For some years now, I’ve been urging everyone to read Ezra Klein’s book “Why We’re Polarized.” It changed my life in that it gives a reader a “view of the forest” of the past 50 years…a way to describe what this data from today’s New York times is ALSO showing:

America is STACKING ITSELF into balkanized “teams.”

Here’s a gift-link to the story today.

Spend some time with this data…it’s deeply important meditate this incredibly well done piece by the NYT. We are stacking into teams about EVERYTHING, not just politics…every shopping purchase, the cars we drive, whether we live an urban or rural life…all of these choices are stacking in ways like no time since the Civil War.

But, unlike the Civil War our team stacking is not into neatly defined large geographic areas (read: “States”)

Team Blue dominates every urban landscape.
Team Red dominates the rural areas.
And the suburbs and exurbs suddenly become the place where the cultural wars burn hot.
(Thus: this is why Texas school board battles burn hot there…)

This makes this stacking all the more complicated. Every large Red State has deep Blue dots (in Texas, the counties around Austin and Dallas…)

I continue to hear progressive folks talk privately about moving…Canada, Mexico, New Mexico….
I continue to hear conservatives speak of “Greater Idaho” or even Texas…

My question continues to be: “Why does anybody have to move anywhere?” “Isn’t this the very heart of the problem?”

Are we so creating “The Other” (see my post on “They Live”) into such an “enemy” that we are voting with our feet (our pocket books, our real estate…), then aren’t we already in a very seriously bad place?

Again, I am part of this problem. I live (by choice) and work (by grace) in a Progressive Bubble. I understand that. But I’m also self aware enough to know that some of my neighbors are Republican, and at least one of them is a guy I occasionally have a beer with and talk about all the commonalities of our lives.

We somehow need the very things we no longer have: Organizations that stitch us together, and “cross-talk” across our divides. If I may, I believe this gets us to a concern about just how many “voluntary associations” atrophied and died. “Voluntary associations” is defined as real-world church groups, civic organizations, bowling leagues, sewing groups, running clubs, garden clubs…etc, etc, etc…

Surveys show that these real-world groups are collapsing alongside the increasing balkanization of America.

Dating apps “stack us” into people who are LIKE us. Real-world dating, and real-world love, used to produce many couples who were quite different from each other. (This is the case in my marriage…) But the cultural assumption today appears to be: Marry somebody just like you…and use an app to help.

Look, I’m not slamming marriages of like-minded people, or dating apps. But I am noticing the underlying message of both.

An honest assessment is that both choices (marrying your “pea in a pod,” or marrying your “opposites attract”) have upsides and downsides. And if we fail to acknowledge this, we are not acknowledging reality. As a young pastor, it feels like I saw a lot more couples who *differed* from each other than I do now.

Said another way, it’s a bald-face lie to suggest that “only” marriages of “alike” folks can succeed. “Alike” and “Different” couples produce marriages with vastly different underlying issues, but not at all marriages where one kind is “better” than the other.

That said, I’m suggesting that the culture has put its thumb on the scale, and tells us, “date people who are like you.”
And this too, sends us a message “live among people just like you…”

If we no longer see our neighbors in our actual neighborhood, we start to believe the lie that the “online world” all that is real. Jonathan Haight’s compelling new book makes the case that a part of why children and teens are suffering from skyrocketing depression is that, over the past fifty years, parents have replaced “real play, in the real world” with “virtual play in the virtual world.”

And…it’s just not the same. Human beings communicate the vast majority of our “information” in non-verbal ways. While the exact number is in dispute, experts continue to insists that much of our human communication is “non verbal.” Part of how human beings come to see across our tribal differences is: through interaction in the real world…and the rise of both the digital world and the global pandemic accelerated what was already happening before.

And if we don’t see each other, we are likely to continue to tribalize and balkanize.

A few times, over the past months, I’ve suggested that, once again, the United Methodist Church has recently “mirrored the culture” once again, in a way that is relevant to what I’m saying here. (The UMC and its predecessors have NEVER “led” the culture in any cultural age for 200 years. Outliers in our denomination do..but not the “whole”)

What has most recently happened in the UMC?
How have we “mirrored the culture?”

We’ve just balkanized into a “Progressive-Moderate-Conservative” denomination on the one hand (the UMC) and a smaller “Conservative” denomination on other (GMC).

We too, like our culture, are balkanizing down to the level of our neighborhoods and cities, mirroring the very data in this NYT story, and the anecdotal evidence of all our lives, and Ezra Klein’s book, for what’s been happening for 50 years, and what is accelerating right now.

Why am I writing this now?
Why focus on this instead of the election today?

Because of my nearly 100% belief that after this election, there will be some kind of violence.
We continue to hear folks on both “Teams” predicting it.
Our society would be foolish to pretend it’s not possible. But, if it happens, it will drive yet a further wedge between people.(1)

I rode by bike home from church yesterday, and rode past what I’ve seen the past few weeks…
One block: Dominated by “Harris” signs.
The next: Dominated by “Trump” ones.

I ride past this every day, and I think about it every day. It’s a good reminder, in my solidly Blue world, that we have all sorts of folks living among us. As do YOU, where ever you live right now.

Everything we do at Kessler Park United Methodist Church is designed to build the trust and the community of our mission field. We’re working as hard as we can do build trust among our neighbors, and it’s gratifying to me that they seem to be deeply grateful for it.

But…our nation needs a crap-ton more of this (“crap-ton” is a theological term), all across the country.

This is hard work.
It’s community building.
It takes real world time…and is that time we still have? Or is it already too late?

I can’t answer that.

But I know this: Until we reverse the tide of our abandonment of the real world, in favor of the digital one, we’ll continue to see data like the NYT show us here.
That means finding ways to talk to our neighbors, our actual neighbors in the actual places where we live, across the divides….not even necessarily about politics…but just connecting with them as human beings have connected for thousands of years.

And after this election, I’ll still be here to condemn political violence and seek to stitch a neighborhood together, best we can
And, as I said the other day, I pray for every single person in our nation, every single day.

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(1) I am speaking here of “political violence” against actual humans, not random destruction of private businesses. Political, racial violence, or hate crimes are an attack against a government or actual humans, and is fundamentally different than an attack against commercial property. You might quibble with this. But this is my definition and my writing.