Outsmarting the Big Sort

Since Bill Bishop’s 2009 book, The Big Sort, there has been a lot of attention given to the fact that we are sorted as a nation. We are sorted into blue or red, states, cities or neighborhoods. We are sorted socio-economically and racially. While the sorting has real effect, it is also true that it’s virtually impossible to sort human beings into pristine categories. Each of us are a complex of experiences. We are, each of us, on a journey of questions and experiments in our vocational and avocational lives, our relationships, our opinions and convictions.

Religion and spirituality have always participated in the big sort. Within the Christian community, we sort ourselves into categories like mainstream, evangelical or fundamental. Most interesting, individuals within church can even be sorted politically according to social issues of the day. Philosophically, we sort the wider community of individuals into pristine categories of agnostic, atheist or believer. We talk about the increasing secular culture in which we live. Framing such categories, we attempt to identify boundaries, rules of engagement and standards of measure. The big sort within religious life imposes a sort of partisanship over the human condition that is otherwise just seeking truth and understanding.

If you talk to folks in the church long enough, you come to understand how truly inadequate the big sort is to define each person. How many “believers” have doubts and components of their church confessions to which they can no longer adhere? How many agnostics with an abundance of questions are sitting there in the pews with a small clutch of convictions that anchor their thoughts and behaviors? There too, one can find a person who wonders if they are not more an atheist. But there they sit hanging on at the periphery of religious life as if an astronaut tethered to a space station.

The human being is more than a state of being within a pristine category. We are more than adherents to ideologies. We experience a dynamic and rich inner life that is best characterized as wonder and longing. In this way we cannot be sorted from each other. I have always been moved by the overwhelming evidence within scripture that Jesus did not require faith statements from individuals. Rather, he responded to their questions and their longing. He outsmarted the big sort at work in his day in order be genuine and loving alongside others. How will those of us who do church in his name outsmart the big sort of our day?