The Relational Fracture
How Western liberal pluralism came apart, how process metaphysics names the wound, and what open-relational theology offers as a way forward.
Part One: The World We Are Losing
A diagnostic portrait of western liberal pluralism and the fifty-year unraveling that has led us here.
I was born into a time where there was a wager at the heart of western liberal democracy. It bet that a modern society could hold together people of genuinely different convictions, backgrounds, and interests through a set of shared commitments and civic institutions. It was, in its best moments, an almost impossible and yet fragile achievement.
The postwar decades, roughly 1945 through the early 1970s, saw that wager at its most confident. Across the United States, Western Europe, Canada, and Australia, a broad embedded liberal consensus held where mixed economies were regulated by the state, welfare was a basic social contract, strong labor unions served as counterweights to capital exploits, a handful of broadcast networks and mix of major metropolitan and local newspapers provided a shared message, and a civic nationalism contained most conflicts without tearing things entirely apart.
What made this work was a structural feature where a working-class Catholic in Pittsburgh might share economic interests with a Black Baptist in Detroit while differing sharply on cultural questions. A small-business Republican in Ohio might share religious values with a Southern Democrat while disagreeing entirely on labor policy. These cross-cutting identities made political coalitions inherently unstable, and therefore dependent on negotiation, compromise, and the recognition that the person across the table held a genuine piece of the truth. No single identity mapped cleanly onto a single tribe.
That structural feature is now, in most respects, gone. And its loss is the hinge on which everything else turns.
Our political tribes have become functional gods, idols that promise ultimate belonging and righteousness while delivering only reaction, resentment, and mutual anathema.
The Great Sorting
Beginning in the 1970s, a series of forces began to sort American and western society in ways that progressively replaced cross-cutting structures with aligned ones. We moved into a world in which every identity marker lines up on a side of a single cultural fault line.
Economic restructures led to the move. The stagflation of the 1970s opened the door to the neoliberal revolution associated with Thatcher and Reagan. Deindustrialization hollowed out working-class communities across the Midwest as well as parts of England and Germany. The social infrastructure including, unions, churches, civic associations, and stable employment collapsed. This left populations with grievances that loosened the anchors to traditional institutions, and provided for mobilization along entirely new lines.
Geographic sorting then accelerated through the 1980s and 1990s. The educated and the youth migrated to cities and university towns. The less mobile, older, those more rooted in place and tradition remained in rural and small-towns. By the 1990s, Americans were increasingly living among people who shared their ideologies, losing the daily friction of differences that had historically served as democratic moderation.
The partisan realignment completed itself across this period, where ideology, religion, geography, education, and race all pointed in the same direction. The cross-cutting quality disappeared. The table that liberal pluralism required, a shared table at which disagreements could be negotiated, was removed.
The Digital Rupture
If the sorting of the postwar years created the kindling, the digital revolution provided the ignition. The collapse of the shared media landscape was perhaps the most consequential structural change of the recent era. The time of three television networks and major metropolitan newspapers was not perfect. But it created a common informational world. Citizens across the political spectrum were at least starting from roughly the same set of facts, even if they interpreted them differently.
Cable news in the 1990s began fracturing this. Fox News, launched in 1996, was based on a model of explicitly partisan news as an entertainment product. It was enormously profitable, widely imitated, and deeply corrosive to a shared informational commons. Social media completed the transition. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and their successors are attention-maximizing machines. Years of research have confirmed what is intuitively obvious, that outrage and fear drive engagement far more effectively than nuance and complexity. The algorithm does not care about democratic health. It optimizes for engagement, and it has discovered that the most reliable way to keep people engaged is to make them angry at and fearful of the other.
What We Lost
Trust, that which allows strangers to cooperate.
A good-faith disagreement, assuming that opponents act from genuine conviction.
The willingness to be changed by an encounter with difference.
The shared horizon of hope where the arc of history bends toward greater inclusion.
What makes the polarization different from ordinary disagreement is that the two coalitions now inhabit different factual universes, not just different interpretations of shared facts, but different accounts of what is happening. Institutions have lost legitimacy and raw power has filled the vacuum. The game has become zero-sum. If my side loses, the system is corrupt. For large portions of the population, identity expression and tribal signaling is more important than the pursuit of collective goods through negotiation. One has to own the opposition and resist the existential threat they represent.
This is a crisis of relation. And that is precisely why a philosophy that places relation at the very heart of reality has something irreplaceable to say about it.
Part Two: Process Metaphysics and the Wound
Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of organism names our polarization with uncommon precision, not as a moral failure, but as a metaphysical one.
Alfred North Whitehead understood reality as a ceaseless flow of events or actual occasions. These are momentary pulses of experience that come into being by inheriting the past, responding to a creative lure toward novelty, and then perishing to become data for the next moment’s becoming. At every scale, reality is constituted by this rhythm of inheritance and creative advance.
Reality is fundamentally constituted by events and relations, not by fixed substances. Every actual entity becomes what it is by prehending, feeling and taking into itself, the reality of others.
Healthy societies exhibit the creative advance, a dynamic tension between conformity (inheriting and honoring the past) and novelty (transcending it toward a richer experience). In my opinion, what we are witnessing in our polarization is a pathological bifurcation of this rhythm. One cultural vector grasps the pole of conformity, tradition, continuity, and inherited identity. Another grasps novelty, liberation, transgression, and revision. Both are abstracting one pole from the necessary tension of the creative advance. Each has mistaken a partial truth for the whole.
The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness
Whitehead’s diagnostic tool for our moment is what he called the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness, which is the error of treating an abstraction as if it were the concrete reality. Our polarized ecosystems have become engines for manufacturing abstractions, “the Left,” “the Right,” “real Americans,” “the elites”, and then making these abstractions our reality.
People no longer encounter one another as relational experiences. The algorithm, the talking head, the influencer, these are abstraction machines. They strip the occasion of its depth and feed us a caricature. When you relate to an abstraction rather than a person, you cannot genuinely prehend them. You cannot feel the feeling. Empathy collapses. Prehension disappears. There is no relation, no community.
We have forgotten that we are constituted by our relations. The polarized self, certain, bounded, is a metaphysical fiction.
The Impoverishment of Prehension
For Whitehead, every actual occasion prehends, feels and takes into itself, the reality of others. This mutual immanence is the metaphysical basis of community. We are, at the most fundamental level, constituted by our relations. Liberal pluralism at its best was an achievement precisely because it created conditions for wide and rich prehension, exposure to difference, encounters with otherness and an enlargement of experience.
Several forces have inverted this. Filter bubbles and algorithmic sorting have narrowed the field of prehension. We increasingly feel only those occasions that confirm our existing patterns of response. It’s mere repetition without creative transformation. Digital mediation constrains the depth of prehension. Our mediated interaction strips away the causal efficacy. We can’t feel the weight of another’s reality. We are left with surface signals lacking the deeper mode of experience that grounds understanding.
The result is a society of negative prehensions. Each side is excluding the feelings and perspectives of the other. This is more than disagreement. It is a metaphysical rupture in social solidarity.
Adventure and Anesthesia
Whitehead identified adventure as the willingness to entertain ideas that disturb settled patterns and essential to vitality. Its opposite is anesthesia, defined as the deadening of experience and the retreat into the comfortable and familiar. The outrage and tribal signaling may feel like passion, but they are the passion of repetition not adventure.
True adventure requires the courage to genuinely entertain the possibility that the other is partly right and that one’s own worldview is incomplete. Our polarized neighbors have anesthetized themselves against this risk. The entertainment-outrage complex is a machine for producing the feeling of intensity while aborting the adventure of genuine novelty. It is a counterfeit.
The Decay of Living Symbols
Civilizations are sustained by living symbols, symbols that genuinely connect the community to depths of value and meaning. When symbols decay, they become mere banners of tribal identity. “Freedom,” “justice,” “democracy,” “family”, these were once living symbols capable of drawing people into shared pursuits of values. They have been drained of their depth of reference and repurposed as tribal insignia.
The deepest diagnosis is this, we have forgotten that we are constituted by our relations. Our mediated self is certain and bound in a metaphysical fiction. It is a creature that cannot actually exist in a real world. Our task is to recover the truth of our relational nature, and to build a different kind of common life.
Part Three: Open-Relational Theology
Process and open-relational theology pastoral vision for living differently in a polarized world.
In process and open-relational theology, drawing on Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne, John B. Cobb Jr., and Thomas Jay Oord, God is not the omnipotent sovereign who unilaterally controls history from above. God is supremely relational and lures all creation toward greater beauty, truth, love, and complexity. God’s fundamental mode of action is persuasion, not coercion. The divine initial aim is offered to every actual occasion as an invitation toward the richest possible realization of value. This invitation can be refused. Creaturely freedom is real, not performative.
This is the important theological frame for our moment and our polarization is not God’s will. It is happening within a world God created with freedom, and therefore risk. The deep longing for meaning, identity, belonging, and justice that drives our passion is God-given. The divine eros is within every human heart. What our polarized culture has done is take that eros and redirect it to tribalism. The passion is real. The spiritual hunger is God-given. But it has been captured by systems that are algorithmic, economic, and political. They are coercive rather than persuasive. They offer the feeling of ultimate meaning but actually close people off from the divine lure of openness and love.
In theological terms, our political tribes have become functional gods. They are idols that promise belonging while delivering only reaction and resentment.
The Closed Self as Sin
Open and relational theology insists that persons are relational beings. We are, at the most fundamental level, constituted by our relations, to one another, to creation, and to God.
The polarized self is a theological distortion. It is a self that has drawn a hard boundary around its community of concern and practices systematic exclusion of the other’s reality. This self equates certainty with faithfulness and mistakes ideological purity for holiness. This is, in a sense, a form of sin. It’s an ontological refusal of relation. It is the creature asserting a kind of false sovereignty. “I will define reality on my own terms. I will not be changed by relation with the other. I will not be lured beyond my present worldview.”
A God Who Suffers
Open and relational theology offers something that purely philosophical thought cannot fully articulate. That is, God is not a detached metaphysical principle. God feels this polarization. And Charles Hartshorne’s doctrine of divine passibility applies here. God genuinely experiences the world. What happens to us happens to God. Every act of dehumanization, every moment of willful blindness to the suffering of the other, every ugliness in public discourse is prehended by God in all their full emotional weight.
God grieves our polarization not as an abstraction but as a parent grieves the estrangement of beloved children. The divine experience is one of suffering the loss of what could be. This is not a God who punishes from outside. It is a God who feels the cost from within, continuously, and who nonetheless goes on offering to every occasion the aim toward something better.
Pastoral Praxis
Process and open-relational theology points to a way of life and hints at practices that embody its metaphysical and theological commitments. What follows are suggested practices rooted in the diagnoses made above.
Learning to Feel the Other’s Feeling
If our crisis is fundamentally one of impoverished prehension and if we are failing to genuinely take the other’s reality into ourselves, then the central spiritual discipline of our moment is cultivating the capacity to actually feel what the other feels. We are called to a disciplined, embodied practice of exposure. It means seeking out the particular stories of those whose experience differs from ours, not to debate or convert, but to be changed. Churches, civic organizations, and community groups that create spaces for this kind of encounter are doing important spiritual work.
Naming the Idols
The prophetic tradition in scripture was more than about moralism. In process-relational terms, the prophets were mediators of the divine aim into specific historical situations. They felt God’s feeling about the distortion of justice and the reduction of persons to their economic utility. Prophetic preaching in our moment must name the idolatry of the tribe. It must call out the elevation of partisan identity as a concern with the same honesty the prophets brought to the idolatries of their own day. This includes naming idolatry where it appears within the preacher’s own community. Prophetic speech that only condemns the other side is not prophecy. It is recruitment.
Harmony of Contrasts
Jesus’s proclamation of the Kingdom of God was a social vision. He was a community organizer around the divine character of an uncoercing, other-regarding love, where the boundaries of concern are always being enlarged. It is where enemies are prayed for and where the marginalized are seen and cared for. It is a community whose internal life enacts a different logic. The deepest calling of the church in our polarized moment is to be a place where the full humanity of opponents is fiercely protected. Where we listen as a spiritual discipline. We don’t need a false unity that erases difference, we need a community that holds difference without violence. The harmony of contrasts is sacred.
Resisting the Abstraction Machines
The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness names the damage done by our media environment. The pastoral response is the recovery of a deliberate, counter-cultural commitment to relating to actual persons not ideological types. This means reducing one’s consumption of media whose primary product is the abstraction and demonization of the other side. It means embodied encounters with neighborhood associations, local congregations, and civic organizations that require sustained face-to-face engagement across differences. The local is the site where the feeling of prehension has its deepest and most transformative quality.
Holding Hope
God’s consequent nature offers a profound eschatological resource for exhausted people of good will. Nothing is lost to God. Every act of bridge-building requires costly empathy. Embracing differences and seeking out loving encounters is participation in God’s life. The practice of love helps avoid being swallowed by the noise of the culture wars. Open and relational theology does not promise that God will fix our polarization. God cannot do that without destroying the freedom that makes love possible. God never stops offering the lure toward a richer and more loving community that is real and woven into the divine life.
Practice of Complexity
Adventure identifies the willingness to entertain ideas that disturb patterns that need to be perturbed. This is a spiritual practice. It requires the willingness to approach even familiar positions with an openness to being surprised. This means reading the best arguments of those with whom you disagree. It means holding our convictions with eschatological humility. Our current view remains partial and is subject to God’s ongoing creative lure. Complexity is a mark of faithfulness to the lure of adventure.
Our polarization is, at root, a spiritual crisis. It is a widespread refusal to hear the divine lure toward love. The response is the spiritual practice of repentance. One that turns from the anesthesia of our current culture and turns toward the reality that we are made for relation. This isn’t easy. God meets us in the face of our enemy. The creative advance toward a relational life is a participation in the very life and love of God.
I am an armchair process thinker. I may have used process concepts incorrectly and am willing to accept any and all critiques of my use or misuse of them. Please feel free to put them in the comments.
Sensational stuff