The violent polarization of U.S. politics in response to the passage of anti-immigration laws in Arizona in 2010 highlights a serious threat to the religious community.

While people in the pews were divided over the new law itself, more in favor of it according to public opinion polls, the more serious problem identified was that, over the past generation or two, the religious community has come to be seen as just one more institution among others in the culture when it comes to politics.

From its beginnings until recently the church has fulfilled an independent, but influential role to play with regard to politics. It dare not accept its current devolution into a subsidiary role. Sacred scriptures recount the role of the faith community in guiding political power, and, when necessary, in calling it to account based on a God's higher plan for the development of the world - the Reign of God. This calling of the religious community didn't somehow stop forever thirty years ago.

Today's religious communities in the U.S., as well as the political middle of the nation, are strongly influence by two opposing partisan political and cultural centers. Media messaging takes its cue from those two extreme positions, creating the current popular image of a bipolar nation locked in a struggle not unlike that between Jacob and Esau in the womb.

For the church, this means that over the past thirty years, the manner of presenting, discussing, and resolving politically-based issue has been to both begin from and follow one extreme or the other, and to do it in the same way that the political parties do. In this process, the church is losing both its theological mandate and its ability to think and act scripturally and theologically about the role of politics in working toward the common good.

When church leaders continue to do this kind of reflection, their work is often discounted by people in the pews, some of whom have long since taken their fundamental arguments from one or the other of the two political poles.

Social holiness and conferencing

Standing within and re-appropriating the Wesleyan traditions of social holiness and conferencing are two key actions that continually remake us as United Methodists. In openness to the spirit's guidance toward a faithful way forward, the Desert Southwest Annual Conference is now testing a new model for reclaiming the church's calling to a unique political role in the new world of the twenty-first century. We are calling that model The Holy Conversation Project.