Apropos my sermon from a few days ago on the difficulties of civic friendship, three quick thoughts, this Election Day morning.
1) I voted early this year for the very first time this year, as a way to support an advance voting site that was set up on my campus two weeks ago. Thus, this Election Day morning is the first in my whole adult life that I wasn't at my local polling station early in the morning. I felt a need to go down the street anyway, and thank some of the volunteers. They were appreciative of the thanks, but not, it seemed to me, surprised. Election workers, poll observers, really everyone involved in the mechanics of making representative systems work: they may not see themselves as avatars of civic friendship in their commitment to this very ordinary, in many ways very boring work, but nonetheless I think they exactly the low-level, even humble hope which my post ended with. Maybe they're personally religious, or maybe they're not, but one way of speaking of the civic conviction which brings them (and perhaps many readers of this as well) out to volunteer is a kind of civil religion. They really must have--as most of us, most of the time, I am confident, similarly have-- some kind of faith that people can govern themselves, and that people like you and me and all of them can be trusted, whatever the legitimate and even necessary extremities of our different views, to go through the electoral rituals of American democracy, not just overturn all the tables without cause.
2) I am a profoundly privileged person; I recognize that, though I also recognize that my articulation of that privilege--which mostly has to do with matters of sin and grace--likely does not operate the same as that which most of those who have engaged with intersectionality might assume. The point is, though, I know that I'm blessed and lucky, and that those blessings and that luck are significantly a function of my position in the various communities I am a member of. So having emphasized that, please take what I say here with all appropriate qualification: my experiences with civic friendship, limited as they may be, have convinced me it's an accomplishable goal. Unlike many others, I do not think I have lost any friends over the past four years. Maybe I have; it honestly wouldn't surprise me to learn that my privilege has blinded me to evils that have been done through my friendliness to people of radically different political views than me, my wishy-washy willingness to simultaneous call someone desperately, even wickedly, wrong but also to continue to consider them a fellow community member. If that is true, then I need to repent--but of course, I need to repent all the time of basically everything anyway (as, I think, does everyone else). In the meantime, I continue to have hope that, beyond all my unseen failures, those community connections, even if only performative, will have some real civic meaning, and thus amount to a real, however small, civic accomplishment. Which, honestly, is just another way of expressing a civic faith, a hope for something unseen, which is nonetheless real.
3) As always, "Northern Exposure" got it mostly right. So find the time today to watch this deeply romanticized, mostly inapplicable to most of our civic lives, but nonetheless, I suspect, deeply true story. And let Chris's final words be, if not a guide, then at least a hopeful reminder to us all.
