A Conversation About Wisdom
Why Not Communism?A Wisdom Conversation on Freedom, Faith, and the Future of AmericaA recent generation of Americans has grown more open to communism and socialism than at any point in America’s history. For many, the appeal is common sensical: rising costs, widening inequality, institutional distrust, and a sense that the American promise is beyond grasp. The question deserves a serious answer and not just slogans.This fall, xxxxxxxxx University invites you to Why Not Communism?, the next installment of our Wisdom Conversations series. Together we’ll examine the moral, economic, and spiritual claims of collectivist ideologies, the historical record of where they have led, and the deeper human longings they attempt to address. More importantly, we’ll ask what a free, faithful, and flourishing America should offer in their place.This is not a lecture. It is a rigorous, civil conversation unafraid of hard questions. Moderated by the president of the University, we’ll bring together some of the best minds to help us consider:
+ Why communism and socialism continue to attract each new generation, despite a century of evidence.+ What the Christian worldview and related moral tradition has to say about property, work, community, and the dignity of the human person.+ How free societies can address real injustices without surrendering the freedom and liberty that make repair and flourishing possible.+ What parents, pastors, educators, and citizens can do now to prepare the next generation for the ideological contests ahead.
Whether you’re a student wrestling with these ideas for the first time, a leader shaping institutions, or a citizen who senses that something important is at stake, you belong in this conversation. Join us!
My Response: What Does Wisdom Require?
Which sounds very much like a conversation worth having.
And yet, the more carefully I read the announcement, the more difficult it became to reconcile its invitation to an open conversation with the assumptions already embedded within it. What it announced was not quite what it seemed to be saying.
The concern deepened when I considered the invited speakers, their public perspectives, and the pattern of similar programs previously sponsored by the university. What initially appeared to be an open inquiry increasingly appeared to be a conversation whose principal conclusions had already been largely determined.
Communism and socialism were introduced as political programs whose attraction needed to be explained anew “despite a century of evidence.” Collectivism supplied the ideological danger. Freedom and liberty supplied the necessary conditions for a nation's repair and flourishing. And a Christian moral worldview was presented as the interpretive framework through which the alternative would be considered. Parents, pastors, educators, and citizens were summoned to prepare the next generation for the “ideological contests ahead.”
Perhaps each of those claims could be defended.
But taken together, they raised a different question for me.
Where, exactly, was the conversation going?
The announcement said that difficult questions would be welcomed. Yet its language appeared to have answered some of the most important questions before anyone entered the room. One political and economic tradition was positioned as the object requiring explanation. Another constellation of commitments - freedom, liberty, Christian faithfulness, and a particular imagination of American flourishing - provided the largely unquestioned standpoint from which the explanation would proceed.
Such concerns do not make a conversation dishonest. Nor do they mean that communism's historical record should be softened, forgotten, or excused. Its record of authoritarianism, repression, coercion, censorship, imprisonment, and enormous human suffering must remain part of any responsible consideration of it.
But the decision to examine communism was not what bothered me.
What bothered me was the tone underneath the words... and especially the word wisdom.
For wisdom surely asks something more of us than identifying the failures of another worldview. It asks whether we are willing to examine the worldview through which we have learned to recognize those failures.
And that is considerably more difficult.
Because the moment we begin speaking about a “free, faithful, and flourishing America,” we are no longer simply asking about communism.
We are making a claim about America.
We are making a claim about freedom.
We are making a claim about faithfulness.
And we are making a claim about what it means for human beings to flourish.
Those claims deserve the same scrutiny on our side of the ledger as we are prepared to give the ideology standing across from us.
Perhaps this is where a wisdom conversation must actually begin.
Wisdom Requires More Than Certainty
It is possible to be right and still not be wise.
That may be one of the more difficult things for any of us to admit. We naturally assume that wisdom follows from having understood something correctly. Gather enough evidence, learn enough history, expose enough falsehood, and surely wisdom will follow.
But history gives us little reason for such confidence.
Human beings have frequently possessed facts while misunderstanding their significance. We have defended true principles while applying them selectively. We have recognized injustice when committed by others while remaining strangely unable to recognize similar patterns within ourselves. Religious communities have been especially susceptible to this temptation because deeply held convictions can acquire the additional authority of divine sanction. Once we become convinced not only that we are right but that our rightness represents faithfulness itself, questioning our interpretation can begin to feel like questioning the truth.
Certainty is not necessarily the enemy of wisdom. There are things about which we should be certain. Human beings should not be tortured. Political dissent should not justify imprisonment. Governments should not disappear their opponents. People should not be deprived of dignity because they belong to the wrong class, race, religion, nationality, or political community. The horrors produced by authoritarian regimes do not become morally ambiguous simply because we wish to remain open-minded.
Wisdom does not require moral indecision.
But wisdom does require something certainty alone cannot provide: the capacity to ask whether the framework through which we understand reality is itself adequate to the reality before us.
It turns the examination around.
Instead of asking only, What is wrong with their worldview?, wisdom eventually asks, What might my worldview prevent me from seeing?
Instead of asking only, Why do they believe what they believe?, wisdom asks, What experiences might make their beliefs intelligible to them?
Instead of asking only, What evidence proves them wrong?, wisdom asks, What evidence would I be willing to receive if it challenged me?
And perhaps most uncomfortably: What would have to happen for me to change my mind?
If the answer is nothing, we may possess conviction. We may even possess truth. But we have placed ourselves in a difficult relationship with wisdom.
This does not mean every idea deserves equal consideration. It does not mean that communism and democracy, authoritarianism and liberty, oppression and freedom are merely alternative perspectives between which a wise person refuses to choose. Nor does wisdom require us to surrender judgment whenever someone disagrees with us.
It means something simpler and more demanding.
Wisdom requires that judgment remain answerable to reality.
And reality includes more than ideas.
It includes history and evidence, certainly. But it also includes consequences. It includes the lives of people who flourish beneath our institutions and the lives of people who do not. It includes experiences that confirm our expectations and experiences that disturb them. It includes voices we recognize as authoritative and voices we would rather dismiss. It includes the people standing inside our communities and those standing beyond their boundaries asking to be seen.
This is where certainty can quietly become dangerous.
Not because conviction itself is dangerous, but because conviction can gradually become a closed interpretive circle. We know what the problem is because our worldview tells us what the problem is. We know who threatens us because our interpretation identifies the threat. We know what the evidence means because the evidence is interpreted within the same framework that told us what to expect.
Eventually the worldview becomes remarkably difficult to challenge because every challenge can be incorporated as further evidence that the worldview was correct.
- The critic proves that we are under attack.
- The dissenter proves that our institutions are being undermined.
- Social unrest proves that social order is collapsing.
- Changing cultural values prove that traditional values are disappearing.
- Economic criticism proves hostility toward freedom.
Accordingly, the outsider's refusal to accept our description of reality becomes evidence that the outsider does not understand reality.
At that point something important has happened.
We are no longer merely interpreting the world.
We have constructed a world in which our interpretation continually confirms itself.
This temptation belongs to no single political tradition. Revolutionary movements have done it. Governments have done it. Religious communities have done it. Progressive movements have done it. Conservative movements have done it. Nations do it. Churches do it. Universities do it. Individuals do it.
And we do it too.
That final admission matters.
For it would be remarkably easy to criticize a Christian university for approaching a conversation with its conclusions substantially formed while approaching our own criticism of that university in precisely the same manner.
If we already know what these Christians are like, what motivates them, what political agenda lies beneath their words, and what their conversation will inevitably become, then we have reproduced the very interpretive closure we claim to oppose.
Wisdom therefore places an obligation upon the critic as surely as it places one upon the criticized.
- We must listen carefully enough to allow for the possibility that we have misunderstood.
- We must distinguish what people actually say from what we suspect they mean.
- We must resist converting disagreement into caricature.
- We must acknowledge legitimate concerns even when we believe those concerns have been framed badly.
- And we must remain capable of discovering something true in a conversation whose larger direction troubles us.
This is why the acknowledgment of communism's historical record matters so much here. Those histories are not rhetorical obstacles to be cleared away before making another political argument. They are human realities. The person who escaped political repression, lost family to an authoritarian state, or witnessed the destruction of civil freedom brings something into the conversation that cannot simply be explained away by a competing theory.
Wisdom listens.
But then wisdom keeps listening.
Because another person may enter the room carrying a different history.
Perhaps that person has known poverty in the midst of extraordinary wealth. Perhaps another has worked full-time and remained unable to afford housing. Another may have watched medical debt overwhelm a family. Another may have experienced racial exclusion within a society describing itself as free. Another may have fled violence only to discover that being a stranger makes welcome uncertain. Another may be a young person who does not dream of communist revolution at all but has begun asking why an economic system producing remarkable abundance leaves so many people anxious about whether they can afford ordinary life.
Their experiences do not prove socialism.
They do not disprove capitalism.
They do something more basic.
They enter the conversation as reality.
And once they do, wisdom has another obligation.
It must listen to them too.
Perhaps, then, the difference between certainty and wisdom is not that certainty possesses convictions while wisdom possesses none. Wisdom may hold convictions quite strongly.
The difference is that wisdom remains relational.
It understands that none of us encounters reality alone. Other people see portions of the world that we cannot see from where we stand. Their perspectives may be incomplete. They may be mistaken. They may interpret their experiences badly.
So may we.
Which means that the presence of another person is not merely an obstacle to our understanding of reality. The other may be part of how reality corrects us. And if that is true, the question confronting any proposed wisdom conversation becomes considerably more demanding than whether knowledgeable people have been invited to speak.
We must also ask:
Who is in the room?
And perhaps more importantly:
Who is not?
Not because every public discussion must represent every possible viewpoint. That would be impossible. Nor because every position deserves equal standing. Some claims are poorly supported. Some have been repeatedly contradicted by evidence. Some political arrangements have produced consequences severe enough that history must weigh heavily against them.
But if the stated purpose of a conversation is to ask what a “free, faithful, and flourishing America” should become, then the question has moved beyond the merits of communism or socialism. It has become a question about a shared society.
And shared societies cannot be understood adequately from only one location within them.
This is where I found myself returning to the language of the original announcement. It spoke sincerely about “deeper human longings.” That phrase deserves attention. For if we really want to know why younger Americans are increasingly dissatisfied with inherited political and economic arrangements, then we must be willing to listen to those longings before deciding what they mean.
Perhaps some young people have been persuaded by romanticized versions of socialism. Perhaps they do not know enough history. Perhaps words such as socialism and communism have become so loosely used that people employ them without understanding their very different histories and meanings. All of that deserves investigation.
But perhaps something else is happening too.
A generation has come of age amid extraordinary wealth while finding home ownership increasingly distant. Many have watched the costs of education, healthcare, food, childcare, and housing rise while economic security feels less certain. They have inherited institutions they are repeatedly told to trust while witnessing financial crises, political dysfunction, war, environmental anxiety, and widening disparities of wealth. Some work hard and still struggle to imagine achieving the stability their parents once assumed would follow from doing so.
One need not accept their political conclusions to recognize the reality of their questions. Indeed, the university's own announcement recognizes many of these conditions. It names rising costs, widening inequality, institutional distrust, and the feeling that the American promise has moved beyond reach.
That acknowledgment is important.
But once those realities have been admitted into the conversation, they cannot simply become an explanation for why people are vulnerable to the wrong ideology. They must also be allowed to question the society whose failures helped produce the dissatisfaction in the first place.
Otherwise we have listened only halfway. We have heard suffering as an explanation for ideological error without allowing suffering to become evidence about the world in which that suffering occurs.
And wisdom must surely do more than that.
The same problem becomes even clearer when we consider the language of American flourishing.
What does a flourishing America look like from the center?
And what does it look like from somewhere else?
The answer may sound very different from the experience of an immigrant family uncertain whether it will continue to belong. It may sound different to a refugee who came to America seeking safety but discovered that the stranger can quickly become an object of suspicion. It may sound different within communities whose racial histories include slavery, segregation, exclusion, displacement, or continuing inequalities that cannot simply be wished into the past. It may sound different to the working poor, to families living one emergency away from financial crisis, or to people who have come to believe that the institutions surrounding them hear their struggles primarily when those struggles become politically useful.
These experiences do not settle political arguments.
That distinction is essential.
The immigrant is not automatically correct about immigration policy because she is an immigrant. The poor person does not automatically possess the correct economic theory because he is poor. A racial minority does not become infallible when speaking about race. A refugee does not possess privileged knowledge about every question confronting a nation.
But each knows something about reality from a location another person does not occupy.
That is why their presence matters.
The question is not whether the other possesses the truth while we do not. The question is whether a truth about our shared reality may be visible from the other's location that remains difficult to see from our own.
This is especially important whenever words such as freedom and flourishing are used.
Freedom is easy to affirm abstractly. It becomes more complicated when experienced concretely.
A business owner may understand freedom partly as protection from unnecessary governmental interference. A worker may experience freedom as having enough economic security to refuse exploitation without losing a home. A religious community may understand freedom as the ability to practice its convictions publicly. A person outside that religious community may understand the same freedom as protection from having someone else's convictions imposed upon them. A property owner may understand freedom through possession and independence. A homeless person may wonder how meaningful such freedom is without somewhere safe to sleep.
These meanings need not cancel one another.
They reveal why conversation is necessary.
Freedom is not less real because it is experienced relationally. It becomes more concrete.
And so does flourishing.
If I am flourishing while my neighbor is suffering, that does not necessarily mean my flourishing is illegitimate. Human life will never distribute fortune evenly. Illness, accident, ability, circumstance, choice, history, and sheer contingency ensure that our lives unfold differently.
But my neighbor's suffering places a question against my flourishing.
What relation exists between the two?
Does my flourishing depend upon arrangements that diminish someone else's possibilities? Does the institution benefiting me exclude another? Does my freedom require another person's vulnerability? Have I mistaken my own experience of society for the condition of society itself?
These are uncomfortable questions precisely because they cannot be answered by political slogans.
They require relational encounter.
And this brings us back to the room.
Imagine a conversation about American flourishing in which everyone present has benefited substantially from the existing arrangement. Their gratitude may be entirely genuine. Their defense of the society may be supported by considerable evidence. Their experiences matter.
But something would still be missing.
Now imagine a room populated only by people who have suffered beneath those arrangements. Their grievances might be equally genuine. Their testimony might expose realities the first room could not see. But their experience alone would not encompass the whole either.
Wisdom requires neither room to silence the other. It requires the rooms somehow to meet. That meeting is difficult because the presence of another person complicates the stories we tell about ourselves.
The refugee who escaped an authoritarian communist society complicates any romantic account of communism.
The worker unable to afford ordinary life amid enormous national wealth complicates any romantic account of capitalism.
The immigrant who finds opportunity and builds a thriving life complicates an account of America as merely oppressive.
The immigrant who encounters hostility and exclusion complicates an account of America as naturally welcoming.
The person whose Christian community has provided love, meaning, generosity, and belonging complicates an account of religion as merely harmful.
The person wounded or excluded by a Christian community complicates an account of Christian faithfulness that measures itself only by doctrinal conviction.
Reality has an inconvenient habit of refusing our simpler stories.
Perhaps that is why we need one another. Not because everyone is equally right, but because none of us stands everywhere.
There is another question hiding inside the university's language that makes this especially important. When it asks what a free, faithful, and flourishing America should offer “in their place,” the sentence quietly establishes a we and a they.
Who belongs to that we?
Perhaps nothing exclusionary was intended. Ordinary language inevitably uses such pronouns. But within a conversation about national identity, faithfulness, political ideology, and social belonging, the question deserves attention.
Is the young socialist part of the we, or someone to whom we must offer a better answer? Is the secular citizen part of the we when we speak of a faithful America? Is the Muslim neighbor? The immigrant? The refugee? The person who loves America but understands its history differently? The Christian who interprets Christianity differently?
At what point does the language by which we describe those with whom we disagree begin placing them outside the community whose future is being imagined?
This is not merely a political question.
It is a question about otherness.
Every community necessarily contains difference. A pluralistic society contains a great deal of it. We do not overcome that difference by pretending everyone ultimately believes the same things, nor by reducing convictions until nothing consequential remains between us.
The challenge is learning how to remain in relation across genuine difference.
That is much harder than tolerance.
But conversation asks something more.
Conversation brings the other near enough to speak.
And wisdom brings the other near enough that what is spoken might matter.
This is where otherness becomes risky.
For once the other is allowed to become more than a category - more than communist, socialist, conservative, liberal, Christian, secular, immigrant, foreigner, believer, unbeliever - the security of our abstractions begins to weaken.
A person appears. And persons are considerably more difficult to dismiss than categories. Their stories complicate ours. Their suffering makes claims upon us. Their questions expose assumptions we did not know we carried. Their humanity prevents us, or should prevent us, from treating them merely as examples of an ideology we have already decided how to judge.
This does not mean we abandon judgment.
It means judgment must occur after encounter rather than instead of it.
Perhaps this is why the most important question facing a wisdom conversation is not simply whether the people in the room are intelligent, accomplished, knowledgeable, or sincere. It may be whether the room has been arranged so that anyone present could actually be surprised.
Could the defender of capitalism discover something true in the socialist's criticism?
Could the socialist discover something true in the testimony of someone who fled a communist society?
Could the Christian discover something about Christian faithfulness from the person Christianity has excluded?
Could the citizen who celebrates America hear the citizen whose American experience has been painful without immediately interpreting that criticism as hostility toward the nation?
Could any of us listen without first requiring the other to become more like us?
If not, we may still have a valuable lecture. We may have an effective defense of important convictions. We may have excellent historical testimony. We may even have a civil exchange. But wisdom asks for something more.
Wisdom does not require the other to agree with us - or even to be right - before we are willing to listen.
And once the other has been heard, the next danger becomes apparent.
We may listen to a person and still never truly encounter them.
We need only turn the person back into a category.
This is one of the quieter powers of political and religious language. Names help us make sense of an enormously complicated social world. We need them. Christian, Muslim, conservative, progressive, capitalist, socialist, immigrant, citizen - these words identify real differences, histories, convictions, and communities. Without categories, much human thought would become impossible.
But categories can also become substitutes for people.
Once that happens, the name begins doing the work that encounter should have done.
If someone is a socialist, we may assume we already understand what that person believes about government, property, freedom, and responsibility. If someone is a conservative Christian, another person may assume that they already know what that Christian believes about women, sexuality, immigration, science, or politics. If someone is an immigrant, refugee, secularist, capitalist, progressive, evangelical, or academic, the category can arrive before the person does.
And sometimes the person never gets a chance to catch up.
This is how difference can gradually become distance.
We begin with a real disagreement. The disagreement acquires a name. The name gathers associations. Those associations become a story. The story tells us what kind of people stand on the other side of the disagreement. Before long, we are no longer responding primarily to particular human beings but to what they have come to represent.
This is especially dangerous when fear enters the story.
Fear is not always irrational. Societies face real dangers. Political movements can become destructive. Religious communities can become oppressive. Economic systems can exploit. Governments can become authoritarian. History provides ample reason not to dismiss warnings merely because they make us uncomfortable.
But fear changes the way we see.
Under fear, difference can begin to look like danger. Criticism can look like disloyalty. Social change can look like social collapse. Political opposition can become an existential threat. The stranger can become suspicious simply because the stranger is unfamiliar.
And once another person has become a threat, our moral relationship to that person begins to change.
We listen differently.
We interpret differently.
We remember different facts.
We excuse things from our own side that we would condemn immediately from theirs.
Most importantly, we can begin to believe that protecting ourselves requires diminishing them.
This is where a conversation about communism becomes relevant to something much larger than communism. The atrocities committed by twentieth-century communist regimes were not produced merely by bad economic theory. They were also enabled by ways of imagining other human beings.
People became enemies of the revolution, enemies of the people, members of suspect classes, ideological contaminants, obstacles to the future being built. Once persons had been converted into categories of threat, actions that would otherwise have appeared morally intolerable could be defended as necessary.
That lesson should remain with us.
But if we learn it only as a lesson about communists, we have not learned very much.
The deeper warning concerns what human beings can do whenever an ideology becomes powerful enough to determine beforehand who belongs, who threatens, whose testimony matters, and whose suffering can be justified for the sake of some supposedly greater good.
No political community is immune to that temptation. No religious community is either.
This is why rhetoric matters.
Words do more than describe the world. They help organize the world we perceive. They tell us what deserves attention, what should frighten us, what should reassure us, and which people belong within which moral categories.
Consider what happens when ordinary disagreements within a pluralistic democracy are gathered beneath increasingly ominous descriptions.
A young person questions whether the distribution of wealth is just. Another asks whether healthcare should be treated differently from other market goods. Someone questions the affordability of housing or education. Others argue for stronger social programs, greater taxation of wealth, labor protections, or different relationships between public and private responsibility.
One may agree strongly with these proposals, reject them strongly, or occupy any number of positions between them.
That is democratic pluralism.
It is the ordinary work of citizens disagreeing about how a shared society should be arranged.
But if such disagreements are too quickly placed beneath words such as communism, collectivism, or an approaching ideological struggle, something has changed. We are no longer merely arguing about policy. We have begun interpreting disagreement through a narrative of threat.
And that narrative can prevent us from asking the most obvious question:
What are these people actually saying?
Not what does socialism say. Not what did Stalin do. Not what might eventually happen if some imagined sequence of political events unfolds.
What is this particular person saying about the life they are actually living?
Perhaps the answer will be poorly reasoned. Perhaps history will expose dangerous naivete. Perhaps the proposed remedy would make matters worse. Wisdom does not promise that listening will vindicate the person to whom we listen.
But listening may reveal that the question being asked is not the question we assumed.
A twenty-five-year-old unable to imagine ever owning a home may not be announcing allegiance to revolutionary collectivism. She may be asking why ordinary economic security seems increasingly inaccessible.
A worker supporting stronger labor protections may not be rejecting freedom. He may be asking what freedom means when refusing an employer's demands threatens his family's livelihood.
A citizen advocating universal healthcare may not have abandoned personal responsibility. She may be asking whether illness should carry the possibility of financial ruin.
And a person criticizing some feature of American life may not despise America. Criticism can also arise because someone believes a society capable of better things should become better than it presently is.
These distinctions matter.
They matter because democratic societies depend upon our ability to disagree without transforming disagreement into estrangement.
They matter even more for Christians.
Christianity makes unusually demanding claims about how another human being is to be regarded. The neighbor does not cease to be neighbor when mistaken. The stranger does not lose moral significance because the stranger is unfamiliar. The enemy, astonishingly, does not even escape the command to love.
That is an extraordinarily difficult ethic.
It is much easier to love humanity abstractly than to love particular people whose beliefs disturb us, whose presence complicates our world, or whose claims place demands upon the arrangements from which we benefit.
Perhaps this is why categories are so tempting. Categories keep the other manageable. A category does not look back at us. A category does not tell us about its children. A category does not describe what it was like to leave home, lose work, fear deportation, endure discrimination, escape political repression, struggle with poverty, or discover that the community promising welcome had already decided what kind of person had arrived.
A person does.
And once a person speaks, wisdom confronts a choice. We can return the person to the category from which they briefly emerged. Or we can allow the encounter to complicate what we thought we knew.
This is not relativism.
The person standing before us may still be wrong. So may we. The encounter does not abolish truth, evidence, history, or moral judgment. It makes them more demanding because now our judgment must account not only for an abstraction but for the reality of another human life.
Perhaps that is one reason genuine conversation is risky. A debate can be won. A lecture can be completed. An ideology can be defended. But an encounter cannot be entirely controlled. If we truly allow another person to become present to us, we cannot know beforehand what that presence might require us to reconsider.
And perhaps this is where conversation finally becomes something more than civility. It becomes an act of openness. Not openness without conviction. Not openness without judgment. But openness to the possibility that reality may be larger than the story through which we have learned to see it.
And if wisdom requires that kind of openness, then a difficult question follows:
Can a conversation really be called a conversation if nothing the other
says could possibly change us?
Freedom is an understandable aspiration. So is flourishing. But the word faithful introduces a more difficult question, particularly when it is spoken by Christians.
What would it mean for America to be faithful?
A person can be faithful. A church can attempt to be faithful. A community of believers can measure its practices against the convictions it professes. But America is not a church. It is a vast and pluralistic society containing Christians and Jews, Muslims and Hindus, Buddhists and atheists, agnostics and people whose spiritual lives fit none of these descriptions. Its citizens disagree profoundly about God, morality, economics, human identity, social responsibility, and the purposes of government.
Perhaps, then, the more Christian question is not whether America can be made faithful, but whether Christians can live faithfully within an America they share with people who do not believe as they do.
That is a very different question.
It moves Christian faithfulness away from possession and toward participation.
It no longer asks primarily how Christian convictions might define the nation -
but how Christians might embody those convictions among neighbors whose freedom includes the freedom to reject them.
And here the language of flourishing becomes equally demanding.
A flourishing society cannot be adequately described from only one location within it. Economic growth may be real while families remain economically precarious. Religious freedom may be celebrated while religious minorities feel unwelcome. National opportunity may be genuine while historical inequalities continue to shape the possibilities available to different communities. A country may offer extraordinary freedom to millions while others experience its institutions through vulnerability, exclusion, or fear.
None of these tensions can be resolved merely by choosing the more favorable or unfavorable description. Both may contain truth.
Wisdom asks us to hold them together long enough to understand the reality they share.
This is why the refugee and immigrant matter so deeply to a conversation about American flourishing. So does the racial minority whose experience of American history differs from the majority's telling of it. So does the worker who has participated responsibly in the economy without finding the security that participation was supposed to provide. So does the person of another faith, or no faith at all, who hears Christians speak about a “faithful America” and wonders whether there remains a full place for them within it.
Their experiences do not invalidate the experiences of those who love America, have prospered within it, or regard its political freedoms as historically precious. Nor should gratitude for those freedoms be dismissed as naive.
The point is more relational than that.
My experience of flourishing cannot by itself tell me whether we are flourishing.
The word we makes a claim upon me.
It asks me to look beyond the boundaries of my own experience and inquire into the conditions under which others are living. It asks whether the freedoms I cherish are available to them, whether the institutions I trust are trustworthy from where they stand, and whether the society I describe as flourishing has made room for their flourishing as well.
For Christians, this question should sound strangely familiar.
The biblical traditions repeatedly interrupt communities by turning their attention toward people easiest to overlook: the poor, the widow, the orphan, the foreigner, the stranger. The prophets measure religious faithfulness against justice. Israel is repeatedly reminded that it knows something about the vulnerability of the stranger because it once knew what it meant to be strange in another land.
And then Jesus makes the matter still more difficult.
He tells a story in which the morally exemplary neighbor is a Samaritan - a person belonging to a community marked by religious and social difference. The Samaritan does not first become culturally acceptable before becoming neighbor. His otherness is not erased. The moral encounter occurs across it.
Jesus goes further still when he commands love of enemies.
Whatever else Christians may believe about politics, nations, economics, or social order, that command places a remarkable constraint upon any Christian politics of fear. The person perceived as enemy does not thereby disappear from the field of Christian moral responsibility.
This may be one of Christianity's most difficult contributions to public life. The stranger cannot simply become threat. The opponent cannot simply become enemy. And even the enemy cannot simply become someone whose suffering no longer matters.
Christian faithfulness therefore cannot be measured solely by whether Christian convictions retain cultural influence, whether Christian institutions remain strong, or whether a nation protects the liberties Christians understandably value. It must also be measured by what Christians become in relation to those who stand outside their communities.
How do we speak about them?
How do we treat them when they are vulnerable?
Can we hear their criticism without assuming hostility?
Can we protect our convictions without diminishing their dignity?
Can we remain Christianly faithful when we no longer control the room?
These are not secondary questions added to faith after the important theological matters have been settled.
They belong near its center.
For Christianity makes an astonishing claim about the stranger. In one of Jesus' most unsettling teachings, the act of welcoming the stranger becomes inseparable from encountering Christ himself.
“I was a stranger and you welcomed me.”
That sentence should make any Christian use of the word faithful considerably more demanding.
Perhaps, then, before Christians ask what a faithful and flourishing America should offer the world, we should ask something nearer and harder:
What has happened to the stranger among us?
The answer will not provide an economic system. It will not settle immigration policy, taxation, healthcare, property rights, or the proper scope of government. Christians can disagree seriously about all of these matters.
But it does establish a moral orientation.
It reminds us that faithfulness cannot finally be evaluated only from the center of power, security, belonging, or cultural familiarity. We must also look from the edges of the community, toward those whose lives tell us things about ourselves that we may not otherwise see.
And perhaps this is where flourishing becomes a more meaningful word.
Flourishing is not sameness. It does not require eliminating disagreement or creating a society without conflict. It does not mean that everyone receives everything they desire.
Flourishing means, at minimum, that difference does not require exclusion; that freedom is not reserved for those who already possess power; that human dignity does not depend upon ideological agreement; and that the suffering of another remains morally consequential even when that person stands outside our community of belief.
A society approaching that kind of flourishing would still contain arguments about socialism and capitalism, public responsibility and private property, tradition and change, religion and secularity. But perhaps those arguments would sound different. Because the people standing across from us would no longer appear primarily as representatives of an ideological threat.
They would appear first as neighbors.
And that may be one of the things wisdom requires.
