progressive or conservative) as the primary basis for belonging itself. In a polarized U.S. context, there are high-pressure litmus tests that govern the acceptability of a person’s identity: are you anti-racist, or are you anti-woke? Are you pro-LGBTQIA, or are you afraid of libraries providing gay-themed children’s books? Zuiko resisted eliding Buddhism behind any of these culture-war binaries.

Let us consider “doing universality” in a nation that has religious diversity. One approach in line with Schleiermacher is to think about our visions of the whole of things from within each respective religious tradition, and to communicate from within and across them. The political process might then involve shared conversation and decision-making between those who hold differing religious and secular worldviews. Those of us who are Christian think with an imaginary informed by the Beloved Community or Kin(g)dom of God, and the divine promise that extends to creation as a whole. Those who are Muslim might speak of the umma and of the tawhid (unity) of all creation; Buddhists talk of the network of samsara with Buddha (awakening) potential ever-present within it. In a religiously pluralistic democratic society, the concrete issue at stake is how each of us, with our respective spiritual and secular tools for making sense of the world, can engage each other around concrete laws and policies—including those that contend with the mix of oppressive and liberation-minded legacies that have shaped a country.

By interacting across different pictures or names for the universal, we are also refining our idea of political community from within our own particular communities. In the process, Christian perspectives are widened, the church becomes more permeable to the larger world as Christian and other religious or secular commitments converge, and a shared space is created that extends the ecclesial Beloved Community into the porous church-world boundary. In the political sphere, different perspectives are added, placed on top of each other without neatly matching up. In politics, we negotiate dreams and realities, we integrate, we debate and articulate our ideas about policy and national identities as these latter take definitive shape. We find a palimpsest of ideas discarded and emended, of perspectives broadened and extended, of positions clarified and extended, in the work of making real political decisions that are attuned to visions of justice. Any Christian pneumatology worth its salt would take into account the empirical fact of a diversity of religious and secular positions.

To be sure, another approach to universality takes its bearings from the question about how to harmonize any religion’s theology of creation with a “secular” metaphysical account of nature as a whole. But if that is the aim, we might explore first the implied question: why do theology at all, when we have compelling naturalistic accounts drawing on the sciences and social sciences, and philosophical conceptualizing in relation to the findings of both?

Our response is that theologies and religions matter because they allow us to see and say things from a distinct perspective that itself has developed over centuries, and they allow us to see the world and navigate our lives in ways we would not otherwise. Theologies and religions provide frames of reference for building worldviews that incorporate ideas not derived exclusively from empirical observation (like life after death, or God, or karma). Storytelling is central to establishing these frames of reference. Storytelling creates intersubjective mechanisms between people, co-developing shared frames of reference. Subsequent generations of individuals—crucially, in community—receive and retell the stories. We build up images and narratives over generations, adding to them, interpreting and misinterpreting them, erasing some bits while emphasizing other bits. André offers one such example of a doctrinal frame of reference when he depicts individuality in Christological terms as “the gift of becoming human” that is not threatened by loss through death.

In sum, religions build around the concepts of the universal, of the individual, and of community. How to tag them in relation to one another is the work of comparative religious thought; how to tag them in relation to the scientific study of our species and world is the work of philosophers of religion and those engaged in faith-and-science conversations. Perhaps André’s own draw is to find a vocabulary that dips into Christian resources while also creating a new vocabulary that can speak satisfyingly to persons not invested in the particular Christian worldview. Do we North Americans detect in André’s questions a new variant of an established tendency in rationalist thought to secure a definitive account of the whole of things in all their varieties and development over time? Our own aim is to acknowledge the multifarious bloom of richly imagined and ritually evoked story-informed pictures of the whole and the ways we, as individuals who dwell within various internally diverse communities, speak from them to the contested questions of our day. Furthermore, we think that more robust theology, not metaphysics alone, can offer alternatives to secular thinking that address the urgent question concerning redemption. Christian theology presupposes a commitment to the realities of Christ and Spirit in the formation and renewal of persons, community, and creation. Theology from this perspective bears witness to a divine benevolence that counters the divisive heresies (in our use of the term) of the far right as well as offering a semantics of redemption that is framed by all-encompassing love. 

 

We are grateful to Avweroswo Akpojaro, Jr. for offering a response to our book from a Nigerian context. Akpojaro describes how Nigerian Christians are divided in ways that are quite different from divisions in North America. On the surface, in Nigeria Christians are supposed to talk only about faith, not politics. Yet particular political or cultural issues divide Christians. Northern Christians vilify southern Christians for their cultural affinity with progressive issues: the north chides the south for being “too worldly,” while the south identifies the north as “too spiritual.” This divide between an allegedly apolitical faith (in the north) and a culturally progressive faith (in the south) has implications for issues on the ground: whether women may wear pants, or whether ordained clergy are required to be teetotalers. These issues drive divisions between Nigerian Christians, Akpojaro relates—not abortion, which Nigerian Christians condemn without debate.

Those living in different geographical regions might disagree about what constitutes a contentious issue among Christians. Indeed, since its earliest days in Jerusalem, Christianity has never been a conflict-free zone. Conflict is one impetus for the faith’s dynamism. But as Akpojaro notes, conflict can quickly become treacherous and destructive. Hence the question we address in Ordinary Faith: how can Christians be in relation to one another, even as they disagree? 

In chapter 5 of Ordinary Faith, we address the question of how and why theologians must analyze the historical inheritances fueling culturally specific divisions. Religion and culture are usually intertwined. The theological work of trying to understand how and why they are related is an integral part of justice-seeking. In our chapter, we identify race as a central issue informing division in the U.S., which thus must be taken into consideration when proposing justice-seeking action in this context. This division concerns whether people see racism and colonialism as the “original sin” of America (which can thus be redeemed), or as part of the very essence of the country’s identity since its founding (so that the country needs an apocalyptic transformation). In either case the U.S. economy was founded on the enslavement of African persons and the destruction of indigenous communities and lands. This inheritance informs all aspects of American life, from real estate to education, from maternal mortality to political representation. Race in the U.S. is the central political identity. The difference between perceiving racial privilege and discrimination as stubborn or malleable is the divisive issue at hand. How one sees race and racism then informs a particular type of justice-seeking. If one sees racism as stubbornly pervasive, then justice-seeking will entail substantive changes to all aspects of American society; if racism is readily ameliorated, then justice-seeking will involve keeping social norms intact. The recent debate about whether DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) and affirmative action are necessary to correct systemic injustice is a case in point. 

We read Akpojaro’s description of divisions between Nigerian Christians in terms of how they are informed by distinctive historical and cultural factors. In a postcolonial country like Nigeria, Akpojaro notes, there are layers of factors—tribes that predate the colonial era, colonial impositions, and postcolonial outlooks—each of which involves particular outlooks on religion, culture, and politics. These factors are layered atop each other and often mix, creating a particular set of interconnected issues that entrench division. As part of their work, theologians need to take seriously the historical, political, cultural, and religious inheritances that inform their particular visions of justice-seeking. In this light, we are curious about the examples Akpojaro raises. How has the division between north and south come about and why would one geographical area of Christianity perceive the other through the particular lens of “spiritual” versus “worldly”? Why is it so important for some Christians to pass judgment on women’s attire and why has this concern crystallized around pants? What multi-braided legacies—like the fact that some Protestant traditions (and Muslims) have advocated for prohibitions against alcohol—inform contemporary attitudes? In order for theologians to be sensitive to Christians on either side of a divisive issue, it helps to perceive the reasons for the division. Justice-seeking is also a sort of healing of divisions through diagnostic understanding of the legacies with which we grapple. 

From our perspective, the issues Akpojaro raises bear a family resemblance to those transpiring in Christianities in the northern hemisphere. German Pietism in Swabia, for example, forbade women to wear pants until at least the 1950s, while abstinence from alcohol figured significantly (and often still does) for clergy and members in many Methodist, Presbyterian, and Baptist churches.

1 Indeed, Christian ideas and morals have a global circulation so that resemblances among them are evident across the globe. Issues of gender and alcohol seem remarkably persistent as issues, even if the factors informing why they are issues in specific regions can vary. Our theological toolkit includes ways to understand the global circulation of particular patterns of Christian living, such as sex/gender or dietary prohibitions. These patterns are often tied to forms of belonging that transcend these behavioral issues per se.

In our book, we spoke of kinship or identity belongings as often feeling more potent than our baptismal belonging to the Beloved Community as Christians. Some are tempted to equate the church with a particular kind of kinship belonging, be it racial, ethnic, or political. The use of particular terms to connote kinship belonging is worth a reflective pause. Akpojaro writes about the significance of how tribal differences stamp a sense of belonging among Christians in Nigeria. We compare Akpojaro’s unproblematic use of the word “tribe” with our deliberate avoidance of the term. 

Akpojaro uses the term “tribe” to describe particular groups of persons in Nigeria in a way consistent with how North American indigenous groups would refer to their particular identities. Yet in North America, the word “tribalism” has a pejorative connotation. On one hand, postcolonial-minded progressives want to respect those indigenous identities and not appropriate “tribe” for anyone else. Everyone else’s ancestors immigrated by choice or by force, and they often lost their old tribal/ethnic/linguistic identities in the process. As we noted above, racial identifications often displace them. For example, “white” (European) ethnic distinctions and conflicts (including resistance to belonging to the same local church) fade with language loss in subsequent generations after immigration. Moreover, especially in North American cities that have little acquaintance with Native communities, “tribe” for some connotes something culturally backwards or primitive, reflecting colonial prejudices against indigenous peoples. And political polarization between Democrats and Republicans has often been called “tribal” in ways that suggest they have become primary forms of kinship belonging in the U.S.

The upshot here is that the theological task includes understanding kinship groups with which local Christian communities also identify. Ordinary faith navigates kinship groups even as our primary Christian identity in Christ interrupts our tendencies to make kinship belonging—tribal or otherwise—central. Akpojaro’s sketch of a Nigerian ecclesial context, shaped by tribal divisions, among other causes, leads us to wonder what path forward he would advocate for Nigerian Christians, with regard to both church divisions and political engagement as Christians. 

What does such a theological understanding of the origins of and reasons for our divisions have to do with justice-seeking? Examining the ways religious belonging plays into kinship belongings and vice versa helps clarify perceptions of injustice and victimization, or aspirations of power and control. Our response to Akpojaro has thus far been taken up with our theological commitment to the task of perceiving how surface divisions are usually informed by deeper kinship structures, cultural alliances, and political aims. If justice-seeking is to include the participation of persons, even those divided by a variety of factors, then this project should resist perpetuating divisions by misunderstanding them. Theology as we imagine it is a discipline in thinking through the complexity of inheritances as it informs the diagnosis of injustices to remedy: understanding how kinship belongings play significant roles alongside and within religious commitments is a complex, possibly traumatic task.
Akpojaro asks the important pragmatic question of how members of different religions traditions can think together about ways to pursue justice. Our response to André Munzinger addresses this question. Here we might add that it is precisely by leaning into our respective senses of both the nature of God and our covenantal forms of belonging to God that we can greet one another across religious differences. There are different strategies for doing this. Some in Sierra Leone identify as “ChrisMus,” or both Christian and Muslim.

2 Other Christians simply see all persons as made in God’s image and love of neighbor as oneself as a sufficient guide to cooperative work.
Akpojaro also asks whether there finally comes a time when we must stop listening to those who disagree with us, and, relatedly, what if someone persists in claiming to speak in the name of justification by faith and using it to shore up their own political bloc or platform? Nothing is more poignantly demoralizing than to endure someone who is weaponizing a core value or doctrine of the church. Jesus confronted the Pharisees for using the Torah’s mandate for the sabbath rest to deny Jesus’ work of healing on this holy day (Luke 13:10-17). Dietrich Bonhoeffer called out German Lutherans for appealing to justification by faith as a defensive shield of “cheap grace” that avoided the costly consequences of living into the freedom of faith to confront the evils of Nazi Germany. We need a spirit of discernment about how we live with the gift of faith and the call to love our neighbors as ourselves. Mutual accountability is not a new spiritual practice in the body of Christ. There have always been wolves in sheep’s clothing (Matthew 7:15) and Satan continues to transform into an angel of light (2 Corinthians 11:14). Thus we advocate making spiritual discernment integral to our life together as Christians. 

A few criteria seem at play when we are attuned to the Spirit while listening with critical attention within the Beloved Community. The first is to ask whether there is really something worthy of moral consideration when we listen deeply to someone with a different view of social justice or flourishing. Is the other expressing a point worth considering independently of the desire to rationalize power over others? We can apply this criterion likewise to our own advocacy for a particular position. 

Second, is the other listening to what we say? Conversely, can we evaluate our own capacity to listen? Speaking and listening are fraught with misunderstanding. As persons, we are works in progress with faults and stubbornly one-sided predilections, and tendencies to narcissism; we might persist in amplifying our victimhood to the point that we cannot recognize how others, too, suffer. Thus any conversation can anticipate each individual’s needs and personal makeup that tend to block or enable conversation. Finally, sometimes it is necessary to pause from engagement. Someone suffering from trauma might be in a season of seeking safety and thus needing clear boundaries of “good” and “bad” that block moral nuance and/or the inclusion of persons and perspectives that trigger flashbacks. Bearing with one another in the body of Christ means deciding—together and individually—where and when to position ourselves within conversations and decisions about the common good. That includes recognizing, and sometimes expelling, those who cause harm to the church by donning their baptism as if it shields them from accountability for harm to or silencing of others. Justice-seeking, in other words, means establishing justice throughout the process of imagining and reaching towards it. And sometimes the process requires at least temporary retreat from engagement, or calling out the one who is weaponizing the discussion with their own will to power. Ordinary faith is grounded in justification by faith, even as it is pessimistically realistic that persons are still mid-transformation, dysfunctionality can thrive in communities, and will to power resides in each of us.  

Akpojaro’s response spans the political and the personal. He notes that marriage is the place to practice justice-seeking. Here the personal is crucial: it is the site of embodied practices of becoming a person through social relations, with one’s partner, child, neighbor. Akpojaro drives home the point about what is at stake in our theology of ordinary faith: practices of storytelling and listening; becoming aware of affective responses; disciplining oneself to resist imposing a one-sided view on the other; and making other fine-tuned calibrations of navigating self and other. All this might sound like it demands something extraordinary! Because listening to someone with whom one disagrees is challenging; loving one’s enemies (cf. Matthew 5:44) is perhaps the most outrageously unrealistic mandate in religion. Yet theology expresses the optimism about the reality of justification by faith: hard but steady practice through remembering our baptismal belonging frees us from self-centeredness and opens us to all creation. 

 

Constantin Plaul offers a response that works constructively with the thesis of our book—namely that justification by faith centers Christian identity in a way that, in theological terms, transcends divisions. Helpfully, Plaul also probes the rationale for and descriptive categories of the nature of collective belonging. We are grateful to him for pressing the question of belonging, a concept that demands reflection on just how to communicate its significance across differences of various kinds–not only of the moral and political sort, but also of the many forms of communal belonging itself. We discuss this issue below, but focus first on Plaul’s excellent suggestions on how Christians might practice the sort of conversations we imagined in our book. While our own contribution was to primarily provide theological frame to begin difficult conversations, Plaul presses all interested in depolarization to think through theories and practices of how best to nurture such conversations. A pragmatics for productive conflict is the direction we need for ordinary faith.

1. Pragmatics of Good Conflict

Social media has shown us school board meetings that quickly devolve into high conflict: parents shouting at each other, yelling about their personal rights while others loudly insist on the academic freedom to read. No one is listening and everyone is speaking at once. These scenes reveal a culture of socialization that inscribes antipathy into any engagement involving two opposing sides. While our book directs attention to a theology of justification as interruptive of such socialization, Plaul urges a pragmatics that transforms high conflict into good conflict. We need leaders who are trained to mediate and moderate difficult conversations. We need to become familiar with the complex mechanisms driving intersubjective engagement. Can we imagine a competent leader facilitating a school board meeting so that parents feel heard enough to be able to listen to other parents’ fears and hopes?

Good conflict is productive. When different people have the opportunity to contribute to decision-making, then decisions honor the insights of those who might have been excluded under the conditions of high conflict. One example we cite in our book is the creation of the creedal consensus that the Son of God (incarnate in Jesus) is fully divine. Though the Council of Constantinople affirmed the Nicene rejection of the Arian depiction of the Son as semi-divine, the development of the doctrine of the Trinity between the Council of Nicaea (325 CE) and the Council of Constantinople (381 CE) wove in one key Arian element that the pro-Nicene theologians had insisted on: that the Father and the Son are distinct persons. The Cappadocians who in the 4th century developed the doctrine of the Triune God as one being in three persons had been in an Arian camp that puzzled over the question: what was the Son, if not fully divine yet not an ordinary creature, either? The theologians who would come to be called “orthodox” articulated the formula that the Son is fully divine but not God the Father. This formulation allowed many former Arians to subscribe to the Nicene Creed. Mutual listening amid theological tussling led to a consensus that clarified and combined key insights from those who declared that the Son is fully divine and those who declared that the Son is distinct from the Father.

This is one historical example of high conflict becoming good conflict through negotiation and mutual listening. Plaul suggests ways that we too, in our own times and places, might follow this lead. We need to learn how to resist our socialization for antipathy; we need to learn how to be fluent in generative conversation. Plaul is right to note that we need to learn from scholars and practitioners who have the theoretical expertise and practical experience to facilitate conversations of the good conflict sort.

A conversation starts even before it actually happens. Plaul offers an insightful example of how the strategy of becoming aware of one’s own moral orientation is an important personal step for entering into productive conversation. We might tend to think about conversation as the actual encounter between self and other, but as Plaul reminds us, conversation presupposes a self with its own affective, moral, theoretical, and biased orientation to the world. This self enters into conversation that triggers affect, elicits reactions, and prompts outbursts. Yet conversation doesn’t have to expose the other to the self’s worst impulses. A crucial task for a good conflict conversation is in its preparation. Plaul describes such a preparatory exercise in which participants map their ethical positions on a worksheet. The exercise aims to promote self-discovery of one’s biases, affective tendencies, and moral preferences. One learns to describe one’s own emotional and conceptual orientations, thus putting words to what someone else might distort or stereotype, and vice versa. This is a pragmatic strategy, geared to “interrupting the impulse to condemn opposing positions right away,” Plaul writes. The development of self-awareness is crucial to participants; it allows them to attain metacognitive wisdom about how they might be unconsciously disposed to others, and how they might resist or restrain tendencies to pigeonhole others. 

We can imagine strategies for sharpening self-awareness about personal character traits that would otherwise sabotage mutual listening, while also learning to articulate our personal positions better. Small groups made up of like-minded acquaintances can aid in practicing the fluency needed to talk about difficult issues. An explicit goal for roundtable meetings can be to generate an awareness of how one listens to others. By sharing stories, we learn to check our impulses, practice attentive listening, and clarify our own positions by testing them on others. One example might be a group of women dedicated to learning together about their positions on abortion. Women would bring their respective thoughts, attitudes, and stories to the table, learning how to speak about and listen to others address a topic that is usually couched in shame and silence. Reminders would be set at the onset that the aim of the gathering is not to score points or to police how others ought to think and feel, but to explore together what each person would like to contribute, and thereby come to a greater understanding about this issue together.

Plaul points to the necessity of training leaders to facilitate difficult conversations. Such training is particularly important today, as we are all too familiar with strategies that shut conversation down. How can facilitators generate the shift from high to good conflict? What are the ground rules for a productive conversation and how are they to be established? How can they be negotiated? One compelling example of the kind of research that might be helpful is psychologist Dr. Marshall Rosenberg’s theory of nonviolent communication.

1 Rosenberg’s work is focused on how people can shift their speech from evaluative connotations to non-evaluative ones. A comment, even an affirmation, is an evaluation that presupposes some power on the part of the one issuing the sentence. But what if we learned how to talk in ways that are non-evaluative? Can we learn how to affirm and listen to each other without assuming the power position of judging them? 

Plaul names another important pragmatic concept: compromise. This word is not popular in the context of polarization. When each side wants to win, there can never be a compromise. But what if we develop compromise into a pragmatics of good conflict, as Plaul suggests? Conversation that is oriented to creative conflict must presuppose the possibility that one or both could change their minds to some degree. Compromise might begin with a shared attitude among participants to imagine both (or multiple) sides, complicating the picture of what we see. What does compromise mean here? A policy development that no one is happy with but is better than one side getting all they want? Or is it just a space of mutual tolerance and agreeing to disagree? To be sure, it is hard to picture what compromise means with regard to the legality of abortion or of same-sex marriage. We need to do more theoretical work in relation to practitioners to see if and when compromise-seeking is a helpful way to advance conversation around justice-seeking. Or perhaps compromise is the goal in simply determining the parameters of a conversation—working out a ground rule to ensure compromise of one’s volatile feelings in order to be open to engaging the other. 

What Plaul offers is a productive way forward in the pragmatics of conversation that draws us out of our polarized echo chambers, out of our respective “fandoms.” A promising practice includes the endeavor of progressives who make a theological case for social justice in the presence of the other (and their conservative theological talking points), and vice versa. To do this—to develop the requisite sensitivity, fluency, and good will—requires working on oneself as well as training leaders.

2. The Search for a Language of Belonging 

A theological question Plaul poses concerns the language for belonging. In response to our emphasis on justification by faith in Christ (that is, baptismal belonging) as the basis for Christian identity, he ponders the sort of language that might be used to describe identity and belonging in the public square. Plaul is wary of employing any uniquely Christian theological language to identify that nature of belonging, and points to other languages—more secular and non-Christian—that might better communicate the notion of belonging to non-Christians. 

Plaul refers to Trutz Rentdorff, a German ethicist who characterizes a “functional equivalence” to baptismal belonging as one that delineates a “pre-moral dimension” of communal belonging. One example, Plaul suggests, is the adjacent theological idea of all humans reflecting the imago dei (image of God) and the secular concept of universal human rights. Theologians productively use the imago dei idea to emphasize that humans already belong to one another by virtue of their shared creation in the divine image. Analogously, every human has inalienable rights by virtue of belonging to the human race. A theological concept is, so to speak, functionally equivalent to a secular one.

Similar terms in other religions also refer to a common belonging. In Islam, tawhid refers to the oneness of God as Creator, implying the unity of creation, which includes humans as stewards of God on earth. Moreover, Muslim theology describes all human beings as naturally muslim, inclined by birth to recognize God’s reality and our own creatureliness and creaturely responsibilities. This perspective acknowledges Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians as a common “People of the Book” who genuinely relate to God. This Islamic designation of a human as muslim means that a person surrenders to God precisely as they identify as Christian or Jewish or some other sort of monotheist. Here we take up Plaul’s question regarding linguistic particularity and ask if Christians might relinquish their language of baptismal belonging (something not conditioned on birth, but upon rebirth in Christ) in favor of a more generic Abrahamic faith identity. In other words, why not make the move through functional equivalence to a preferable formulation of human identity and belonging—one that works more like a Muslim definition of all persons as in some sense “muslim,” rather than a Christian definition of Christian belonging based on a covenant forged through baptism in the name of Jesus Christ? 

One response to this question is to circle back to the theistically indifferent functional equivalence that Plaul cites: “the idea of human dignity, finding its legal expression in the concept of universal human rights.” This is the conviction that all persons share in human dignity, which nourishes advocacy for human rights without presupposing any notion of the divine at all. While this language harmonizes with Christian language of the imago dei or the Muslim idea of muslim, it reflects a European Enlightenment inheritance of a naturalistic anthropology. Belonging to the human community is based on the inalienable right to exist with liberty, freedom, and equality. Here we find an even broader universal language for speaking of unconditional belonging to one another: one that can unite theists and non-theists alike. Does functional equivalence allow the particularities of Chrisian language to be transposed into broad terms of pre-moral belonging that more people can agree with? In other words, should Christians be prepared to shelve their particular theological language in order to speak to a broader constituency about belonging, at least insofar as they are engaged in the public square? 

The choice of adequate language to communicate common belonging across differences is significant. Language brings its baggage and holds its promises. However, whether Muslim or muslim, Christian or secular humanist, these designations are not neutral, idealized Habermasian constructions of belonging that can be easily communicated across and beyond our various communal spaces or identities. There are not only theological but affective reasons why these designations might not be effective as functional equivalents to one another. Some people might deem the particularities of religious language as too divisive to articulate belonging at all. Those who have felt unseen or been deeply traumatized by religious communities might prefer to avoid bringing the language of Christian or Muslim or any religious belonging at all into the public square. Religions have their own respective forms of patriarchal, heterosexist, or anti-trans language that, when deployed, convey harm to many. In this perspective, religious identities are inherently dangerous. If so, it is best to keep religion out of the public sphere entirely. The language of universal human dignity is enough: it allows us to breathe, to live, and move, and have our being without persecution and belittlement in the name of God.

Let us examine the unintended consequences of holding the position that we must marginalize Christian language from the public square because of its inherent harms of heteropatriarchal sexism and white supremacy. This position makes no distinction between the particularity of Christian language and its harms. Thus it is seen to be safer to translate Christianity into its secular functional equivalent, such as universal human rights. But the implication of this position reinforces the perception that Christian identity is equivalent to a Christian politics of the right. Seen in this light, to be Christian is to want to participate in patriarchal forms of Christian nationalism. Thus if one is more politically liberal and actually cares about trying to connect with neighbors traumatized by religion, then one must make the move to another language that is better suited to a shared civic space of democratic politics. Such an allergic reaction on the secular left to Christian identity might be more common in some countries where religious habits and vocabulary have purchase—like the U.S.—than it is in an increasingly secular country, like Germany, where there might be more of a sense of the total irrelevance of Christian discourse. 

The alternative approach to Christian identity that we have suggested is that, for Christians, a reclamation of our baptismal belonging amid fraught political or moral debates interrupts the equation of Christian identity with such abusive appeals to the faith that dehumanize others in the name of defining norms and agendas for all human beings. To open to this approach of baptismal belonging might still be too traumatizing for some (at least for a season of their lives), or a matter of indifference for others. But the alternatives do not avoid the same dangers.

The appeal to a universal, non-theistic language like human rights does not guarantee protection from the harms done in the name of any particular form of belonging. Any language of functional equivalence that conveys a pre-moral sense of belonging can be weaponized. The language of human dignity, for example, can be used to deprive pregnant women of moral agency in the face of an unplanned pregnancy. This language might absolutize the dignity of the prenate and relativize the dignity of the woman carrying that prenate. Language about the common good can become a cipher for specific, presumptuous visions of what is best for everyone, carried out in an authoritarian or paternalistic manner. “We know what is best for you …”

Finally, let’s consider taking our bearings from a secular sensibility in which there is at best indifference to religious forms of belonging and perceiving the world—as may be the case in many parts of Europe. Does the search for a universal language of belonging that can crisscross religious pluralism expose a longing for a civil religion sustained by the state—one with national or other politically drawn boundaries? Many in North America (at least) are nervous about any support for the idea of a state religion—even if described in the blandest of terms. Might we do better by ritualizing a sense of shared belonging, the kind expressed in the desire to say “Merry Christmas!” or “Ramadan Mubarak” to everyone during the holidays?

Our own theological bet is that, for Christians and other people of faith, the way to such a civil religion—bounded and bonded in part by particular identities, but transcending them through a recognition of common humanity—is precisely by dwelling in the rich thickness of worship and fellowship that sustains and forms the religious communities to which we belong. We think Christian moral reflection about matters of public policy finds its footing in those communities first and foremost.
The question we hold open is about the intention and the effects of a secular functional equivalence for baptismal belonging (justification by faith in Christ) for Christians. Is it meant to be synonymous with Christian belonging? To replace it? Or to be part of a conversation in the public square in which we are debating ethics and public policy for the sake of a common good to which we belong in multiple ways?