Can America regain civility after Election Day?

NEW YORK—Fifteen days before the election in one of the most bitter presidential campaigns in recent memory, a crowd of young New Yorkers packed Redeemer Presbyterian Church on the Upper West Side to talk about civility.

Phones mostly remained in bags and pockets as Redeemer pastor Tim Keller spoke with New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and Washington University School of Law professor and First Amendment expert John Inazu about whether the country’s societal fabric is unraveling. In a conversation that was civil, but not too bland, they chewed over what the church, the media, and the legal world could do to repair the tears after Election Day. The event was sold out, and had a long waiting list.

Kristof, who had just penned a column about the “God gulf” between secular liberals and conservative Christians this election, tipped his hat to Redeemer for hosting the discussion. He brought up a school in a struggling town in his home state of Oregon that is “really torn apart” as a result of the election, with students chanting “build the wall” in class and others walking out.

Our society, Kristof argued, is so fragmented that we tend to surround ourselves with media sources and friends who think like us. His own effort to combat that self-affirming tendency? He reads the Wall Street Journal editorial page every day.

Keller praised this kind of practice as a definition of civility: “You are willing to subject yourself to positions you find painful to hear. That’s not all that civility is, but it is at least that. … Patience comes from that.”

Keller also thanked Kristof for acknowledging the problem of “irreligious intolerance,” a secular hostility to Christians that can treat their views as bigoted and unworthy of the public square.

Keller said he could imagine two “nightmares” after the election: in one, the rise of white nationalism, and in another, the rise of a “cosmopolitan secularism” that would marginalize religious people.

The audience could text questions to the panel, and moderator Stephanie Summers, CEO of the Center for Public Justice, said her iPad was tallying which questions were being asked most often. One of the most asked: “What is the civil response to people who hold the public square hostage with their incivility?”

Inazu issued a measured response: “When someone takes hostage the public square and shuts down the possibility of others to speak, the law can regulate that.” Kristof said hate speech should be countered with more speech, not regulation.

The next most asked question: “How can we think about undoing the damage to our culture that [Donald] Trump’s campaign has done?”

There was a long silence from the speakers, and then the room broke into nervous laughter.

“I think the future is very, very hard to predict, but if he loses by a large margin, Republicans will distance themselves from him, that he will be tarred, that people will move in other directions, that the Republican party will genuinely push for the kind of inclusiveness that it talked about four years ago. … If Marco Rubio had been the nominee we would not be having much of this conversation,” Kristof said. “Things can move in a different direction. I don’t think all of this was written in stone. And after all, it was only four years ago that we had the remarkable situation of the son of an African villager competing against a Mormon for president. These days they seem a lot more depressing but things can change and it seems to me that would be more likely to happen if there is a very decisive rejection of Trump.”

Keller said Republican Christians had largely been overly “messianic” about their party. He thinks this election won’t result in an exodus from the party (“ultimately it’s good to have a two-party system”), but that Republican Christians will be more circumspect about their party now.

More broadly speaking, he said the global church, not American evangelicals, should be a model for our culture to repair its divisions. Global Christianity has “astonishing resources,” he said.

“There’s more Presbyterians in Ghana than there are in all of America and Scotland put together,” he said. “There’s more Anglicans in Uganda than there are in all of North America and Britain put together. That’s just the reality. … If the white Christian leaders who still dominate the world because of their money, if they really say, ‘You know what, the voices of the Christian world, we really need to make sure all our spokespersons are across the spectrum.’ Christianity is a cross-ethnic, cross-class identity. So you’re a Christian first and you’re white or black second. You’re a Christian first and you’re rich or poor second. It’s always been that, from the very beginning. … The idea that Christianity itself could be a bridge-builder—that would be a good model for other races and other classes that can’t get together.”