Bitterly Divided

I am worried at how divided we have become and are increasingly becoming.

Whatever views we may have taken regarding the EU referendum, it is alarming that so much bitterness and vitriol and (in some cases) hatred has been uncovered and unleashed. I find it truly disturbing.

Almost everyone is somewhat cynical about politics and politicians, and I suppose that is nothing new. But the way in which people rather than policies are attacked and the irrelevant personal nature of some of these attacks is far from healthy or good.

And in wider society, the tendency to blame all our woes on ‘them’ (who ever the ‘they’ may be!) risks deeply dividing and fracturing our whole society.

And if it is bad in the UK, then it is no better in the USA as we have observed during the recent Presidential Election campaign. And there too it seems that something rather unpleasant has been unleashed within that society by way of hatred and tension.

I am not suggesting that those on either side of the debates in the UK or the USA necessarily or consciously intended the unleashing of hatred and tension. I hope they did not, and doubt that they did. But these worrying negative outcomes have nonetheless emerged (and many observers are far from surprised).

So what (if anything) is the role of the church in all of this?

Well, if the peacemakers are called ‘blessed’ and if reconciliation and the breaking down of dividing walls are to be seen as part of our mission then we surely do have a role.

Except... in the church we too are divided, and in our divisions we can seem to the public to be just as vitriolic as any other group in society. I do not mean denominational divisions – at least not solely or mainly these. The ‘fault lines’ are no longer solely or even primarily denominational.

The division now seem to be over theology, interpretation, Christian ethics, the nature of mission and so on. And of course the issue of sexuality has been the most obvious of late.

And yet, from what I know of colleagues and discussions and friendships within the church, the divisions are not as deep, nor as stark and nor as widespread as it may seem from public debates and media coverage. Which also makes me wonder about the national, political and societal divisions.

Division and disagreement makes for good entertainment. How much is the media to blame?

But how much also are politicians and commentators and church people to blame for the perception of division. We play the game in public... opposing views, staged debates, confrontational disagreement, in the TV studio or the Parliament or the newspaper column or the General Assembly or on Facebook etc etc.

I know the church, and I know that even those who bitterly disagree on some of the issues and who would be passionate in that disagreement in the debates at Assembly or Presbytery, nevertheless (mostly) can treat one another gently and respectfully as brothers and sisters in Christ when in private. Love wins... but why is it not seen to win?

It is even more marked in the arena of politics. The disagreements and debates can be offputtingly robust... and yet when some of these politicians get together away from the set piece, stage managed debates, out of sight of the TV cameras, they are perfectly civil, friendly and sociable with their political opponents. I know this, for I have frequently witnessed it.

But the public perception is different and it all plays into the hands of the media who love the entertainment of heated debate. And that just increases the cynicism of the public. Recent election and referendum results do suggest that the public is eager for some kind of change from ‘business as usual’.

Can we in the Church not find better ways of having our disagreements so that we might publicly model something different? Of course the danger is that we would become increasingly irrelevant to a media searching out scandal and interested only in sharp disagreements. But perhaps irrelevance would be better than shooting ourselves in the foot. And just maybe someone would notice that we have found a better way of handling the spectrum of views that exist in all human groupings.

And that may (just may) have a more positive effect on the wider discourse in society than we imagine.

A ‘mustard seed’ perhaps?