Healing the Red-Blue Divide by Using the Gift of Tongues

Is divine intervention the only way to effectively communicate with our fellow Americans?

“What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.” That famous line from the movie Cool Hand Luke, uttered by the Captain (played by Strother Martin), could be the theme of America’s current red-blue divide. It is also an accurate diagnosis of problems in the Catholic Church.

America today is bifurcated by language. “Blue” America, by which I mean the liberal/progressive enclaves, usually urban, does not understand “red” America, which encompasses most of the rest of the country. Due to progressive capture of the media and culture, red Americans are steeped in blue language and ideas. On the other side of the divide, blue Americans often have little or no familiarity with red Americans and their “folkways,” to borrow an anthropological term.

On a recent episode of the well-known radio interview show Fresh Air, a staple on NPR stations, interviewer Tonya Mosley began her questions to guest Hilton Als, a culture critic and longtime New Yorker writer, this way: “I couldn’t help but think about the limitations of language at this particular time when we can’t even seem to agree on a shared reality….” To which Als responded: “Or don’t want to…I think you’re being kind. Tonya, it’s just a very emotionally and spiritually upsetting time because language is being used to not even wound but to annihilate people.” Here we see the common leftist assertion that language equals violence. How can one dialogue or accompany (to make use of the modernist Church lexicon) with someone who cannot accept any contrary ideas?

One approach is to not pull any punches and document blue failures to communicate. Conservative columnist David Harsanyi lays out the Left’s hypocrisy about changing narratives around Covid and laying blame for mistaken policies. Or, one can stride into the lion’s den, as conservative journalist and pundit Megyn Kelly did by sitting down at The New York Times for an interview in which she tried to dispel interviewer Lulu Garcia-Navarro’s misunderstandings about a new media landscape emerging from the Right. 

These examples might fall under the umbrella of learning a foreign language for missionary purposes. This has often been the approach used by the Church. However, there is a danger that too much outreach for the purposes of inculturation could lead to the missionary “going native” and embracing the pagan culture he is trying to evangelize. That is what has happened at many formerly-Catholic campuses where the faculty and student body have tipped ever more toward modernist culture and away from tradition.

It’s clear from these examples—and a legion’s-worth more that could be cited—that the blue Left is at best puzzled by and at worst aggressively hostile toward their red fellow-citizens. It’s that failure to communicate again. God’s Holy Scripture and the Sacred Tradition of the Church provide an answer to communication problems. That answer is the gifts of the Holy Spirit bestowed at Pentecost. It’s not as if the blue Left has no familiarity with biblical language. Bill Clinton referenced the prophet Isaiah and standing in the breach, and Chuck Schumer in his Supreme Court steps tirade used an image from Job. But those references are devoid of God’s Spirit and deployed, in leftist fashion, as mere weapons.

The spiritual “Gift of Tongues” has also been misunderstood and misused by those connected to the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements, even within the Catholic Church. As research by Kennedy Hall and others shows, the true Gift of Tongues is not some seeming babble; rather, it is a God-given ability to understand or speak a language one has never learned. If it’s true that our blue brethren cannot understand us, then shouldn’t we wish for the Gift of Tongues in order to reach them and work for their salvation?  The spiritual “Gift of Tongues” has also been misunderstood and misused by those connected to the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements, even within the Catholic Church.Tweet This

I plead guilty to a bit of hyperbole in my pitch for seeking tongues, but only in order to make a point. Our deluded blue fellow humans need help. Earthly efforts and mere human strength will get us only so far. What we desperately need is supernatural assistance to reach them and penetrate the enemy’s defenses. Although the past few years have seen a number of everyday and high-profile blues wake up and smell reality, many millions more remain trapped in a suffocating groupthink where honest disagreement is actually hate, health care is abortion, and affirming care is mutilation of the confused. No program will change that. Only God can.

How do we respond to God’s commands and promptings? That brings me to my other point about failure to communicate. The red-blue divide has its parallel in the Church, with progressives speaking a murky, modernist lingo dripping with emotion-laden jargon and lacking in traditional moral firmness. We have to hear about “accompaniment” and “listening” and “dialogue.” Seemingly gone are the clear teaching of previous popes such as Pius XII, theologians like St. Alphonsus Liguori, and evangelists along the lines of Ven. Fulton Sheen.

Sadly, today’s Church has been infected by the Babel virus—meaning both a lack of common purpose as well as no common language—which can only be cured by Pentecost. Dom Guéranger makes an accurate diagnosis in Volume IX of his The Liturgical Year. He writes:

Since the confusion at Babel, there have been as many languages as countries; communication by word has been interrupted. How, then, is the word to become the instrument of the world’s conquest and to make one family out of all these nations that cannot understand each other? Fear not: the holy Spirit is all-powerful, and has provided for this difficulty.

The answer is to recover our traditional understanding of mission, which is to preach Christ to the world. To facilitate that, we need to communicate with one another, and one sensible way to achieve that is for the hierarchy, clergy, and scholars (as well as laity when possible) to once again attain fluency in Latin. It may come as a shock to some that the Second Vatican Council of sixty years ago (a small fragment of the Church’s history) was conducted largely in Latin. Beyond the confines of inter-Church communication, Latin has often served as a way for scientists, explorers, and others to speak to one another when there is no other shared tongue.

There are many things that divide us. Language does not need to be one of them. The Byzantine kontakion for Pentecost sums up what I am trying to say: “When the Most High came down and confused the tongues, He parted the nations. When He divided the tongues of fire, He called all to unity; thus with one voice we glorify the all-Holy Spirit.”