A House United is a clarion call to Christians to address the toxic political polarization that plagues American society. Hilton's thesis is that the most important gift the church has to offer at this crucial juncture is the ability to help people come together across difference (xiii).
Hilton provides a sobering analysis of the exponential increase in political polarization. The percentage of Americans with highly unfavorable views of people from the “opposite” political party has jumped, over the course of the past thirty years, from 17 to 40 percent (88), largely due to the media echo chambers that allow persons to engage only those voices that reinforce preconceived opinions (63–73).
In a nation that is three-fourths Christian, “we” are a major part of the problem. Most churches perpetuate the culture's self-segregation into racially and politically homogenous enclaves on Sunday morning (91) and exacerbate society's tribal conflicts and divisions (30–31).
Hilton's biblical foundation is Jesus’ prayer that his followers might be unified (John 17:20-23). When we love one another as Christ commanded (John 13:34-35), Christ's reality will be made manifest to people outside the church (206). However, unity is not bland Christian congeniality and harmony at all costs. Truth matters, and the reason for keeping Christians who dramatically differ together at the same table, working through conflicting ideas, is that this gives us a better shot at truth than isolation into insulated tribes (173–74). Neither side possesses the entire truth, and therefore we should all be open to the possibility that those “other people” have some of the right answers as well (51–52).
This book does not offer groundbreaking theological scholarship, but that's not a liability because Hilton's purpose is to issue an urgent call to action. The intended audience is a popular audience composed of ministers, church leaders, and conscientious laypersons concerned about the impact of this polarization on the nation and the church's public witness. A House United would be most profitably read by leaders and study groups within congregations and parishes. Hilton makes a powerful case that congregations must risk creative initiatives that bring people together for shared mission, shared Bible study, and “courageous conversations” across the “theo-political” aisle (166). One of the book's strengths is its concrete suggestions for creating social spaces for conversation, reconciliation, and shared mission. Allen Hilton has written a timely book that, if taken seriously as a guide for action, would have a transformative impact on Christian life in the United States.
However, the book has some limitations. First, Hilton does not address the extent to which racial fears and injustices play a central role in American political divisions. Truly coming together across differences will require more than bringing together conservatives and liberals. It will involve bringing Christians of different racial and ethnic groups together to face the deep fault lines produced by the racial segregation and racial disparities woven into the fabric of the nation's political and economic life.
Second, in spite of disclaimers to the contrary, Hilton's big-tent inclusivism sometimes comes perilously close to some of the less nuanced cultural rhetoric of inclusion and diversity that would treat all boundaries and exclusions as intolerably oppressive. He is critical of the tendency of Christians through the ages to prioritize orthodoxy over community. He speaks of the historic Christian repudiation of Gnosticism (33) and Arianism (154) as heretical as uncharitable actions of “defining people as out of the club.” But is there not a difference between overly restrictive exclusionary boundaries and those boundary lines that must be drawn to exclude what seriously betrays and distorts the faith? In bringing persons to the same table across our political differences, must we not, for example, repudiate as radically incompatible with Christian faith certain dangerous political currents such as white nationalism?
The crisis described in this book raises a disturbing question. Have Christians in the United States been more successfully catechized by the right-wing and left-wing echo chambers than by their churches? If so, bringing persons together across difference may be a project doomed to failure unless churches also recover practices of Christian formation capable of inculcating a richer and distinctively Christian imagination and construal of the world with the power to disrupt the left-right binary and enable Christians to break free from captivity to these narrow tribal allegiances.
