After Election, We Must Love One Another

Cutting people off and demonizing them for voting for Trump is not Christian.

but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles,

-I Corinthians 1:23

The week before election day, I preached a sermon about how we as Christians are called to love no matter who wins. I shared an article from the Free Press written by Larissa Phillips called, “Whatever Happens, Love Thy Neighbor.” She and her family lived in Park Slope, Brooklyn a very progressive area of New York City, and then moved to Greene County, south of Albany.  This is a very Republican area and she was definitely in the minority. What was interesting is how time and the life of farming changed her opinion of her neighbors. “It’s hard to care where someone stands on politics when they race to your house to save a dying lamb,” she writes. “This is the gift of living in a rural area: I keep finding reasons to see my political adversaries as human.”

The article showed how day-to-day encounters with her neighbors changed her opinion of her Trump-voting neighbors. I don’t think she has changed to become a conservative, but she started to see her neighbors differently. They weren’t abstractions that were easy to fear, but flesh and blood people that she got to know.

If you read the gospels, what you start to understand is that Jesus was interested in relationships. Jesus seemed to make friends in a way that left people scratching their heads. Among Jesus’ disciples, there were revolutionaries, a collaborator with the Romans, country bumpkins, and others. Jesus struck up a conversation with a woman at a well who was considered an outcast in her town. He was even willing to heal the servant of a Roman centurion, the representative of the occupying force keeping the Jewish people down.

In Mainline Protestant/Progressive circles, we want to look at Jesus as a moral example. Jesus was about relationships and we who are in mainline/ Progressive Protestant churches tend to understand this. We talk about how Jesus made friends with the outcast and the oppressed and how we should be inclusive.

But wanting to be inclusive, and trying to follow Jesus is not easy and in fact, it would be considered scandalous to many of us. Think about Jesus healing the Centurion’s servant. We might think this is wonderful, but how mindblowing and infuriating was it to hear Jesus showing kindness to a Roman?

I’ve been thinking about loving those who are different from us in the wake of the election. As someone who voted for Harris over Trump, I am sad that she lost and wary that he won (especially in light of his recent cabinet picks). But how should we treat those who voted the other way? Larissa Phillips would say we should get to know and see them as humans. But it’s interesting to see how a number of people posting memes like the following on social media:

Progressive Christian influencer John Pavlovitz echoes this sentiment by calling the belief that politics shouldn’t ruin relationships “bullshit.” According to Pavlovitz, of course, you can sacrifice relationships:

This is no longer about a policy difference, not a simple disagreement on the humane and responsible way to deal with collective national challenges, it isn’t a matter of agreeing to disagree on less-than-critical subjects where a stalemate is acceptable.

This moment is about the rejecting or embracing of abject hatred of difference, of unapologetic racism, of dehumanization of vulnerable human beings, of fierce, narcissistic greed.

And this is worth cutting people off, of severing ties, of social media blocking.

Because the lives of hundreds of millions of flesh-and-blood human beings hang in the balance because of these decisions: their freedom to make healthcare decisions for themselves, their access to fundamental liberties promised in the Constitution, their agency to govern their own destinies, their basic sense of safety from harassment and harm and violence. In fact, it may be your life or the life of someone you love that someone you know has chosen to disregard or erase with their vote.

If there was ever something that justified a deleted contact number or an empty chair at the Thanksgiving table or an exodus from a church or the termination of a friendship, it is this.

At some point, we as adult human beings knowing that our time here is finite, each need to choose whether we will lean into our deepest convictions or into relationships with people whose presence increasingly causes us to compromise those convictions.

So, did Jesus break off relationships with people? As I said earlier, Jesus was about relationships, not ideological convictions.

I think about these two essays. Both of the writers are politically progressive. One the one hand is this woman who left an area where everyone thought the same way to move to a part of the country where she was forced to get to know people who were very different from and who yes, voted for Trump. On the other side, we have a gentleman who has a crazy popular blog who seems to be talking about Trump voters in the abstract. Phillips has come to respect the people she has come to know. Pavlovitz hates people that he seems to know really know.

There are tons of reasons that people voted for Trump. As much as I can’t stand Trump, I want to know understand why people voted for him because it allows me to see things from a different perspective and think about my own views.

As Christians, we gather at the communion table. In my specific tradition of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), we gather there every Sunday. I and other pastors like to say that everyone is welcome at the communion table. It doesn’t matter if you are liberal or conservative, we all like to say this. But if you scratch the surface, what we really mean is that all those who are like us are welcome at the table. If we are conservative, we want people who aren’t “woke.” If we are liberal we want people who basically line up with those “In this house we believe” signs.

But if Jesus calls everyone to the table and he means everyone. Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury writes that communion changes how we look at people. “One of the most transformingly surprising things about Holy Communion,” he writes in his book Being Christian, “is that it obliges you to see the person next to you as wanted by God.”

This is what makes God so infuriating to us. We want a God just like us, who loves and hates the same things we do. But God loves everyone, even those we think aren’t deserving of God’s love.

Pavlovitz is correct in some of his assessments of Trump, but he is not correct about those who voted for Trump, at least not all of them. There are a lot of reasons that people voted for Trump. For many it was the economy and what they perceived as Biden’s poor stewardship. It was not simply racism or sexism (especially since many of the voters for Trump were people of color).

Breaking off contact with your relatives and friends who voted for Trump might feel good and make you feel righteous. But it also shows that politics and right thinking matter more to you than relationships. It shows that your heart isn’t big enough to love your neighbor.

Throughout this year, I’ve been wondering how we can live with each other, especially in a time of political polarization. How do we live out that verse from 2 Corinthians: “May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all?”

Maybe it’s by realizing the grace and love God has shown towards me and sharing that with others, especially those who didn’t vote like me. Maybe it means getting off my self-righteous high horse and seeking to understand those others. And maybe, it’s realizing that at the end of history, God isn’t going to ask if I had the right opinions or voted the right way, but how I loved the neighbor, the ones who are wanted by God.