Political turmoil needs more than political solutions
Christianity Today
November 6, 2026
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SOPA Images / Contributor / Getty
Europe is burning. Not everywhere, and not all at once. But the recurring images of cars aflame, shattered storefronts, angry crowds, and riot police on the streets of Germany, Spain, Italy, and France should concern us. For American Christians, they may warn of a future we are not prepared to face.
We have become accustomed to interpreting social unrest here and abroad through political and economic categories. Cable news presents the familiar divisions of left and right, rich and poor, immigrant and native-born, progressive and conservative. Each side identifies its villains and offers its preferred solutions.
These explanations are not necessarily wrong. Economic hardship matters. Discrimination matters. Failed public policies matter. So do debates about immigration, policing, education, and political accountability. Justice remains justice.
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But these factors are not the whole story. Politics is downstream from culture, and culture is downstream from religion. This does not mean every political problem has a single religious cause. It means the shared understandings of reality within a society—its formative moral ecology—shape what its people regard as legitimate, just, and worth defending.
If we want to understand what is happening in Europe, we must learn to look upstream. What happens when people no longer believe the institutions governing their lives represent a common good?
A school is no longer experienced as our school. A town hall is no longer our town hall. The police are no longer understood as our police. ICE is portrayed as the Gestapo. Institutions become symbols of an opposing power. This is more than ordinary political disagreement. It is a breakdown in civic identification. People don’t experience themselves as participants in a shared public life, but as an opposition front to the ruling authorities.
The issue is not simply whether a government possesses sufficient force to maintain order. It is whether the exercise of that authority is regarded as legitimate. A government can enforce laws. But it cannot manufacture trust through coercion alone. And when trust disappears, every exercise of power risks becoming another occasion for conflict. In fact, harsh crackdowns generally make matters a lot worse.
Sociologist James Davison Hunter, writing about the cultural conditions underlying contemporary political conflict, finds that both the political left and right are operating from a shared culture of nihilism, where resentment motivates and power is the default.
Nihilism? Really? Most people don’t wake up in the morning declaring that life has no meaning, truth does not exist, or moral obligations are illusions. Quite the opposite. People care passionately about justice, identity, dignity, freedom, and belonging.
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Yet we all increasingly inhabit a cultural environment in which no shared transcendent moral order possesses sufficient public authority to settle competing claims about these goods. Conflicts get appealed to the Supreme Court, whose rulings are themselves subject to the same delegitimization.
What happens when millions of autonomous individuals and competing communities disagree about what justice, freedom, and human flourishing require? Who decides? Upon what authority? And why should anyone accept a judgment that contradicts their own deeply held convictions?
These are not abstract philosophical questions. The possibility of living together in a democracy depends on them.
That’s because democracy requires more than elections, laws, and constitutional procedures. It necessitates a measure of shared trust, mutual restraint, and willingness to recognize the legitimacy of those with whom we disagree.
Without these, politics increasingly becomes a struggle for power rather than a shared pursuit of justice or the common good. The result can be civic anarchy like what we’re seeing in Europe: the erosion of shared obligations, and the growing temptation to substitute intimidation, confrontation, and coercion for persuasion and peaceful cooperation.
The reciprocal temptation is to answer chaos with greater power. More police. More surveillance. More aggressive enforcement. More centralized authority.
Public safety and the protection of innocent people are genuine responsibilities of government. Violence and looting cannot simply be tolerated. The victims of unrest deserve protection, and communities need the rule of law. But force cannot substitute for legitimacy.
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A society cannot indefinitely compensate for the erosion of its moral foundations by increasing its capacity for coercion. Indeed, the opposite responses of anarchy and authoritarianism arise from the same underlying condition, the mirrored responses of the same underlying civic dysfunction.
Anarchism rejects the authority of institutions. Authoritarianism seeks to preserve order through increasing concentrations of power. Both emerge when people lose confidence in the moral commitments necessary for peaceful common life. And Christians should be wary of both temptations.
It would be comforting to imagine that Europe’s problems are uniquely European. They aren’t.
The United States faces its own forms of institutional distrust, political polarization, social fragmentation, and weakening civic solidarity. We increasingly inhabit separate informational worlds. We disagree about which institutions deserve trust, which facts matter, and what kind of nation we are trying to become. Even the meaning of familiar words such as justice, freedom, equality, patriotism, and democracy has become contested. Families are more fragile. Communities are less stable. Religious authority is increasingly contested or totally absent. Our political opponents are increasingly portrayed not simply as mistaken but as threats to everything good about the country, enemies of Western civilization itself.
This is a dangerous development. The more we interpret political disagreement as an existential struggle, the more difficult it becomes to recognize our opponents as neighbors and fellow citizens.
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The same cultural conditions produce radically different political responses. Some withdraw from public life altogether. Others embrace consumerism or private forms of escape. Still others turn toward political movements promising decisive action against their enemies. Nihilism does not necessarily produce indifference. It can also provoke intense moral passion detached from a sufficiently shared understanding of moral authority.
This is why the current crisis in Europe cannot be understood simply as a conflict between political parties. The opposing sides share more of the same cultural assumptions than they care to admit. Both are captive to the belief that political power is the primary means of securing the good. Both confuse winning with renewal and overlook the deeper cultural conditions making our common life increasingly difficult.
Politics matters. Christians should participate responsibly in public life, defend justice, and support institutions that protect human dignity. But political action cannot by itself restore meaning, belonging, trust, or moral formation. These cultural and spiritual realities are cultivated over time through families, churches, schools, friendships, neighborhoods, and institutions that teach people how to live together. We cannot expect politicians to accomplish what only sustained cultural formation can provide.
As such, the church must resist the temptation to seek salvation through political power. When Christians respond to social fragmentation primarily by demanding stronger political control, we risk accepting the same reductionistic frame that we should be challenging. We begin treating political authority as the solution to problems that are fundamentally cultural and spiritual. Like Esau, we sell our spiritual birthright.
The church must offer more than another political faction. It must offer a credible alternative to the cultural conditions producing our present disorder—a countercultural kingdom of God, whose distinctive power is expressed through truth, love, service, and sacrifice. Salt, which preserves what is good. Light, which reveals what is true.
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If our society is experiencing a crisis of meaning, belonging, and moral authority, Christians should ask whether our churches are forming people capable of answering that crisis. Pagans can be expected to act like pagans. Of Christians and the church, we must expect more.
Are we cultivating communities where people experience genuine belonging? Are we forming men and women who practice patience, courage, humility, forgiveness, and responsibility? Are we preparing Christians to engage their neighbors with curiosity rather than suspicion? Are our churches known for serving their communities, or primarily for defending their political positions?
These questions move individual believers and the church upstream to the cultural and spiritual. They also bring our shared challenge closer to home. The renewal of civic life does not begin only in legislative chambers or national elections. It begins in ordinary relationships.
A Christian who listens carefully to a frustrated neighbor is practicing civic renewal. A church that welcomes lonely young adults is rebuilding belonging. A family that teaches children to respect people with whom they disagree is strengthening the habits necessary for democratic life. A school that forms character rather than merely transmitting information is contributing to the moral ecology of the next generation.
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These acts appear small when compared with the scale of national unrest. But cultural renewal has always depended upon the patient formation of people and institutions over time. It may show up first among parents on the sidelines of a youth soccer game. The work is slow, often invisible, and essential.
The images of burning streets should trouble us. But they should also challenge us to ask better questions. Most immediately: How can governments protect citizens and restore public order? That question matters and deserves responsible answers.
But the deeper question is how societies cultivate the moral commitments, relationships, and institutions that make peaceful civic cooperation possible in the first place.
We must become communities where transcendent meaning is believable, love is practiced, moral responsibility is cultivated, and neighbors discover that they belong to something larger than themselves. We must recover the patience to listen, the courage to speak truthfully, and the humility to recognize our own complicity in the divisions surrounding us.
The church cannot control the future of Europe or America. But it can bear faithful witness to a kingdom whose authority does not depend upon political victory and whose peace is deeper than the absence of conflict. It can see the world through the larger story of God’s redemptive purposes inaugurated in the death and resurrection of Jesus. We can, and we must. The future of our common life depends on it.
David John Seel Jr. is a writer, educator, and cultural analyst. He is a principle strategist at The Reframe and academic dean at St. Andrew’s College in Lake Almanor, California. He and his wife, Kathryn, live in Wilmington, North Carolina, where they attend Christ Community Church.
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