It feels like many disagreements now quickly become personal, hostile, or all-or-nothing, especially online.
Do you think respectful disagreement has become harder in modern culture, or does it just seem more visible because of social media?
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Ummm, well, I had a guy today try to kill me over a bologna sandwich and will probably get an additional 10 years for assault on an officer. Plain bread and greasy dog meat from Vietnam.
I think it’s social media. I hate it so much, yet need to use it for business. Creating posts. Creating content. Posting reels. Ugh. I hate it. In the past 6 years I’ve noticed a HUGE divide between people, mostly the “left” and the “right”. Those of us that are conservative, Christian, value family, morals, integrity, peace, honesty..and those that don’t. And if you should comment in any way that “offends” the “left” then the hate is palpable. Even if I’m trying to be kind, or even factual, I get nothing but hate, so I respond with scripture. I’ll provoke the wicked every day.
I think the answer is yes. For both. But it is fascinating to really learn history. With a tingling fear of resorting to my old life, I just wanted to share this. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Democratic Party was the party of the American South, deeply tied to the defense of slavery, the implementation of Jim Crow laws, and opposition to early civil rights measures. Conversely, Abraham Lincoln was the first Republican president, and the early Republican Party was founded explicitly to stop the expansion of slavery.
The reason this feels contrary to modern assumptions is due to a massive, decades-long political transformation known to historians as the great realignment. Over the course of the 20th century, both parties fundamentally shifted their geographic bases, voter demographics, and ideological platforms.
Here is a look at how that flip happened, driven by a few critical historical turning points.
The Great Depression & The New Deal (1930s) For decades after the Civil War, Black Americans voted overwhelmingly Republican, aka, the party of Lincoln. However, the economic devastation of the Great Depression changed the political landscape.
When Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced the New Deal in the 1930s, his massive economic relief programs provided crucial support to lower-income Americans, including many Black families. While FDR avoided pushing hard on civil rights to keep Southern white Democrats in his coalition, the economic shift caused working-class voters and Black voters in Northern cities to start moving toward the Democratic Party for economic reasons.
The ideological dam broke over the issue of civil rights. The friction within the Democratic Party between its Northern liberal wing and its conservative Southern wing (“Dixiecrats”) became unsustainable. In 1948, the Democratic President Harry Truman integrated the U.S. military and added a civil rights plank to the party platform. In protest, Southern Democrats walked out of the convention and formed the “Dixiecrat” party.
In 1964, the Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Upon signing it, Johnson famously remarked that the Democrats had “delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.”
Historically, the GOP had been the party of the Northern business elite. Starting with Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign and later perfected by Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, the Republican Party adopted the “Southern Strategy.” By emphasizing states’ rights, law and order, and traditional social values, the GOP successfully appealed to conservative Southern voters. Ronald Reagan once famously stated, “I did not leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me.”
Over roughly 50 years, the Solid South transformed from overwhelmingly Democratic to overwhelmingly Republican. Meanwhile, the Northeast and West Coast, once Republican strongholds, became deeply Democratic.
So, while the names of the parties stayed the same, the ideologies, voter bases, and platforms completely traded places over the course of a century. However, even through all this, we could still have civil debates and still love one another. Why? Because both saw God as a moral compass. Both understood right and wrong.
Historians generally point to the late 1960s through the 1990s as the era when this shared baseline began to fracture. The Removal of God
The rise of secularism and relativism. Starting in the 1960s, Western culture experienced a massive shift toward expressive individualism. The idea that the ultimate goal of life is to define your own truth, your own morality, and your own identity from within, rather than submitting to an external authority like God, the church, or community tradition. As moral relativism (“what’s right for you might not be right for me”) took root, the concept of a universal moral compass began to fade.
The sorting of religion into politics. Historically, both parties had deep religious wings. You had conservative evangelicals and faithful church-going Democrats (like Jimmy Carter). However, through the 1970s and 1980s, political issues became deeply entangled with religious identity . Politics became the new “religion” for many. Instead of letting faith dictate their morals and politics, people increasingly let their political party affiliation dictate how they interpret their faith and morals. When your political opponent is no longer just someone with a different economic theory, but someone you view as an existential threat to your entire worldview, civil debate breaks down.
The digital echo chamber. In the 21st century, technology accelerated this split. The media landscape shifted from three major networks delivering the same basic facts to internet algorithms designed to feed people exactly what confirms their biases. This has led to what sociologists call anomie. The condition of instability resulting from a breakdown of shared standards and values. We no longer just disagree on solutions; we disagree on basic reality.
The lens of Romans In Romans 1:18-32, the Apostle Paul describes a specific spiritual trajectory for a society. The core theme of the passage isn’t just that people commit sins, but that a society actively chooses to suppress the truth of God. “They exchanged the truth about God for a lie.” According to the text, the consequence of this choice is that God “gives them over” to their own desires, leading to a darkening of the mind, a rejection of natural design, and a state of spiritual and moral confusion. The passage concludes with a list of societal traits: envy, strife, deceit, maliciousness, gossip, and a lack of mercy or understanding.
Remember, when you remove God, something else ALWAYS takes His place.
Peter