Party conferences: echo chambers or an opportunity for good disagreement?

For around 15 years, party conferences were a regular part of my life.

In various previous roles I attended the autumn conferences of all the main political parties, some of their spring conferences, and in one of my roles, even attended the Trades Union Congress.

But I haven't attended a party conference for several years now, although colleagues in CARE's policy team continue to attend some of them.

I confess I don't miss them.

I really, really disliked having to go to the party conferences. That may be in part because I am an introvert, and any large gathering is outside my comfort zone. But more substantively, it's because I often observed how these kinds of gatherings bring out some of our worst tendencies in people.

Put enough of us in a room with people who largely agree with us and who share our beliefs, aspirations and frustrations, and interesting things happen. We can become more certain that we are right, less generous towards those outside the room and more comfortable saying things about our opponents that we might hesitate to say if they were sitting beside us. Many indulge in behaviours that are far from edifying, and I naturally react against the arrogance that can often characterise the conference party faithful.

Yet I have many friends for whom the party conference is a highlight of their year. So as this year's conference season began I thought I would look into both the theology and psychology of gathering together in large numbers, and what the church can teach (and perhaps learn from) politics.

My search engine initially directed me to the work of French sociologist Émile Durkheim, who, writing over a century ago, used the phrase "collective effervescence" to describe the heightened sense of emotion and belonging that can arise when people gather together. Intriguingly, he included political gatherings amongst his examples.

Modern psychology has continued to explore this. Gathering with others can reinforce our identity, strengthen shared convictions and leave us feeling energised and connected. We don't simply communicate ideas when we gather; something happens to us through the very act of being together.

As Christians we shouldn't be surprised. The Bible is full of people gathering. God's people feast, sing, mourn and worship together. The early church was made up of groups of believers gathering to hear Scripture, pray and break bread.

But Christian gathering goes further than reinforcing an identity we already possess.

We don't just gather because we have found people like ourselves. The New Testament picture is of Christ calling together people who might not naturally have chosen one another: Jew and Gentile, rich and poor, people of very different backgrounds and experiences. Our unity is not created by agreeing about everything, but by belonging to Christ and, through him, belonging to one another.

Nor should Christians gathering together simply reinforce the boundary between those inside and outside ‘the family’. God's people gather and are then sent out again, to love our neighbours, serve others and seek their good.

Perhaps, then, one test of any gathering is not simply how strongly it reinforces our sense of belonging to a group or tribe, but what kind of people it sends us back out into the rest of the world to be.

That brings me back to party conferences.

I hope I am not the type of person who looks back at the past through rose-tinted spectacles. Political parties have always contained factions and rivalries, and conferences have always involved stage-management and political theatre.

But I do wonder whether something has changed over the years?

The party conferences I remember watching in my childhood and early adulthood often contained visible, vocal and sometimes uncomfortable disagreement. Some of those I later attended still had plenty of it. That was the case for parties of all colours, even if some were better at managing and obscuring those differences to people outside the conference village.

These differences weren't necessarily a weakness.

Political parties are coalitions of people, not collections of identical minds. People can broadly agree about the society they want while disagreeing strongly about how to get there. Conference provided a space to work out how people with sometimes significantly different views could remain in the same political family and find a way forward.

Increasingly, though, party conferences can feel more controlled.

There is the carefully constructed backdrop, approved slogans and artwork, announcements timed for maximum media coverage, and speeches designed as much for television and social media as for those in the hall. There are even stories of delegates being instructed when to laugh at jokes and when to clap.

On one level that is understandable. Political parties want to win elections, and conference season is an opportunity to break into the media headlines.

But there is a danger that conferences become less authentic: less a place where political communities wrestle publicly with competing ideas and more a sanitised, air-brushed presentation of a superficial and often temporary unity. At their worst, they can start to feel like American presidential conventions: highly managed displays of unity, enthusiasm and loyalty.

And I wonder if this reflects something happening far beyond conference halls.

Healthy disagreement requires quite a lot from us.

I need sufficient conviction to tell you why I think you are wrong, but enough humility to accept I might have something to learn from you. I need to challenge your argument without assuming the worst about your motives, and to distinguish between believing an idea is wrong and believing the person who holds it must therefore be a bad person.

It is much easier to surround ourselves with people who already agree with us.

Psychologists describe some of this through "social identity": we understand ourselves partly through the groups to which we belong. Once there is an "us", it can become remarkably easy to create a "them".

Party conferences can intensify that tendency. We wear the same coloured lanyard (it was a rosette in my day!), applaud our side, celebrate our victories and mock our opponents.

None of this is unique to any one party or to politics more generally. But repeated often enough, it can form how we think and relate to others, even if we are political hobbyists observing from the margins.

So perhaps, rather than viewing party conferences simply through the lens of policies announced and whether a leader's speech has been successful, this year we might also ask one another whether political gatherings help demonstrate and model disagreement well?

Do party conferences expose us to arguments we would rather not hear and help us to understand why somebody might reach a different conclusion? Or do they encourage conformity within our tribe while making those outside it appear a threat to our wellbeing?

And there are lessons here for the Church too, both good and bad.

Like political parties, churches are communities of belonging, and we too can be uncomfortable with disagreement.

There are, of course, truths at the heart of the Christian faith upon which our unity depends. But faithful, sincere and thoughtful Christians can reach different conclusions on important secondary questions, including political ones.

Too often churches can resemble the more sanitised version of the political conference. We would rather airbrush disagreement than acknowledge it, perhaps fearing that admitting significant differences might threaten our unity.

But what if disagreement, handled well, need not weaken Christian community? What if it could sometimes strengthen it?

Listening seriously to someone we love and respect explain why they have reached a very different conclusion can sharpen our thinking, expose assumptions we didn't know we were making and help us understand another person's experience.

Occasionally it might even lead us to the deeply unfashionable conclusion that we were wrong.

That requires Christian communities where conviction is not confused with certainty about everything; where changing our mind is not regarded as weakness; and where disagreement does not threaten relationship because our belonging rests on something deeper than agreement on every secondary question.

The Church doesn't always model this well. Christians can be every bit as tribal as anyone else. We can retreat into echo chambers, caricature those with whom we disagree and turn secondary questions into tests of faithfulness.

But imagine if we learned to do this better. Imagine if we became communities where people really did disagree, sometimes profoundly, but refused either to pretend those disagreements didn't exist or to allow them to destroy their relationships. Where people challenged one another, listened, and sometimes changed their minds, forgave one another and continued to pray, worship and serve together.

There is a famous line from party conference history which we can perhaps adapt for the Church. At the end of the 1981 Liberal Party conference, with his party riding high in the opinion polls, David Steel told delegates to "go back to your constituencies and prepare for government."

History didn't quite turn out as Steel hoped. But I wonder if there is something in that idea of going back which Christians could borrow.

The point of gathering as the Church is not simply the gathering itself. We come together to worship God, hear his Word, pray, encourage and challenge one another, and then we are sent back out into the world.

Back to our homes and families. Back to our workplaces. Back to our neighbourhoods and communities. And, for some, back into politics and public life.

We are sent back not to prepare for government, but hopefully, better prepared to witness to Christ in word and deed; to love our neighbours, including those with whom we profoundly disagree; to seek the good of the places where God has put us; and perhaps to model something of a different way of living together.

Party conferences remind us that gathering forms us. But perhaps the real test of any gathering is what happens when everyone goes home.