Our Tower of Babel
Like many of you, I’m sure, I’ve spent the better part of several years wondering: What’s gone wrong? Why do our disagreements seem so intense? Our bonds so broken?
In a recent article in The Atlantic, social psychologist and atheist Jonathan Haidt says the answer to the questions we’ve been asking can be found in the tale of the tower of Babel. He writes:
The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth.
Situating the crisis in the rise of social media, he continues, saying that Babel is
… about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community. It’s a metaphor for what is happening not only between red and blue, but within the left and within the right, as well as within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families.
We could take Haidt’s analysis a step further here and add “churches” to the list of communities that have been scattered and fractured.
Data backs up this breakdown, all the way down to the individual. Polls and studies reveal that Americans of all ages are less happy and more alone than ever.
So, where’s our hope?
What are we to do in the face of such challenges? That’s not a question any of us can answer. But, we can turn to God’s promises.
In one of the readings appointed for the Third Sunday of Easter, Jeremiah 32:37-38, we find a remarkable complement to the scattering of Babel:
Behold, I will gather them from all the countries to which I drove them in my anger and my wrath and in great indignation. I will bring them back to this place, and I will make them dwell in safety. And they shall be my people, and I will be their God.
As Christians, we are not united as Americans, Democrats or Republicans, Millennials or Boomers, or any of the rest. We are united as Easter people who have been given eternity by a God who promises to make a fragmented, disunited group into a “people”—a people whose only real hope is found in the resurrection of Christ.
In this moment, that’s the hope to which we hold fast.
In Him,
Charles Snow
Artwork: Tower of Babel – Eva Hašková, 2003. CC BY-SA 4.0