Picking Up Serpents

Friendship, Empathy, and the Antidote to Political Poison

Sep 26, 2025

a man and woman holding a sign — Photo by Floris Van Cauwelaert on Unsplash

Sometimes my academic work feels like living inside Mark 16:18. The New American Bible: Revised Edition (NABRE) translates it this way: “They will pick up serpents [with their hands], and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not harm them. They will lay hands on the sick, and they will recover.” Scholars of religion spend long hours handling venom, parsing through rows of rhetoric that casts opponents as demons, reframes violence as holy, and replaces evidence with claims of divine persecution.

The responses in the comment sections around the internet are not engagement with evidence or acknowledgment of complexities, just accusations that authors are “deceived by powers of darkness.” These comments mirror prayer requests and narratives found in groups like Intercessors for America, a group who portrayed January 6th defendants not as perpetrators of violence but as “mostly peaceful protestors” or “unfairly jailed protestors.” (Intercessors for America, 2025; Dinulescu, 2021). To contrast, the same network also boosted narratives of 2020 demonstrations as “radical leftist militias” animated by “demonic ideology”, even though Democratic leaders from Joe Biden to James Clyburn to Nancy Pelosi repeatedly condemned violence linked to those protests (Caldera, 2020).

January 6 attacker assaults police with bear spray Source: United States Department of Justice

The point is not whether evidence exists — it does. The problem is that within this narrative, context itself is erased. Once context disappears, what fills the void are faith claims that recast civic events as cosmic battles, seeing “good as evil and evil as good” (Isaiah 5:20).

When facts are replaced with faith claims

This is substitution at work. Kucinskas and Stewart (2022) describe how spiritual practice can become a substitute for civic duty, redirecting engagement away from dialogue and into cosmic struggle. Perry (2025) shows how religious and political sorting leaves Americans less informed about civic life, yet more confident in their misperceptions. Gorski and Perry (2022) trace the “deep story” of Christian nationalism that recasts democratic opposition as demonic threat.

Nearly 18 percent of white weekly churchgoers fall into this high-risk cluster, representing millions of Americans living inside a different map of reality (Armaly, Buckley, & Enders, 2022). The problem is not simply disagreement about policy. It is the creation of parallel worlds where the images broadcast live to the nation are recast as deception or “media lies”. Taylor (2024) shows how leaders in the New Apostolic Reformation described the 2020 election and January 6 as part of a “governmental war,” framing insurrection as divine destiny. This is the substitution at work: civic responsibility displaced by cosmic battle, violence reframed as holy obligation.

The frustration of engaging online

The reality, of course, is that most of these venomous exchanges do not happen in churches or civic organizations. They happen online. Comment threads become pulpits for spiritualized grievance. Campbell (2012) describes this shift as part of “networked religion,” where digital media extends religious identity, authority, and practice into online spaces. The result is a blurring of the sacred and the civic, where prayer requests and political commentary circulate together in ways that reinforce partisan worldviews.

Her later work with Evolvi (2019) shows that digital religion research highlights how online platforms provide new arenas for negotiating authority and constructing religious identity. In polarized environments, this means that grievances framed as spiritual warfare can spread quickly, unmoored from traditional checks of congregational or denominational life. Instead of dialogue, networked spaces can amplify suspicion and embolden communities to recast political disputes as battles against evil itself.

This is disheartening for those of us who study religion out of love for its ecumenical promise. We recognize the beauty of traditions that call people to healing, forgiveness, seeking, and solidarity. Yet we find those same scriptures weaponized into partisan slogans. As Rev. William Barber III has put it, “They are so loud on what God says so little, and so quiet about what God says so much about.”

Why meeting fire with fire fails

The temptation in polarized times is to meet fire with fire. When confronted with an opponent who insists an election was stolen and claims violence to overturn a democratic election was “holy,” the instinct is to fact-check harder and argue louder. Research confirms that fact-checking alone rarely changes minds (Broockman & Kalla, 2016). Holliday, Lelkes, and Westwood (2025) show that even the best-designed depolarization interventions shift partisan animosity only modestly, and those effects fade within weeks. What does move opinion is trust, especially when grounded in empathy across divides (Santos, Voelkel, Willer, & Zaki, 2022).

Yet empathy itself is under attack. Voices like theologian Joe Rigney in The Sin of Empathy, argue that empathy is a liability, leaving Christians vulnerable to the so-called “progressive gaze.” As Huckabee (2025) observes in a review, this reframes empathy as weakness rather than humility, recasting even attempts at perspective-taking as compromise.

Servant leadership offers a counter-vision. Greenleaf (2002) described leaders whose legitimacy flows from service rather than dominance. Liden et al. (2014) found that such leadership fosters trust, fairness, and psychological safety. Eva et al. (2019) synthesized evidence that servant leadership strengthens resilience against polarization by creating rare spaces where dialogue continues across disagreement. At its best, this approach is marked by listening before judging, treating authority as stewardship rather than dominance, and committing to the growth of others so that flourishing, not fear, defines community life.

Ways forward

Perry (2025) warns that when citizens cluster into camps that filter facts through ideology, democratic accountability weakens. Yet he also points to the possibility of pluralistic spaces where cross-cutting ties interrupt polarization. Cassese (2019) finds the same dynamic in her study of gender and religious cross-pressures, showing that even strong identities do not fully determine political choice when people remain embedded in diverse networks. Holliday, Lelkes, and Westwood (2025) add that bottom-up interventions alone cannot scale without systemic reforms that reshape elite incentives and institutional structures. Taken together, their work suggests that building pluralistic spaces is necessary but not sufficient. It requires leaders who embody listening, stewardship, and commitment to others, modeling a politics that resists demonization not by erasing differences but by insisting that dignity is never conditional.

Picking up serpents, again

There is no guarantee this approach will eliminate polarization. Serpents still bite. Poison still circulates online. Comment sections are filled with declarations, not dialogue by voices more animated by end-times drama than the slow work of community. This theology thrives outside the checks of church or neighborhood, sustained instead by political tribes that reward certainty over humility. In that world, the person at Starbucks who says “Happy Holidays” becomes a deceiver, and the journalist who omits partisan talking points is condemned as a liar. To some, empathy itself is treated as sin.

That ordinary recognition of humanity is exactly what is missing in these digital pulpits of grievance. I think of my own friendships with Christians who differ theologically. We work together, tease each other, watch professional wrestling, and even discuss politics without denying one another’s good faith. I do not think they are less human. They do not think I am less human. Even when people would call me evil for practicing empathy, I feel empathy for them, because a worldview that only sees demons is exhausting, disheartening, and misses the point.

As Thomas Bolin (2025) argues, no one reads the Bible neutrally. Every community approaches scripture through a particular lens, and the danger comes when those lenses collapse complexity into absolutes, leaving no space for discernment or dialogue. It is telling that the verses most often invoked in these digital pulpits of grievance come from the Old Testament. Prophetic texts provide stark binaries of good and evil, blessing and curse, chosen people and condemned enemies, lifted into modern politics as if America itself were ancient Israel.

What gets lost is the counterweight of the New Testament, where Jesus commands his followers to love enemies, bless those who curse them, and build friendship rooted in humility and service (John 15:13–15; Philippians 2:3–4). The result is a selective canon within the canon, privileging imagery of conquest and judgment while muting the call to compassion and reconciliation.

Jonathan Sammut (2017) reminds us that authentic friendship has a deeper foundation than politics. In the Gospel of John, Jesus calls his disciples not servants but friends, a relationship rooted in love that mirrors his communion with the Father. Friendship of this kind is a trustworthy basis for building community because it arises from the love of God and is sustained by peace that “passes all understanding.” That vision resists the suspicion of online polemics and insists that the work of democracy, like the life of the church, rests on friendship rather than fear.

To retreat from the venom would be to concede the public square to those who substitute conspiracy for fact. The vocation, then, is to keep handling the serpents without becoming poisoned ourselves and to keep laying hands through service, dialogue, and leadership on a body politic still in need of healing.