Published December 11, 2024
Excommunication is back, baby!
Many on the left are responding to their electoral losses by cutting ties with their Trump-supporting friends and family. Take, for example, John Pavlovitz, a left-wing pastor who once wrote a book titled If God Is Love, Don’t Be a Jerk. Following the election, Pavlovitz went viral for tweeting, “I will never forgive my family members and former friends for voting for him. Never.” Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us—unless it was by voting for Donald Trump. Love your enemies—unless they’re political enemies.
There is a spiritual as well as political sickness in this.
The political ailment is obvious. If we cannot break bread together as friends and family despite political disagreements, then we will find it difficult to live peacefully as citizens of the same nation. This is a decidedly post-liberal vision in which democratic coexistence becomes impossible due to irreconcilable moral disagreements on fundamental matters.
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Nathanael Blake, Ph.D. is a Fellow in the Life and Family Initiative at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. His research interests include American political theory, Christian political thought, and the intersection of natural law and philosophical hermeneutics. His published scholarship has included work on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Alasdair MacIntyre, Russell Kirk and J.R.R. Tolkien.
