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Apart from Partisan

For both State Street and Allisonville Christian, this mission of bridge-building has become much more challenging over the past decade. Calls for unity and “celebrating differences” are, it turns out, one of the great drivers of division in contemporary America.

“There was a time when we could figure out how to solve issues in a way that benefited the most people,” State Street’s pastor, Nate Loucks, says. “We were going to disagree on the route to get there, but we could agree that there was a path to get to this place. Now, we just deny that we’re even going the same way—that there’s a potential path we could go on. If
you say the sky is blue, I have to say the sky is green. That didn’t exist 20 years ago. And it seems to exist more
and more now.”

As a way to push back against this entrenchment, State Street launched a new program, “Discussions Over Dinner,” in the wake of the 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. For one of the first “Discussions,” State Street invited three panelists to talk about the Black experience in La Porte County. The church’s pastor (Loucks) moderated a conversation with the panelists for about half an hour, followed by questions from participants in person and via the livestream. About 80 people took part in person, and a few more watched the live stream. It became one of State Street’s signature programs and was hosted five or six times annually from 2015 to 2020.

“We don’t want to be a congregation that forms opinions without actually informing ourselves of the truth,” Loucks says of the program’s origins. “Our calling as people of faith is not to convert across the partisan divide. It’s to inform ourselves and to learn to love each other in spite of our differences and to celebrate our differences.” State Street paused the program during the COVID pandemic but plans to revive it soon.

While churches like State Street are pushing back against division, political polarization magnifies its acute pain points in churches across Indiana. Allisonville Christian’s pastor, Beau Underwood, believes that churches of all stripes are stereotyped based on the loudest and most provocative voices in the culture wars that rage on social media channels and traditional media outlets alike.

“There’s an increasing skepticism in our society about who Christians are and what church is about,” he says. “And so people think, well, if being a Christian means I have to be against science, or being a Christian means I have to vote a certain way, or I can’t love the gay couple that moved in next to me—I don’t want anything to do with that.

“There is a lot more suspicion and skepticism toward churches than there used to be. So we’re trying to do some things to help people realize there’s a different way of being Christian than they might think. That’s what we’re trying to do here.”

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