Webinar explores how to thrive throughout the election

Panelists in a webinar sponsored by Baylor University explained hyper-politicization from philosophical, psychological and theological perspectives. Then they offered concrete strategies for political desaturation.

David Corey, director of Baylor in Washington, moderated the Oct. 15 webinar on “Political Desaturation: How to Thrive Before, During, and After the 2024 Election.”

Joining him were panelists Robert Talisse, a political philosopher from Vanderbilt University; psychiatrist and author Curt Thompson; and theology-trained leadership coach Elizabeth Oldfield, who joined from the UK.

Framing the discussion, Corey posed the question: If political engagement is a virtue in democracy and it’s a “good thing” for people to be active in politics, how can there be such a thing as political oversaturation?

Talisse responded the idea of having “too much of a good thing” is readily accepted in other areas.

“You know, the 12th bite of a cheesecake is really just not as good a thing as the first three bites,” he noted.

As a “better example,” he described a friend of his who set a goal to become physically fit.

The goal was a positive one, but the commitment to becoming physically fit took over. She lost sight of virtually everything else in her life in pursuit of that goal. The woman became so focused on workouts and her physical health project, it began to affect relationships and isolate her from friends.

He pointed out fitness didn’t stop being good, but “what fitness was good for” got lost in the hyperfocus on fitness itself.

Similarly, he observed, “There’s a good that is achieved in being an active democratic participant. But when that project becomes the center of everything that we do, it becomes a little bit like my friend in the gym.”

Diminishing common life

The politicization of institutions and relationships that aren’t intrinsically political did not previously exist to the extent it does now, Oldfield noted. It’s a development she attributes to “the retreat of other forms of common life.”

Psychology and theology, she said, always have known about deeper needs.

“We need belonging. We need to be part of something. We need a story that is bigger than us. We need meaningfulness and a stable sense of self,” she said.

In the past, those had been formed locally in multiple connections—to family, guilds based on common types of work or types of people, faith and religious identity, and stability in these areas. But all those ways people used to find meaning and identity have eroded, she said.

“So, all of that weight, all of that longing, all of that need doesn’t have as many places to go,” Oldfield asserted.

Her feeling is that it now either “goes into trying to stabilize ourselves as a consumer,” or it goes into “trying to give ourselves a sense of identity as a political animal,” and “finding ourselves” in a broader political story.

Neither of those is “supposed to take that weight,” Oldfield noted. “They are not designed for that.”

Addiction and idolatry

From a psychological standpoint, Thompson suggested hyperfocus aptly could be termed “addiction.” Or it could be described biblically as “idolatry”—the idea that “I’m going to commit myself to something at the expense of all other good things.”

It’s not always easy to determine when the line between healthy participation and addiction or idolatry has been crossed.

“Most people who are addicted find that their power in that addiction has everything to do with their isolation,” Thompson said. “The more isolated I am, the more likely I am to need something to cure me of my isolation.”

The addiction is the attempt to cure the isolation. But the data shows community is the most helpful way for addiction to be resolved and healed, Thompson asserted.

“We find ourselves weighted with our grief, weighted with our fear, weighted with our shame.”

But individuals don’t turn to deeper modes of healing for these issues “that we all really have in common as humans—the Democrats and the Republicans both have lots of grief,” he noted.

“But we turn to our different addictions,” isolated from those things that “actually bring us the most health and regeneration”—relationships, faith and religious institutions.

Talisse pointed out the level of disagreement or division on political topics hasn’t increased since the 1990s, but “the level of animosity toward perceived political opponents has skyrocketed.”

“We don’t disagree more severely, but we dislike each other more,” to the point of liking to dislike each other. “We’re addicted to negative affect toward perceived outsiders.”

Whereas politics once was viewed as something necessary but not deserving of passion, with the retraction of local forms of common life, politics has taken on a “sacred weight,” Oldfield said.

Politics has become the “only way that we know how to negotiate these goods. The only way we know how to actually be together, and increasingly seems to be cannibalizing our common life and our ability to hold each other as really human.”

Thompson asserted, culturally, “we are accounting for our collective grief over a period of many, many years.”

Ways to push back division

One way to overcome divisions when “things get testy,” Thompson suggested, is to ask the questions: “What is it you really want? … Do you want to be angry with me? … “What are you afraid of?” These questions, asked with vulnerability, help focus on what is held in common between people of differing positions.

Our two-party, “fairly zero-sum” political system “trains us to win” and “defend our own,” which is theologically problematic, Oldfield noted, “leading us to not know how to have a common life.”

But healthy societies find ways to keep in check the natural tendency to prefer “people like me” so all the members can recognize the humanity of others and take others’ needs into consideration in decision making, she claimed.

To desaturate from hyper-politicization, Thompson suggested inviting one person who thinks “differently from you” to coffee and ask that person questions in “genuine curiosity.”

Take “steps of embodiment” to form a relationship—actually get in the room “with someone who is different from you,” and ask: “What is it like to live with someone like me?”

Ask these types of questions that will lead to finding the many things two people, even of opposing viewpoints, invariably will have in common, he said.

Oldfield agreed, suggesting people must get out of comfort zones and “unclench a little bit from our fear,” knowing a “fight or flight” sensation is to be expected, but can be pushed through.

In these efforts, banish contempt, she urged, consciously resisting the impulse to view a person who disagrees with an angry disgust that will trigger shame and lead to rejection of the bridge-building efforts.

Additionally, to achieve political desaturation, she suggested withdrawing from political news and conversation, if one has already come to a decision about a vote—with the caveat one shouldn’t become so far removed as to miss new information that might change that decision.

We cannot “Save ourselves, with the capital ‘S’” through politics, panelists asserted. Theologically, politics isn’t the answer.

Desaturation does not equal political disengagement, but it is a necessary action to combat some of the political dysfunction, they agreed.

“We have to do the work,” to keep in check the impulses that would drive toward deeper division and away from community, Thompson noted.

That’s true even when the opposing viewpoint seems “abhorrent,” Oldfield agreed, so that learning to see political opponents as fellow human beings with a common set of needs becomes a possibility again.