1. The Crisis of Polarization
This is the first installment in a multi-part series on the constructive theology behind a "Ministry of Small Things."
In 2016, Business Insider published research results investigating the trends in voting practices of the House of Representatives over a 60-year period. The decreasing levels of bipartisan cooperation and increasing party-line loyalty evident resulted in an animated graphic reminiscent of cellular mitosis, halves retreating from each other foreboding a final breaking apart.
Diversity presumes thriving based on complementary and interdependent difference (think of the Earth as a habitat), but polarization weaponizes difference, causing elements to withdraw from each other, reducing the ability for cooperation. The likely result is system breakdown. Polarization arises when individual choice/agency is abused or subjected to propaganda intended to objectify and desensitize one to difference, causing elements to artificially differentiate and morally evaluate segments of life as if they were separate from each other, possessing inherent worthiness or unworthiness based on false objectivity.
These conditions, set within the climate’s Decade of No Return, the surge of authoritarianism worldwide, and the US politicization of the COVID-19 pandemic, demonstrate or help to create a crisis of polarization. Whether polarization occurs within personal, familial, communal or global realms, the intensification of “Othering” in the era of climate crisis has irrevocable global implications.
Nature plays no favorites, and humanity’s survival or salvation is irrelevant to the cosmic cycles of change. It is on us to assess for ourselves what our values require of us.
As theologian Sharon Welch and others have noted, we will never eliminate injustice, and within systems of oppression much injustice is perpetrated in the name of Othering. But the generative friction of difference is prerequisite to life. This can be expressed via process theology and Alfred North Whitehead’s notion of the creative tension between stability and novelty.
Read Part 2 in the series, "The Redemption of Hospitality."
