Outraged by outrage

President Joe Biden’s address to a joint session of Congress on April 28 and Republican Sen. Tim Scott’s immediate rebuttal sounded a lot like past presidential and opposition tit-for-tats. Each laid out a lofty vision with sometimes soaring language. After the weird political theater of the past year, we might even relish a return to the ordinary.

And yet the media ecosystem that centers on Washington, D.C., keeps peddling each news blip as a last-stand issue, an outrage bigger than the previous day’s. Reaction from both the left and the right to Scott—he’s the only black Republican in the Senate, so his race is prominent in news accounts—was a perfect case study.

Immediately after Scott’s rebuttal to Biden’s speech, the left unsurprisingly came after him. Plenty of cable news talking heads lobbed bombs, but some of the most vicious came from MSNBC’s Tiffany Cross: “Tim Scott does not represent any constituency other than the small number of sleepy slow-witted sufferers of Stockholm Syndrome who get elevated to prominence for repeating a false narrative about this country that makes conservative white people feel comfortable.” She also called him a “clown” and a “tap dancer.”

But on the right, Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who has climbed to the top of the network in part by peddling outrage, also sniped at Scott. Liberals had said there’s “more work to be done” on race issues following Derek Chauvin’s conviction in the death of George Floyd—and Scott, who last year drafted a police reform bill to compete with Democrats’ more extreme bill, also said that. Of course we have more work to do this side of heaven, but Carlson’s point seemed to be: If liberals say x, conservatives like Scott must say the opposite. Never, never seek consensus.

It all underscores what’s become one of the foundational laws of politics: For every outrage there’s an equal but opposite outrage. The bombast that political operatives and media personalities gin up won’t go away—it pushes up ratings! But what’s a Christian’s calling amid the Forever Culture Wars?

First, we should recognize the limits of politics. The outrage-after-outrage-after-outrage spin cycle leads to follies like Major League Baseball moving the All-Star Game from Georgia to Colorado for political reasons. Overpoliticization drives more and more Americans into ideological ghettos where their calls for boycotts butt up against the other side’s calls for boycotts.

Dutch theologian and statesman Abraham Kuyper advocated “sphere sovereignty”: Each area of life (state, home, education) fulfills its own purpose, distinct from the other spheres. It’s a helpful distinction in the days of perpetual outrage. When we allow political divisions to creep into places they ought not, soon our opinions on things like mask mandates and vaccination become divisive virtue signals instead of areas in which brothers and sisters in Christ may lovingly disagree.

Second, we should remember that the Scriptures tell us to expect troubles. Christianity has enjoyed a relatively comfortable position in the public square for most of U.S. history, but cultural forces have tilted over the last six decades. We should pray about the rise of secularism, the crumbling of sexual mores, and the hysteria of “cancel culture,” but we should neither fear nor rage. Those trends help us remember what the Apostle Peter wrote: We are sojourners and exiles (1 Peter 2:11).

Pastor Alistair Begg recently reminded us to “choose between obedience and comfort. The next decades will not bring apathy to the gospel, but antagonism. And that’s OK. After all, that has been the reality for most of God’s people through most of history.”

Third, although we shouldn’t abandon spheres like politics, we should double down on the sphere God specifically tasked to proclaim His word: the Church. Gallup reported in March that church membership among Americans fell to 47 percent in 2020—the lowest it’s been since Gallup began tracking the statistic in 1937. That’s down from about 70 percent at the turn of the century.

Perpetual political outrage isn’t worth Christians’ time. Political engagement is. But lobbying, voting, and outraging won’t get more of our neighbors engaged with local congregations.