Culture of Division

And he said, “It is what comes out of a person that defiles. For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”

Mark 7:20-23

We live in a culture of division. Everything we do and believe is placed on one of two opposing sides – the masked or the unmasked, the vaccinated or the unvaccinated, the democrat or the republican, and so on. In the midst of a pandemic, in a world that is chaotic and unsteady, division is actually an attempt for us to try to control the chaos, to make sense of the world, to keep things in order. We are living in a time when there are truly no clear answers. All the information available to us is conflicting and seems to shift depending on the source. Furthermore, in all of this, we have left out God and when we do that we end up creating even more chaos than was already there. 

While this may seem like a bleak outlook on the world, our hope is in the Lord, who will create order out of the chaos. God unites; He orders things perfectly according to how He created it and intended for it to be. God is love; He is the source of the virtue of charity and without the grace of God we can do nothing good in and of ourselves. We must get back to the source of all order, the source of all truth, the source of love, and that can only be done when we place our trust in the one true God. 

So many well meaning people are falling into this trap of widening the gap of division. The enemy has entrapped us by continuing to point out how right we are and how wrong everyone else is. He is convincing us to fight against those who choose to navigate this pandemic differently than us. He is getting us to believe that we can no longer associate with or be in relationship with anyone on the opposite side of this great chasm. Even though we may truly love the Lord and want to do His will, it seems to me that our good intentions are being hijacked by Satan; he continues to distort what is true and what is good on both sides. This has caused so much confusion, personal judgement of our neighbor, and outright hatred. This very unstable environment has led us to feeling the need to control that which seems so out of control.

Over the past few decades, some of the main issues of division have been abortion and gay marriage, which have ended up becoming political pawns that are now being used by the world to widen the chasm. These issues are actually not political at all, but are matters of faith and morality. The Church clearly teaches a firm truth on both of these issues and has never wavered in those truths in her 2000+ year history of existence. You can read the Early Church Fathers and see that even in the very beginnings of Christianty the Church believed the same truths that she teaches today regarding homosexuality and abortion. While the world shifts its perspective on these issues, the Church has remained steadfast to the teachings of Christ. God’s order has not and will not change, for it is perfect order. It is only in our imperfection, that we seem to shift back and forth on issues, unless of course we are grounded in the Word and the Truth. 

Then this past year the world was hit with a pandemic, which has further widened the division in our society, and I dare to say it has catapulted us into definitively segregating ourselves on one side of the chasm or the other. One of the lasting effects of the pandemic is the all consuming fear that has infiltrated our culture. Every single person at some point in this past year and half has experienced fear in regards to the pandemic. While fear is good to some degree, for it is the emotion that we need in order to keep us safe from danger, it has now become a daily emotional cross that so many people are carrying. When any emotion takes over our lives, when it infiltrates our every day, when it begins to shape all of our decisions and wedges itself into our relationships, it is no longer a healthy emotion, but instead becomes an emotion we are enslaved to.

God does not desire that we be enslaved. He is the God of freedom and life. He has given us free will so that we will freely choose Him, to love Him and to serve Him. The fear that has entered into our culture by way of the pandemic is diabolical. It is not from God. So we must not continue to let it rule our lives. We must not feed the beast, so to speak, so that it does not continue to grow and shape our own lives or our culture as a whole. At some point, we must realize that we have abandoned the gift of Fear of the Lord and have listened to the diabolical fear of suffering and death.  

I believe we are currently at a crossroads. At this point in time, we need to begin to stand up against fear and Satan and say enough is enough. When we stop listening to this diabolical fear, then we will then be able to start truly loving our neighbor, which will close the gap of division and bring us back together. But it is very important to know what this standing up against fear looks like. Does it look like shouting at our neighbor on facebook? Does it look like trying to prove our point and be right about whichever side we are on? Does it mean letting it ruin our relationships or even worse, stop us from worshiping God? 

Hopefully we are not playing into the division, no matter how convicted we are of how we have chosen to navigate this pandemic. Hopefully we have been standing up for unity, instead of judging our neighbor and trying to prove that we are right. To refuse to feed into the division means not allowing someone else’s opposing choice to determine our relationship with that person. It means looking at each one of God’s people through the merciful eyes of Christ. It means uniting ourselves to all people in love. Am I actually able to love my neighbor who is navigating this pandemic differently than me?

One important thing we should all be united in is standing up for and protecting our freedom. It is our freedom that we should be most concerned about being compromised in all this. The moment we step over the line and no longer allow people freedom, when we try to control people on a massive scale and do not allow them the ability to use their gift of free will that has been given to them by the Creator, this is the moment we succumb to the evil of communism, which the Church continues to emphatically oppose.  

Whatever side you find yourself on, we must all keep in mind that every person is having to make choices that place them on one side or the other. We are all confined to these opposing sides at this moment in time, but this does not mean that we have to feed into the fear and continue to widen the gap of division. In order to stand up against Satan and the fear he has incited in the world, we must choose to rise above the division. Let us rise above the need to be right. Let us rise above the need to fight for our side and hate those who choose the other side. Instead, let us love our neighbor for who they are and not what they have chosen to do during this pandemic. Unity is a fruit of the virtue of charity. When we truly love our neighbor, we stand up against division and cast out all fear.

This all being said, we may come to a point in our lifetime where we will be made to choose between standing up for the faith or denying it. Christian persecution is in fact happening in the world today. If this division continues to spread, if fear continues to rule our lives, the persecution may come closer to home. Whether or not this day is coming, we should be preparing our hearts, we should be strengthening ourselves in virtue, we should be steeping ourselves in prayer and in the Word; so that when we are put to the test, we will persevere, we will be courageous, we will stand for God. The fear and division in our world is merely a tactic of the enemy to distract us from this most important task at hand. We have a choice to not let the enemy entrap us any longer. We have a choice to opt out of division and to choose unity and love. We have a choice to love our neighbor despite anything that is going on in the world. This is the true freedom of being a child of God. 

See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is. And all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.

1 John 3:1-3