By some measures, political polarization in the United States is as pronounced today as it has been at any moment since the Civil War. As Rachel Kleinfeld recently observed, no wealthy, mature democracy has been as polarized, and for as long, as the United States. As a result of this polarization, people who disagree politically have stopped engaging with one another—or, at least, stopped engaging productively. Instead, they increasingly tend to congregate with the like-minded in ideologically homogeneous echo chambers, which only reinforces the polarization.
One insufficiently appreciated consequence of polarization is what we might call the “politicization of everything.” Virtually no area of human endeavor is safely outside the realm of political combat. As the Catholic historian Massimo Faggioli has observed, American political polarization—and the attendant politicization of everything—has had a negative impact on how American Catholics understand themselves and their faith community. In our two-party system, increasing political polarization has polarized the U.S. Church itself, putting more pressure on individual Catholics to “choose sides” at the expense of a shared religious identity that crosses party lines.
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