“Barack Obama radiates an ethos of integrity, humanity, good manners, and elegance that I’m beginning to miss, and that I suspect we will all miss a bit, regardless of who replaces him.”
– conservative Republican author, TV commentator, and columnist David Brooks, several months before the election

 

Whatever our response to the 2016 presidential election, we can all agree that during the months leading up to it “integrity, humanity, good manners, and elegance” were rarely present. To be blunt, it was a horror show. And we have received little indication that things will change in the few weeks since.

In some quarters, the simple virtues referenced above were discarded as part of a newly fashionable attack on “political correctness,” an expression used almost exclusively as a slur, a disparaging critique of any attempt to direct our attention to the fact that what one person might see as humorous another might find as hurtful. And so we declared open season on schoolyard taunting, disrespect toward women and religious and ethnic minorities, and even critiques of individuals’ physical characteristics, a particularly heinous and mean-spirited offense.

In a few weeks, Christians throughout the world will celebrate the birth of a certain Galilean who famously enjoined us to do onto others as we would want done onto us. These words, preached by a diversity of religious leaders both before Jesus and long after him, constitute the foundation of civilized life, the social glue that connects us to each other and allows us to get along reasonably well. We ignore them at our peril.

In the coming months and years, men and women of good will must unite against this culture of insult and expose it whenever and wherever it resurfaces. Let this be the mission that unites us, that allows us to come together as men and women of “integrity, humanity, good manners, and elegance.” Our future demands it.

“We have to grow up–past conspiracy theories, demagoguery, single-issue voting, partisan seductions, mudslinging, and God-and-country conflations and confusions.”

-David Gushee, Baptist minister and professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia.

Sometimes a single quote says it all: We have to grow up. We have to reject the conspiracy theories, demagoguery, single issue voting, partisan seductions, mudslinging, and God-and-country conflations and confusions that have characterized our political dialog for at least a generation now and at a magnified level for the past eight years. It is time for the adults to enter the room.

The quote referenced above was written in 2008, prophetically anticipating what the next eight years would bring and the political crisis that has now come to a head. And how prescient are those words–conspiracy theories about missing birth certificates, blatantly demagogic political “solutions” in the nation that gave the world democracy, a legislative body so engulfed in partisanship that its members would rather shut down the government than find common ground, mudslinging and name-calling that suggests a developmental blockage at the early middle school years, and the increasing identification of Christianity with a narrow nationalistic exceptionalism, a careless rebuke of the founder’s directive that we carefully separate the things that are Caesar’s and the things that are God’s.

It is indeed time to grow up. It is time to reject this madness as a frightening manifestation of America’s dark side, its shadow side. It is time to reconnect with America’s goodness, a fitting symbol of which is the Statue of Liberty with its call to embrace “your tired, your poor, your huddled mases yearning to breathe free,” words that have long served as a reminder of our openness, tolerance, acceptance, and civility. These are the true measures of our virtue; these are the values that make America great. It is time to step out of the dark and reenter the light.