In the Western world of 2018, there is a hard standoff on every (ideological) street corner: progressive versus populist, millennial versus baby boomer, religious versus secular, conservative versus liberal, globalist versus patriot, and so on. Our age, of course, is not unique in being riven by division. Humans have always debated competing ideals. Our period’s distinct accent is heard, rather, in the political discourse relied on to handle these differences.

In the present-day West, mass democracy is increasingly regarded as a game that separates winners and losers. The players are rivals in search of dominance, and the winner takes all. When it comes to politics, consensus-building and compromise seem to be things of the past. Although Christians are often critical of our era’s turn to post-truth politics, we should not ignore that the same politics are also post-neighborly.

Victory in today’s democracy, even by the slightest of margins, elevates one group’s particular preference to “will of the people” status, aligning reason, patriotism, progress—or whatever the winning side’s greatest aspiration might be—exclusively with the majority. The losers, in comparison, become a kind of non-people by implication. Their minority viewpoint—should they remain committed to it—places them on a spectrum ranging from unpatriotic moaners to enemies of the people. This is the kind of culture in which 21st-century Christians live, move, and—often uncritically—have their being.

Winner-Takes-All Democracy

Democracy, of course, is not a biblical ideal. Although Scripture says a great deal about social justice, it does not tell Christians to organize their societies along the lines of any particular system. In a historical sense, democracy in its ancient Athenian form pre-dates Christianity by around five centuries. That said, debates around the best form of social order—between democracy, monarchy, and aristocracy—have formed a near-constant backdrop to Christianity’s history in the West.

At the heart of Christianity’s long (political) history lies the idea that although the Bible contains no distinct blueprint for the state, it nonetheless has unique power to speak into every state in calling the powerful to act justly—from Augustine’s Rome and Calvin’s Geneva to present-day Washington, DC, and London. In that sense, Christianity has always been a political faith.

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In our day, Western Christianity has to deal with the latest stage in democracy’s restless development: mass democracy as a high-stakes race to majority domination. As this game turns the majority viewpoint into the “will of the people,” securing the majority position—whether in elections or movements of social opinion—matters a great deal. To win at this game is exhilarating. After all, the game itself promises you freedom of choice: a vote unimpeded by outside influence, an opinion formed by you and you alone. This, in turn, makes victory all the sweeter when you realize, abuzz with feelings of freedom and authenticity, that you have backed the winning horse.

Recent scandals that have engulfed big data firms like Cambridge Analytica and the social media giant Facebook have altered our perspective on this winners-and-losers brand of political discourse. In these scandals, it is alleged, the private information of millions of Facebook users was harvested without our consent and presumably used to profile us, further turning our newsfeeds into bespoke ideological echo chambers and drip-feeding us with the right encouragements and provocations to embolden even the subtlest political leaning. Ultimately, the concern is, social media manipulated by unseen forces have made us more likely to vote in a particular way.

With this, we have been served a painful reminder that the will of the people may be less freely chosen than we previously believed. That illusion has been shattered by the realization of something far murkier: a lurking big data industry that watches our every online move, amassing unimaginable amounts of information on us that is used to cajole us for the political ends of its paymasters. That revelation subverts the narrative of freedom we’ve been sold; it makes us look less like the players and more like the ones who are being played.

A Christian Response

How should Christians respond? For many, the immediate and difficult question is “Should I delete Facebook?” This is certainly an existential crisis of Kierkegaardian proportions for social media natives whose identities have been formed as much online as in the real world. A thoughtful Christian response should extend that question to consider the kind of civic discourse—our winner-takes-all style of mass democracy—that led us to this point.

Our age’s readiness to turn its complex nexus of divisions into a winners-and-losers race to majority dominance is precisely what gives rise to a powerful, amoral big data industry. If the winners take all and the losers become outcasts, we have reason to use every available tool to win. This zero-sum reality incentivizes political leaders to use the power of big data to turn their will into the “will of the people.”

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A Christian response might resume an argument aired in 2016 and then further developed in 2017 by the Anglican theologian Rowan Williams. In its full form, his argument began as a critique of contemporary American populist politics before focusing on British politics after the Brexit referendum. After 51.9 percent of UK voters chose to leave the European Union in 2016, numerous prominent pro–European Union Brits were publicly shamed by tabloid newspapers and some politicians as unpatriotic, anti-democratic, and in some cases “enemies of the people.” Williams’s critique of that shaming centered on how current politics encourages us to see others as rivals—those we strive to turn into losers—in a struggle for dominance. By contrast, Williams argued, Christianity challenges us to view others primarily as neighbors.

His argument was not against democracy itself. It was, however, a claim that some styles of political discourse are healthier than others, especially when viewed from a Christian perspective. His key diagnostic question centered on the majority’s treatment of the minority in a democratic society.

In a pro-abortion and pro-euthanasia society, for example, how are citizens who dissent on those issues treated by the dominant majority? If they are regarded as irrational and immoral, face exclusion from public life, and are expected to give up their beliefs simply because those beliefs have minority status, the democracy in question is in poor shape. And before we cry foul when we feel traditional marriage, right to life, or religious liberty are jeopardized as minority beliefs, Christians must remember that we often find ourselves in the majority. In such an ailing democracy, our race to make the majority into “The People” in turn makes it harder to remember that the minority are also people.

Digital Good Samaritans

A better kind of democracy, Williams’s logic goes, would be one where the majority loves its minority neighbor and exercises democratically granted responsibility in a more humane way. For this to happen, of course, the winners have to see election victories not as prizes but rather as appointments to promote the good of all citizens—including those who voted differently than they did. When we begin to think in terms of loving our political neighbors as ourselves, the language of winners and losers quickly becomes awkward.

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Although Christianity did not create democracy, it has a unique capacity to address it. In our era, Christianity challenges us to abandon the rivalry of democratic winners and losers in favor of intentional neighborliness. What does this mean in practice?

Theologically, neighborliness is an event. It happens when one person treats another humanely, regardless of their differences. Neighborliness does not flatten out those differences or assume that differing parties must find some kind of consensus as a precondition to kindness, civility, and seeking to do good for one another.

In the parable of the Good Samaritan, the Jew and the Samaritan retain their identities throughout. Indeed, the parable closes by showing that the Samaritan proved himself a neighbor precisely in that context: “Which of these three, do you think, became a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” (Luke 10:36, Mounce).

To become a neighbor is necessarily to deny that you—and those like you—are the most important individual(s) in this world. It is, rather, to affirm that something else stands above you and your tribe, even when you are enjoying social dominance. In Christianity, that place of ultimate authority is reserved for God.

In a post-neighborly age, majority power is not easily humbled. Although a secular mass democracy might point to the state as more important than a majority group, that group usually has a monopoly on influence within the state in our winners-and-losers democracy. This, in turn, leads to cultures where democracy’s losers and their minority concerns are simply ignored or disparaged. Christians should be critical of such impoverishments of democracy regardless of which side of the political divide we find ourselves on.

Branding our current form of mass democracy a failure, Williams pondered what it would take to make Western people desire a more humane kind of politics. Has the necessary catalyst arrived in the shape of Facebook and Cambridge Analytica? Was this the wake-up call we needed? For the wider Western world, probably not. Several months on, Facebook’s users have not abandoned it in any great numbers. Following a symbolic wrap on the knuckles by the powers they helped to enthrone, the masters of big data will retreat into the shadows.

Nevertheless, even though our age provides little encouragement for it, the gospel still calls Christians to be good neighbors. If anything, the data-driven attempt to manipulate public opinion that was unmasked by the Cambridge Analytica scandal makes plain that Christians can best serve and love their neighbors by rejecting the polarized post-neighbor politics that—thus far, at least—have typified our century.

James Eglinton is Meldrum Lecturer in Reformed Theology at the University of Edinburgh.

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