Participation and community are at the heart of citizenship. In a democracy, citizens are participatory members of a political community that grants us certain rights and privileges. In return, we have duties that extend beyond the individual.

Engagement with our fellow citizens—“We the people”—is one of the benchmarks of a healthy democracy.

Of course, engagement comes in a variety of fashions. We each make thousands of daily choices about the particular terms of that engagement. We may be cranky or pleasant, resentful or empathetic, hateful or loving. Most of us go through these daily interactions blissfully unaware of our own contradictions and hypocrisies. Are our choices a factor of our environment or outside stimuli? The result of values and beliefs? Does our past impact the way we engage with the present?

I suspect these and more all come into play, but I want to focus on the past—our “raising” as we say in the South.

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Personal histories

Sorting out personal histories is hard work. I have spent years trying to recognize and acknowledge the complicated family history that is part and parcel of who I am today. Understanding how Scotch-Irish immigrants who settled primarily in the American South prior to the Civil War influenced my perceptions, opportunity, fortune, and worldview is important as I navigate life in the 21st century. How did these Presbyterians, Baptists, Episcopalians, and Restorationists ingrain their religious tenants in my beliefs? Where do the influences I inherited from my Depression/New Deal/World War II-era parents show up today in everything from lifestyle choices to voting patterns? How much white male privilege have I called upon in things large and small in my almost seven decades of life?

What we know about the past is changing as we uncover new information, recognize previously hidden bias, and engage with broader communities. History is always under construction. Part of my personal construction project is trying to recognize the limiting and destructive patterns of living and thinking I’ve unconsciously adopted through the years. Patterns which, no doubt, affect my ability to be a good citizen.

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Everybody has a role

Krista Tippett, in introducing last year’s exceptional On Being interview with author Isabel Wilkerson, talks of how we fall into these patterns. She gives as an example our ranking of human value—who matters the most and who matters less—and identifies it as “communal infrastructure” (there’s that community piece again) that “becomes internalized and perpetuated at every level along the hierarchies that result.”

Wilkerson suggests we have the power and expertise to change history. Instead of thinking “I wish we could do something about the Supreme Court” as if it is someone else’s problem, she calls on us to recognize that we each have power, influence, and expertise—as bankers, doctors, teachers, union members, and more—that we can bring to our role as citizens.

Recognizing that everyone has a role to play is key to being a good and conscientious citizen.

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Lifting all Americans

How we respond to others is important in building the type of country we want America to be. Just don’t expect the outrage agenda of today’s traditional and social media to help. As Teri Kanefield noted recently, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find news sources not enthralled to misinformation and conspiracy theories. Most thinking people understand that Fox is a propaganda network that keeps people enraged for profit. But like Kanefield, I’ve noticed an uptick in the outrage agenda from progressive voices as well. It has led me to stop watching cable news shows and to unsubscribe from several newsletters.

Leslie Moonves, a former CBS executive, famously said of Trump’s presidency: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” Joking or not, this is simply bad corporate citizenship. * Rather than focusing on drama or the binary choice of who is up/who is down, socially responsible media—good corporate citizens—inquire about where candidates want to lead the country and how they envision leading “all” Americans, not just the ones who agree with them.

Helping lift all Americans reflects the optimism of the New Deal, which is part of my personal history.

“The foundational belief of the New Deal was the conviction that democracy in the United States—limited and flawed though it remained—was better kept than abandoned, in the hope of strengthening and extending it.” The New Deal mattered then, at the cusp of spring in 1933, because “it gave Americans permission to believe in a common purpose that was not war.” 

Belief in a fundamentally uplifting common purpose leads naturally to how we think about others. The presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, Michael Curry, has encouraged us to “Love the neighbor you like and the neighbor you don’t like.”

In my religious worldview none of us is perfect. We are all—to use Biblical language—sinners. Richard Rohr reminds us that Jesus is shockingly not upset with sinners.

This is a shock so total that most Christians still refuse to see it. He is only upset with people who do not think they are sinners: These denying, fearful, and illusory ones are the blockage. They are much more likely to hate and feel no compunction.

Our job, and the mission of religion, is not to expel sin and evil. There is no place to expel it to because “we have met the enemy, and the enemy is us.”

We can choose to perpetuate injustice against “the other” or—in our own flawed but unique way—take on the job of choosing to fight it. In FDR’s words, we can “apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.”

The next time I prepare to respond with outrage, I’ll try instead to love the neighbor I don’t like. The reality is that we’re all in this together.

More to come . . .

DJB

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*Corporate citizenship is a recognition that a business has “social, cultural and environmental responsibilities to the community in which it seeks a license to operate, as well as economic and financial ones to its shareholders or immediate stakeholders.”

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Photo by Matt Collamer on Unsplash