The Radical Courtesy: How Franciscan and Anglican Thought Challenge the Church's Addiction to Outrage

It has become a commonplace observation that American Christianity is in trouble. The specific nature of that trouble is debated with considerable energy, but one symptom presents itself with uncomfortable consistency across denominational lines: the church has largely learned to speak the language of contempt. The political polarization that defines American public life has not simply influenced Christian communities from the outside; it has been welcomed in, baptized, and given a theological vocabulary. The person who holds different views is not merely wrong but wicked. The opposing political coalition is not misguided but evil. And the Christian who refuses to perform the appropriate outrage at the appropriate moment is suspected of insufficient loyalty to the cause—whichever cause happens to be ascendant in their particular tradition.

Against this backdrop, two ancient traditions have something to say that neither the religious left nor the religious right particularly wants to hear.

Courtesy as Theology, Not Manners

The Franciscan concept of cortesia—usually translated as courtesy but carrying a weight that the English word no longer fully conveys—was not a social nicety. For Francis of Assisi and the theological tradition that developed from his example, courtesy toward other human beings was inseparable from courtesy toward God. To treat another person with contempt was to treat with contempt the image of God in which that person was made. To dismiss, demean, or dehumanize an opponent was not merely a social failure but a theological one—a refusal to see what God had placed in front of you.

This conviction was not merely theoretical in Francis's own practice. His encounter with the Sultan Malik al-Kamil during the Fifth Crusade—an episode that has attracted renewed scholarly attention in recent decades—is perhaps the most striking illustration. Francis crossed enemy lines not to debate, not to demand conversion, but to engage. He was received with hospitality and returned it. Contemporary accounts suggest that both men were changed by the encounter, not because either abandoned his convictions, but because each discovered in the other a seriousness about God that demanded genuine respect.

This is not the courtesy of conflict avoidance. Francis was not a man who smoothed over disagreement with diplomatic vagueness. He held his convictions with a tenacity that occasionally alarmed his own supporters. But he appears to have understood, with a clarity that eludes much contemporary Christian discourse, that the manner in which one holds and expresses conviction is itself a form of witness—that how one treats an opponent communicates something about one's theology of the human person that no amount of correct doctrine can override.

Anglican Comprehensiveness and the Via Media

The Anglican tradition arrived at a related, if distinct, ethic through a different historical route. The Elizabethan Settlement of the sixteenth century was, among other things, an attempt to hold together a theologically fractured nation by insisting that the church could contain more disagreement than its members supposed. The via media—the middle way—was not a theological position so much as a theological posture: a deliberate refusal to resolve every disputed question by fiat, and a corresponding commitment to remaining in relationship with those whose answers differed from one's own.

This has been criticized, often fairly, as a form of institutional cowardice—a way of avoiding difficult decisions by pretending they need not be made. But the tradition also contains a more generous reading. The Anglican insistence on comprehensiveness reflects a genuine theological humility about the limits of human understanding. The person who disagrees with me about a contested question of doctrine or ethics may, in the end, be seeing something I am missing. The community that remains together through disagreement, rather than fracturing into like-minded enclaves, has access to a fuller range of human experience and scriptural insight than any single faction can claim.

Richard Hooker, the sixteenth-century Anglican theologian whose influence on the tradition is difficult to overstate, articulated this with characteristic precision. Laws, he argued, must be made not only for the best cases but for the full range of human complexity. A church that can only accommodate the fully converted, the fully orthodox, or the fully virtuous is not a church but a club. The Anglican tradition, at its most faithful, has understood itself as called to something more demanding: a community of people who remain together not because they agree about everything but because they have committed to working out their disagreements in charity.

What the Church Has Traded Away

The alignment of significant portions of American Christianity with partisan political identity represents, from the perspective of both traditions, a catastrophic exchange. The church has traded its capacity to speak to all people—including its opponents—for the comfort of speaking only to its own. It has traded the spiritual discipline of courtesy for the emotional satisfaction of contempt. It has traded the slow, difficult work of genuine persuasion for the quick rewards of tribal solidarity.

The consequences are visible in the data. Survey research consistently documents that Americans who have left religious affiliation cite, among their primary reasons, the perceived hypocrisy of churches that profess love while practicing contempt. Young adults in particular report that the church's identification with political power—on both sides of the spectrum—has made it impossible to take seriously its claims about a kingdom that transcends political arrangements.

This is not primarily a strategic problem, though it is certainly that. It is a theological problem. A community that has organized itself around contempt for its opponents has, whatever its stated beliefs, adopted a functional anthropology that contradicts the doctrines it professes. It has decided, in practice if not in creed, that some human beings are not made in the image of God, or that the image in them is too distorted to warrant the effort of genuine engagement.

The Discipline of the Difficult Encounter

Both the Franciscan and Anglican traditions suggest that genuine courtesy toward those with whom one disagrees is not a natural disposition but a spiritual discipline—something that must be practiced, cultivated, and submitted to accountability. It is not the absence of conviction but the insistence that conviction be expressed in ways that honor the humanity of those who do not share it.

For communities formed in these traditions, this has practical implications that go beyond rhetorical style. It means creating spaces where people with genuinely different political and theological commitments can remain in relationship long enough for those commitments to be examined and, occasionally, revised. It means resisting the institutional incentives—financial, social, and political—that reward the performance of outrage and penalize the practice of charity. It means, at times, accepting the accusation of insufficient zeal from one's own side as the cost of remaining available to the other.

Francis crossed enemy lines with nothing but his conviction and his courtesy. The Anglican tradition spent centuries insisting that the church was large enough to hold more than one kind of Christian. Neither model is comfortable. Neither is fashionable. But in a nation where the political temperature has made genuine encounter across difference increasingly rare, both traditions are pointing toward something that the broader culture has largely forgotten how to do: treat the person in front of you as someone worth the effort of actual engagement.

That is not a political strategy. It is a theological claim about the nature of the human person and the character of the God in whose image that person is made. And it may be, in the present moment, among the most radical things the church could say.