It's a very safe bet that the election will not end on November 5. It most likely won't even end on November 6, 7, 8, or maybe weeks after Election Day. Votes have to be counted, but it's far more than the votes. There will be challenges to procedures. There will be challenges when ballots are received. There will be challenges to ballots themselves.
And the longer the time period between when they start counting votes and when a winner is declared, the more anxiety will roil the United States. It's a foregone conclusion that bipartisanship after the election was never a realistic hope.
But that doesn't mean we have to be at each other's throats. Bonnie Kristian, editorial director of ideas and books at Christianity Today, says that even though our differences in this election matter, and some of those differences matter a lot, "they are not all that matters, and they do not determine how we treat each other."
This may sound very blithe right now, whether you’re troubled by one or both of the possible outcomes of the presidential race, or by the overall drift of our culture, or by all of it. It may even sound worse than blithe: silly, naïve, kumbaya oblivion to a country divided against itself. The last year has been dominated by debate over abortion, immigration, war, and rumors of war. It’s easy to make a case, if you take these things seriously, that a moral life will be a combative life—that if you’re true to your convictions, you will end friendships, ostracize family, and change churches and jobs when the disagreement becomes too great.
I would not have been a very good 16th-century Catholic. In truth, I wasn't a very good 20th-century Catholic but not for the same reasons. Fifteenth-century Catholics lived that "combative life." This was the age of religious wars in France, especially, and the ruinous 30 Years War. People were killed for not believing the "right" thing. They were burned at the stake for rejecting dogma. They were ostracized and excommunicated for what today seems trifling reasons.
Today, we're not quite as extreme. Instead, we disassociate ourselves from friends and even family members if they support the "wrong" candidate. We publicly denounce them if they hold the "wrong" beliefs on abortion, immigration, or the Gaza War.
This sickens me. There is nothing in this world that cannot be resolved by discussion. It is our silly prejudices, biases, peer pressure. and an inflated sense of ego that prevent us from talking about what separates us. We will probably never reach an accommodation on some issues, especially abortion. But we can get to the point where our differences don't make us enemies.
C.S. Lewis is one of my favorite authors because he makes me think.
Toward the end of Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis takes up the mystery of Christian behavior: “If Christianity is true why are not all Christians obviously nicer than all non-Christians?” It’s a reasonable question, Lewis says, in the sense that if we saw no difference in people’s behavior before and after conversion, we might fairly wonder whether the conversions were not “largely imaginary.”
But consider, Lewis continues, a scenario in which “Christian Miss Bates may have an unkinder tongue than unbelieving Dick Firkin.” We want to say that if Christianity is real, then it ought to be apparent in these two: Miss Bates ought to be kinder than Dick. But that’s the wrong comparison, Lewis explains. The right comparisons are “what Miss Bates’s tongue would be like if she were not a Christian and what Dick’s would be like if he became one.” For all you know, God has already done a wonder in Miss Bates, while Dick is frittering away a naturally good temperament.
“What can you ever really know of other people’s souls,” Lewis muses, “of their temptations, their opportunities, their struggles?” "Give them grace" suggests Kristian, "and seek it for yourself."
