Note to subscribers: I originally intended to pitch this piece to a Christian Periodical. However, other work delayed finishing the writing, so I decided to publish it here, given the timeliness of the upcoming election. I hope all of you find it challenging and thought-provoking in the right ways.
As the 2024 election closes in, it is heartening to see that many Christians have grown weary of the bitter partisan polarization that has infected the American church over the past decade. Many prominent Evangelical intellectuals have thrown their weight behind efforts to encourage Christians to think past partisan identities and to embrace a more nuanced and authentic Christian witness in the political arena. We desperately need these voices to turn down the temperature, and we all should hope and pray that their efforts will prove fruitful, especially if the aftermath of the 2024 presidential election proves as contentious as the 2020 race.
However, an honest and sober assessment reveals that while partisanship is a form of idolatry that stands in the way of our public Christian witness, removing this idol is a necessary but insufficient step to healthy engagement. A second form of distorted witness afflicts even many who have earnestly tried to turn away from polarization, the disorder of “political hobbyism.”
In his 2020 book Politics Is for Power, author Eitan Hersh defined political hobbyism as consuming news content, discussing politics with friends, and posting on social media to build support for our favorite causes. Hersh cites time-use surveys showing that a third of Americans spend two hours or more daily on “political” activity. When you dive into the details, this is almost always passively consuming content and discussing issues online or with a few friends. Politics in this context is almost entirely interchangeable with sports fandom, a leisure hobby that serves to pass the time and for conversational fodder. But unlike sports fans, political hobbyists struggle to compartmentalize their fandom and see those on the other side of the aisle as humans made in the image of God.
Just as dangerous is the tendency of political hobbyists to easily deceive ourselves into thinking that we can make a difference merely by consuming content and displaying knowledge. I am a recovering hobbyist. For a long time, I earnestly believed that my passive consumption of political content made a difference in the world. Over time, I realized how warped this was. I asked myself: has any of my reading impacted anyone's life? Was anything concrete changed from all the information I had learned? Consuming political content and national news distracted me from the needs of my neighbors. National politics is the level of government furthest removed from our local community. Over time, I realized that my addiction to political content was a very convenient way to avoid the hard and uncomfortable work of talking to real-world neighbors about concrete issues in their lives and working together to achieve change.
One of my colleagues likes to tell a story about a prominent community organizer he knew. The organizer had a chance to speak at an event with an audience of well-educated, politically engaged Christians. This organizer had spent decades in the southwest US working on training community leaders in low-income neighborhoods, achieving practical gains like better-resourced schools and water and sanitation infrastructure. After he finished speaking, one of the attendees got up and asked him, “What can we do to seek peace in the Middle East?” To his shock and surprise, the labor organizer replied, “You can do nothing.”
His response may seem harsh, but refuting it is also nearly impossible. The crisis in the Middle East was then and tragically remains today, far beyond the ability of individual Americans to influence. It may be beyond the entire American church’s influence. This does not mean we don’t pray or care -- after all, we serve a God whose justice will ultimately reign. But it is vital to recognize that if we center our political life on intractable conflicts far from our backyard, we are likely doing a poor job of stewarding our time and political voice. The community organizer needed to be blunt with his audience: there was a real danger that the mere hope of contributing to something as exciting as seeing peace in the Middle East would become a distraction. If they could achieve that, why would they bother to engage in the far more parochial work of ensuring that local low-income kids have an adequate education?
To make an important distinction, some Christians will be called to work vocationally on global and national political issues (including peace in the Middle East). Some reading this may work in government, as academics at think tanks, or non-profit advocacy. All of these are good and important vocational callings, and what distinguishes them from hobbyists is that their expertise, connections, and skills can turn ideas into tractable progress.
But this is not the reality of most people who care about politics. Most of us are no different than the questioner in that organizer’s audience: we are hobbyists needing a reality check. America does not need more people who can make a passionate case for why various prominent national political figures are morally bankrupt. Nor does it need more people who can explain the intricacies of Nate Silver's election model. Neither of these are bad in and of themselves, but when they make up the whole of our political engagement, they become a sinful addiction. When we get caught up in national political hobbyism, we become the priest and the Levite in the story of the Good Samaritan. I think of all the times I left a meeting, stuck my headphones in, and started listening to some political podcast while walking by numerous homeless community members on the side of the street. National politics has a way of deforming us into “activists” who “Love a concept—peace, community, flourishing and so on—but don’t seem to like people very much,” as former activist-turned-pastor Tyler Wigg-Stevenson noted.1 If the primary lens through which you see your neighbors' politics is whether they are voting for Donald Trump or Kamala Harris, you may fundamentally misunderstand what politics is.
Politics is derived from Polis, a Greek word for the idealized approach to running a city. Politics, as defined initially, was about the messy but ultimately vital work of working with our neighbors to figure out how to manage the common lives of our city. The essence of politics is not about abstract issues but about where those ideas intersect the lives of real people, people we need to listen to, work with, and disciple into Jesus' calling of love for neighbor. The most impactful Christian social movements of the last 200 years have understood this, from 19th-century Clapham reformers to the civil rights movement.
If hobbyists in the American church want to get serious about recovery, we should start with our backyard. Local elected officials hold tremendous power over education, criminal justice, housing, and homelessness, just to name a few. These issues may not make for exciting podcast material, but they have a tangible impact on the everyday lives of our neighbors.
Consider Los Angeles, where I live. In my neighborhood, many Christians consider both of the current city council candidates to be unacceptable. One is a progressive activist who has used obscene language to describe law enforcement and has avoided questions about whether she supports defunding the police. The other is an incumbent whose taped conversation included racially derogatory comments and scheming to maintain his power at the expense of his constituents.
How did the district get saddled with these two unacceptable candidates? Simple: in a district with over 250,000 residents, only 35,147 voted in the primary. California uses a top-2 open primary system where the two highest vote-getters in the primary advance to the general election. The final margin separating the 2nd and 3rd place candidates was only 750 votes. A robust effort to educate and involve thoughtful people in the primary process might have changed the outcome. This is not unusual: many of the city council members in Los Angeles were elected by well-organized factions who do not have the public’s best interest in mind simply because good people did not bother to vote.
While Christians with different views across the political spectrum may not always agree on all policy details, they will find it much easier to find common ground in local contexts than in our national culture war fights. Most importantly, when they find common ground, they will influence local policymakers, making it possible to work toward the good of their city.
I saw this personally in 2022 when a small group in my community organized a Zoom meeting with our local representative to discuss housing legislation before the California Assembly. We were not a large group: we only had eight people on the call. The meeting itself was largely positive and uneventful. We discussed various bills with the representative’s staff that we thought could help our community. They were open and supportive of those initiatives. The most shocking moment for me came towards the end of the meeting when a staff member off-handedly mentioned that the eight of us were the largest group of constituents they had met with all year. Since approximately 500,000 people live in our district, I expected our group to be a relatively minor blip on their radar. Knowing that a turnout of that size was moving the needle shifted my perspective. This is especially true now that I have seen how those bills passed and how one of them (AB 2097’s parking reform) has helped enable tens of thousands of affordable housing units here in Los Angeles.
If you read this before you vote, I hope you will prayerfully consider how to steward your public voice faithfully. Part of this involves voting for national offices and taking the time to prayerfully reason through how you vote. But you should put at least as much if not more, effort into considering who you will vote for in every other race. More importantly, I hope you will keep thinking about political engagement beyond the election. Find contexts where you can work and talk to your real-life neighbors face-to-face to develop practical, non-polarized solutions to the real problems you collectively experience. Think about how your church can be a hub for this kind of community and become a blessing to your community’s schools, businesses, and residents of all socioeconomic backgrounds. Taking these steps is a roadmap to how we, as Christians, will move past both partisanship and hobbyism and be more authentic witnesses of what Christian love looks like.
Taken from Wigg-Stevenson’s 2013 Book “The World is Not Ours to Save" page 35