Review: ‘How Can I Love Church Members with Different Politics?’ by Jonathan Leeman and Andy Naselli
“The day before the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, a small book by Jonathan Leeman and Andy Naselli was released: How Can I Love Church Members with Different Politics? Nobody knew at the time how much we’d need it.” - TGC
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There’s a sense in which this framing of the problem of political disagreement is politically naive: the authors don’t engage either with questions about why contemporary political disagreement is particularly fraught or with the broader range of psychological and social forces that sort us into political tribes and make it hard to change our minds.
We need thoughtful discussions of these questions, but what the authors have given us is more important. Political disagreement among fellow Christians is a problem that rests on foundations in theological anthropology: creation, fall, redemption, the human task of discernment, and believers’ obligation to maintain the unity of the Spirit. This theological ballast is often invisible—the bulk of the berg is below the waterline—but it means that anyone who is committed to those truths will find the logic compelling and the solutions not bound to one historical moment.
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Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
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