Our poisoned politics overlook our common home: U.S. professor

An us-versus-them mentality is destroying civilized society, says Steven Millies, an associate professor of public theology from Chicago.

“The poison of our politics is the mistaken idea that we have to defeat someone. ‘Next election will settle things and we will get everything we want. We will win. We should win. We can achieve a paradise. We can cross some sort of finish line that will set the world aright once and for all,’” he said at St. Mark’s College at the University of British Columbia Nov. 7.

“When did that ever happen? Yet, over and over, we behave as if this time it might be true.”

The director of the Bernardin Center at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago noted the context of an American speaking in Vancouver three weeks after Canada’s federal election. He said the concept of “winning” an election and beating out the “bad people” only leads to increased division and suffering.

Considering the minority government in Canada, increasing political tension in the United States, the UK’s Brexit, and the rise of a “Wexit” separatist movement in Alberta, Millies said it’s not hard to see many people have replaced the “politics of discourse” with the “politics of force.”

Canada’s divided election results reveal “the same polarizations of region, class, education level, and religious participation that have divided nations around the world have begun to show themselves now here.”

These regional differences are natural and to be expected of a country that spans a continent, Millies told the audience of about 100. People form political opinions based on their understanding of the world and their place in it, but that does not mean they must therefore think of people with different opinions as their enemies.

“Differences can mean we simply disagree,” he said. There’s no need to “transform natural disagreements into apocalyptic confrontations.”

In fact in ancient Greece the word politics meant “what people share in common,” said Millies.

“Too often we say politics but we mean self-interest or partisanship, and it just isn’t so,” he said. “It is our shared common life, it is our relationships, it is the space where we gather as a people united in our love for the other and for the common good.”

Too many political parties, leaders, and activists have focused on our differences and used them to exploit their own gains and win their own battles. Pope Francis offers a different way, he said.

In Evangelii Gaudium and Laudato Si, the Pope emphasized the importance of Gospel living and a recognition that since we all live in one common home, we may as well act like it.

“Love, overflowing with small gestures of mutual care, is also civic and political, and it makes itself felt in every action that seeks to build a better world. Love for society and commitment to the common good are outstanding expressions of a charity which affects not only relationships between individuals but also ‘macro-relationships, social, economic and political ones,’” said Pope Francis.

“That is why the Church set before the world the ideal of a ‘civilization of love.’ Social love is the key to authentic development: ‘In order to make society more human, more worthy of the human person, love in social life – political, economic and cultural – must be given renewed value, becoming the constant and highest norm for all activity.’”

Love is the solution to our divisions, said Millies.

“Politics isn’t about violence,” he said. “If it is, we don’t have a civilization.”

Millies added that crises of the 21st century like economic inequality, the idea that persons are disposable, and the effects that idea has on us and on the planet are all “the same crisis.”

“When we discuss care for our common home, an issue we tend to box up and separate from other issues as merely environmental, (Pope) Francis reminds us that all of it and everything around us is part of the same creation and proceeds from the one, same, single creative act.”

They are not “a range of separate problems, but at heart one singular problem. Feeling ourselves to be masters of ourselves, our world, and our history, we fail to love.”

During a question and answer period, Millies added that the Church’s goal is not to win elections but to win hearts.

“What we ought to be winning is person by person, conversion by conversion. One person at a time is the way we built the church in the first place. I think if we did a little more of that, we wouldn’t face all the political problems we do.”

Millies’ lecture was put on by the Centre for Christian Engagement at St. Mark’s College. The new centre was launched this June with guest Father Ronald Rolheiser speaking on the role of the laity.