“There are a lot of big feelings in this room,” a friend whispered to me a couple of days after the election as the women of our church gathered for our weekly Bible study. We were there to continue our study of Ecclesiastes, but most of us were less focused on the Bible than we were on the tense mood in the room. At our “purple” church, no single emotional reaction dominated—the women filing into pews that morning were relieved, distressed, comforted, grieved.
Many churches like ours spent the lead-up to the election thinking about how to disagree well, how to seek unity amid diversity of opinion, and how to keep our focus on Christ without diminishing the importance of loving our neighbors through politics. But now that the election is over, churches—and families, friends, and communities—are grappling with a new question: “How do we handle our conflicting emotional responses?”
Unlike other national events—whether tragedies like school shootings or celebrations like Olympic victories—elections feel significant to everyone in very different ways. Some people walked into their churches the Sunday after the election with a sense of relief, even joy. Others walked into church with lingering dread or grief.
While the church may be comfortable responding to different emotions—after all, we are called to rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn (Rom. 12:15)—this time, we are responding differently to the same event. We don’t only misunderstand each other’s emotional responses—we recoil at them. Before the election, we may have thought, How could you possibly think that? Now, we’re confronted with another challenging question: “How could you possibly feel that way?”
This new question is, in some ways, more volatile. We aren’t talking about different policy positions, political philosophies, or candidate preferences. We’re talking about something more visceral: how we feel about the state of our country, the well-being of our communities, and the kind of life we want to live. However, this shift to feelings may be exactly what we need to navigate the post-election season with greater faithfulness.
The 2024 election season, like every other election season, was never primarily about facts or data or policy positions. Deeper emotions, stories, and claims on our identity and sense of community were always humming under the surface of our political disagreements. Anyone who has ever gotten into a political argument with a friend or family member knows this. You may start out by explaining why you support a policy or prefer a candidate, but things only get heated when deeper differences arise: when your loyalties conflict, when your loves diverge, when your sense of identity is threatened.
Our policy differences are important, but they seem intractable in part because they are fueled by powerful stories about what it means to be human, what kinds of communities we want to live in, what is ultimately right and true. We are constantly formed by these stories, often without realizing it. When these stories clash, however, they reveal themselves as formative drivers of much of our political life.
During the 2020 election, I spent many hours in conversation with people at my church who disagreed with me politically. As one conversation moved from economic policy into underlying political philosophy, it got more emotionally charged. It was clear that the difference in opinion between us was masking something deeper.
Finally, the woman burst out, “Are you calling my dad a liar?” We disagreed about what economic policies would serve our country best. And underneath that policy difference was a difference in political philosophy. But neither of those differences were driving the emotion of the conversation. The real issue was about family loyalty, a threatened sense of personal righteousness, and conflicting ideas about what flourishing communities look like.
This focus on our emotional responses also has the potential to open up new conversations about our political differences. When we start by addressing the deeper feelings people have about politics—their fear, desire, anger, love—we resist the temptation to objectify our political opponents. We cannot boil them down to one belief or position; we must take them as whole people. Their political positions do not entirely define them, and they came to those positions through a complicated personal history: past pains and joys, family dynamics, and media consumption habits.
I have been speaking to groups of Christians about faith and politics for three election cycles now, and the single most helpful thing I have learned in the hundreds of conversations I have had is one question. When a political conversation gets heated or thorny, I pause and ask, “This seems important to you. Can you tell me more about why?” The vast majority of the time, the other person does not respond with policy details. They say something like “My dad taught me to care about this.” Or “I’m worried about my kids.” Or “Something scary happened in my neighborhood.”
While our different emotional responses to the election present a challenge to our communities, they also unearth a reality we have avoided for too long. Our political differences are not merely about policy details; they are about our desires, fears, loves, and loyalties. Our difficulty navigating these emotional differences might, in a strange way, bring to the surface the real challenge for political formation and discipleship today: confronting the stories our politics sell us and finding in Scripture a truer and better story.
While that morning in Bible study was emotionally charged, it turned out that Ecclesiastes offered us exactly the word we needed. This book, known for its pessimism about human endeavors and earthly pleasures—“meaningless, meaningless!” is the author’s refrain—surprisingly confronts the whole spectrum of emotional responses to the election.
We worship a God who can handle the emotional outburst of Ecclesiastes: delight at the joys of creation, devastation at their limitations, despair when all efforts at success and contentment fail. We worship a God who reveals himself to us in such a book. Nothing about our emotional reactions to the election surprises God. Ecclesiastes honors the full range of human emotions in response to a world that is somehow both beautiful and horrifying, joyful and devastating.
But Ecclesiastes doesn’t leave us there. For those leaning toward triumphalism and rejoicing, the wisdom book reminds us that failure and evil are mixed into all human work. For those leaning toward despair and gloom, Ecclesiastes reminds us that moments of joy and goodness remain even in suffering.
We should honor each other’s emotional responses to this election—they are legitimate, and they helpfully point us toward the deeper stories we believe about the world and our place in it. But we should also, in the days and months after the election, point each other to the truth in Scripture that we do not “understand the work of God, the Maker of all things” (Ecc. 11:5).
We do not yet know what God is doing—in our country, in our churches, in ourselves. But the instructions to us now are the same as those to the distraught reader of Ecclesiastes throughout all of history: “Fear God and keep his commandments,” knowing that “God will bring every deed into judgment, including every hidden thing, whether it is good or evil” (12:13–14).
Kaitlyn Schiess is the author of The Ballot and the Bible: How Scripture Has Been Used and Abused in American Politics and Where We Go from Here.
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