Let's Talk About: Modern Fragmentation

Why does everything feel so fractured—and has it always been this way?

In this solo episode, Dr. Bradley Melle dives deep into the 500-year story of fragmentation in the Western world, from the shattering of medieval consensus in the Reformation to today’s tribalism, polarization, and nostalgia-fueled politics. But this isn’t just a history lesson—it’s a challenge to embrace the disorientation of modern life as an opportunity for truth, empathy, and a new kind of unity.

Today we'll explore:

• Why modern life feels so fragmented—and why that’s not all bad
• How nostalgia fuels dangerous political and religious movements
• What we lost after the medieval world—and what we gained in return
• Why the longing for “simpler times” can be a trap
• How fragmentation may actually help us love our neighbour better

Whether you're wrestling with Christian nationalism, deconstructing your faith, or just trying to make sense of our chaotic world, this episode offers historical insight with real-world relevance. It's an invitation to face reality as it is—and build something new in the cracks.

🎧 Listen now and join the conversation.
📬 Got thoughts? Email Brad at freestyletheology [at] gmail.com or DM @freestyletheology on Instagram.

Transcript

Brad 0:00

Hey everybody, this is Dr. Bradley Melle, historian of global Christianity and culture. And yeah, this week, it's just me here. It's got a lot of thoughts running through my mind. I find that I've been taking all kinds of notes. And if I don't, Get them out. Get them off the page and out into the world somehow. I tend to just move on and start thinking about something else before eventually coming back to some of the same thoughts. And so I thought I would just turn on my microphone and get some of these thoughts down, share them with you, maybe hear from you some of your ideas of some of the stuff I'm talking about. But I would love it if you... contacted me with some of your ideas. If you want to get in touch with me over email, you can just email freestyletheology at gmail.com or of course message me on Instagram, which I check daily. And yeah, any chance, any time I receive any kind of message, I'm just so excited to be engaging beyond just my own thoughts. So I would love to hear from you and would welcome any message if you would be up for that. So what I'm thinking about lately, just over the last few days, just has really, haven't been able to get it out of my mind, is something fairly broad, but something that we're experiencing collectively every day across the Western world. I'm sure beyond that, but I can only really speak to the Western world since I'm so deeply rooted in it and living in its midst. And that is this experience of fragmentation, of fracture, of divisiveness. It's a really... tense time, politically, religiously, spiritually, economically. I'm talking about this. This is May 2025, if anyone's ever listening in the future. And it's just this age of this powerful experience of constant fragmentation. And that is being experienced in all kinds of different ways. The most obvious way, the most common term being thrown around these days is polarization. You know, we usually talk about that in the political sphere. There is an increasing move towards polarization, you know, towards a tribalistic way of living, where the goal is sort of to, no, not even the goal, where we are increasingly homogenous and seeking to be around people who think the same way, sort of have the same posture towards life and politics and government and the world. And so we're polarized. Well, that does tend to reduce who we are to political identities, which is an important part of who we are, for sure. People are experiencing fragmentation in how they engage on social media, algorithms, fine-tuning and curating feeds to play on, A, the things we already think and agree with, and B, the things that enrage us and cause these intense emotional reactions. That's this form of fragmentation. We're living in this hyper-accelerated infosphere, and that's in some ways pulling us apart from one another, in some ways. Movements that are fueled by nostalgia for sort of a fantasizing memory, a fantastical distorted memory of the past as better, whether that's a past that we actually experienced, like for me, the 1990s, or whether it's even more artificial, like a nostalgia for another time period. before we existed. Something vague, something about a time when things were simpler, people knew their neighbors, et cetera, et cetera. And those kinds of nostalgic movements are pretty dangerous because in many ways they are fantasy. They are not reality. They're not good history. Our nostalgic longings and memories do not construct a nuanced and textured and complex picture of the past they do the opposite they it's like this a photograph that has its contrasts all way off and it doesn't look real because you have taken you know good things from the past and oversaturated them in the image it's not real it's it's stylized and but nostalgia is very powerful emotionally And it can drive entire political movements. I mean, fascist movements are nostalgic in nature, remembering a fantasy, a mythic past that never really existed and trying to get back to something that never really existed in the first place. And it can make people do crazy things. It can make people do cruel things in this desperation to return to a place they never were. So fragmentation happens. I guess what I've come to realize, this experience of fragmentation across the various aspects of life is really the deep context that we live in in the 21st century. Fracture and fragmentation is our underlying deep context. And it's a lot older than we might think. Again, nostalgic views of the past tend to not acknowledge just how long our society has been living and experiencing this paradigm of fracture. I really think that since the year 1500, the Western world has been existing and experiencing, moving through a time of fracture and fragmenting. But I also want to be clear about something, that this is not all bad. It shouldn't be seen as just a negative thing. Because fragmentation is also, just another name for that is diversification, differentiation, complexification, being made more complex. There's all kinds of talk in the modern Western world of sort of an unending critique, a critique of our individualism, of our consumerism, of our capitalistic greed, and the list goes on and on. The modern Western world is no stranger to self-critique. In fact, it's almost as much of a feature of modern life, as is the various aspects of modern life. Not everyone shares this, of course, but our belief in progress, our belief in science and technology. Just as one example, our addiction to self-critique, almost bordering on a self-loathing, it has been constant. It's been a feature of the modern world ever since it was sort of initiated. So there's been a lot of talk for a long time, many decades, even centuries, critiquing the Western world's fragmentation and its lack of unity and its kind of breakdown. It's almost part of the tradition itself now. Part of the Western tradition itself is critique of the Western tradition. Critique, almost a feature of modernity is critiquing modernity. This makes me think of, you know, I've had this thought a lot watching Christmas movies and Christmas specials. I'll try to explain this and I hope it makes sense. But I think that as a collective experience, the holiday of Christmas, not what it should be about, not what it could be about, not how it should be or ought to be celebrated, but what it actually is. And I think the meaning of Christmas is the conversation about the meaning of Christmas. I think that's actually what we do. That's what every Christmas movie and special and story is about. It's about critiquing Christmas and attempting to articulate what it's really about. Whether that's it's really about the birth of Christ or it's really about being with family. It's like the purpose, the actual practice, the ritual, the discourse around the festival every year is about how the festival is not being celebrated the way it should be. And it ends up being this sort of strange time of moral reflection and self-critique that once we put away the Christmas tree, when we pull it out again next year, we're going to have the same conversations. And we even pass this tradition on to our children because this is what they absorb about Christmas. It is this dissonant experience of there's all these presents and Christmas isn't about that, but let's enjoy these presents. It's this strange thing. Why am I talking about this? It's because it reminds me a lot of what it's like to live in the modern Western world. We both believe in certain aspects of modernity, and we also are in a never-ending state of critique of modernity. And I just find that to be interesting, that part of the tradition of the Western world is to critique the Western world. And there's people that oppose that, who want to say, you know, we need to stop with this And, you know, don't you realize how good you have it? That itself is also part of the tradition, is that reminder. You wouldn't really want to live somewhere else. Trust me. That's part of the tradition. These are all just pieces of it. So kind of where I'm going with this is I think that fragmentation has been the dominant motif of the last 500 years. I don't think that that's all bad. but I do think it has generated a lot of pain and that we still haven't figured out collectively what to do, how to manage it. Now, people who talk about the fragmentation of life in the modern world, which again, they've been doing for 500 years in various ways, is there's this sort of underlying operating assumption that before the modern world, or before X, there was Y. And Y was when things were good, when people knew each other, when people believed in something, when people trusted each other. Insert any vague notion. Again, this is nostalgia, nostalgia speaking. So if X is the fragmentation of society, then Y is that society prior to fragmentation. And I think that This is where it's really interesting because my argument that I make in various ways in different platforms is that I really think that the Western world has not actually moved on from its old medieval consensus. Fragmentation destroys old unities. It destroys old assumptions. It destroys old stability. And that experience can be painful and disorienting. And yet it also invites us into opportunities to establish new, potentially different or healthier unities. So yeah, I think there's this underlying assumption that we don't often critique or think about too clearly. But when we are criticizing our, quote, fragmented contemporary existence, what is it that we're saying is we want things to be like. If the modern world is like A, B, and C, people don't know their neighbors, they spend too much time addicted to their phones, they're isolated from each other, they're just hooked on technology. What is it that we're thinking is the better option? And I don't think people think explicitly that what we need is to return to the old medieval ways of doing things, medieval Western Europe. But I think that in some ways that's built in. to this critique. But the answer to our modern sort of existential ongoing crises and fragmentation is not to go back to a medieval way, a medieval solidity and consensus. Because while the Western European medieval world had its benefits, had its pluses and minuses, its pros and cons, Yes, it was unified. Absolutely. It was a much more unified and cohesive society than we live in now. It was much clearer what your purpose was and your place. Life was slower and quieter and calmer. Village life was simpler. That is true. There was one church, the Roman Catholic Church, that everyone belonged to. And if you didn't belong to it, you were a heretic. You were outside the church, outside salvation. And you, in a way, sort of were a non-entity. It was very unified, especially religiously and economically. But the fact is, it was unified because it was held together by strict patriarchal power and hierarchy. There was a theological monopoly. People in the medieval West didn't know that there was other Christian traditions that were different, that were not under the authority of the Roman church. Maybe in theory, they knew that though there were other Christians out there who were, you know, in many ways disobedient because they were not under the authority of the Pope. But for the average person living in medieval Western Europe, this was a 100% total theological monopoly where dissent was suppressed in various ways. And all of this backed up by very strong imperial or kingdom political power. So yes, people who lived in the medieval West did feel a certain kind of safety and security. They didn't ask, how do we know that the church is telling the truth? How do we know that our interpretation of scripture is right? They didn't ask that question. They knew. that if they were in communion with the Roman church and they were engaging in its rituals and its processes, that they were good. They may have to do a long time in purgatory after death. That might just be what has to happen to cleanse them, purify them of all their roles of sin. But they knew that if they were in communion with the church and were not heretics and were not excommunicated, that they would die and go to purgatory and eventually reach God. It might be painful. It might be long. Maybe there were things you could do to shorten that time. But for the most part, if you stepped back and looked at it from a cosmic bird's eye view, these people were on their way to God. They didn't have to worry as much about questions of authority and truth because authority was inherited. They looked... and they saw the church hierarchy, they saw the bishop of Rome, they heard how this was connected all the way back to the apostles, there was no reason to doubt it. And so for the average person, at a deep existential level, they felt some kind of safety and security. Their role was pretty much defined at birth, like where they fit in the hierarchy of society and what they were supposed to do, what they were called to do. Their contributions, most people's contribution by far, 90% of people's contribution was called to farm to provide food and stability for their kingdoms, for their lords, and by extension for the kingdom. The lord whose land they farmed had the responsibility to protect them from invasion. And life was sort of just about that. It was about doing that thing through the proper channels, in the proper way, with this strict hierarchy. So if you ask, if you look at the modern world, everything after the Reformation, and you ask, is that kind of safety and security gone? The answer is yes. That security, that safety, that sort of cosmic sense of, I know my place, I know what I have to do, I know who's in charge, and I'm kind of just, I accept that, that is gone. that will never return again. That was just a time in history that is now over. I think in many ways, and for a lot of reasons, which I'll talk about a little bit, that medieval consensus, that medieval solidity was temporary. It was not sustainable. It was not possible to hold together forever. And so whenever there's these thoughts about There's a lot of romanticizing of the medieval period, especially among more conservative Christians, but not only limited to that. This doesn't mean that you can't find anything to admire or even long for about the medieval world. For example, the simple longing for a time before modern technology. Yeah, there are times in our life, even moments, where we long for that. Usually when we are being bombarded with messages and emails and inputs from with our dopamine addictions and seeking the highs and the hits from new messages and new texts and videos, flashy videos. Of course, that's going to start to feel exhausting at times. And we let our minds drift to a simpler time. Ultimately, I would find it difficult to actually find someone who really did want to go back to the medieval period for various reasons. So I don't think it's an actual active desire, explicit desire to return to the medieval consensus. But I think we carry this, some of the nostalgia with us. And again, that's what it is. It's nostalgia. It's not reality, complex textured reality. We are just thinking it would be nice to live in a village where everyone knew each other, to have a simple job. That required maybe hard work sometimes, rest other times, eat, drink, be merry, work hard, no fresh air, no stresses of modern life. So yeah, there's things that we can admire and even, again, long for. It makes sense to long to be away from a screen and instead in the fresh air looking at the blue sky or listening to the singing birds, taking a walk and a hike. That's not all medieval life was, of course. But medieval unity... was also suffocating. Because as you probably know, people are pretty different from one another, especially when they're given the chance to flex their own muscles and exercise some freedom. People are pretty different from one another. People want very different things. We inhabit very different personalities and postures towards the world. We are motivated by different things. Humans are just not a one-size-fits-all kind of creature, which I think makes sense being made in the image of God. God is obviously more diverse, the source of all different things, and we reflect some of those aspects. And so the medieval world's sort of simplified hierarchy and chain of being is in many ways too simple. It doesn't capture... complexity of of the totality of life so in that way the medieval consensus which is what i keep calling it the medieval unity was destined to break apart it just wasn't possible to stay like that forever especially once europeans started venturing across the ocean and encountering Populations and languages and cultures and products and traditions and histories that were so radically different and unknown to them to what people had known about, you know, in say the 1200s. By the time you get to the 1500s, the world has just opened up and exploded. And there's so much difference that it was overwhelming and dizzying. just how many different kinds of lifestyles and peoples and histories there were out there. And in many ways, that begins a process of fragmentation. Because the old certainties about the way the world was, which would have been clarified and explicated on by religious authorities, turned out to be way too small. Not that everything they said was wrong, it just was provincial. It was parochial. It was regional, local, rather than global. I think one of the reasons European imperialism and colonization was so violent and so destructive to so many people was it was this attempt to impose a local regionalness on a global world, taking what had the tradition's and the knowledge that had grown up regionally in Western Europe, the assumptions that had developed over time locally, indigenously. The imperial way and the colonial extension was an attempt to sort of enforce that European knowledge and lifestyle on very different parts and peoples of the world. And that could be a very frustrating thing to do because people resist that. Because they do not see the world the same way. And they don't want someone from another place to come in and tell them everything about you and your traditions is wrong. We have it all figured out. And we're going to take over. And you either comply or there's no place for you. We'll make life difficult for you. You will be pushed to the sidelines. Marginalized. Literally. But you can't encounter... I think the European... modern experience, it cannot be disconnected from colonialism. Sometimes we can do a European history where the colonial aspect, like the overseas ventures and the colonizing of other parts of the world is sort of this side history, like a peripheral history, an extra almost, an appendix. But in reality, modern Europe doesn't exist without the colonial period. And that's in terms of what it knows. So that's in terms of its knowledge. That's in terms of its economy, its trade, its religious experience. So much of what we think of as European, modern European or Western, is forged in the colonial period, in this interaction between Western peoples and non-Western peoples. So when I say fragmentation was inevitable, the encounter, encountering other people's worldviews and lifestyles couldn't not fragment the medieval European simplicity and unity. It just was impossible to do. Why am I saying all this? So yes, I do think since 1500, fragmentation has been the name of the game at a deep, deep level in Western society. I think that meant the loss, the destruction of the old medieval culture safety and security, the old medieval hierarchy and way of life and worldview, because it was too small, too regional. I think that that fragmentation generated a lot of pain that we are still experiencing and channeling and feeling right now. And that has brought about some emotionally mature responses and a whole lot of emotionally immature responses that have really harmed people. But I don't think it's all this fragmentation is just bad. I think the fractures that kind of broke apart the medieval world were necessary and in a way necessary experiences of growing up and maturing, necessary experiences of reality. The fractures that were experienced in the post-medieval and early modern world brought about new opportunities for freedom of conscience and thought. It brought about new cultural plurality, whether people liked that or not. New art, new theology, new expressions of faith, new space for people to speak honestly and grapple with pain and trauma and come to different conclusions that were distinct from what the religious and political authorities had sort of sanctioned as the answers. The end of a uniformity that was sometimes experienced positively and other times, especially by dissenters, was experienced as violent and oppressive. The answer is not to return to some kind of medieval unity. That is nostalgia. That is not how a society flourishes. That's not where we need to go to move on. It's not exactly like this, but it is similar. The medieval period from a churchly or Christian perspective is kind of similar to a childhood for a society where there is kind of a strict, rigid hierarchy of of authority, like parent and child, where the norms are laid out crystal clear by the authorities, and you have to obey and comply, that's just what has to happen. Or else, and if you don't, you'll be punished pretty severely in order to prevent that from happening again. But to anyone who has kids or a family, you know that at some point, you move out of the childhood-like paradigm. And members of the family start flexing their own muscles and expressing themselves and going in different directions and being interested in different things. And this can be experienced as a drifting apart, can be experienced as a fracturing, but it's also, it doesn't have to be experienced like that. Especially if, you know, your children developing in different ways with different interests, if you approach with curiosity and openness, instead of sort of looking for why what they're doing is wrong, just because it breaks with what has always been done, it doesn't have to be a time of drifting apart, but it does have to be a time of expansion. It does have to be a time of listening and curious learning about one another and not just being on the defensive and not just attempting to shift strategies so that you can control. Children grow up. And they go in different directions. And in some ways, that's what the fragmentation that began with the Reformation and with the scientific revolution and with the Enlightenment and with all the various eras of change that were experienced over the last 500 years. In some ways, whether you like it or not, it's just people going different directions. And that's not something... When that kind of directional movement is met with judgment is met with you know again new strategies of how to ensure compliance or go back in time to the way things used to be it's that's always that always generates more and more painful fractures so it doesn't have to be painful or sorry it's going to be painful at some level but it doesn't have to be experienced as destructive it's often in our stubborn resistance of change, that things actually get damaged and destroyed and harmed. Like I said before, fragmentation destroys old unities and old certainties. And that's painful. But it also fosters the possibility of establishing new, healthier unities. The loss of these old certainties, which yes, I'm placing at, again from this perspective, historical bird's eye view around the year 1500 at the beginning of the Reformation. But then it's experienced in numerous other ways throughout the last 500 years. It's a common experience of establishing some kind of new reality and then that also being challenged and losing that. And so yes, there's pain involved in change. But I remember someone saying that Often with change, it's not change that we fear, first and foremost, it's loss. And it might be important. I'm convinced at some fundamental level for a Western person, whether we feel emotionally connected to the medieval period at all or not, whether it's just romanticism or whether you look back on the medieval period as a barbaric era, I can imagine, especially for women, when people talk about where would you go, if you could go back in time, often men have all these different answers of where they would go and what they would like to experience. But for women, it's often, I wouldn't go to any of those places. This right now is probably the safest period for me. So there's people who look at the medieval period like that, like it's not something to ever want to be experienced, which makes sense, which is totally fair. But I just think that since 1500, I think we're still in continuity with the era of the Reformation, with the fractures that it introduced. I think we are continuing to experience fragmentation. It's almost, again, like I said at the beginning, it's almost like a necessary aspect of modern life. Because the modern period fundamentally identifies itself in contrast to the medieval period. That wasn't just an enlightenment thing. That's still kind of in our bones. And so, you know, maybe it's important just to look for a second at some of the, what was lost after the medieval period sort of crumbled apart, or sorry, not crumbled, fractured apart, fractured apart into pieces that would grow into the modern world. So, you know, beginning with the reformation, In the early 1500s, the Western world experienced a severe loss of consensus around who was in charge, what was trustworthy, what wasn't. It lost a spiritual sense of security. So even as people, reformers and Protestants, were rediscovering Scripture in new ways and expressing a new kind of security, You cannot deny that people also experienced this with anxiety because the old authorities, how you knew something was true, again, by being in communion with the church at Rome, was gone. People were standing on their own feet. And this wasn't just a Protestant experience because Catholics, too, even those who remained connected and in that way still had their feet planted in the medieval way, looked around and saw, you know, millions of people moving away from it, and a new world forming with new communities and nation states being established, and of course war. So even the Catholic experience of just the obvious voice of moral authority found in the church hierarchy wasn't as simple as it had been earlier than that. I think there was a loss of established communal rhythms And I'm not just talking, again, this is difficult to express. I'm not just talking about the loss of communal rhythms from medieval to reformation. I'm talking about the fact that this idea that we used to have communal rhythms and now we don't is a feature of modern Western life. We are constantly looking back and looking forward. There was a loss of inherited belonging, a loss of a shared baseline reality. And so I think that followed the Reformation, that was experienced in the Enlightenment. But I think our contemporary 21st century experience stands in direct continuity with those same losses. I think we repeat them almost. And maybe in using more contemporary psychological language, we repeat these things because there's something unresolved. There's something unresolved and has been unresolved. in the Western experience ever since the fractures of the Reformation. So that's why perhaps we keep reliving this experience of losing security of what once was and experiencing the disorientation of now. So right now we're experiencing this through, we're trying to appease These feelings of dissonance that like the world really is more complicated and bigger than we can imagine and understand. It's not, it's not, doesn't always feel like a safe and secure place. Things don't feel certain. It's not always clear who's in charge and who should be and who shouldn't be. So I think right now, the way we're experiencing this loss is, you know, we're stuck in echo chambers. We're moving in tribalistic directions because that makes us feel safer and more secure. So we're like manufacturing artificial homogeneity, ignoring the complexity that is our neighborhoods and all the people who live in our neighborhoods from all kinds of different parts of the world with different religious beliefs and cultures and languages, ignoring the complexity under our nose and next door, and instead retreating into spaces that feel safe, again, by manufacturing homogeneity. Sometimes that's physical spaces, like we actually go to places where people are all like us and look like us. Or we more easily and more commonly, we gravitate towards them online. Living this virtual, kind of existing virtually, finding our identity there rather than engaging with the disorienting diversity around us, which is actually the real calling. of the person who claims to follow Christ or listen to Jesus. Love your neighbor, the people around you, the normal, diverse people around you who you might not like or agree with or be the same as. And the pain that comes from fragmentation, which I think is what fuels nostalgia, and nostalgia is what fuels love. the really destructive movements of fascism and authoritarianism and turning to extreme and violent measures to manufacture this homogeneity. That's really what fascism is. That's what it's doing when it targets scapegoats and immigrants and refugees. It's an attempt to forcefully and coercively recreate, quote unquote, recreate a fantasy homogeneity. So because there's pain, in this fragmentation experience. Some people just feel the pain and kind of accept the fragmenting. Some people lean into the fracturing and just say, this is just the way things are. And they move almost in what we might think of as like a postmodern or relativistic direction, an agnostic direction where it's like these fragmentations are happening. There's nothing we can really do. And there's a little bit of resigning to it. But there's also groups that who feel this pain of fragmenting and the fear that comes along with it. And what they really try to do is, quote, reclaim or again, quote, restore the past. And these usually end up moving in bad directions that hurt people. Because at some level, these efforts to restore a past that never existed in the first place, a past that only seemed to exist, what they're engaging with is unreality. And Christian nationalism, especially as we're seeing it play out in the United States, but it's also across the Western world. It's not just an American phenomenon. Christian nationalism is one of these nostalgic projects. It is aimed at restoring an old form of order and compliance that ignores the reality of your neighbor, ignores the reality on the ground. It's a fantasy. the idea that society needs to be Christian again. That's what I mean about sort of living into, even if it's not acknowledged, some kind of medieval romanticism. Back when there was one church, back when it was clear who was in authority and who wasn't, which ideas were right and which ones weren't. I think that this is still in continuity with the fragmentation that all Western peoples and those who have come into the Western orbit have have been collectively experiencing since the 1500s. But like I said at the beginning, it can be really easy to fall into a trap where it's addictive, where it's easy to just kind of stand and look out at society and wake up critiquing it, critique it all the day long and then go to bed and wake up and do it again the next day. It can feel good. It is the feeling of self-righteousness, which has its own sort of form of pleasure. to be right when the rest of the world is wrong. And I know this feeling well because I occupied a space like that for many years until I just got tired of the constant critiquing because it started to feel like romanticism and not productive and not moving us in a new direction with a new vision. So that's why I want to highlight that this experience of fragmentation is not just a negative thing, as if we had some kind of unity That was good, and we've slowly been losing it as it erodes. That's not accurate either. This fragmentation initiated with the Reformation, and again, continued on with all the important larger historical movements of the modern age. It also brought about an expansion, new understandings, new opportunities to learn about other people and other ways of life that were disorienting, but also if you approached it with curiosity, hopefully your vision of of people and culture and truth grew and expanded. It had to be more elastic. There were more things in heaven and earth than in our imaginings. New opportunities to show empathy, to hear stories of people who were not like you. This fracturing of society and old certainties also brought about rejection of authoritarianism, challenging assumed and inherited religious authority. That's good. That's more honest. This fragmentation in many ways is more honest than the old medieval certainty. New impetus to seek truth and to do so without coercion. New space for spirituality and for trauma healing to occur by honest grappling. And this fragmentation also has led to the emergence of new communities, new connected peoples who would not have connected otherwise. It has... provided new spaces for marginalized voices to find platforms, to express their experiences, to express and make open hidden and invisible or ignored aspects of reality. You know, when you think about the American experience and people talk about, you know, we need to get back to something and why that's so often deeply connected with white supremacy is because usually it is communities of Euro-Americans or white Americans longing for some earlier era, often the 1950s or maybe earlier than that. And those eras were not actually less diverse. Marginalized peoples were just more marginalized then, more hidden, more buried. They're there. And so this longing to go back to a simpler time in many ways is more, let's go back to when reality was being hidden more explicitly and more proudly. So the fragmentation of that past has led to new connections between people, and that's good. So while on the one hand, there has been, we can attest to some kind of collective disconnection from our neighbors, a rootlessness, a loneliness, partially the reason for that is because neighborhoods are less homogenous, and that is going to require, it's much harder to love your neighbor who is very different from you speaks a different language or from a different religious tradition, it's much easier to love your neighbor when you have an experience of homogeneity. It's hard enough to do it then. So yes, the fragmentation of modern life has led to some kind of disconnection from neighbors, rootlessness, loneliness, but it's also exposed us to new diversities or the diversities that were there all along. And this gives us opportunities to reinvent and create possibilities. We have a chance to ask the question, What kind of coming together do we actually want to do? Do we want to engage with our neighborhoods as they are? This is what I mean by reality, to deal with what exists. Or do we want to manufacture artificially something that's more palatable, something easier? We are called to love our neighbor as they are, our neighborhoods as they are. I know this is complicated because it is at an economic level It is we construct neighborhoods that are more homogenous. So we do many actions. We take a lot of action. We put a lot of energy into preventing reality, the reality of diversity from existing in our communities. But no matter how much we try, it's still there. Your neighborhood is probably a lot less homogenous than your church is. And that's concerning. You know, modern life, you can say we have, families have been experiencing in recent years, but they've been saying this for centuries. This isn't just brand new, a loss of stability or new estrangement between parents and children, displacement. And that is true. That's part of the fragmenting. And that has a lot of negative side effects to it. But this family fragmentation has also had the chance for, has also opened up opportunities for therapeutic growth, for people to stand on their own two feet autonomously and to say what they need to say. It's led to whistleblowing within families about abuse and about just things that have gone hidden that need to stop being hidden. So there has been, this fragmentation has allowed for spaces, cracks between families cracks in the family's public image and reputation to do some serious truth-telling, some new boundary setting, to establish new ways of how are we going to be family. That's also a result of fragmentation. So I don't really know fully what my takeaway is. What I'm trying to communicate is that the simple fact is for the last 500 years, and it continues right into this moment, fragmentation is our deep context. It undergirds Everything. And it has for 500 years. I am led to believe that choosing to actually love the neighbor as they are in front of you is the way forward, which I guess if you follow Jesus, shouldn't be a surprise that that's the way forward. But I think we also need to grapple with the reality that we don't really know how to love our neighbor who is different than us. Like we know that Jesus commands it, but we need to really seriously examine the Be curious and ask for the real results of, hey, how do I love my neighbor who is very different than I? Here are some of the obstacles I face. These are some of the emotions I'm dealing with. I have a low desire to seek out and build relationship with my neighbor. I can do the thing that we always do in Western society, which is I can shame myself at church or at home or with my friends for not loving my neighbor. People feel satisfied that that's enough. But that is pointless if it leads to no new action. Guilt is just an alarm that something is wrong and needs to change. But in Western Christianity, guilt is a way of life. It's our way of atoning for... I think at some level we think feeling guilt is our way to atone for our sins. what God asks of us, and we can say, well, he said, you know, it's called to repent. And that's because we have confused repentance with the word means to turn away, right? To turn and move in a new direction. But for us, you need to repent means you need to feel bad about what you've done and sort of confess it, make it public. And often that's where we stop with repentance, just continue to feel bad. Instead of asking the honest question, like, I don't love my neighbor. I really don't. So what do I do with that? I'm not going to sit and pretend and tell you and just promise you I'm going to try more. I keep struggling and falling into the same traps as always. I don't love my neighbor. So what do I do? What works? What are some examples of a person moving from apathy towards their neighbor towards true love? Those are the kind of stories that I want to know. That's the kind of evidence that we need to explore. Jesus tells us, commands us to love our neighbor. It's up to us to ask how, what works and what doesn't. So I think just moving forward, I want to start engaging with sort of just acknowledging the truth that fragmenting is sort of, like I keep saying, it's our deep context. It's the way things really are. And I think once we acknowledge that that is just true, we can start to ask new questions that could lead us in a better direction, especially, okay, so the old ways are continuously fragmenting apart. what kind of coming together should we engage in and how do we start to do that? So instead of just looking nostalgically back on the past, again, which rarely existed in the way that we are imagining, fragmentation gives us new opportunities, new cracks and spaces where we can maybe experiment with something new, try new things. And we're not the first to do that. New forms of community have come into existence because of the fracturing apart in Western society. So that's just what's been on my mind today. And I hope if anything here resonated or you have any ideas to add to this, this is by no means the definitive talk on fragmentation. This is just inviting you into some of the realizations I've had lately. But I think I know at a deep fundamental level that honesty is always better. than hiding things. Honest grappling, whether you have everything accurate or not, is always better than keeping silent until you have everything perfectly figured out. Honest grappling leads somewhere. And so I think we need to honestly acknowledge that fragmentation is what we know. That's what we've lived in for centuries. And stop pretending that that's true. Stop longing to go back to a time when it wasn't And channel that longing energy into something more productive, something that leads to bonds being formed between people, that deals with the people around you as they are, not as you wish things were.