By common consent, identity politics is tearing people apart. At bottom, identity politics starts with some feature that differentiates people into a group and forms political perspectives, alliances, and goals that advance the interest of the group. Race and gender are by far the most common organizing principles of identity politics, but they aren’t the only ones. These days, nearly anything can get turned into a badge of identity, a lever to elevate one group at the expense of another.
Identity politics hardens differences into divides. It politicizes everything. It can easily turn loyalty to your group into loathing of every competing group. Often, it implicitly sets up some standard of who gets to count as fully human, a standard that your group possesses and the other does not. Identity politics turns common life into a war of every socially constructed subcommunity against every other.
So its problems are obvious. But identity politics doesn’t just create problems “out there”: many of the forces that threaten to pull churches apart are driven by toxic, worldly manifestations of identity politics. One reason that political disagreements between Christians so often escalate into battle royales is that it increasingly seems like disagreeing with my
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