Fraying Democracy, Ravaged Psyche before the Living God

“All life is one and I can never be what is my potential to be as long as you are not what your potential is to be, so that I’m tied to you.”

— Howard Thurman, “Man and Social Change, Part 2: Man and the Experience of Community (Continued)”

https://thurman.pitts.emory.edu/items/show/56

This moment reveals how easily we forget that we are interconnected. Our lives, bodies, stories, and futures remain intertwined whether we acknowledge it or not. Publicly, we describe it as a democratic crisis. It appears in contested elections, culture wars, and the erosion of trust. Beneath all of this, I sense a kind of spiritual imbalance. Something inside us is out of sync. This is a spiritual arrhythmia in our shared life. We are becoming a society that is drifting out of harmony with the deepest order of being. 

Thurman says that when we break “the harmony which [we have] as a human creature… with [our] total environment,” our psyches are left “ravaged.” In this state, the mind can only show its pain in unhealthy ways. I believe our politics now reflects that kind of pain.

Speaking from my womanist-leaning perspective in this moment, I see this era as just another chapter in a much older story. Women of color have long known what it is like to live in systems that clearly “read them out” of the human circle (to borrow Thurman’s language about how nations prepare for war). When a group is labeled as a threat or as less than human, Thurman says, “it’s open season… without any guilt, without any moral responsibility.”

What we see happening in democracy today is simply an old pattern spreading. The circle of community shrinks, and only a few people are seen as deserving protection, opportunity, or even grief. From a theological viewpoint, this shrinking is a refusal to accept that we all share the same humanity. Thurman describes community as “the experience of any form of life when it realizes itself,” and he adds that “wholeness is community.” In other words, life is at its truest when we resist the trend and insist that we belong to each other. The world may celebrate the power of “me,” but the deeper power is always “us.”

Such a deeper truth means that life itself is bent toward connection. Community and wholeness do not require uniformity. They just require a shared decision to stay attached, even when we take a different view. And that is not easy (see Thurman on Part 2: https://thurman.pitts.emory.edu/items/show/55).

When we let division and fear organize our public life, we end up with policies that harm our shared environments and hurt people. We are not just making poor political choices. We are going against the core of what it means to live together, and like it or not, we do live together on this earth. So, when someone claims that this kind of disregard somehow “serves community” and society at large, they are not telling the truth.

As someone who studies the New Testament, I know that truth is not just an idea floating above us. It is never so vague that it disappears. Truth is felt. It is seen and enacted. Truth is lived. In John’s language, we either “do what is true” and “walk in the light,” or we “do not live out the truth” (John 3:21; 1 John 1:6–7). James says the same thing when he insists that faith devoid of concrete care for a hungry, barely dressed sibling is dead on arrival (James 2:14–17). 

Truth shows up in the histories we make and how we either let life flourish or block it. Truth is what happens between people. It reveals itself in the gap between those who have room to live well and those forced to fight for a well-lived life against the current.

It is in these circumstances that I see both the challenge and the hope in theological and religious education. If, as Thurman says, “community is built into the bias of mind,” then our job is to help people remember what their bodies already know. In classrooms, congregations, and study groups, we can create what Thurman calls “experiences of unity between peoples.” We can trust his idea that these experiences are “more compelling than all the concepts, ideologies, creeds, fears, anxieties, [and] hatred that divide.” This is not just wishful thinking. It is a belief in how life is meant to work, and I stand for life, not against it.

In practice, I do not see teaching as just sharing information or conducting critical analysis, though both are important. I see it as work that expands the circle. I ask: whose stories have been left out of this conversation, this syllabus, this canon, or our society? Who has been labeled a threat, openly or quietly, so that harm against them can be justified or ignored? I invite students, especially those preparing for ministry, scholarship, or organizing, to reflect on Thurman’s tough message: “If I want to destroy you with a clear conscience… all I need to do is to have you outside of the circle.”

While some people work hard to exclude others, those of us who understand the importance of pluralism must be even more committed to widening it. We should honor the kitchen-table theologians, domestic workers, and mothers who, like Thurman’s own, spent years “caught in this surviving process” with little energy left to “sort things out.” Their lives still show us another way to build community.

Teaching and fostering community in theological education shapes students who can see the brokenness of this nation’s psyche and still choose not to reproduce its violence or despair. However, we must think beyond simply the “student” label. We need to consider what it truly means to form people—our fellow citizens, neighbors, and the world. 

So we teach toward that end, inviting them to move with the deeper bias of mind and body toward life. We hustle past those who shout their refusal to care. While they show up late and leave early, we show up earlier and stay longer. We speak more plainly, living certain that every act of community catches the current of the living, breathing God who holds us together.

For such a time as this, theological and religious education can offer both protest and comfort. But more importantly, it can shape people who know, in their bones and in their practices, that “all life is one.” Some of us must be willing to stake our vocations, teaching, and politics on that claim. And I am grateful to be among a “great cloud of witnesses,” both in this series and beyond, who are willing to do just that.