David P. Gushee
Westminster Press, Louisville, Ky. 128 pages
Reviewed by Andy Nagel
If my social media feed is any indication, we are indeed living in anxious times. Prior to the election, one thing seemed to be certain: our country/democracy/civilization/world would be grave peril if the opposite side prevailed.
This is nothing new, of course. The political divides that seem so stark today have been present for a long time and are rooted in divergent conceptions of the common good, each of which has its more and less articulate and thoughtful proponents. Perhaps Facebook and Twitter are not the places I should be looking for generosity and complexity of thought. Status updates and tweets might not be the most suitable genre for handing deeply contested matters.
This is why David Gushee’s book is both so welcome and so limited. In it, he proposes 20 short reflections on divisive issues such as race, abortion, guns, climate, education and health care. Each reflection is thoughtful, measured and charitable in just the way you wish was more characteristic of cable news and social media feeds. Gushee tends toward a center-left position on these matters, doing so in most cases after admirable effort to understand and explain both the history of the issue as well as the opposing perspective. If you are looking for a quick summary of a politically moderate, charitable, Christian view of our current political arguments, this book will be a great place to start.
However, the book’s strength of brevity is also its greatest weakness. Not even a scholar of Gushee’s caliber is really able to boil down the issues of abortion, war or health care and still be sufficiently detailed enough to make a case that would be persuasive to those not already persuaded of his position. This leaves many of Gushee’s proposed “ways forward” to feel rather flat, such as in his chapter on education: “Elementary schools need teachers who love children and who supplement parental investment with the skills that they have been trained to offer. Middle and high school teachers need to know an academic area well and have the ability to design classes that educate effectively. A disciplinary environment needs to be created that is neither a prisonlike tyranny nor a ‘Lord of the Flies’ anarchy. Facilities, equipment and textbooks need to be adequate to their purpose.” Well, yes. Who could disagree with this? But the really interesting question — how to accomplish this — is precisely where serious disagreements begin and often end.
If we are indeed anxious Christians, perhaps our problem is not that we don’t understand the issues or the perspective of others, but rather that we don’t understand the promises of the gospel. Gushee ends with this salutary note that even if our worst political fears come true (and over the half the country is likely to be thinking just that), God will still be God, and the church will still be the church. Our God has not failed, and our mission has not changed.
Andy Nagel is associate pastor of Central Presbyterian Church in Towson, Maryland.
