Jimmy Kimmel Live! will return to the air tonight. The Walt Disney Company, which owns ABC, said in a statement, “Last Wednesday, we made the decision to suspend production on the show to avoid further inflaming a tense situation at an emotional moment for our country. It is a decision we made because we felt some of the comments were ill-timed and thus insensitive.”
The statement added, “We have spent the last days having thoughtful conversations with Jimmy, and after those conversations, we reached the decision to return the show on Tuesday.” (For more on the story, see Dr. Ryan Denison’s Daily Article, “Jimmy Kimmel suspended for comments on Charlie Kirk’s killer.”)
The controversy over Kimmel’s suspension illustrates the partisan fault lines dividing our country: According to a new poll, Democrats are far more likely to watch late-night talk shows than Republicans or Independents. This explains why late-night talk show hosts are negative toward President Trump and Republicans while sympathetic toward Democratic Party leaders—they are “playing to their audience.” However, confining themselves to only one part of the electorate also defines their audience, further reinforcing their bias and that of those who watch them.
By contrast, Johnny Carson, widely known as the “King of Late Night,” explained many years ago that he was “not there” to deal with political issues. “Once you start that, you start to get that self-important feeling” and try to sway people, he said, adding, “I don’t think you should as an entertainer.” Jay Leno made the same point recently.
However, both were reflecting times that were not nearly so bitterly and deeply divided. As Chris Matthews illustrates in his fascinating book, Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked, Republican President Ronald Reagan and Democratic Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill disagreed on many issues but found ways to work together. Matthews writes: “Reagan was fond of Tip and completely believed that Tip wanted to help the little people. He just disagreed about how to do it.”
That was then, this is now. The divisiveness of our society has risen to a level that fundamentally threatens the future of our democratic experiment.
And the solution lies in the very message that many people blame for the problem.
The challenge of “affective polarization”
Cultural commentator Fareed Zakaria remembers a time when political debates involved two issues: economics (how much to tax and spend) and the Soviet threat (how best to counter it). On both issues, compromise was possible.
However, many of today’s issues are moral in nature and thus far more deeply held. While there once were pro-life Democrats and pro-choice Republicans, for example, Zakaria writes that the parties have now “sorted themselves into ideologically consistent groups,” so “the divides get weaponized” and “each party sees the other as not just misguided but evil.”
New York Times columnist Ezra Klein explains how this happened: over the past fifty years, our partisan identities have merged with our racial, religious, geographic, ideological, and cultural identities. These “merged identities” have come to define who we are, not just what we believe. We therefore self-select into disparate cultures with little or no overlap or interchange.
The result is “affective polarization,” which is how scholars describe a society such as ours in which the two sides simply do not like members of the other party. How do we make a democratic republic work in the midst of such bitterness?
Three biblical facts
Many religious skeptics consider religion to be at the root of our divisions. They’re right that our most divisive issues are religious at their core, from abortion to same-sex marriage to euthanasia. They’re also right in noting that religious platforms are often used to advance political agendas and politicians today.
However, our faith embraces not just a worldview that critics consider divisive, but the way its followers can embrace such critics. Consider three biblical facts.
First, the Bible views all people, whatever their beliefs, as “image bearers” of the Divine (Genesis 1:27).
God loves us despite ourselves: “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). Now our Savior commands us to love as we are loved (John 13:34–35). As a result, Christians are compelled to seek common ground with our opponents, to wish their best even at the cost of our own, to forgive as our Father has forgiven us and to pay forward the grace we have received by faith.
Second, the God who commands us to “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:43) also empowers us to do what he commands.
His Spirit indwelling his people manifests the “fruit” of “love” in and through all who submit to him (Galatians 5:22; Ephesians 5:18). Erika Kirk’s decision to forgive her husband’s assassin is just one example of such love at work. No other religion or worldview empowers its followers from within to be the change they wish to see. But Jesus does.
Third, our commitment to love those who do not love us points the essential way forward for our society.
Cultural commentator Paul Kingsnorth describes our cultural moment: “Cut loose in the postmodern present, with no center, no truth, and no direction, we have not become independent-minded, responsible, democratic citizens in a human republic. We have become slaves to the power of money, and worshippers of the self.” We therefore have no hope for a better future in ourselves. But we have abundant hope in the transforming grace of Christ (cf. 1 Peter 1:3; Romans 5:5).
We are back where we began
In a sense, Americans are where America started. As the famed historian Joseph Ellis explains, colonial Americans were united in their opposition to Great Britain but were otherwise thirteen very disparate and divided colonies. Consequently, George Washington observed that their hope for a collective future lay not in themselves. Rather, he declared,
“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.”
As historians Peter A. Lillback and Jerry Newcombe compellingly demonstrate, the “religion and morality” our first president embraced and endorsed was the Christian faith.
In a consensual democracy, citizens rule each other. But we cannot rule others if we cannot rule ourselves. And as James Madison warned, “Whenever there is interest and power to do wrong, wrong will generally be done.”
There is only one Power in the universe capable of remaking fallen people, of giving sinners a “new heart” and a “new spirit” (Ezekiel 36:26) as children of God who manifest his character to the world (John 1:12; Romans 8:29). Submitting to this Power and demonstrating this transforming love is the greatest, most essential gift we can give our divided nation.
Do you agree?
Quote for the day:
“The salvation of a single soul is more important than the production or preservation of all the epics and tragedies in the world” —C. S. Lewis
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