I’ve been trying to figure out how to write this for a while now. The war in Ukraine is soaking up media attention, and rightly so. And yet, here in the US, we still have domestic difficulties. These are my first thoughts. I will be writing more soon.

I am concerned about where we are as a nation and where we are heading. We are increasingly divided and less willing to hear each other out. The presidency of Trump is past. However, the political momentum he rode in on is still in place. The phenomenon of Trumpism did not happen in a vacuum. We have been moving closer toward sectarian divide for some time now. Many forces and hundreds of thousands of decisions over decades have brought us here. It will take many, or more, decisions and as much or more time to journey back out of our polarized worldviews.

It is not simply that we have differing positions on important societal questions. It is that we are less willing and able to listen. We are quicker to dismiss people and ideas. We are less willing to compromise.

After six years of studying what happened with and between people before, during, and after the Troubles in Northern Ireland, Joseph Liecthy and Cecelia Clegg came up with a scale of sectarian danger. It has 11 levels, beginning with “We are different, we believe differently,” and ending with “You are demonic.”

#5 says “You are not what you say you are.” I have heard liberal Christian people claim, speaking of right-wing, conservative evangelicals, that they are not following the gospel, that they are not real Christians. That, in fact, as #6 says, “We are what you say you are.” We are the real Christians. We are the ones who love our neighbors. We are the ones who do and think right.

#8 of 11 states: “You are so wrong that you forfeit ordinary rights.” More than one article ran this past year with some variation of the title, “Should anti-maskers (/anti-vaxers) receive life saving healthcare?” And in some states, under emergency orders, healthcare professionals had to explicitly make that decision. I wonder what is the fallout from those interactions. How do we recover relationship after such injury?

I wonder if our dividedness will create a ripe environment for a tyrant to come to power. Will our hatred and fear of one another lead us to elect and accept the dominance of a dictator? Our divisions erupted into violence on January 6, 2021. I wonder if our disconnection will devolve into more intense and more frequent violences. Is a peaceful exit from our distrust possible? What would it take?

How do we reclaim our humanity?