The State of the Union: Spiritual Wisdom to Heal the Political Divide

There was much to appreciate about President Obama’s speech last night. I also think that Nikki Haley’s Republican response was commendable on many levels. Both put forth a vision and a hope for renewed political cooperation, and they even repented in the ways they and their parties have contributed to the politics that have greatly divided the United States.

Governor Haley suggested some good spiritual wisdom about the loud political noise that has spread throughout the US, “Often the best thing we can do is turn down the volume,” she said. “When the sound is quieter, you can actually hear what someone else is saying. And that can make a world of difference.”

Ah, yes, if we could just turn down the noise and listen to one another, even to those we call our political enemies, the world would be a radically different and much better place.

In a similar manner, President Obama modeled for us the spiritual practice of repentance. He repented of his part in propagating political divisions. “It’s been one of the few regrets of my presidency,” he stated. “That the rancor and suspicion between the parties has gotten worse instead of better. There’s no doubt a president with the gifts of Lincoln or Roosevelt might have been better to bridge the divide.”

To listen better. To repent of our participation in systems that breed rancor and suspicion. Those are deep spiritual practices that will heal the politics of our nation.

Unfortunately, I fear that both Obama and Haley aren’t leading us far enough with their messages. In order to heal our national political divisions, we do need to listen. We do need to repent. But our problems are bigger than national politics. We need to heal our global political divisions. And to do that, the United States needs to have the courage to listen and repent on a global scale.

But instead, Obama and Haley offered the same old solutions to our global problems. In the face of terrorism they both claimed that the solution is not listening to our enemies, nor repenting of our own violence, but that we should be more violent. While Obama boasted that the United States already has the greatest military the world has ever seen and spends more on our military budget than the next eight countries combined, Haley stated that if the Republicans held the White House, “… we would actually strengthen our military.”

But military violence isn’t working. The more violent we become, the more we sow the seeds that produce more violence against us. The anthropologist René Girard taught us that violence is mimetic, or imitative. It’s human nature to respond to violence with more violence, but as Girard warns, the reciprocal exchange of violence for violence isn’t working to keep us sage. “[V]iolent imitation is the rule of the day,” writes Girard in his apocalyptic book Battling to the End, “not the imitation that slows and suspends the flow [of violence], but the one that accelerates it” (13). Violence is accelerating because we live in truly apocalyptic times. Weapons of mass destruction are easier to make and nuclear weapons threaten us with global annihilation.

If we want a future, we need to stop threatening our enemies with violence. Instead, we need follow Governor Haley’s advice and start listening to our enemies. Maybe if we listened to them, we would find the truth.

The truth is that our enemies, even those we label as “terrorists,” do not hate us because of our freedom. Rather, they are frustrated because of many American policies – policies that, following President Obama, we should repent from.

In a dig against Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz, Obama said that our answer to terrorism shouldn’t be to “carpet bomb civilians.” I agree. That would be disastrous for so many reasons, including the fact that to kill innocent civilians would be an act of terror. It would make us just like the terrorists that we condemn.

But that’s exactly what President Obama has done during his presidency. Drone warfare has terrorized civilians and created a breeding ground for recruiting terrorists. As this Huffington Post article states, “Nearly 90 percent of people killed in recent drone strikes were not the target. U.S. drone strikes have killed scores of civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.”

My colleague at the Raven Foundation, Lindsey Paris-Lopez, takes it a step further in her Open Letter to President Obama: End the War in Afghanistan,

Principled journalists have long published atrocities regularly committed by our military. These atrocities are rightly called acts of terrorism and war crimes when committed by others. The practice of “signature strikes”, assigning death sentences from afar to people whose identities are unknown based on patterns of their behavior, assumes that life and death judgments can be made without knowing a name or having a conversation. It puts the lives of Afghan citizens into the hands of a military that has been trained to dehumanize them (as killing without knowing someone’s identity is the very epitome of dehumanization). But our military goes beyond killing those whose behavior may reasonably be deemed suspicious, and targets people caught in the act of helping their fellow human beings. We kill rescuers. We attack mourners at funerals. And in one of the most callous, dishonest policies imaginable, we have effectively demonized the entire male population of countries we purport to be helping by preemptively labeling all military-aged males killed in attacks “enemy combatants.”

The best advice for the future of America, indeed, the future of human existence, came last night from both sides of the political aisle. We should repent of our national and international participation in violent atrocities. And we should listen to others, even to those we call our enemies.

The state of the world is in peril. If we do not repent and listen, we will continue to be the very terrorists we despise. Even worse, if we continue down this violent path, we will resign ourselves to the extinction of humanity.

Jesus said that those who live by the sword die by the sword. The same can be said about the gun, the tank, the drone, and the bomb. We must find another way, the way of listening and repenting, if we are to survive.