Why we cannot afford to stay out of political conversations: a response to Mark Brown's post on By Comon Consent

Mark Brown’s latest post, as I read it, makes the argument that because our environment generally produces our political opinions, we should refrain from accusing people with different opinions of “bad thinking” and remove political conversations from church settings in order to prevent internal division. Many of Mark’s points are undeniably wise. Certainly, it behooves each of us to interrogate our own political beliefs, to consistently attempt to learn from those whose opinions differ, and to love those who disagree with us, recognizing that no party is God’s party. But although I can fully join Mark in believing that we would be well served by giving up negative models of political conversation, I must depart from what I read, perhaps wrongly, as Mark’s conclusion to renounce political conversation more generally within the Church.

I wish to offer the alternative argument that any contemporary organization that wishes to remain a significant moral force (and I’m assuming here that one function of an institutionalized church is to prescribe standards for moral action) cannot afford to give up politically oriented conversations, even for the aim of promoting peace amongst its membership. By politically oriented conversations, I’m referring to politics in the broadest sense of the term, incorporating all of the social and economic systems that order our lives, including, but not limited to, party politics.

My disagreement with Mark turns on the question of whether the moral practices a church should prescribe encompass merely localized, interpersonal interactions or extend to a far more global scale. Mark’s suggestion that we give up political discourse in order to promote harmony amongst the membership inherently prioritizes the local community as the body whose needs demand our attention. Local harmony takes precedence over our relationships with people who live far from us but inhabit the same systems we act within. Mark’s decision to prioritize interpersonal relationships seems to me characteristic of mainstream Mormon moral thinking in general. The vast majority of the principles we learn in church and the case studies we encounter there focus on how to properly interact with the people we encounter in our daily lives. This scale of interaction is undoubtedly significant, and perhaps indeed deserves our greatest loyalty, but it is also increasingly inadequate to not consider more global scales of interaction.

With ever increasing frequency, a vast amount of our interactions occur within social, economic, environmental, and technological systems, ensuring that our actions have consequences that impact the lives of people far removed from our local spheres. Although these people are not immediate faces, I would be very reluctant to claim that these people should morally matter less in God’s eyes than my more immediate neighbors. While we do not yet have adequate moral or religious paradigms for helping us conceptualize what our agency might mean when it extends to a global scale, we most certainly have a moral obligation think about this deeply important issue.

While as church members we should make an effort to move beyond divisive political rhetoric, if we want to remain a relevant institution in society and to claim our full potential as moral agents, then we have to extend our discussion of morality to the institutions and systems that mediate our activity, a major one of which is indeed party politics. We cannot refrain from increased inquiry into the political process, because our actions within this system will have consequences that impact the lives of real people in drastic ways. If we refuse to discuss our agency in the context of these political systems, then we do not simply limit our moral influence to the local, but also wrongly deny our own responsibility for events that happen far, far away. While such discussions might promote division, the moral cost of hiding from these conversations strikes me as far too high.

I deeply value our church’s policy of not endorsing candidates, precisely because this policy enables members to continue a conversation about their beliefs and focus on their relationship to God. But if we extend our commitment to neutrality to refraining from all political discussion (a suggestion Mark does NOT make but that I wish to consider), I doubt that this policy would be either neutral or beneficial. Evoking neutrality of thought in a context in which the majority of members are both Republican and committed to conceptualizing morality in a local way would implicitly keep these interests in tact and shut down further conversation.