Stand into the Storm: Thoughts on Election Day, with Peter Wehner and David Goatley

How should we respond to the anxiety, fear, and catastrophizing of Election Day? Is there an alternative to fight, flight, or freeze? Can people of Christian conviction stand firm, grounded in faith, leaning into the storm?

In this special Election Day episode of Conversing, Mark Labberton welcomes Peter Wehner (columnist, the New York Times, The Atlantic) and David Goatley (president, Fuller Seminary) to make sense of the moral, emotional, and spiritual factors operating in the 2024 US general election.

Together they discuss the emotional response to political media; faithful alternatives to the overabundance of fear, anxiety, and catastrophizing; how the threat of affective polarization divides families and friendships; biblical attitudes toward troubling or frightening political and cultural events; how to respond to vitriol, anger, cynicism, hate, and manipulative language; and how the church can help restore trust and be a faithful witness, standing firm through the political storm.

About Peter Wehner

Peter Wehner, an American essayist, is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times, a contributing writer for The Atlantic, and senior fellow at the Trinity Forum. He writes on politics and political ideas, on faith and culture, on foreign policy, sports, and friendships.

Wehner served in three presidential administrations, including as deputy director of presidential speechwriting for President George W. Bush. Later, he served as the director of the Office of Strategic Initiatives.

Wehner, a graduate of the University of Washington, is editor or author of six books, including The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump, which the New York Times called “a model of conscientious political engagements.” Married and the father of three, he lives in McLean, Virginia.

About David Goatley

David Emmanuel Goatley is president of Fuller Seminary. Prior to his appointment in January 2023, he served as the associate dean for academic and vocational formation, Ruth W. and A. Morris Williams Jr. Research Professor of Theology and Christian Ministry, and director of the Office of Black Church Studies at Duke Divinity School. Ordained in the National Baptist Convention, USA, he served as pastor of the First Baptist Church of Campbellsville, Kentucky, for nine years (1986–1995).

In addition to his articles, essays, and book chapters, Goatley is the author of Were You There? Godforsakenness in Slave Religion and A Divine Assignment: The Missiology of Wendell Clay Somerville, as well as the editor of Black Religion, Black Theology: Collected Essays of J. Deotis Roberts. His current research focuses on flourishing in ministry and thriving congregations, most recently working on projects funded by the Lilly Endowment and the Duke Endowment.

Show Notes

• Anxiety, Uncertainty, and Worst-Case Scenarios
• The regular appeal to “the most important election of our lifetimes”
• Assuming the worst about others
• “We are at a fork in the road for a certain kind of vision of who we want to be.”
• “As an African American, many of us always live in the crosswinds.”
• Living with fragility, vulnerability, and uncertainty
• Hymn: “On Christ the Solid Rock I Stand”
• Anger, Antipathy, and Fear
• Passions and beliefs—and an electoral system built to amplify those
• “They’re more amplified than in the past.”
• Families and friendships that divide over politics.
• Feeling like we “share a continent but not a country”
• Affective polarization—”There’s a sense of the other side being an enemy.”
• Catastrophizing
• Recalibrate, reset, and rethink
• Hoping that calmer heads prevail
• Church splintering and aligning with partisan politics
• “God will use all things—not that God intends all things.”
• The political balance wheel
• “Fear is not a Christian state of mind.”
• “Hope is based on something real.”
• “The long game for believers is to hearken back to the early church and remember that Jesus is Lord, and the emperor is not.”
• Political toxicity that infects the household of faith
• “We have to do all that we can to live with peacefully with each other.”
• Vitriol, hubris
• “It’s important to name things. … If you don’t name them—if you try to hide them—then you can’t begin the process of healing.”
• “Faith is subordinate to other factors that they’re not aware of.”
• The Era of Fear: What informs our fears? What can we do about our fears?
• Fear of the Lord that sets us free
• Firmness as an alternative to fighting or fleeing
• “Valuing the vibrant diversity of God”
• “Expand your reading.”
• Breaking out of conformity and homogeneity
• “Meeting the moment”: Inflection points in a human life or a society’s life—a moment for leaders to rise up, speak, and shape
• Example: Winston Churchill and Great Britain pre–World War II (from pariah to prime minister)
• Example: Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation and the agenda to make schools phone-free
• These aren’t the conditions for human flourishing
• “We’ve got to be faithful. We may not be successful.”
• Cultivating a political garden to prepare the soil for shared core values of decency, respect, fairness
• “… what we have loved, / Others will love, and we will teach them how” (William Wordsworth, “The Prelude”)
• Loving the right things
• Voting
• “Complicating my view of the world.”
• “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”
• Before voting: “A prayer to submit myself to the will of God.”
• “Tell me how you came to believe what you believe … over time it can create a feeling of trust”
• “What don’t I see? What about my own blindspots?”
• Stunned by the profundity and sobering word that “God will not be mocked”
• Expressing convictions through voting

Production Credits

Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment magazine and Fuller Seminary.