Have you ever tried to read the Bible straight through? The story starts out well enough. Genesis is full of engaging and wild stories. Exodus recounts the dramatic tale of God’s deliverance of his people from slavery in Egypt, through the wilderness, and into the promised land.

But then it gets brutal.

In our political moment, the way of wisdom requires us to appraise our values and determine which to prioritize—and the courage to prioritize some at the expense of others—as we engage the public square in faithfulness to Jesus Christ and out of love for our neighbors.

Over the last two decades, the trend away from deliberative discourse toward a kind of scorched earth politics on both ends of the spectrum has accelerated at a staggering pace: virtue signaling and performative moral posturing, the outrage cycle and the politics of grievance, cancel culture—all exacerbated by our consumption of media carefully curated by algorithms explicitly devised to confirm the views we already hold.