Faithful Christianity in a Polarized Culture | Justin Giboney

Our culture—and our churches—are growing increasingly polarized, leaving many Christians unsure of how to function faithfully within their communities. Families, neighbors, and congregations feel divided, even paralyzed, by widening gulfs. How should Christians think and talk about this moment, and what paths toward reconciliation are possible?

Join us for an inspiring and timely evening with Justin Giboney, co-founder of the AND Campaign and author of Don’t Let Nobody Turn You Around. Drawing on the Black church’s legacy of holding together justice and moral order, Justin will challenge us to move beyond the culture wars and recover a faithful, courageous Christian public witness. With clarity and conviction, he will offer a hopeful roadmap for civic engagement rooted in humility, truth, and love—inviting us to rethink partisan assumptions, cultivate moral imagination, and pursue bridge-building engagement shaped by the kingdom of God.

This event was recorded live at Upper House on April 9, 2026.

Justin E. Giboney (JD, Vanderbilt University) is cofounder and president of the AND Campaign, a Christian civic organization equipping believers to engage public life with the love and truth of Jesus Christ. An ordained minister, attorney, and political strategist, he is the author of Don’t Let Nobody Turn You Around and coauthor of Compassion (&) Conviction. He has been featured in The New York Times and Christianity Today, and lives in Atlanta with his wife and three sons.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Uh now I'm gonna have the honor of introducing our speaker tonight. His name is Justin Gibbony. He's a law school grad from Vanderbilt University. He's a co-founder and president of the AND campaign. It's a Christian civic organization focused on raising civic literacy, promoting civic pluralism, and equipping Christians to engage politics with the love and truth of Jesus Christ. He's an ordained minister, attorney, and political strategist, strategist. And Gibney has been featured in publications such as The New York Times and Christianity Today. And he co-authored the book Compassion and Conviction. He just released his latest book, which I mentioned earlier in November, titled Don't Let Nobody Turn You Around. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia with his wife and three sons. And a fun fact, he played D1 football at Vanderbilt. Please welcome to the stage, Justin.

SPEAKER_01 0:51

Good evening. So that makes it even more of an honor to be uh before you today. Uh let me rush to thank you all for coming out. I also want to thank uh Joy Fia and the upper house, the whole team uh for the invitation and and really just the hospitality that they show me. I I really appreciate it. I I don't take for granted uh when I have the opportunity to come into uh an institution like this and talk about subjects that are really aren't easy. Um and so I do think it takes a little bit of trust. Uh I know Joy wouldn't just put anybody up here to talk about issues that can be tough. And so I thank you for entrusting me with the opportunity to do that. And I'm just uh thankful to be before you today. Um my task today is to talk about how Christians can be faithful in a very polarized and polarizing moment. How can we be faithful? How can we model the things that come from our faith and those principles in this moment where at times it feels like the stakes are too high to be charitable, to be civil. Sometimes being civil and survival seems like they're uh at odds, uh, but that's never the case. And so I want to talk about, and this a lot of this comes from my book. I want to talk about how we can engage in a better way. All right. And I want us to think about the fact that Jesus was actually born into a very divisive and polarizing time, too. Let's not forget that. Jesus was born into a Roman occupation. And it was so divisive, so polarized that they were planning to kill him before he was even born. Right? Um, and it's interesting because even if you look at Jesus' own community, they were responding in very different ways. There wasn't just one consensus response, even from his own community. You had the zealots who were responding with violence and what we might even call terrorism. Uh, you had the uh Herodians who were responding by assimilation, telling the Roman government, the occupying government, we can be just like you, and assimilating into uh what was in front of them in that entire culture. Then, interestingly, you also had the Pharisees and the Sadducees who were against the occupation, but at the same time willing to use that occupation to solit to solidify their power in their own community. And so Jesus comes in with several different options of how he can engage society based on the division that's going on. And the beauty of what Jesus does is he doesn't come into this moment and say, well, the Herodians don't really believe, let me be a zealot. Or this the the Pharisees are very legalistic, so I have to be a Sadducee. No, he does something different altogether. He starts saying crazy things like, love your neighbor, but not only love your neighbor, love your enemy. And one of the biggest things that we see Jesus do in this very consequential, very polarized time is he changes the way we look at ourselves and he changes the way we look at others. And I think in this polarized moment, the key to doing differently, the key to doing better and having a better public witness is the change how we see ourselves and to change how we see others. But I first want to get to the source of this polarization. Have you ever asked yourself, how did we get so divided in this country? Where does all of this come from? And so, as I talk about in my book, a lot of this comes from what we can call the culture war. Have you guys heard that term before? The culture war. American uh sociologist James Davison Hunter defined the culture war as a struggle between progressives and conservatives over the national identity, over the meaning of America. It's a battle for power and cultural dominance, and it manifests in political and social hostility rooted in different systems of moral understanding. One way to think of this is the moral majority versus the sexual revolution. Like these are this two different powers, kind of budding heads, because they have two different understandings of truth, of the origin of truth. The the traditionalist or the conservative would say that truth comes from above us and we must uh we must change ourselves to go along with truth. We submit ourselves to a truth that's outside of us. The more progressive or postmodernists would say, no, truth comes from us and we express our own truths, right? And so this is kind of the uh the the origin of this difference. And I think one of the moments that really define this culture war occurred in the presidential election in 1992. And you have these two addresses, one at the Republican National Convention and one at the Democratic National Convention, that really draws the lines for the two sides about what this culture war is. Uh the first one I'll point out is is Pat Buchanan Buchanan at the Republican National Convention talks about what the culture war is about to him, right? And in this, uh we see George H.W. Bush is running against uh Bill Clinton. Here's what Pat Buchanan has to say. Here's his side of the argument. The agenda that Clinton and Clinton would impose on America, abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat units, that's change, all right. But it's not the kind of change America needs. It's not the kind of change America wants, and it's not the kind of change we can abide in a nation that we still call God's country. God bless you, and God bless America. During that same election cycle, earlier that month, New York governor uh Mario Cuomo offered an alternative vision, a vision that was about progress and inclusion for America to follow. Uh, and here's what he had to say about it. He says, Bill Clinton believes, as we all do, in the first principle of our democratic commitment, the politics of inclusion, the solemn obligation to create opportunities for all people of whatever color, of whatever creed, of whatever sex, of ri of whatever sexual orientation, all of them equal members of the American family. That is the fundamental democratic predicate. And so, regardless of which uh vision of America you agree with, you get to see how these two visions come about and how these two sides are forming. Now, this culture war didn't start in 1992. It probably starts around the uh 1920s or 1930s, and I'll get into that a little bit later. But you see this division start to form. I want to be very clear though. The issues that are part of the culture war are worth debating. The sanctity of life, uh, what kids learn in schools, all these are issues that we can't just say, oh, we don't want to talk about them, we don't want to argue, so just let them go. It's not that we're debating these issues, it's how we're debating these issues, how we're treating the people we disagree with as we debate these issues. And it's interesting that uh uh this division really still holds up, and we see it in a a survey that was done, a some research that was done a few years back, uh called Hidden Tribes. And what it did is it broke up America into, I think, about 12 different tribes. And the interesting thing that we learned from this research was that the two smallest groups on the extremes controlled the whole American discourse, that they had an outside outsized voice in the conversation. So one of those groups was pro progressive activists, who were eight percent of the um of the American population, and then we had devoted conservatives, who were 6% of the uh American population. So 8% on one side, 6% on the other, they were really having an outsized voice and controlling the public discourse. 8%. The majority of people were in the middle, and they were called what we would say the exhausted majority that were just kind of sick of everything. They wanted people to get along, and they they didn't really have the time and resources that these other two groups had to invest into the public square. Two things that were interesting, and these are just the facts, two things that were interesting about these two groups, the um uh devoted can devoted conservatives and the progressive activists, is they can't agree on whether the sky is blue or not, right? But they had two really interesting things in common. That they were affluent, they had a lot of money, and they were all Caucasian, majority, right? And so these two groups were controlling the conversation uh more than any other group, and they were only together 14% of the population. That's kind of what's going on today, and I think that frames how we see what's going on in society right now. But what I want to do for you is I want to offer today an alternative vision, an alternative way of engaging this, these conversations. We're not gonna come to the point where everybody in society agrees with us, but hopefully we can engage people in a way that's different, that's better, that reflects our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. And one of the best examples I could give of that, because what I didn't want to do when I started writing this book was just talking theory. Oh, we can love one another, everything can be fine, we can just all get along. No, I wanted to actually not just give you theory, but to give you proof of concept, to give you a historical example that actually happened in a time that might have been and probably should have been more polarized and tense than it is now. So, what I talk about is the civil rights generation. And the book is centered around the story of my uh maternal grandmother, Willie Fay, and her favorite gospel artist, Mahalia Jackson. And they become the center of the narrative for the book because they were part of this civil rights generation. And what was extraordinary about this civil rights generation is how they used their public witness. Have you heard that term before? Public witness? Let me explain to you what a public witness is. Our public witness as Christians is our testimony to society about what we believe is good and true, and what is false and immoral and unjust. It tells people what we value, what we represent, and who we serve. Our public witness does not belong to any political party, it does not belong to any ideological tribe, it doesn't even belong to any identity group. In fact, as a Christian, your public witness doesn't even belong to you, it belongs to Christ, it belongs to God. Second Corinthians chapter 5, verse 20 says, We are ambassadors of Christ as though God were making his appeal through us. Now, what if we thought about that every time before we re-posted something? What if we thought about that every time uh before we got into an argument with somebody that disagreed with us? I think we would conduct ourselves a lot differently if we thought about the fact that we're ambassadors of Christ as though God Almighty were making his appeal through us. Would we have the same pettiness? Would we have the same contempt? See, our public witness can be used constructively or destructively, but it's more than just verbalizing our convictions. Anybody can talk about what they believe. Your public witness is an application of those convictions in your social actions. It's our priorities and it's what we consistently do. Let me give you an example. In Exodus, the uh when the midwives undermined the king's edict to murder all the Hebrew children, all the Hebrew boys, their public witness at that moment proved that they valued the lives of those made in the image of God more than they feared human authority. What does what we consistently do and consistently stand up for and consistently sacrifice for say about us to others? They're not just listening to your words, they're watching what you do, they're looking at what you invest in and what you're willing to sacrifice for. So when it comes to the civil rights generation, I talk about in the book that there were four characteristics that were very distinctive about this about this uh tradition. Four characteristics. The first one was connecting the spiritual and the sociopolitical. Connecting the spiritual and the sociopolitical. Number two, upholding social justice and moral order, which means they didn't fit into the culture war binary of conservative versus progressive. Number three, acknowledging the potential for wickedness in themselves, not just in their opponents. Number four, choosing moral imagination over contempt and cynicism. All right. So you can see in in the, and I talk about this obviously more in the book, but you can see that they talked about morality and heaven, but unlike many evangelical churches, they didn't limit God's will in the public square just to personal piety. Right? They recognized that justice was a required part of the kingdom plan as well. Unlike secularists, they did, they clearly didn't interpret the separation between church and state to be a severing of one's faith from their sociopolitical engagement. Faith guided and anchored their social action. Unlike the social gospel of many of today's progressive Christians, they believed that the whole council of God was more than just the justice imperative alone. It also involved the biblical tenets about sin and how sin exists in all of humanity, not excluding their community or themselves. Lastly, unlike secular activism, while they understood that power concedes nothing without demand, they believed their social actions had to be aspirational, had to be holy, and had to be redemptive. That no group of people, not even their oppressors, were irredeemable. So I named those very quickly, but I want to go through that list of things that I think were very distinct about the civil rights generation. And also keep in mind that these are things I think we need to apply today to better engage people who disagree with us. And so the first one is connecting the spiritual with the social, with our sociopolitical engagement. One thing that you heard, anybody who's paid any attention or watched any documentaries about the civil rights generation, you heard a lot of gospel hymns and old-fashioned spirituals. And what I want you to know is that when they were singing these spirituals, they weren't just singing them to pass the time. This wasn't just something they did because they were bored and needed something to say. These spirituals served as much-needed reminders of the foundational principles that they never needed an advanced degree to understand or interpret. If you notice, these songs were often tirelessly repetitive, but not vainly repetitive. They drove home the point. Lyrics to songs like Keep Your Eyes on the Prize, which was an adaptation of Keep Your Hand on the Plow, which was a plantation song, spoke of perseverance and how God's promises liberate us from being enslaved by the threats of the moment. Keep your eyes on the prize. Other songs like Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around, which my book is named after, and I woke up this morning with my mind stayed on Jesus, with my mind stayed on freedom, spoke of the resolve to stay on task and to overcome minor and major setbacks while centering Jesus in every interaction. Another song continually repeats, and this is the whole song. That's the song. How simple yet profound. It becomes profound when you think about the fact that they weren't just talking about people who blessed them. They were talking about people who lynched them and bombed their churches. That kind of song was a penetrating exposition about how those who are committed to seeing the human dignity in everyone will somehow find the image of God in the most hostile manifestations of human brokenness. It speaks to how the only way to see God and someone who hates you is to see what's invisible outside of faith. The only way to see it is that you have to want to see it. You have to be willing to imagine it in spite of all their behavior. You have to love and fear God too much not to see it. It's the difference between wanting vengeance when it comes to your enemy and wanting redemption when it comes to your enemy. As I said earlier, when survival and civility seemed to conflict, spiritual served as disciplines, a way of forming one's perspectives and reiterating their standards. They're repeating these things over and over as they walk through the valley of the shadow of death, as they walk into dogs and fire hoses. And it's the thing that keeps them from hating those who are physically hurting them. Not just with words, but physically. So we see that connection through these spirituals, the connection between the sociopolitical and the spiritual. They took the church into the public square. Not in the same way that some may take Christian national nationalism into the public square to impose it on others, but they took the spirit of that movement into the public square because it changed how they would treat people who mistreated them. Number two, upholding social justice and moral order. Upholding social justice and moral order. Ephesians 4, verses 14 through 15 talks about maturity. And one of the things that it says is basically that a mature Christian isn't easily swayed by every teaching. Every new vibe that comes along, every new trend that comes along isn't going to change the mind or the opinion of a mature Christian. Why? Because a mature Christian knows what they stand for. And then it goes on to say that a mature Christian should always be able to speak the truth in love. Speak the truth in love. See, we live in a society that at times separates love and truth. That if you love somebody, you don't tell them the truth. That if you know the truth, you can say it harshly to somebody you disagree with. That's not the gospel. The gospel is not choosing between love or truth. The gospel brings love and truth together in attention. Jesus did that better than anybody. Love and truth are not at odds, they're not at conflict, they're interdependent. If you don't love someone and you have something to tell them, when you say it, it's not gonna be a strong truth because it's missing that sympathy, it's missing that compassion that the gospel says we need to have to really understand other people. If I love people, but there's no truth tied behind how I love them, then my love has no form, it has nothing to it, it's just anything I make it out to be. Love and truth, as the gospel shows us, brings this together. Now, again, I told you, probably around the 1920s, 1930s is when this culture war starts to get going. And when we first see it is when a lot of um Protestant institutions like Yale, Princeton, places like that, they start to become more secular. And so the folks who started them, they start to push back against this secularization of what's happening. The interesting thing, though, is as this was happening in the larger white church, black denominations were watching this. And if you look in their publications during that time, they're actually commenting on the split between the left and the right in the other churches. And here's what they say they're deliberately watching, and they say, you know what? We can't choose either of these sides. Because if we go to the right, we lose our bodies because there's no justice there, because they're not stopping the injustice that's affecting us. But if we go to the left, we lose our souls. They're walking away from the authority of scripture, they're depending on their own wisdom instead of the eternal wisdom of God. They make the deliberate choice, like Jesus, to do something very different. And so they actually end up avoiding this dichotomy that we're all fighting with today. Now, let me give you a practical example of how this plays out. When I say that this tradition didn't fit into the right or the left, here's what I mean. You had somebody like Fred Shuttlesworth. Fred Shuttlesworth was a friend of Dr. Martin Luther King. He started the SELC with Dr. Martin Luther King. Dr. King said that Fred Shuttlesworth was the most courageous person in the civil rights movement. I don't know if you can get a larger compliment coming from somebody like Dr. King, right? And here's why he says that. He says that because Shuttlesworth at one time had planned to do a bus boycott. The night before the bus boycott, the Ku Klux Klan comes to his uh house and blows it up with dynamite. Somehow he walks out. Now, I'm sure they figured that if he survives this, which he probably won't, he's gonna have to change his cost benefit analysis. He's gonna have to rethink this thing because now it's probably too dangerous for him to move forward. Shuttlesworth refuses to change his cost benefit analysis. Because it's it's his cost-benefit analysis is based on who he knows God to be and what he's called, what he's been called to do, not what they might do to him. So he goes forward with it the very next day. Now, going forward with a busboy cot, we would probably call that more progressive, right? That's social action that would be considered more progressive. But that's not the only thing these people were doing at that time. Reverend Shuttlesworth would also get groups of pastors together to help regulate the juke joints in his neighborhoods that were taking men out of their homes, that were sending them uh back home in caskets, that was really devastating his community. Unlike we do today, he didn't say, oh yes, it's just all the system. He addressed the system and he also addressed what was going on in his community that he could have something to say about too. Now, regulating juke joints and things of that nature would probably be considered more conservative. They weren't worried about what category it was in. They were worried about truth and justice. And so what I'm saying to you today is your job is not to be the best progressive you can be or the best conservative you can be. As a Christian, your job is to search for truth and justice. It's to choose the right position, not follow one side off the cliff. Because the left can be right about something and get it really well, and they can be wrong about something else. So if you if you outsource your public witness to one side or the other, at that point you're not making any decisions at all. In fact, I would say, I would suggest that if you always come to a progressive conclusion or always come to a conservative conclusion, then you're being intellectually lazy. Because I can't tell that you're thinking at all. Christians have to think through every issue through a biblical lens. I will never assume the left is right. I will never assume the right is right. I want to find where the justice and where the truth lies. The leaders in this next generation that I'm talking to, those who weren't born in the 1900s, the true leaders of the church are gonna be the ones that aren't concerned about what they're being labeled. They'll be the ones that are concerned about what is true and what is just. They rejected him in part because the people who were talking to them about it, they didn't think they had to listen to him. They didn't think that they even deserved to speak in their space. Who is it in your life that you don't think you have to listen to? And where in the Bible can you show me that God can't send you a message through them? You have to start listening. You have to open your heart and understand good opinion, bad opinion, whether it's something close to you or far from you, you don't know people based on their politics. You don't know people based on an opinion here or there. Lastly, I want to talk about moral imagination, choosing moral imagination over cynicism and contempt. Historian Andrew Manis said that African American spirituality looks at disappointment and despair and death in the face and declares that beyond all these there is hope. Moral imagination is our ability to see not only what has been throughout history, not just what is in the present, or even what's likely to be. Moral imagination for the Christian is the ability to see what ought to be and what will be based on the capacity and character of God. That's what the moral imagination is about. Gardner C. Taylor kind of put it this way: Dr. Gardner C. Taylor, who was a friend of DeWitt Proctor and Dr. Martin Luther King as well, once explained that to say God can't change a situation is to impeach the authority of God. And who would dare stand in the presence of the eternal and cast a pall of doubt on what he can do? Last story, I promise. In 1972, Congressman uh Shirley Chisholm ran for the president of the United States. She was the first uh black female to run for president of the United States. One of the people that she was running against was George Wallace, who had been the governor of Alabama. During this campaign in 1972, George Wallace actually gets shot in an assassination attempt. Someone tried to kill him and take him out of the race. And guess who stops their campaign and goes to see George Wallace in the hospital? No other than Shirley Chisholm. Now, let me remind you, this is somebody who was watching her people get lynched in his state and was doing nothing about it. This is someone who not only didn't want her to vote, he didn't want her to participate in the political process whatsoever or have any representation in the political process, and she stops her campaign and she goes to visit him in the hospital. Listen to what she does next. She tells him, I'm sorry that this happened to you. Now, if we're honest, the person we dislike the most, I don't know that we're gonna go to them and say, I'm sorry that you almost got taken out. She goes a step further. She starts listing off things that she agrees with him on. Yes, you're right. Corporations have too much power in politics. The little man's not being taken care of. I think you're right about that. But what I want you to understand is the process that she had to go through in order to even see that they had any agreement. She had to have the maturity to filter out all the hateful, nasty, ugly things he had to say about her and her people, the maturity to filter through that, to see that he still had something to offer and to contribute to her to what she was thinking. How many of us can listen to somebody who's dead wrong? I'm not saying he wasn't wrong, who was dead wrong, who should not have been an authority. How many of us can listen and filter out the nastiness and ugliness and hear them for what they're trying to say outside of that? But it doesn't end there. After she leaves, once he recovers, George Wallace goes on an apology tour. He apologizes for his stances on segregation. He apologizes for his racism and the way he treated other people and the way he abused his power outside of the gospel. What reason did Shirley Chisholm have to believe that he would ever change, that he would ever apologize for any of the things he did. What I want to tell you is that is the power of the gospel. And every day that you don't see the possibility of redemption in your enemy is another day that you hold it back from doing what it can do in your lives and other people's lives. This is the impact that Christians should be having on the public square, not engaging in insult for insult, not engaging in boosting other people or bringing them down, but believing that people can change standing for truth and justice and watching God do his work. Thank you.