25 Quotes from Truth Over Tribe: Pledging Allegiance to the Lamb, Not the Donkey or the Elephant.
Quotes from the forthcoming book by Patrick Miller and Keith Simon.
The tribalism in our politics has seeped into our churches and is dividing people from each other more than it has for generations. Recovering our unity in Christ over our political tribes is one of the foremost tasks of the Church today.
A few months ago, I joined the team at Truth Over Tribe to help spread that message. On October 4th, our hosts Patrick Miller and Keith Simon are releasing their book by the same name.
If these quotes pique your interest and you resonate with the message, the most helpful thing you can to do spread it is to pre-order the book.
1.
Jesus didn’t come to earth to recruit culture warriors. He came to recruit disciples who imitated his sacrificial love.
2.
Jesus offers the ultimate solution to the tribalism that is tearing our community apart: transforming humans, with all their tribal tendencies, from the inside out.
3.
Here’s the key to relationships that can’t be broken by tribalism. Share a love that’s rooted in something stronger and more everlasting than today’s tribal boundaries: Jesus. His followers don’t have the same politics, wealth, race, and gender, but they all call him Lord.
4.
Nothing—even abandonment by your tribe—can separate you from the love of God.
5.
Conservatives and liberals are not significantly more polarized over policy issues than they were thirty years ago. But we do like each other significantly less.
6.
The more you resist allegiance to a political tribe, the more you’ll embrace Jesus’s kingdom.
7.
The more you assume the best about others, the more you can assume you’re walking in God’s grace.
8.
If you follow Jesus faithfully, you will be slowly set free from the suspicion, disdain, and hatred that characterize every other tribe, without losing the cohesion, empathy, and solidarity that we all long to experience.
9.
Big Brother, it turns out, isn’t a violent totalitarian. He surveils you covertly, sells you sweetly, and manipulates you gently. So gently that you don’t even notice.
10.
This explains why your friends and family are becoming more radicalized on the internet. Big Tech is serving them more and more radical content in a bid for their attention.
11.
For Jesus, “the world” was a phrase that summarized the complex way human sin and idolatry folds itself into cultures, institutions, and political organizations. These interlocking forces create an overwhelming system that structurally tempts people away from God, disincentivizes righteousness, promotes lies, and justifies evil.
12.
You will never plumb the depths of how the world is manipulating you—and how Big Tech is doing it specifically. Nonetheless, you will never experience an inch of freedom from that manipulative power if you continue to live by the lie that it’s not having an impact on your life. It is.
13.
Today, there is a competitive market of alternative truths. The battle is not to define truth but to have the power to actualize your tribe’s truth.
14.
When truth is a matter of personal taste, preference reigns, not reason.
15.
As your local connections erode, so does your sense of belonging. As your sense of belonging decreases, so does your sense of trust in local leaders and friends. As your sense of local trust evaporates, you find yourself more open to tribalized experts or leaders with national platforms whose theories promise to explain and resolve the problems plaguing society.
16.
You’re living through the Great Depression of social capital, and it’s miserable.
17.
Tribalism simply cannot withstand the weight of self-sacrificial generosity. It always breaks under the pressure of a gift freely given.
18.
If you’re known by what you’re for, it will be difficult for tribalists to make you play their game. They won’t know what to do with you because you won’t fit their paradigm.
19.
Jesus doesn’t support the Democratic platform or the Republican platform. His vision of God’s kingdom on earth doesn’t neatly fit into either tribal ideology.
20.
No Christian can hope to weather our culture’s tribal politics without keeping first things first: Jesus is king.
21.
You must never sacrifice your witness for the sake of a political win. You must never allow your party’s platform or interest to shape your ethics and beliefs more than Jesus’s teachings do. Where your party leaves behind Jesus’s politic and ethics, you must leave behind your party.
22.
The line between good and evil didn’t cut parties. It cut between through both parties.
23.
You should feel more at home with people who share your faith than people who share your politics.
24.
There are few things more valuable than the opinion of someone who disagrees with you. One of the greatest gifts God can give you is a friend who sees the world differently than you.
25.
Following Jesus should lead us to form a worldwide tribe that welcomes everyone and charitably dialogues over our differences.
Bonus.
Tribalism may force the church through a painful realignment. But that won’t be the last chapter.