Was New York Times columnist Tish Warren clairvoyant when she called for small acts of kindness as a remedy to national divisions? A little less than two weeks before the Nov. 4th elections, she counseled readers to cultivate “cultural habits that allow us to share in our common humanity.” Such “daily practices” – even “seemingly pointless conversations” – could “rebuild social trust.”
Warren didn’t explicitly talk about the role voting can play in promoting societal unity (even though the results of the Virginia gubernatorial election might prompt her to reconsider). Yet she did, however, concede that her father taught her how politics – and the casting of ballots that accompanied it as part of civic duty – could foster a degree of “cordiality and civil trust.” As it turns out, choosing between candidates in an official election may generate even more harmony than Warren imagines.
Here’s the reason: Since the 2016 presidential election, white evangelicalism has been one of the more polarizing features of American society. This has some bearing on Warren, herself a priest in the Anglican Church in North America and who comes to the Times from the flagship evangelical magazine, Christianity Today.
Eighty-one percent of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump in 2016. This became a regular data point to prove the hypocrisy of these (so-called) believers. The numbers from Virginia indicate Glenn Youngkin outperformed Trump with white evangelicals (89 percent).
Surprisingly, these returns have not provoked disgust over Youngkin’s appeal to hypocritical Christians. Instead, many commentators have used the election to challenge the progressive wing of the Democratic party. With exit polls indicating that voters made their decision with the economy, education, and COVID-19 in mind, James Carville blamed the defeat on “this stupid wokeness,” “this defund the police lunacy, this take Abraham Lincoln’s name off of schools.” For his part, former advisor to President Obama David Axelrod argued that “you can be as visionary as you want, but just make sure you take the garbage out and fill the potholes.”
Could it be that the evangelicals who voted for Youngkin were actually heeding the advice of Warren (who is in the same denomination as the governor-elect)? If so, they took it in a different direction. They may have recognized the value of social trust. But they also thought that social trust comes not so much from ordinary acts of kindness or random conversations as from institutions that make common life possible – election commissions, health inspectors, trash collectors, nurses, public school teachers, justices of the peace, and truck drivers. All these workers nurture social trust in ways that go well beyond small talk in the check-out line at the supermarket.
That is one way of interpreting the results of the Nov. election and supplementing Warren’s otherwise laudable call for social harmony and trust.
Yet why she failed to address her own evangelical tribe is a mystery. It could reflect the serious limits of faith-based politics. Since Ronald Reagan's presidency, the Religious Right has been more a watchdog about national drift than a contributor to shared norms. Concerns shared by evangelicals over creeping secularism and relativism led to alliances with conservative Roman Catholics as part of a strategy to win the culture wars.
Along the way, evangelicals also embraced a version of identity politics that echoed feminists and black American activists. If gender or race shouldn’t be discounted in public debate, then surely neither should faith. The politics of belief may have spanned divides between Roman Catholics and Protestants, but it also added to the politics of race, gender, and sexual orientation that have divided Americans.
This divisive tendency of the Religious Right contrasts vividly with the capacity of Warren's own Anglican tradition to sustain national cohesion. As Harvard historian David Hempton has written, the Anglican Church was a “genuinely nation-wide institution” that “upheld the natural hierarchy of mutual obligations” that in turn provided “social cohesion” and “public morality.”
That kind of Christian nationalism may have worked for England, but its negative connotations in the United States may have prodded Warren to appeal to Jane Jacobs, the godmother of urbanism in America. For Jacobs, who led the charge to save neighborhoods from urban and transportation planners, the seemingly inconsequential encounters between neighbors and customers build social trust.
Jacobs's wisdom about neighborhoods, however, is not as useful as the instruction of Augustine, the original urbanist and fourth-century bishop of Hippo. In his famous book, “The City of God,” Augustine offered faith-based citizens advice about living in an empire in decline – one whose elites often blamed Christianity for Rome's misfortunes. Although the fifth-century bishop recognized the difference between the earthly (non-believers) and heavenly (believers) cities, he commended an attitude of “not scrupling about diversities in the manners, laws, and institutions” in any society as long as peace was “secured and maintained.” If public authorities did not hinder worship, Christians should avail themselves of “a common agreement among men regarding the acquisition of the necessaries of life.”
How can we recover the trust that Warren commends? Perhaps as the vote in Virginia indicates, the path runs through recognizing, using, and esteeming the institutions, policies, and laws that make a measure of social order possible.
Had Warren turned to Augustine instead of Jane Jacobs, she might have even provided an important reminder to Democrats while warning faith-based voters. What Americans of all stripes have in common are a vast array of institutions that provide a necessary platform for ordinary affairs.
D. G. Hart is a distinguished associate professor of history at Hillsdale College and writes about Christianity in the United States. He is the author of several books, including most recently, “Benjamin Franklin: Cultural Protestant” (Oxford University Press).