It’s a bit of a crazy time to be posting this on the day after Christmas with the New Year approaching—better than Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, I suppose—but, since it’s the final installment, I’ll just put it “out there” for whenever you have nothing better to do. With apologies for that—as well as for what I deemed the necessary prologue to the previous post and the venture onto the “side road” created by the events occurring nationally—I will proceed, as promised, to explore the second and third “setbacks” that I believe, among a number of others I have not addressed here, can be significant impediments to our sense of community.

The second one has to do with what I will call “definitional” communities. To be clear upfront, the point I want to make and explore is what appears to me to be the fragmentation of society that has occurred based on the absolutizing of some element of people’s personal, ethnic, religious, or cultural history.  I first posted a piece on this topic on Facebook in February 2017 and later a version of it as the first blog post on this site in February 2018, both of which were drawn in part from papers I wrote from one to three decades ago. I note that because it’s interesting, but also sad, that what I wrote then, and am borrowing and updating here, continues to be not only relevant, but visibly present in our world.

While there is certainly nothing wrong with affirming our diversity, what has happened are not just recognitions of our distinctiveness, but the breaking up of society into dozens of “definitional communities.” There seems to be a sanction for idealizing some component of one’s life— ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age, political commitments, economic status, ability or disability, ethical commitments, religious persuasion, theological posture, and on and on —and making that the primary basis of self-identity rather than our common humanity.

The American dream of the cultural melting pot has become a cultural “tossed salad.”  And we find ourselves faced with the specter of “communities” without “community,” of diversity without connectedness.

Wherever one looks—from our cities and towns to rural communities, to nationalistic or religious conflicts virtually anywhere on the globe—one sees a world that seems hell-bent on repeating the story of the tower of Babel: we no longer understand one another.

We can, of course, celebrate our differences, and we should—there are distinctive attributes worth preserving—but somehow we must find a way to live in the tension that affirms diversity within community rather than diversity instead of community.  Recall, for example, what we already know–

• We all share space on this planet.
• We have common experiences.
• We all use language.
• We have emotions in common—we love, we hope, we fear.
• We all respond to the aesthetic.
• We all are connected with institutions that birth us, nurture us, and bury us.
• We all recall the past and anticipate the future.

As I noted in a previous post, I am—among other things—an American, white, heterosexual, male who identifies politically as a Democrat and was nurtured in the Christian tradition.  I’m not ashamed of those and I wouldn’t change any of them if I could.  But if I absolutize any of them such that I forget that I am also a citizen of the world, a human being, an inhabitant of the planet, and only one of the many with whom I share more commonalities than differences, then I have fallen victim in microcosm to the pervasive malady that is tearing the United States into the Disunited States and threatening to blow our world apart.

That said, there are some hopeful signs, one of which involved the Women’s Marches that occurred all over the country and the world, as well as the more recent Black Lives Matter movement with its several offshoots that expose and try to heal the racism that exists and festers in our society.  A couple of years ago when a male friend of mine and I joined a Women’s March in Asheville, we saw people from any number of “definitional communities”— ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age, economic status, religious persuasion, and, yes, even political affiliation—who had joined in common cause with that movement, as is also happening with Black Lives Matter, both of which press for human rights.  While these amazing movements can get caught up in the current political crisis that divides us, they also symbolize and actualize our ability to find community within diversity.

My hope is that we will be about finding the threads of “connectedness” running through the diversity that confronts us globally, nationally, and locally and that we will find ways to be part of the answer instead of part of the problem.

The third setback to a sense of community that I want to address arises from what I will call the tension between compromises and “ditches.” The issue, of course, is the tightrope that we must walk in so many areas of our lives between, on the one hand, being willing to compromise, to seek common ground, on issues where we disagree with others; and, on the other hand, standing firm on some things that for all of my adult life I have called, and chosen very carefully, “the ditches I’m willing to die in.”  I suppose the more common, but less colorful, term would be “principles,” although, speaking of colorful, Edmund Burke once said, “None will barter away the immediate jewel of his soul.”  But since he was stressing the fact that there can be limits to such possessiveness, the question becomes, when is it possible that we do reach that point?

Whether the difficult decision about whether to compromise or “stand your ground” happens in a Deacons’ meeting in your church, a Parents’ Council meeting at your child’s school, the Homeowners Association meeting in your neighborhood, at the non-profit organization’s Board of Directors meeting, in the State Legislature, or the Senate in the nation’s capital—choose your poison—the problem and the potential threat to our sense of community is the same.

Then let’s start with recognizing the task of identifying those principles, stances, “jewels and ditches” that we feel cannot be compromised. For some, those may be easy decisions—for others, maybe not so easy. My suggestion would be that, in Burke’s phrase, those “jewels of the soul” should be straightforwardly defined and held close. But, as Henry Neufeld argues, things that are not open to discussion need to be as few as possible. I would agree, because, as Geoff Nunberg points out, “the word ‘compromise’ faces in two directions. It looks forward to the bargains we strike, but it also looks backward at what we had to sacrifice to get there.”

I would also submit that we need to step back and try to be as objective as possible about our “ditches” lest, as Nunberg warns, we yield to the temptation to “stand on principle” in order to just cock our heads and show that we can’t be pushed around, or to parade our loyalty to some group, or organization, or political party.

It is increasingly important then to distinguish, as Neufeld suggests, between desires and principles: guard and maintain the principles; compromise the desires. The term he suggests is “passionate moderation”—i.e. know the things you cannot compromise on and don’t be afraid to state your views, while keeping the lines of communication open in order to reach the greatest consensus.

Another way to come at the importance of compromise, as Daniel Weinstock points out, is identifying from a “consequentialist” point of view the values that will not be realized by the failure to compromise. We know the “end” we seek—and sometimes, for the sake of community, it justifies the “means” it takes to get there.

It’s hard for me not to think at this point about the eight months of conversations and negotiations—and the lack thereof—that finally led to the compromise(s) that produced the imperfect-but-important “stimulus package” that ultimately passed both houses of Congress this past Monday. While I am personally grateful that it finally happened, it was not, perhaps, the best example of “passionate moderation” or of “consequentialist” thinking regarding what were apparently way too many “immediate jewels of the soul!” And then there is the current President’s threat to veto belatedly that compromise legislation after being totally absent from the deliberations that led to it, as well as his decision actually to veto the bill that funds the nation’s defense—both on the basis of uncompromising demands. I can think of no “ditch” that justifies either of these actions under the current critical circumstances.

In a Harvard Divinity School post, Dudley Rose remarked with prescient insight , “If I were to look forward to how do we get out of this polarized mess we’re in, I think one of the first things we’re going to probably have to do is quit calling each other names. . . I think we’re going to have to figure out how to have hard conversations.”

Although some of what I’ve had to say stands indicted by his recommendations, I expect he is right and that those “hard conversations” will commence shortly after January 20th, 2021!

To any who have managed to “plow through” to the end of these ruminations . . . grace, peace, and blessings to you!

Sources Consulted, Entire Blog

Jonathan Beasley and Dudley Rose,.” For Trump’s Evangelicals, the Inconvenient Teachings of Christ,” Harvard Divinity School, November 1, 2018.

“The Decency Agenda,” Opinion, Editorial Board, New York Times, Dec. 5, 2020.

Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons, Maggie Siddiqi, and Samantha Behar,” How the Trump Administration Has Harmed Faith Communities,” Center for American Progress: September 21, 2020.

Maya Hasegawa, “Separatism, Separation, and Diversity,” Liberal Education, 77:1 (Jan/Feb ’91), pp. 16-17.

William Bryan Martin, “Cultural Pluralism, Institutional Character.”  Unedited draft of an unpublished address, Association of Southern Baptist Colleges and Schools, Samford University, July 24, 1992.

Henry Neufeld, “Principle and Compromise,” henryneufeld.com.

Geoff Nunberg, “What The Word ‘Compromise’ Really Means,” Fresh Air, NPR,  July 19, 2011.

Daniel Weinstock, “On the possibility of principled moral compromise,” Published online: Sept. 2, 2013

Adam Yarmolinski, “Loose Canons: Multiculturalism and Humanities 101,” Change, 24:1 (Jan/Feb ’92), pp. 6-9, 74-75