How do we respond to deep difference? The types of difference which cut across deeply held beliefs. Typically, there are five approaches: domination, exclusion, assimilation, retreat, or moderation. Each one either seeks to remove or eradicate difference. Or, if they accept the legitimacy of difference, fails to take the profound nature of the difference seriously.
Dr Kaemingk argued for a better way. The task of politics is not to treat difference as a problem to be solved, but a matter to be negotiated. The solution therefore is not power or domination or withdrawal, but politics. Founded on the hospitality of Jesus, Dr Kaemingk argued for a posture of hospitality, a way of entering into democratic life which is servant hearted and neighbour loving.
Whilst liberals pursue ‘open doors’ and conservatives ‘high walls’, the democratic life of the believer is to be concerned with a politics of hospitality. Modelled on coming around a table, Dr Kaemingk presented a picture of politics in which open doors are an invitation to come to the table, and high walls a means of moderating and safeguarding the discussion at that table.
Politics can be a means to dominate, or it can be a means to abdicate, but a politics of hospitability is a politics based around the table, a place of discussion, negotiation, and welcome in which people can come together to navigate matters of deep difference.
Democracy in and of itself lacks the positive content to stand alone against the forces we might dislike. The job of the believer then is to cultivate patience, tolerance, and hospitality in our civic life that difference might be negotiated not weaponised, and public life might be concerned with the good of the community.
What does that mean for our politics today? Well, Dr Kaemingk left that job to us. What might a table politics based on a posture of hospitality look like where God has placed you?
Dr Matthew Kaemingk is the Richard John Mouw Associate Professor of Faith and Public Life at Fuller Theological Seminary, Director of the Mouw Institute of Faith and Public Life, A Fellow for the Centre for Public Justice, and co-host of the podcast, Zealots at the Gate, hosted by Comment.
Tom Kendall is Strategic Assistant to the CEO and heads up the alumni work at CARE, having previously been on the CARE Leadership Programme himself back in 2018-19.