‘The After Party’ Offers Christians An Escape From Divisive Politics
To understand why “The After Party” curriculum was created, it helps to talk with Caleb Campbell.
The lead pastor of Desert Springs Bible Church in Phoenix, Campbell could have been a casualty of the strife engendered by conflicts between Christians torn by the election of Donald Trump, the pandemic that followed and the ascendancy of Christian nationalism in some segments of the evangelical right.
For decades, his congregation had fit comfortably in the historical evangelical tradition marked by its “high view of the Bible, high view of Jesus, personal conversion experiences and social action,” Campbell said.
READ: Do Pastors Face Pressure Tied To Partisan Politics?
But after he became lead pastor in 2015, he started to hear rumblings in the congregation about its programs created to care for immigrants and refugees and promote racial reconciliation. During the pandemic — when the church leaders decided it was safer not to meet in person — the discontent boiled over. Every other day, he said, he got emails, text messages and phone calls labeling him demon-possessed or a communist.
“2020 was the worst year of my life so far,” said the pastor, who considered leaving his post.
But Campbell, author of the recently published “Disarming Leviathan: Loving Your Christian Nationalist Neighbor” and now a doctoral student at Fuller Theological Seminary, did something unusual in response: He became a missionary to Christian nationalists, attending their rallies and even becoming a coach to one of the organizations that promotes it.
Though he lost a lot of his congregation to other churches, he said, it has been replenished by “refugees” from other congregations. All over the map theologically, he said, the new people are “asking questions from the wounding they have received.”
The problem, as Campbell sees it, is one of formation and discipleship. Christians “don’t have the muscle to have a healthy conversation with someone who voted differently, and can’t tolerate that somebody who shares that faith has a different political conviction.”
In that regard, he said, “The After Party” was a gift from God.
Shane Hughes, preaching minister at the Highland Church of Christ in Abilene, Texas, hadn’t experienced the same level of disruption in his church. But he could see, he said, that there was a need to create a space in his congregation for “the tools to begin to have good conversations.”
“I just don’t think we’re equipped to do it in an easy or simple way.” Social media had poured kerosene on the human tendency to break relationships, and sin is a broken relationship,” he added.
The past eight years or so, he said, “have been a season of shifting where our political identity is beginning to become more central to our ourselves than maybe our identity in God or affiliation to church. That’s beginning… to cause a lot of problems in churches. It’s causing greater harm, or maybe just revealing who we are.”
So when Hughes heard about “The After Party” curriculum (there’s also a book and an accompanying worship album) from an associate, he jumped at the opportunity to use it in his congregation, one that is more diverse than many in the largely red corner of West Texas.
Seeking a new approach
Over the past few years, a number of clergy, laypeople partners and funders, some faith-based and some secular, have invested in efforts to reach Americans who are exhausted by the nonstop shouting match of contemporary American politics. In the case of “The After Party,” that includes the nonprofit Trinity Forum, the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities and the secular New Pluralists, which is funding projects aimed at addressing division across the United States.
A number of them were initiated by evangelicals seeking to approach politics first through the lens of faith — at a time when the term “evangelical” is often associated with right-wing politics. Others are multi- and interfaith efforts.
Both the emergence of former President (and current GOP candidate) Donald Trump and the stress of the pandemic (a difficult time for the whole country) created an environment in which these projects could come to fruition, according to sociologist Ruth Braunstein, an associate professor at the University of Connecticut and director of the Meanings of Democracy Lab.
“Conversations are happening in Christian churches, both in conservative and in moderate to liberal spaces,” said Braunstein, who is currently mapping American efforts to counter Christian nationalism. “There is a sense that this is our problem. We have to put the fire out in our own house.”
Spearheading one of a growing number of attempts among evangelicals to empower clergy and laypeople to reframe the political divide, the creators of “The After Party” hope to foster conversations that will not only promote healing but enable those engaged to participate in public life in ways that are constructive, rather than chronically divisive.
The video series, which incorporates time for discussion and personal reflection (it recently became available as well in workshop form), was not specifically designed as a resistance to the Christian nationalist movement, or to any particular political posture.
In fact, though it features prominent “never-Trumpers” like noted author and New York Times columnist David French and Christianity Today editor-in-chief Russell Moore, the people behind it argue that Christians can hold a wide variety of positions on different government policies.
Though it doesn’t skew red or blue, nor is it limited to evangelical congregations, the project came of age in an era in which White evangelicals are increasingly identified as aligned with Trump and right-wing politics.
New way to talk about politics
Longtime friends Curtis Chang — a former evangelical pastor, consultant and professor — and French shared a desire for a reboot, an alternative, biblically focused way to talk about politics.
In the course of their conversations, said Chang, “it became increasingly apparent that the politics was a critical cleavage point in how the church was relating to the rest of society, and that the church was itself getting divided and polarized by politics.”
Chang said he and his friends were convinced that pastors needed an assist, a program that would exist outside of Sunday sermon time.
Chang had already started Redeeming Babel in 2019 as “a way of reinventing the ways that evangelicals interacted with American culture (including addressing vaccine hesitancy).” Redeeming Babel became the vehicle for offering “The After Party.” Offered free to any church, small group or individual, it’s so far been accessed by approximately 75,000 people since it was released in April.
Chang, who had worked in an evangelical congregation and had a subsequent experience in political science, education and consulting, said he was comfortable as a public theologian straddling the intersection of politics and religion. But, he added, “I’m a bit of an outlier. Most of my peer pastors didn’t get into the ministry to be political commentators. Yet the political season has almost required them to navigate very complex political dynamics in their congregations.”
That’s an almost impossible task, he said, given that preaching on politics is likely to antagonize some and potentially foster misunderstanding, leading to Monday-morning blowback.
“We needed a different play. It’s harder to get into political antagonism and polarization when you are talking about politics with the person who brought you a casserole when your wife was going into surgery,” said Chang.
Their aim is to “recapture the forgotten, ignored and just cast-aside teaching of Jesus about the ‘how’ of politics,” he added. It’s a way to reach “the exhausted majority,” and give them a “Jesus-centered” means of engaging in conversations that feel more hopeful.
Cyndi Born, a longtime member of Desert Springs Bible Church, and her husband Karl, who identifies himself as a “seeker,” participated in an “After Party” small group at the church, Campbell’s congregation. Disenchanted with the overtly political tone of congregations they visited after retiring and moving away from Phoenix, they wondered, said Cyndi: “How do you keep conversations going? How do you deal with this divisiveness? How do you show love when there is so much vitriol?”
Karl Born described the sessions as “incredible.”
“There are actually outwardly vocal Christians espousing exactly the opposite of (the partisanship) I had been seeing,” he said. “It was cathartic, very encouraging.”
People were eager to talk about their feelings, said Cyndi Born. Finally, there was an outlet for it, and enough time to do so. On the other hand, she added, she had a feeling that “not everyone who needed to be at these tables was here. The group of people for whom this was attractive were all somewhat on the same page.”
Monika Morris also participated in a small group at Desert Bible Church. The curriculum, which explores different personality types, did a really good job of helping participants understand that others might see issues from a radically different perspective, she said.
“The course talks about different postures, puts them in a context that makes them less (antagonistic). I can understand where they are coming from, and think of ways to ask them gentle questions, with curiosity — and not be worried everything has to end in a brawl,” he said.
She said she now feels better equipped to engage, though some older members of her group expressed the sentiment that nothing would really change.
Though she shared a group with the same people, it wasn’t until the end, she said, that they felt comfortable enough to allude to their own political convictions. “If you are not in safe space with others who think like you, you’re scared you are going to get attacked.”
Nonetheless, she said, “We were all there because we wanted something better than what is out there right now.”
‘Appeal to our better angels’
In Puyallup, about 35 miles south of Seattle, Linda Saarela and her husband are part of a three-couple small group who took up “The After Party” curriculum after several of them heard Chang-helmed “Good Faith” podcast.
Saarela, who describes herself as committed to hearing diverse voices, and her spouse had experienced a difficult break-up of a 30-year-long Bible study group over the same political and theological divisions sweeping the country.
“It just grieves my heart that there is so much divisiveness and an inability to even have conversation and dialog — not to necessarily change somebody else’s perspective, but to understand their perspective and for them to be curious about my perspective. And so it’s almost like we don’t know how to do that. I was losing hope,” she said.
She and her spouse needed a reset. So did Michael Yoder and his wife.
After surviving the breakup of their own small group over COVID-19 restrictions, and experiencing a mass pandemic exodus in his own congregation, Yoder had been reading books and listening to podcasts, trying to make sense of what he’d experienced. Though they had mutual connections, the two couples didn’t really know each other (or the third couple) before.
“This group study is the most introspective, meaningful, small group study I’ve done,” Yoder said. “The principles of ‘The After Party’ are deeply revealing to me about the growth I need to do in my discipleship.”
Though the other five people in the group are probably more alike than not in their convictions, they share a commitment to share their own struggles, and attempt to see others in ways that focuses less on judgment and more on forgiveness and love of neighbor.
Will “The After Party” (and other faith-based projects like the Matthew 5:9 Fellowship) create a space for common ground, particularly among evangelicals?
There is no quick fix for deeply rooted problems, manifested by people who are modeling practices alien to Christian virtues, said Peter Wehner, a columnist, editor and senior fellow at the Trinity Forum. But “The After Party” is heading in the right direction, he said, by modeling practices based on the biblical virtues like joy, peace and kindness, rather than anger, fear and grievance.
“What it’s trying to do is say Christians are going to have different points of view, like everybody else, but we ought to engage in politics in a way that appeals to our better angels,” Wehner said, “not the worse ones.”
Elizabeth Eisenstadt Evans is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Religion News Service, National Catholic Reporter, Sojourners, Christian Century, The Washington Post and Philadelphia Inquirer.