How a Conversation with Ian Morgan Cron and Suzanne Stabile led to The Spirit of Our Politics
The Spirit of Our Politics: Spiritual Formation and the Renovation of Public Life will be published on January 23, 2024—just over two months away! I believe in this book a great deal: it is my heartfelt offering to the life of the Church and to our politics. Last month, I began a monthly series describing the development of this book. You can read Part One of this series here. What follows is Part Two. Part Three is here.
It would mean so much to me if you would preorder The Spirit of Our Politics today. And, sincerely, I think it would end up meaning a great deal to you as well. I can’t wait for you to read this book.
In August of 2016, I was finishing the manuscript for Reclaiming Hope just as Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were preparing to accept their party’s nominations to run for president. As I reflected on what I learned during my time working in The White House and in national politics, my thoughts increasingly led me to the spiritual aspects of the crisis. The way the 2016 presidential campaign was unfolding was leading me in the same direction.
Still, an hour before a podcast interview with Ian Morgan Cron and Suzanne Stabile for their podcast The Road Back to You, I was worried. What was I going to say on a podcast about the Enneagram? I knew about the Enneagram, but I was not into the Enneagram. I was fine with the conclusion that I was a 4, but I didn’t even know my wing! Was I setting myself up to be embarrassed on this podcast? I knew very little about Ian and Suzanne. What would we even talk about? I called Melissa and told her I thought I had made a mistake accepting the interview and asked her to pray for me.
It only took about five minutes for Ian and Suzanne to crack the conversation open, as Suzanne interjected to ask me about how my propensity for the sentimental or nostalgic intersected with my experience in politics. You can hear my surprise at the poignancy of the question on the interview. We were off to the races!
It’s not a perfect interview by any means—at least it wasn’t on my part. You can hear me thinking through my responses as I give them. I’d never had the opportunity to speak publicly about these topics in quite this way. In some instances, the way I articulated certain ideas was brand new to me! On this podcast, I expressed the following ideas publicly for the first time:
“You need to have a firmer ground to stake your identity in when you enter politics than politics itself.”
“Do not go to politics looking for your inner needs to be met.”
“…we need to think about the spiritual harm that a politics of pure power does to people…”
This podcast was the first time I spoke about politics and “spiritual harm,” a concept I’d squeeze into the final manuscript for Reclaiming Hope even though I knew I would not be able to fully explore it. Here’s the paragraph where I added a few lines (italicized) following my conversation with Ian and Suzanne.
One lesson from my time working with the president and religious leaders is that politics is a central influencer of the cultural health of our nation. This book focuses on politics because political institutions create and drive culture, and we can no longer ignore this aspect of how politics functions. As I have talked to pastors around the country, I’ve come to under- stand that many of those who refrain from political engagement do so not because they believe it is unimportant, but because they know, for too many of their congregants, politics is important in all of the wrong ways. If we are to reclaim hope, we must understand our nation’s political life and our role in it. Politics is causing great spiritual harm and a big reason for that is people are going to politics to have their inner needs met. Politics does a poor job of meeting inner needs, but politicians will suggest they can do so it if it will get them votes. The state of our politics is a reflection of the state of our souls.
I would return to their podcast three months later following the 2016 election for another conversation. I’m incredibly grateful to Ian and Suzanne for their skill as interviewers, their depth of insight as people, and especially now for the friendship we share. It’s amazing how God will bring people and opportunities that help point you in the direction you should go.
If writing Reclaiming Hope pointed me down the path that would lead to The Spirit of Our Politics, then it was these two conversations with Ian and Suzanne that convinced me that I needed to dedicate myself to developing some of these insights further.
The Spirit of Our Politics is the result of a lifetime of experience, and nearly a decade of writing and thinking about the intersection of theology, formation and politics. However, I couldn’t go straight from Reclaiming Hope and these conversations with Ian and Suzanne to writing The Spirit of Our Politics, I needed to prove to myself that these ideas had legs. I would do that in 2018, and I’ll share more about it in Part Three of this series.