As measured in surveys, Americans' negative attitudes toward political parties other than their own have increased dramatically in recent decades and at a much faster pace than in other countries.

These entrenched divisions simultaneously increase the vehemence of our arguments and decrease our willingness to listen to one another.

We exhaust ourselves by declaring our opinions but are not in conversation.

We produce monologues that are intended more to reassure us than to convince those with different views—or worse, that are received by them as taunts and provocations which must be answered in turn.

Constant exposure to arguments that we are not willing or able to engage with in dialogue is draining as well.

It is like listening to a radio tuned to a station that is half static, half shouting—but that we dare not turn off lest we miss the point our own monologue will aim to refute later.

When we think about polarisation in terms of its derangement of public discourse, we often think first of political partisanship.

But it is clear that this dynamic also plays out in many realms of common life, including religion. In the Catholic Church, it is easy to recognize polarisation operating both within the life of the church itself and in the church's relation to the secular world.

For example, conflicts over the Traditional Latin Mass and over how the church should engage with a wider culture whose sexual norms have changed radically both reflect different factions arguing fervently but often talking past each other.

Indeed, what most characterizes polarisation is the constant sense of threat: Everything is always at stake, always in need of defence.

In fact, a closer look at the relationship between religion and secularity provides powerful insights about how polarisation arises and how it becomes so intractable—and it also helps us imagine how to find a way toward greater unity.

The reality of the church as a communion, not just an association of individuals, offers a powerful antidote to polarisation.

Finding resources within the church's tradition for a healthier engagement across internal divisions can also provide a model for responding to secular forms of polarisation.

Where polarisation and secularity intersect

Polarisation is not simply an intense form of extremism but not just the worst case of division or disagreement.

The kind of polarisation that is exhausting us is, instead, a pathology endemic to pluralism.

It is a name for how attempts to live together with others who hold different accounts of meaning, goodness and human nature—accounts that overlap and intersect but do not fully agree—break down and turn into fear and scapegoating instead.

Our arguments about how to live together run in circles.

As we despair of ever convincing each other, the "other side" in a polarized discourse becomes less a partner in conversation and more a threat to be neutralized.

Indeed, what most characterizes polarisation is the constant sense of threat: Everything is always at stake, always in need of defense.

Because we lack shared ground on which to agree or disagree, we also feel the lack of safe ground for our own beliefs.

This is the ugly and dangerous truth of why the outrage machines of social media and the 24-hour news cycle work so well on us.

We are already afraid—and they are ready at hand to tell us why.

Believers or not, we all live in a secular age in which we become responsible for opting to believe.

In thinking through how polarisation operates, I have found that the philosopher Charles Taylor's analysis in A Secular Age offers crucial insights into how the stakes of disagreement have risen so high in our contemporary situation.

(While I would encourage everyone interested in these issues to read A Secular Age themselves, a 900-page tome is a very good reason to make a recommendation of a shorter précis as well. James K. A. Smith's How (Not) to Be Secular is an excellent exploration of the key points of Taylor's work.)

Two main points from Taylor have bearing on the question of polarisation: his distinction between three different meanings of secular and his concept of being "cross-pressured" by having to constantly choose among many sources of ultimate meaning. Continue reading

• Sam Sawyer is Editor in Chief of America Media

There is virtue-signaling, to be sure, but turn on the news or log onto Twitter and you will undoubtedly find politicians and pundits engaged in verbal combat or thinly veiled self-congratulation.

In times like these, the "virtuous speech" counseled by St. Francis de Sales in his Introduction to the Devout Life is downright countercultural (Part III, 26-30).

His writings on cultivating this unfashionable virtue are a good place to start if we as Catholics wish to help restore a degree of civility to our public life.

Weigh your words

The saint encourages modesty in speech and respect for each other in our speech.

He writes: "Be careful never to let an indecent word leave your lips, for even if you do not speak with an evil intention those who hear it may take it in a different way."

Weigh your words and the thoughts that ultimately produce those words. This is truly good advice for each of us.

"The more pointed a dart is, the more easily it enters the body, and in like manner the sharper an obscene word is, the deeper it penetrates into the heart."

De Sales teaches that nothing is so opposed to charity as to despise and condemn one's neighbor.

"Derision and mockery are always accompanied by scoffing, and it is therefore a very great sin."

He does encourage, however, good-humored and joking words—pleasant conversation, if you will: "By their means we take friendly, virtuous enjoyment in the amusing situations human imperfections provide us."

Rash judgments

Francis de Sales is particularly hard on "rash judgments" of others. He states that judgments are offenses against God for they usurp the office of the Lord.

"Many men," he writes, "make a habit of rash judgment merely because they like to play the philosopher and probe into men's moods and morals as a way of showing their own keen intelligence."

Others, he writes, "judge out of passion. They always think well of things they love and ill of those they dislike."

For de Sales, "the sin of rash judgment is truly spiritual jaundice and causes all things to appear evil to the eyes of those infected with it."

De Sales provides a remedy for this infection: "Whoever wants to be cured must apply remedies not to his eyes or intellect but to his affections, which are feet in relation to his soul.

"If your reflections are kind, your judgments will also be kind. If your affections are charitable, your judgments will be the same."

A degree of self-awareness is useful in this regard: "Those who look carefully into their consciences are not very likely to pass rash judgments. Just as bees in misty or cloudy weather stay in their hives to prepare honey, so also the thoughts of good men do not go out in search of things concealed among the cloudy actions of our neighbor. To avoid meeting them they retire into their own hearts and make good resolutions for their own amendment."

Slander

Francis de Sales refers to slander as "the true plague of society." He says further that "the man who could free the world of slander would free it of a large share of its sins and iniquity." Slander robs a person of his good name, and it requires reparation. Continue reading

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