Last week I sat in staff meeting at my church and heard a story of someone in our community who made a striking comment: “I don’t think Christians love their neighbor very well.” This comment was made in the context of observing what’s going on in our national and local politics, and with Christian rhetoric at the center of so much of the intense and oftentimes cruel immigration policy enforcement. As I heard that comment, I couldn’t help but agree. When I log on to social media and see the latest headlines, it’s hard to not empathize with this critique. And with so many Evangelicals continuing to justify or refuse to stand against the extreme political actions of our leaders at the expense of people in their own communities, how can one step away from that and not think “I don’t think Christians love their neighbors very well”?!
Why is that? Every little boy and girl in Sunday school was taught the Golden Rule; every child in church knows “to love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus famously says that the summation and heart of the Law and the Prophets is about loving God and loving all people as our neighbors (Matthew 22:37-39). Most Christians have seen the Old Testament verses on showing hospitality to the immigrant (Lev 19:34, Deut 24:17-22, Ex 20:21). So what’s going on? Why is there such a divide between Evangelicals’ knowledge of Jesus’ love and teachings and the embodiment of them? It would be easy to paint a certain group, denomination, or leader as the enemy. But if you’ve ever spent time genuinely conversing and talking with someone you disagree with, you quickly realize that they are far more similar to you than you originally thought. To simply conclude that some Christians just “hate immigrants” or are evil incarnate would be to misdiagnose our current moment and to move forward in the kind of unhealthy political discourse that already is so damaging to our society and our churches. Or visa versa, to conclude that Christians who care for immigrants are just ‘woke liberals’, immature believers who twist Bible verses out of context, and aren’t serious, committed Christians who care about the Bible or doctrine is an equally toxic and unhelpful conclusion.
And beyond this one topic, there are several other issues where there are such fierce ideological divides that Christian rhetoric and ethic principles often appears at the center of. Talking to followers of Jesus on different sides, it’s hard to comprehend how people who believe the same things can come to such different conclusions.
What’s really going on? How can different groups of people look at the same situation and come to such different conclusions? How can two sides define “loving your neighbor” so differently? What if our problem is more than just ‘that group is out of their mind!’ What if the real problem starts with the roots of our spiritual formation and view of life itself?
What Forms Us
In his book Desiring the Kingdom, James K. Smith introduces the concept of cultural liturgies. Smith argues that we are “embodied agents of desire” and our “ultimate love is what we worship.”1 Our desires are shaped and formed by the practices and habits we engage in on both a conscious and subconscious level. The result of this formation leads to the kinds of worship we engage in and the kinds of things we love. Smith introduces the term “cultural liturgies” to describe the formative, influential practices that people engage in beyond the walls of the church that deeply shape their lives. According to Smith, the questions we should be asking as we evaluate our culture and our role within it are: “What vision of human flourishing is implicit in this or that practice? What does the good life look like as embedded in cultural rituals? What sort of person will I become after being immersed in this or that cultural liturgy?”2 2Desiring the Kingdom goes on to analyze how going to a shopping mall, patriotic rituals and songs before a sports game, or daily activities in our lives have tremendous power to influence what we desire; to shape what we love.
The more I’ve thought about this framework, the more it ‘clicks’ with what I see around me. How can people of the same faith have such intensely different views on political issues? How can people with the same beliefs viewing the same situations and issues become so bitterly divided? According to Smith, part of the answer is found in the cultural liturgies that are shaping and forming them in different directions. And even among Christianity, weekly worship gatherings feature vastly diverse kinds of liturgy across denominations. From both within the church and outside of it, people are being formed to embody different values and pursue different desires as an expression of their ultimate love of Christ. We all read the same Bibles, know the same verses, but what practices we engage in, what stories we play out, and what habits we knowingly or unknowingly let guide our lives. Cultural liturgies can help us understand how we come to such different conclusions, but there’s more at play here than even our formation.
Close Your Eyes and Picture This….
In his second book of the series, Smith digs into another important aspect to spiritual formation: the social imagination. Imagining the Kingdom discusses how narrative and community play a massive role in shaping a person’s worldview. Two Christians could affirm the same doctrine and hold the same core beliefs but with different communities and worldview-shaping narratives, these two individuals will have vastly different approaches to life. Smith surveys philosophers, social scientists, and psychologists to build his thesis: people are embodied beings that are shaped by the stories they tell themselves and the communities they share life with. According to Smith, “imagination precedes desire.”3 Our idea of the ‘good life’ or ‘love’ as we envision it is formed by the community we grow up in and inhabit and by the stories we tell ourselves and live out every day. The idea of the things we love are shaped by our social imagination that instructs us on what that thing we desire even should be conceived as! Smith summarizes this by saying: “Liturgical animals are imaginative animals who live off the stuff of imagination: stories, pictures, images, and metaphors are the poetry of our embodied existence.”4
If someone’s personal narrative is “I’m a bad person who doesn’t deserved to be loved,” they will are likely engage in self-destructive habits; they are living out their ‘story’. If a community rehearses the view that “we are God’s one true church,” they are likely to condemn others and raise up prideful followers of Jesus. Why? They are living out their narrative; a worldview rehearsed and practiced by liturgy and language week to week. Smith concludes: “Our bodies, brains, and environments function together as a three-legged stool of our experience; any meaning is generated at the nexus of all three.”5
If we reduce the purpose of our God-given creaturehood to absorbing objective knowledge through expository lectures, we will quickly conclude that anyone who differs from our views, is sinful or heretical or flawed or inferior. But what if the stories we tell, the communities we inhabit, and the practices we engage in are shaping us just as much if not more than the weekly sermon we sit through?
If Smith is correct, then our hearts indeed “traffic in stories.”6 While this all might seem complicated, it’s actually very helpful for the tension of our current moment. We aren’t destined to disagree endlessly; some people aren’t destined to just be “wrong.” Each individual is a part of a broader community and culture that is full of a particular social imagination and story; each individual is engaged in practices and narratives that particularly shape them to approach topics and issues. We don’t need to give up hope in humanity over intense, overwhelming political division or give into a “conquer-all” mentality. Instead, we should examine eachothers’ stories. Perhaps, there are things we can share with others. Maybe there are things we ourselves could learn.
A New Starting Point
Let’s be honest: the starting point of conversation around immigration begins with ideological assumptions from one political party or another. Many conservatives assume that people who care about immigrants, emphasize kindness or hospitality, or talk about ‘loving your neighbor’ must want to destroy America and turn it into the hellish nightmare more commonly called Communism. And on the other side it can be assumed that people with who care about the American economy, protected borders, and limitations on immigration must be heartless fascists who have lost all moral integrity. This hateful rhetoric is echoed everywhere in our society. And while we may refrain from saying it, don’t we all begin with a presupposition as we enter political conversation? How quickly do we size up someone in our political dialogue and begin to make assumptions about them the moment they begin to voice their ideas?
But genuinely go outside your social circle and talk to people. You will quickly discover conservatives aren’t all racists and liberals aren’t all conspiring to destroy this country. That narrative is cheap, unimaginative, and deeply out of touch with reality.
The starting point of our political conversations is so often based on ideological defense and categorization. Our political imagination can be so narrow. As followers of Jesus, we must look beyond the surface level and examine how an individual’s liturgies and personal story shape them; we must consider how communal imagination and stories can emphasize and value different things.
A Path Forward
Does any of this really solve our immigration policy issues? Does any of this instantly and tangibly help immigrants struggling to find peace and prosperity or American politicians as they struggle to balance all of the different political values and goals? Probably not. But what these things can do is shape our dialogue and discourse with one another. Retrieving an understanding of cultural liturgies and social imagination can help us view and treat each other with more kindness, empathy, and curiosity; to see each other as humans made in God’s image rather than enemies to defeat with words or laws. And whether we are wrestling through the solutions to our immigration policy and the current humanitarian crisis at the root of it or struggling to understand how someone we care about can see things so differently than us, this starting point is valuable and transformative. If we lose sight of our value and connection as a human collective, than we will afflict more pain, cause more damage, and lose even more as a society then we ever thought possible.
Faithfulapprentices 
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