In 2017, following four years of studying in Europe, Fr. Aaron Wessman returned to America and discovered an anger and divisiveness much more pronounced than when he left. While the last seven years have further entrenched this divisiveness, Fr. Aaron has spent his time trying to understand what happened – in his country, with his family and friends, but also in himself. As he wrote in the introduction to his recent book, The Church’s Mission in a Polarized World: “I am just as concerned with what is happening inside me.”

Fr. Aaron is a priest belonging to the Glenmary Home Missioners – a Catholic society of priests, brothers and lay missioners who serve primarily in Appalachia and the deep South. GHM was founded by a priest of the Archdiocese of Baltimore, Fr. William Howard Bishop, who was moved by the many poor and forgotten people who inhabited rural America and wanted to find ways to accompany them in their lives. Today, Glenmary missions seek out counties where less than 1% of the population is Catholic. There they serve their mission churches with the goal of returning the developed parishes to the care of the local diocese before moving onto a new mission.

As a GHM priest, Fr. Aaron has first-hand experience of what Chris Arnade calls “back row America” and the challenges to human dignity men, women, and families face in the rural areas of our country. The Church’s Mission in a Polarized World offers a helpful analysis of the confused and reactive landscape we find ourselves in, and Fr. Aaron invites us to rediscover the essence of the Church and how the Christian witness can reawaken an experience of freedom we all desire to live.

In your book you describe the polarization we are experiencing as a consequence of Americans having ‘sorted’ themselves. Can you explain this?

Sorting has been widely studied. We discovered that human beings like to associate with people, places, and experiences that they can relate to and that they share something in common with. We have this natural tendency, but we're beginning to see that sorting doesn’t only happen in social settings. We’re also going through a geographical sorting in the United States. Bill Bishop, in his book The Big Sort, showed that over the last 60 years people moved within the United States in an unprecedented way, and as that took place, people made decisions in any number of ways around where they would like to live and why. Perhaps it is not initially the case that people say, “I want to move to a place in the United States where there are other folks who think the same way as I do politically”, but as they look for a job, they also want to go to a place where they can practice their religion, whatever that may be. People also make decisions about what they're interested in culturally – agriculture, hunting, fishing, cultural diversity, ethnic diversity, etc. So, statistically speaking, we sorted ourselves into two Americas which are largely defined in political terms. Rural America tends to be more conservative and Republican, which wasn't always the case in the United States, whereas urban America tends to be more progressive and Democratic.

What are the consequences of this geographic sorting?

It is already very easy for us to have prejudices or biases against the group that is different from ours. We are not bad people because of that, it's just the way we work. If we're not around folks who are different than we are, it's easy for us to imagine what they're like rather than engaging with who they actually are. And suspicion starts to grow between the two groups. The tricky thing is that in order to lessen some of that suspicion the groups have to relate to each other in very common ways, such as having kids share the same little league baseball team, shopping for groceries in the same place together, having their kids going to similar schools, etc. But, because of the way we have sorted ourselves geographically, that kind of interaction is not happening, and a strong “us versus them” mentality is growing. One group looks at the other and thinks, “they have issues” without ever having real-life interactions with them that can challenge their assumptions.

Citing several others, you explain that this sorting has contributed to the phenomenon of “mega-identities”. What is a “mega-identity”?

A “mega identity” is where one’s political identity is the identity with which most of a person’s identities align. This means, as Ezra Klein describes, that political participation is no longer solely about strictly political considerations or outcomes, such as working for and supporting a particular political candidate, or winning an election for a political party. With mega-identities, one’s political participation and the outcomes that happen politically affect almost all of the identities in a person’s life. Mega-identities make it hard to distinguish between oneself and one’s political participation or party expression.

“Identity” is a loaded term. How do you understand identity?

I was always very interested in the theme of identity, which I came to through the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar. Referencing the ancients, he simply said that identity is trying as human beings to answer the question, “Who am I?” That's such a profound question and only human beings can ask it. Life is really a search for that whole sense of who I am. For Christians, we recognize that identity is something given by God. We are something in the eyes of God! God understands who we are and there is an aspect of identity that can only flourish by cultivating the relationship with God. Balthasar would relate our identity to our vocation and to what God is calling each of us to. Ultimately, who am I? I'm a son or a daughter of God. I am one who has been called into a relationship with God. And that isn't something that I can fully create on my own, but is a gift. The danger in “identity politics” is the tendency for a certain conception of one’s identity to close one off from others, keeping one from engaging with people who are different. On a fundamental level, Christian identity – which I argue should be the preeminent identity for Christians – is something that sends us out to others, is something that invites us to engage with others in charity.

You write that polarization has also entered the Church. When you illustrate the impact of polarization on the Church, you begin by describing her nature as “one, holy, Catholic and apostolic”. Why do you start there?

I've always been interested in what the Church is, and when we say that the Church is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic, we recognize that there is a gift given to us and constituted by God that can never be lost. And yet, on the other side of that, we always are called. If the Church is one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic, we are then called to cultivate those aspects of the Church in our own lives and in the Church as a gift for the world. As I looked at those four marks of the Church, my thought was that even as they're given as gifts and cannot be completely lost within a polarized world, there are ways in which polarization can impede us from cultivating those four marks and living them out as individual Christians. I also wanted to write the book in a way that was somewhat accessible to non-Catholic Christians, because in the United States, it's very difficult to think of Christianity – or even Catholicism – without thinking of our interrelationship with our Protestant brothers and sisters. Non-Catholic Christians can relate to these marks of the church as defined by the Council of Nicaea.

Your book invites people to cross over into the storm in order to engage instead of becoming more entrenched in our position. You write that in America, polarization not only closes us off from ideas, but also from people. As a missionary priest in Glenmary your work is to go into areas with low Catholic presence. What has this “crossing over” looked like for you?

I strongly believe that the Church is missionary by her very nature. Therefore the Church is always seeking to engage the other. It's tied into her Catholicity, her universality, in the very words of Jesus who mandates us to go to all the nations, not just some. We can see it throughout the vibrant, wonderful history and tradition of the Church. Believing that the Church is missionary, I see our tendency towards polarization as a major threat to the Church’s missionary movement. Polarized culture seems to influence us to say, “I'm not going to all the nations. I'll just go to some of the nations and I'll go to the nations that think like me and look like me and enjoy the things I enjoy.” But that undercuts who we are as Christians. If the Church is missionary by her very nature, we are missionary disciples and we can't be anything less. On a more personal level, Glenmary is full of priests and brothers who are not from the rural south or Appalachia, but our history is filled with “outsiders” who felt a strong desire to cross over to the folks of Appalachia in the South. Part of our formation is to realize that we cannot go into those areas thinking that we have the totality of the truth for what these people need in their lives. God has been working with and in these folks since before we were there – the Holy Spirit has been present. They have their own lives, their own stories, their own desires, values and dreams, their own histories and traditions. For us to come in and presume that we just simply need to dump onto them what our experience has been does a disservice to their dignity as human beings. God comes to us and affirms each of us, and then works to purify who we are inviting us to something more. As we're crossing over and entering into people’s lives we can begin to discover the way God's already been working with them.

What does it mean to be a missionary disciple?

Being a missionary disciple is an entire way of life, a way in which we approach the world around us. There are two extremes that I think we should try to avoid. One is to presume that we have every single answer and are the only ones interacting with God, imagining that those we encounter are completely devoid of any wisdom or truth or goodness. That isn’t true! We know that the Spirit is working in the world in many ways, constantly preparing people to deepen communion with God. The other extreme is the idea that we have nothing to offer or add – that facing her limits, the Church would say “We shouldn’t even offer anything.” Missionary discipleship is lived between both of these. It is so mysterious how God draws us to Himself. A great wonder is required in our living out this missionary curiosity to discover how God is working.

And this is why you describe the culture war metaphor as deeply unhelpful?

Yes, because it erodes this curiosity and this wonder and reduces the other to someone I need to conquer.

Looking at the current political landscape, it is hard not to find the culture war metaphor somehow accurate. But, instead of this dynamic of power, in the book you point to St. Paul writing to the community in Philippi and his invitation to a Christ-like self-emptying. How can our political participation be Christian?

To be quite honest, this is something I have not worked out in my own mind. I continue to wrestle and struggle with it. We as Christians in the United States have to work within the systems – the political structures that exist – and those structures are flawed and produce candidates and laws with which we are unhappy. Even with our deep sense of freedom here, we feel pushed in directions we don't want to go. We need to recognize the imperfect reality that we're living in and look at it within the eschatological framework that informs Christian life: we are made for something more than what we are living now. In the face of living in an imperfect system, the great temptation is to amass power and then force the system and the world around us to be the way we think it should be. But there are dangers in that because we're promised and asked to believe that until Jesus comes again, reality is always going to be imperfect. We have to be incredibly wise about how we as Christians engage with power. You’re right that the war metaphor is enticing because it shows us how to use that power in a way that makes us feel like we can carry out the ends we feel we desire. But it is very dangerous because it implies that the other is the enemy and we need to use this power to take them out.

What does it look like to engage?

We have to try to put people in positions and build structures where people use the power they have in ways that respect human beings. We can refer to this as ‘humanizing’ political structures – allowing the values of the Gospel to inform the way we order our lives and things. We often fail to see that living Catholicism within the life of the Church – going to mass and cultivating the life of a parish, being involved in a group like CL – is already a political ordering. Those experiences are truly the striving to live the city of God. Living Catholicism – going to mass with people from different countries and sharing pews with folks who may or may not have papers – is already a political statement. It says we can love each other and be together in the same room while we can think differently, because we can all face in the same direction toward God. We need God in our lives, because without Him we’ll abuse the power that we have been given and we will hurt each other. That shows the rest of the world that there is a different way of being. Our task is to enmesh the city of God within the city of man. How that plays out is very complex for each individual.

This November, can voting be an act of freedom and not just an engagement in a power struggle?

Today in the Church we're celebrating both synodality and the Eucharistic revival. I want to hold these two things together. We need the Eucharist because we desire fulfillment, and the Eucharist satisfies that desire and shows us how we can freely give of ourselves without fear or the will to dominate. If I receive Jesus, and I am satisfied there, then it is possible to give myself totally. If I really believe that this is God Himself, what else could I want? The Eucharist satisfies the heart, and it gives us the ability to live the life of synodality, which ultimately is the messiness of engaging not only within the Church, but with the broader world. Engaging all of these differences: cultural, ethnic, language, racial, religious, theological, liturgical, etc. If I am living Catholicism, which means living the Eucharist and engaging in synodality in the broad sense of the term, then I’m already acting in a way which is political. In this way, we are already doing what we are called to do and we are not exiting the world around us. Then, we have to cast votes for imperfect people within an imperfect system. However, the presidential election should be one small sliver of the pie. There is a pressure to believe that it is the most important thing, because all of the money is spent there and the news talks about it and all the influence is there. But the rest of the pie is living the fullness of Catholicism, eucharistically and synodally. When I go to the poll, I think I will look at it as an imperfect decision. Can I love an imperfect decision? I think so, because God loves me in my imperfection, and I am called to love my Glenmary brothers and my community in all of its imperfections. Even with all of the tension I feel, I still have to act and live and therefore I can love these imperfect situations. It is a love of a country that is totally imperfect and we cast votes that are less than perfect. Offering what we can is an act of love and therefore also an act of freedom.