Political Virtues: Love

Austin (00:00.99) Peace, friends. Thank you so much for tuning back into United We Pray. I’m Austin Suter, joined today by Caitlin… I’m sorry, I forgot to ask. Is it Shice or Shess? That’s what I thought. Okay, joined today by Caitlin Shess. How are you, sister? Kaitlyn (00:08.083) It’s okay. Shess. Yeah. Good, how are you Austin? Austin (00:16.52) I’m doing well. I don’t say this often. It is an honor to have you. Thank you for making the time for us. Caitlin Schess is a writer, author and doctoral student at Duke Divinity School studying political theology, ethics and biblical interpretation. She graduated from Dallas Theological Seminary in 2021 with a THM in systematic theology. She is the author of Liturgy of Politics, Spiritual Formation for the Sake of Our Neighbor and the forthcoming Kaitlyn (00:20.563) Oh, thank you. Austin (00:42.078) the ballot in the Bible, how scripture has been used and abused in American politics and where we go from here. She also contributed a chapter about political theology, Augustine and conspiracy theories for an Erdemans book, QAnon, Chaos and the Cross. You can also find her writings at places like Christianity Today, New York Times, Christ in Pop Cultures, CT Women, Relevant Sojourners, Fathom, and the Christian Research Journal. Did I cover everything? Kaitlyn (01:08.499) Yes, that was great, thank you. Austin (01:11.038) Excellent. Friends, just so you know, if you like this conversation and if you want to think more about these themes, you should get Caitlin’s truly excellent book, Liturgy of Politics. I read this in preparation for the episode and it was fantastic. It’s one the best things I’ve read lately. So, of course, we’re talking today about political virtues and specifically the virtue of love. We’ve spent the past three weeks critiquing political idolatry and how prevalent it is today. Kaitlyn (01:27.571) Thank you. Austin (01:39.518) But rather than just critiquing, we’re trying to also state positively what Christians can do to be agents of unity. And today we’ll be talking about love. But let’s start by talking about spiritual formation, which you spend a lot of time on in this book. We tend to think of spiritual formation as this thing that happens to us when we read our Bibles in our quiet times. But what other forces are forming us spiritually? Kaitlyn (02:04.851) Yeah, that’s a great question. I was first introduced to the concept of spiritual formation when I was in seminary, and it was kind of limited to the historic Christian practices, reading the Bible, praying, spiritual disciplines maybe. And it was kind of individually focused. How am I being shaped individually to be kind of a better person on the inside? And it was pretty limited focused to just what are the kind of Christian ways of spiritually forming us. And in this book, I wanted to… acknowledge that we are formed in all sorts of other ways and not just formed in our opinions or our relationships, but we are spiritually formed. The way that we are formed by forces outside of the church doesn’t stay kind of quarantined to just this little box. Like the way I engage politically doesn’t just shape me in this little political box of my life. It shapes my theology, it shapes my relationships, it shapes my spiritual condition. And so thinking more broadly about spiritual formation is just saying we are not siloed pieces of a human. We are one person. And so everything we do that’s forming us is also spiritually forming us. So that includes the neighborhoods we live in, the relationships we have in our homes and outside of our homes. And I’m especially concerned with the ways that our media consumption is forming us in very often negative ways. And our political participation is forming us. So the movies, the TV shows that we consume, the podcasts that we listen to, the books that we read, all of those are. telling us particular stories about the world, about what kind of creatures humans are, what kind of communities we should live in, what a good life looks like. And often they’re telling us what is really ultimately wrong with the world and what will fix that ultimate problem. And those stories don’t just give us information in our brains, they form our desires, our loves, our fears, the things that we grow to hate. And so we have to pay attention then to not just… What are the intentional ways I’m spiritually forming or being spiritually formed? But also, what are all the unintentional ways that I’m consuming media, that I’m engaging in relationships, that I’m living in my neighborhood, that might be teaching me other stories about the world, other things to love, other senses of loyalty? And if we don’t pay attention to those things, they’ll still be operating on us. They’ll still be spiritually forming us. The question is just, are we paying attention to them? And are we paying attention to the resources that Christian faith has for counterforming us? Kaitlyn (04:23.151) in the story of the gospel and belief in the coming kingdom of God. Austin (04:27.806) Friends, just as an aside, if you’re more interested in that particular answer and some more work on it, I would commend Karen Swallow Pryor’s The Evangelical Imagination and the episode we did with her on that. But you wrote in Liturgy of Politics how Christians engage politics thinking that we were in control of our politics and what we’ve actually seen is our politics are controlling us. Can you explain what you meant by that? Kaitlyn (04:36.045) Mmm. Kaitlyn (04:46.231) Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm. Yeah, I think a lot of us have this vision, this mental picture of political life as Christians that says, in our churches and our homes, we learn good theology, we become good Christians, and then we go out into the world and we just kind of exert our will. And we do the things that are good, and we are the forces for good in the world. And we don’t often pay attention to the ways, as I was just describing, that our participation forms us in really negative ways. And we might go in with really good intentions. We might think, I am reading scripture and scripture says these things about human communities and so I want to go out and kind of play my part in making that true on earth. And we might not pay sufficient attention to the ways in which it’s not just our intentions, our desire that’s going to determine what we actually do. It’s all of the ways in which. our participation in those things can malform us. And all of a sudden, we had all these good intentions, but all of a sudden, we’ve discovered that we’re doing something that’s really counter to the gospel and the teachings of scripture in terms of our communities. And I think the language of idolatry is really helpful for this, and like y ‘all have been exploring. But recognizing that we can often go in thinking, like we’re in control of this relationship. I offer my idol some kind of sacrifice, and this idol provides what I need. And we have this transactional relationship, and I’m the one that’s in charge. And if you look to scripture, the way that idols often function is they ask more and more of you and you get less and less of what you were promised in return until all of a sudden they’re the one controlling you, you’re not the one controlling anything about this relationship. And that’s often true of our political life. I mean, it’s true even if you look at the history of the American church, there have been some significant moments in our history where we have thought, okay, we are the ones that have the voting power here, where we are a significant voting block. We’ll tell these politicians what to do and they’ll do it. And it might have started out that way in some moments, but over time, the kind of allure of keeping that power, keeping the listening ear of that politician, means that we’re no longer the one in control of this relationship. Actually, it’s those political forces that are telling us what we should be advocating for, what we should believe. And it’s subtle and it’s seductive. And so you don’t realize it’s happening. It’d be really easy to identify it if it was just straightforward. But often, we don’t even know we’re going down that path until all of a sudden, there’s a revelation that. Kaitlyn (07:02.011) Something was wrong all along and we just didn’t see it. Austin (07:06.078) Well, okay, given that formative power that politics can have over us, should we just avoid politics and political engagement altogether? Kaitlyn (07:14.031) That’s a great question. And there have been some Christians throughout history who have kind of taken that path or at least explored it as a possibility. One important reason I think that that shouldn’t be the Christian response is in part because so much of the story of scripture is a story of the people of God oriented towards the flourishing of the larger world. This is the first conversation that God has with Abraham is. God saying, I will bless you, I will make you a great nation, you will be a blessing to the nations. These are inextricably linked. There’s no blessing for the people of God apart from blessing for the nations. And then you see that happen over and over again. And very often when the people of God go astray, it’s because they’re too internally focused. They’re not paying attention to the good of the vulnerable within their community and the vulnerable without. One of my favorite examples of this is in Luke four, when Jesus is quoting from Isaiah saying like, I am here to free the captive and give sight to the blind. And basically, I’m going to overturn the social system that is oppressing you. And the people are like, yes, we love it. They thought he was so great. And then the second he brings up these two examples of Elijah and Elisha, both going to these important prophets in this communal history that these people shared, he gives two examples of these two prophets going to people outside of the Jewish community and serving them and healing them first. And the second he gives those stories, the people want to throw him off a cliff. It’s like the second it’s not about us, the second we aren’t the oppressed, we actually might be harming someone else, suddenly this message of liberation doesn’t sound so great anymore. Suddenly we don’t know if you’re the guy for us. And so politics is not the only way that we fulfill this obligation for the people of God to seek the flourishing of our larger communities. But it is one very significant way, especially for… you know, Christians who live in modern democracies that have some ability to influence the conditions that our neighbors live under from really high level, top down kind of national policies, but all the way down to just engaging in your very local government. When I say, I think our response should not be isolation, it doesn’t mean you have to become obsessed with national politics and watch C -SPAN all the time and scroll Twitter for all the new updates. That actually might be really malforming your soul. What I mean is you show up. Kaitlyn (09:25.455) to a city council meeting. You build relationships with your neighbors so that if there is a structural problem harming them, you actually have the relationship to know about it, to write a letter or make a phone call to an elected official in your local area. Those are things that are practical outworkings of this story and scripture of the people of God being oriented to the larger flourishing of our communities. It’s not the whole story, but it’s a significant part of the story. Austin (09:49.694) In this series, something we keep coming back to is that how and why you do a thing might be as important as what it is you’re actually doing. And if we’re approaching politics from a place of love for God and love for neighbor, how will that change what we do? Kaitlyn (09:57.453) Mm -hmm. Kaitlyn (10:06.607) Mm -hmm. That’s a great question. Yeah, I mean too often in larger Christian history in general We have approached politics as a tool for gaining goods for ourselves And that’s a pretty human a fallen human impulse, right? That’s how most people approach politics I pay attention to what I will receive and I vote accordingly and You could vote for the same policies as you just described with this view towards just protecting yourself and your family, as you might do if you are trying to protect more vulnerable people. I think very often the policies will be different, but sometimes they could be the same. But the motivation that you have not only shapes the means through which you engage, it means your conversations with people who vote differently than you will be different. It means that you will have other things outside of this vote that also express this desire for other people’s flourishing. But I think it also means that over time, your votes might change. You might start out kind of voting the way that you’ve always known how to, with the party that your family was affiliated with, or with someone in your local area that you’re familiar with, and you do it out of genuine love for your neighbor. And over time, that love for your neighbor means you have relationships with people who are quite different from you, and you learn needs they have that you weren’t aware of. And you learn that maybe this policy that you thought was really good has this unintended effect of harming these other people that you would maybe otherwise never interact with. And then all of a sudden, your voting is different. It doesn’t have to immediately be different. I think right now we have this impulse to say, I have to be educated and informed about absolutely every issue so I can have the right perspective and vote the right way. And I think a way to lower the anxiety that people might feel about that is to say, you do the best you can with the resources available to you, but you start first with, do I have this genuine desire to care for my neighbor? Am I in relationship with that neighbor? Loving your neighbor is not something you do. in the abstract, hypothetically. There’s a lot of that happening right now. I’m voting for a hypothetical love for my neighbor. I would really love to vote with particular people in mind. When I vote, I will literally walk down the street from my house to a local church where voting happens. I will pass by many of my neighbors. And voting with their actual needs in mind might look very different. My ballot might not have one single party represented. It might change year to year because of different needs in my community that feel more pressing this year than another year. Kaitlyn (12:27.567) And so it doesn’t require, I think, it does require some research. It does require some care and attention, but I think it starts with going, am I actually a neighbor? Do I actually have relationships with the people around me? And am I open to my mind being changed out of love for them? My mind might not change. They might actually say, yeah, this policy that you like, we like it too. And actually there are these really good effects from it. But that humility, that holding your hands wide enough to say, okay, I’m doing this with the best of my knowledge. But I could be wrong, and the relationships that I’m in with people from different perspectives and different backgrounds might change me, and that’s okay. Austin (13:02.718) How do we cultivate that kind of love in our lives to where love for neighbor is the driving force behind everything we do, not just our politics? Kaitlyn (13:07.887) Hmm. Kaitlyn (13:11.599) Yeah, that’s a good question and a really hard one. There’s a lot of social scientists that have done some research on how actually being in close proximity to people who are really different from you can sometimes actually not change your mind about things because you discover that you really don’t like them very much. I think one gift that the Christian church has to offer the world, and we have not done that well very often, but I do think it’s important to say we have gifts to offer our wider communities. And one of those gifts, Austin (13:24.894) Yeah, yeah. Kaitlyn (13:41.967) I think is a story about the world that says the weight of the world is not on my shoulders. I will not be the one to create perfect justice and peace on earth. I can seek it faithfully with the resources available to me. But I also can hold my decisions about these things a little lighter. Because if I’m wrong, I mean, I want to be right. I’m going to do everything in my power to be right and to act faithfully. But if I make mistakes, if I misjudge a policy or a politician, that does not change. Austin (13:48.574) Ah, that’s good. Kaitlyn (14:11.599) the end of the story of the end of the world. The story of the end of the world is still perfect peace and justice and restoration of all creation. And the reason I give that answer as this question about how do I love better is partially because I think what makes loving people, especially in an election season, so difficult is not that they’ve come to different conclusions about policies than me. And so it’s like, it’s just a rational disagreement. That wouldn’t create the level of animosity we have. Part of what’s going on is I have to create the perfect world. And so if you and I have different ideas about how to do that, this is life or death. This is everything. And one of the best gifts I think the Christian church has to offer is that we can say the weight of the world is not on our shoulders without saying, like some other philosophies throughout history have said, nothing matters. Just worry less. Fear less. Things are not that big a deal. We can say things are very important. These policies we’re talking about when it comes to the houses people live in, the food they have accessible to them, who can come to the country and under what conditions, these are important questions. We care about the body, we care about well -being of humans, that’s important. I can believe that and I can also believe the weight of the world is not on my shoulders. I can act faithfully, I can partner with people who are different from me. And that kind of story, I think, is part of how we learn this kind of love, not losing the sense of what we truly believe. about the death and resurrection and return of Christ in our political life, but then starting to foster that in terms of cooperating with people on things that we can agree with. I talk to churches a lot of the time who are like, we are super politically diverse. I don’t know how we’re gonna make it through this election season. And one of the things I often say to them is, look, getting people together and having a political conversation can be good, and I can give you some resources for trying to do that well. What I would first actually recommend you do is say, okay, we might vote very differently in this election, but is there one… community cause that we actually can find some common ground on. And can we show up together, volunteer at a soup kitchen, show up to, I mean, in my community, it was pretty recently in a very political way, there was some energy around trying to get the office that deals with housing disputes in our city to have someone who was bilingual and speak Spanish because most of the people dealing with housing disputes spoke Spanish and there was no one in that office that could advocate for them because they didn’t speak their language. Austin (16:09.918) So that’s good. Kaitlyn (16:31.919) So people who were voting for different people in different parties, had very different political perspectives in a church as Christians, we could say, we’ll show up to that meeting together and just be the voices and the bodies that say that’s an important cause for justice in our community. That sort of seems like we’re avoiding the question by only focusing on the things we agree on, but I think that’s one of the ways that we build love for one another is to say there are things we can cooperate with each other on. And actually, when I hear things that people in my church say that I really disagree with, that I really struggle to believe well of them, and then I show up to this one thing that we agree on and I see their care for people and I see that we can work well together, it builds up that muscle that kind of can hold against the part of me that wants to doubt, wants to assume the worst of them, wants to believe that if they disagree with me on this thing, it must be because they’re evil. I have lived experience that says, no, they care about people in our community, but we have disagreements and that’s okay and we can talk about them. But I’m coming from a place of, I can’t believe the worst of you, because I’ve seen better of you than the worst of you. Austin (17:33.822) And while we’re talking about the church, getting back to an earlier question, what role does the local church play in our spiritual formation? Kaitlyn (17:39.791) Hmm, yeah. I mean, another part of the book where I was really concerned to kind of counteract some of the messages that I had heard was that spiritual formation is individual. It’s just about me and Jesus, and spiritual disciplines are about me being a better person on the inside. And there is an element of that that’s true. But so much of what I want to say to churches when they’re going, how do I handle this divisive election year, starts with the regular rhythms of the church that actually, throughout time and around the world, have given us a pretty good foundation very often. Some of our churches forget that we have these kinds of resources that actually, you know, receiving communion together every week. We have very different ways of doing that and thinking about what it means and talking about it. And yet we have this foundational practice where we say who we most intimately and truly belong to is one another. Christians across time and around the world, that is our true sense of loyalty. What if we talked about that more before we received communion? We don’t have to give a political speech. We just recognize that in our community, there are forces telling us, these are your people and these are not your people. And every week we will gather together and say, these are our people. And also, Christians who don’t speak our language, who are not American, who don’t share any of our political beliefs, they belong to us too. We are one people. So things like communion, things like baptism, the way we talk about baptism in a similar way. If we are now inaugurating someone into this community, what does that mean? One of the things it means is that, Austin (18:50.334) Yeah, yeah, yeah. Kaitlyn (19:03.631) their needs and concerns become our needs and concerns. So if we have people we’re baptizing into our community who come from different backgrounds than us, that places demands on us. So are we doing those kind of regular spiritually formative activities that aren’t just ideas? They are important ideas, but they involve our bodies, they involve us being in person together, they involve repeated actions and words. And there’s lots of opportunities for people, I mean, churches that have very different ideas about. what we do together corporately, who sing different kinds of songs, who use different words. My biggest kind of encouragement is to say, pay attention to the words you use regularly, the times you use your bodies repetitively. That’s how we are learning most deeply. Don’t miss those opportunities to teach these kind of foundational things to people of who you most intimately belong to and what story you most intimately believe and the security that you have in this story in which you are ultimately. secure and safe and the end of the world is justice and peace and mercy. Those are kinds of things that have great political effects and might actually be more formative than a one -off sermon about politics or a Sunday school class about politics, which can be great. And I love doing stuff like that. But I think more foundationally, we in churches can practice these gifts the church has always had and say, let’s just spend a little time thinking about how we articulate what we’re doing, what language we use, and making sure that that language is giving us an opportunity to form in our community these foundational beliefs about. who I am and who I belong to and what story I’m a part of. Austin (20:32.958) That answer sort of got to what I was gonna ask with this next question, but you write that the church is a political organization. What do you mean by that? Kaitlyn (20:40.495) Hmm, yeah, a scary statement. A political organization. Throughout the book, I am using the word political in a broader sense than people tend to think. So often when someone says political, the images that come to mind are the Supreme Court or Congress or the presidential election. And those are part of politics. But the word politics, even in its root, comes from polis, this word that means city or community. So when I talk about something being political, I just mean it involves. the forming of a common life together. So how you vote, but also the relationships you have with your neighbor and also the structures that you live under, the decisions that get made about how your neighborhood works and where you go get your groceries and where you go to church. And so I say the church is a political organization because as I said earlier, it is oriented towards the flourishing of the larger community that it’s in. And if you look throughout scripture, it is impossible to believe that God doesn’t care. about how communities are structured. There are instructions in the Old and New Testament that say this is how you care for vulnerable people. And it’s not just about changing your heart towards them. That’s important. The prophets have a lot to say about changing your heart. They also have a lot to say in the Old and New Testament about the structure in which communities function best. The law has tons of very specific stipulations where God cared about how that community worked together. That’s true even in the New Testament. when there is a dispute in the beginning of Acts about what widows are receiving what kinds of food, the answer is not just individual heart change, though that’s important. The answer is, let’s figure this out on a structural level. Who is going to distribute food so that it is distributed fairly? And so that tells me that the church has a certain form and it is designed to be a place where people are flourishing in community and to seek the larger flourishing of the community it’s in. And so in that sense, it’s political. It very importantly should not be partisan meaning of a particular party or supporting a particular party but sometimes in church when we talk about like I don’t want to get political or let’s not make this political we’re kind of what we really often mean is partisan and I think that’s an important line to say people from different parties should be able to worship together in a church. If we say we don’t want to be political though we’re kind of lobbing off a huge section of our lives and saying that is not under the purview of the gospel and that’s where I think we can actually go really wrong. Austin (23:01.406) Well, you mentioned that the church being political is a controversial or scary statement. You made an even more controversial one, perhaps, in saying that you thought the moral majority was insufficiently political. Which, for a lot of people our age and younger, they might recoil at that. But what did you mean by that? Kaitlyn (23:14.285) Yeah. Kaitlyn (23:20.108) Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So part of the story I wanted to tell in the book was to kind of flip our understanding of, you know, we’ve all become a more aware over the last few years of there is this really tight relationship between American evangelicals and the Republican Party. And I think our response to that sometimes has been, let’s just get the politics out of it. The politics is the bad part. And what I meant when I said it was insufficiently political was that often really what we were functionally doing is saying there’s a set of rules. for my spiritual, personal church life. And in that world, I listen to the Sermon on the Mount. I say turn the other cheek. I say love your enemies. In the political realm, there’s a different set of rules. Let’s just be real. We have to play by a little bit of the rules of the world. And so we got to take power and we can get it. We got to compromise some moral compromises if that’s what gets us our ultimate political goal. And so it was insufficiently political in that it wasn’t really taking seriously how the Christian faith, shaped politics. It was using the Christian faith as kind of a symbol, some language, some justification for those policies. It mobilized lots of individual Christians, but it wasn’t sufficiently political to say, actually, the story of scripture doesn’t just give us a few policies to support. It tells us a way of being in the world that is important. My friend Michael Ware will often say that when he talks to people about politics, they’ll basically say some version of like, Jesus couldn’t have known how hard this is. Like he had no idea what I was dealing with. And part of the underlying assumption there is the way of Jesus is fine for my personal life. That’s how I should interact with people on a personal level. The way of Jesus is just too simplistic for our complicated political world. And what I want to say instead is actually the way of Jesus is deeply political. It shapes not only the things we care about, the people we want to protect, the concerns we have for our community. It also tells us certain options for achieving those political goals are off the table. Kaitlyn (25:19.596) We don’t steamroll over people. We don’t use violence. We don’t take the kind of easy compromising way out where we kind of throw some people under the bus in order to achieve what we really want. That’s a really robustly political account of Christianity. And I think we actually haven’t done it far enough in the past. Austin (25:36.83) That’s a really helpful contribution to this conversation and thank you for making it as well and winsomely as you did in this book. You alluded to this earlier, but we’ve just been talking about things we can do to cultivate love of neighbor. Are there things we should stop doing that would help us love our neighbors better? Like you mentioned media consumption habits. Kaitlyn (25:48.172) Mm -hmm. Kaitlyn (25:53.876) Yeah. Yeah, that’s a great question. I do think some of us should consider certain media outlets, just cutting them off for a while. We might want to consult our community and see if they think there are any media sources that we seem overly invested in. I think another thing we might want to consider when it comes to media consumption is not just getting rid of certain media forms, but also spending some time evaluating what kind of stories and feelings that media is forming in us. And this relates to our love for neighbors. So really, whether it’s a news outlet or a movie or a TV show or a podcast or anything, spending time after media consumption and asking yourself, who was presented as my neighbor or my kind of people in this media? Who was presented as an enemy or someone to either fear or hate or treat with condescension or kind of disgust? And then asking other d – deeper questions. What did this media present as the real problem in the world? And did it present a solution to that real problem? What kind of good life was described in this media? And is it a good life that actually is described in scripture or not? Those are the kinds of questions that I think might lead us sometimes to say, okay, that form of media, those answers to my questions have told me that one’s done. We are not consuming that anymore at all. It might tell us I consume less of it or I consume less of it at certain times or, It’s actually really important, maybe for your job, to consume some form of media. And you’re like, I’m never going to consume it without asking these questions afterwards, because I need to keep my head on straight. I need to remember what’s true. Because we think we’re these rational creatures that can just consume this information and sort out the bad and the good and we’ll be fine. We are loving, desiring creatures that when we are presented with really powerfully effective stories, want to latch onto them. And so we might think we can go in. and just be fine. And then somewhere along the way, that algorithm on YouTube or on Twitter has let us down a rabbit hole, and we have somehow ended up loving really wrong things and hating people made in God’s image. And so those are the kinds of questions I want us to ask to prevent that from happening. Another thing we might want to consider not doing, and this is not a hard and fast rule, but something just for people to consider, a lot of us might be really, I, Kaitlyn (28:18.378) hypothetically invested in engaging politically, and we might think what that means is national politics. And that can be a really great way of loving our neighbor. Some of us might have learned that engaging in that way has really caused us to hate certain people in our communities, or fear them, or treat them with condescension. So maybe that’s a not for right now, but that doesn’t mean politics is not for right now. It might mean I’m stopping the politics at the national level for a season to kind of reorder my desires and my loves. And in order to help facilitate that, I’m getting really involved with some local political issue, or I’m really invested in becoming actual friends with my neighbors, or I’m showing up to this service project in my community doing those kinds of things that parallels. I’m saying no to this thing that I don’t think is forming me in a good way, but I’m not just saying no. I’m saying yes to this other thing that has the potential to be a really positive, formative force in my life. Austin (29:07.774) and powerful for your neighbor. I know you’re not just talking about voting, but like your vote for DA might affect your neighbor’s lives a lot more than your vote for president. Kaitlyn (29:16.012) Yes. Absolutely. Austin (29:21.118) Well, thank you for this conversation. This has been really helpful and the book is great. Let me close by asking you this, and you don’t have to answer, it’s too personal. But when you consider the state of American Christianity and how we engage politics, are you hopeful for the future? Kaitlyn (29:35.628) Hmm. Honestly, yes. I mean, it depends on the moment, certainly. But generally speaking, one of the reasons that I am hopeful is I am hopeful that we will continue to have these kinds of conversations. I think a lot of young Christians are beginning to realize that politics does affect our faith, and our faith should affect politics. And we’re starting to have some conversations about how we go about doing that well. Austin (29:39.518) I thought you were. Kaitlyn (30:04.332) I’m also honestly really hopeful because I have seen in my own life, in the life of my church, that people have changed. I think sometimes part of our despair over politics is we look at some of our neighbors or our family members that maybe are making poor media consumption choices, maybe they’re voting in ways that really genuinely make us really sad or distraught. It does seem like what they’re doing is harmful to the world. That feeling is totally real. But I think sometimes what we miss is that change can happen. And I understand why it feels like it can’t, because things can seem really dark. But I have seen people change their minds. I’ve seen people, because of relationships they were in, because of books that they read, because of long, long suffering conversations with people who cared about them, have changed their mind. I’ve changed my mind. I mean, I have changed my mind drastically about lots of issues over the last few years. And that has been a reminder to me that no one is just a lost cause. No one is just never going to come around. There is great possibility, especially among the community of believers, for the Holy Spirit to convict people, to continue to convict me, to change us, to bring to light areas of our life that we have really been captivated by an idol and show us a better way forward. And so I guess that’s a long way of saying, like, I believe in the Holy Spirit, and so I am hopeful because of that. Austin (31:28.254) That’s a really good answer. I mean, as I think about it, I get more encouraged the smaller my world is, if that makes sense. Like I log on Twitter, I get really discouraged, but I go to church on Sunday and I leave really encouraged. And that, insofar as that feels like a small consolation, that’s a me problem. Because God has said that this community of people I’m in covenant with in relationship is actually really, really important. And if somebody’s wrong on the internet, that’s not… Kaitlyn (31:36.012) Mm -hmm. Kaitlyn (31:54.38) Yes. Austin (31:58.142) Calm down and go to church. Kaitlyn (31:59.784) Yep, yep, amen. Austin (32:03.166) Well, again, Sister, thank you for the time. Thank you for the book. Why don’t we close in prayer and praying for perspective and that Christians would just would grow in love and that would be our motivator. I’ll start and you close us. Kaitlyn (32:11.306) Mmm. Austin (32:21.982) Heavenly Father, thank you for this time. Thank you for Caitlin and all the ways you’ve gifted her and the way she is blessing your people. We pray, Lord, for perspective and for growth in love among your people. May we stand out as we engage not only politically, but in everything we do. May we be marked by love. May that be the driving force behind everything we do. And we just acknowledge that only you can work that in us. So we ask you to do that in Jesus’ name. Amen. Kaitlyn (32:53.612) God, I know that many of us are afraid, anxious, worried about friends and family, worried about the state of our country, of our neighbors. God, I pray that you would comfort us in our anxiety about this election year, about our neighborhoods, about particular issues that we feel passionate about and worried about vulnerable people. God, I pray that you would comfort us, calm our hearts. I pray that you would illuminate ways for us to practically love our neighbors, both in interpersonal ways and in political ways. Um, God, I pray that you would bring to light specific ways that we could engage in our communities and healthy ways. I pray that you would bring to light for us and our families and our neighbors, media we’re consuming that needs to stop practices that need to stop. And then ways that we could engage more healthily ways that we could say yes to our communities. ways that we could say yes to the way that you are leading before us, before we come up with the policies or the ideas or the ways to love our neighbor. God, we know you are already moving and working, and we pray that you will illuminate ways for us to join you in that work. We thank you that the weight of the world is not on our shoulders, that you are coming back to make all things new, that you will restore and redeem and wipe every tear from every eye. And God, we pray that we would believe that strongly. and act in light of it. It’s in your son’s name we pray. Amen. Austin (34:27.774) Amen. Well, thank you, Caitlin, again for coming on and friends can’t come in this book enough. We’ll link to it in the show notes, but it is highly recommended. And thank you so much for listening. Grace and peace. Kaitlyn (34:41.654) Thanks, Austin. Austin (34:43.294) Thank you, Caitlin. Sorry, I know.