There are temptations for Christians at a time of significant cultural and political polarization. Our present problems arise in no small part because of the increasing identification of people with the ideas and beliefs they hold. In times past, Western countries had a foundation of shared social capital that ran deeper than politics and thus prevented political disagreements from defining personal relationships.

That capital, whether we think of it in terms of patriotism, shared history, or common loves for things such as family and neighborhood, seems all but gone in many places. And once history, place, and family vanish as markers of who we are, only ideas remain. There is then nothing to bind together in the world outside the voting booth those who have always ticked different boxes within it. That my father voted Conservative and his father-in-law voted Labour was never a source of tension when I was growing up in Britain in the 1970s and ’80s. It is hard to believe the same would be true today.