Benedictine Practices for a Polarized Age

By Nick Scrimenti

My brother lost a friend over politics.

This wasn’t a gradual drifting apart. It wasn’t the kind of break we too often shrug off, like when you find out a high school acquaintance secretly, but not unsurprisingly, holds some uncouth prejudice. This was a real, painful, and sudden break. A chasm opened up between them when his friend began to express increasingly hardline right-wing views. My brother sought to understand, but the temptation to persuade, debate, and ultimately reject won out. What grieved my brother the most wasn’t the disagreement, but the sense that his friend had become unrecognizable, unreachable.

Their story isn’t unique. There’s a good chance, if you’re reading this, that you too have drawn a line in the sand with someone you once held close. According to some studies, around 26 percent of Americans have reported a loss of a friendship because of political disagreements. This number represents the breakdown of millions of relationships across the country; a fraying of our already meager social fabric.

It can often be healthy to draw boundaries for ourselves – to remove ourselves from toxic situations. Nevertheless, more and more, we seem to be drawing our boundary lines ever closer to ourselves, letting in those who only confirm and affirm our established assumptions. This tendency to retreat into our own ideological bubbles feeds radicalization and, in turn, creates a cycle where it becomes harder and harder to maintain community across ideological divides.

This cycle of polarization, where we increasingly withdraw into ideologically similar circles, not only deepens divides but also erodes our ability to build spiritual community, to achieve true solidarity, and to even persuade others to join in our political project. To counteract this, we must rediscover dialogical “tools for good works” - practices of listening and mutual commitment that invite transformation.

Icon of The Embrace of the Apostles Peter and Paul, by Angelos Akontanos (1400s)

After graduate school, I went to live for a year in Benedictine monastery in rural France. For that year, I had committed myself to a vow of stability. Stability means staying put, not just physically, but relationally. I found myself in community with people of all ages, from all places, and with politics very different from my own. We all lived, worked, and prayed together, as we were, not as we wished each other to be. We were held lovingly together by the Rule of St. Benedict, which we would read and reflect on together each morning.

The first line in the Rule is “listen carefully….and incline the ear of your heart.” Benedict asks of us a particular kind of listening; a listening that calls us to move beyond the rationalizing, analyzing head-space and move into the heart-space. It is with the “ear of the heart” that we listen for deeper meaning. We lay aside our refutations and arguments so that we can hear people on their own terms. It’s a kind of spiritual disposition, an open availability.

In dialogue facilitation, we often speak of curiosity-based listening: listening not to reply, but to understand. I’ve come to think of it as Benedictine listening: grounded in humility and hospitality, shaped by silence, and oriented toward the possibility of conversion, not just of the other, but of ourselves.

Of course, not everyone sees dialogue as a meaningful or adequate response to the crises we face. Many people, especially those on the political left, are rightly skeptical of dialogue when it appears to sideline justice in favor of civility, or when it treats all positions as equally valid, regardless of their impact. Dialogue, when misused, can excuse harm or place undue emotional labor on those already carrying the weight of marginalization.

But at its best, dialogue is not a detour around hard truths, it is a path through them. At the interpersonal level, we are in desperate need of rehumanization. We are forgetting how to see one another as whole people. We reduce each other to headlines, to caricatures, to stereotypes. We cut off friends, siblings, colleagues not always out of hatred, but out of exhaustion, confusion, and pain. And while some boundaries are necessary, we must also ask: What is lost when we stop believing that transformation is possible?

What might it look like to recover a spirituality of encounter? Benedictine wisdom teaches us that community is not the absence of conflict, but the presence of commitment and mutual obedience. Benedictine listening asks of us a humility that says, “I do not yet fully understand you, but I am trying.”

I sometimes wonder what might have unfolded differently if my brother or his friend had been equipped with these tools. What if, instead of trying to argue his friend back from the edge, my brother had known how to listen with the ear of the heart? What if he had asked, “Can you tell me more about how you came to see things this way?”, not as a trap, but as a real question? Dialogue alone wouldn’t have guaranteed healing. But it might have preserved the relationship long enough for understanding to emerge. Perhaps that’s where transformation begins: not with winning an argument, but with staying in the room.

If we are to find a way to maintain community and friendship through difference, we will need not just new skills, but an old imagination: one that listens with the ear of the heart.

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AUTHOR

Nick Scrimenti is a dialogue facilitator, spiritual director, and educator based in Washington, D.C.