This Is Going to Hurt: Following Jesus In a Divided America (Beka McNeel) - A Review

THIS IS GOING TO HURT: Following Jesus in a DividedAmerica. By Bekah McNeel. Foreword by Frank Shaeffer. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2024. Xi + 196 pages.

We who reside in the United States of America live in a very divided nation. The recent Presidential election bears witness to that reality. Give or take a few points, just under 50% of American voters chose Donald Trump to return to office, while slightly less than that voted for Kamala Harris. Even as the nation is divided politically, the church appears to be just as divided. The same political dynamics affect the church. In other words, we tend to bring our politics into the church. As a result, we find it difficult to understand how our family, friends, and neighbors could vote for the other party and then sit down in the same pews as we do. Yet, this is our reality. So, how do we move forward?

Had I read Bekah McNeel's book This Is Going to Hurt before the 2024 election my response to her book might have been different. However, I read it after the election of Donald Trump to a second, non-consecutive term. It does appear that the divisions that existed before the election will not only continue but will get magnified, at least for a few years. The election has produced a great deal of anxiety in many corners of society, and only time will tell whether these feelings are truly warranted. It is in this social/political/cultural context that I came to read Bekah McNeel’s powerful book. McNeel is a journalist and a Christian who grew up Southern Baptist. As a journalist, she reports from her home state of Texas, where during her journalistic career, she has focused much of her reporting on education, which is one of the places where America's divisions have revealed themselves. She has also written, especially more recently, on immigration issues. Being that she reports from Texas, she has had first-hand experience with the central issues that divide the nation. McNeel is not a dispassionate reporter, in the sense that she can distance herself from the realities of our times. Therefore, as she points out in her introduction, she's no fun at parties. When people ask her what she writes about as a journalist, she writes that her "sparkling banter in recent years has included why we should pay more for fruit, fetal abnormalities, the mechanics of the GOP stranglehold on Texas, the failure of the humanitarian parole process for Afghans, and three reasons a school bus first aid kit should include a chest seal" (p. 1). These are not the most enticing topics of conversation, but as we discover in reading this important book, that's not all she writes about.

This Is Going to Hurt is a book about suffering and healing. When we get to the end of the book, after reading a great deal about the suffering the people, especially people on the margins, endure, McNeel confesses that she is not attracted to theodicies. That is, she doesn’t find defenses of God in the presence of evil all that compelling. I agree with her on that! The point McNeel wants to make in this book is not to offer explanations about how a loving God can permit suffering and evil. She wants us to consider how people who follow Jesus can respond to the suffering people experience in a divided America. I think this is a better option than trying to exonerate God in the face of the suffering people face.

What we have in This Is Going to Hurt is a book that lifts up the various forms or causes of suffering that people experience. In other words, she focuses her attention on the issues that people in the United States divide over, issues that involve suffering on the part of someone or some community. One of the important elements of this book involves McNeel’s recognition that both the causes of suffering and the possible responses are rather complicated. In other words, there are no easy answers. She approaches this conversation as one who, careerwise, has pursued what is known as "solutions journalism." This form of journalism seeks not only answers to problems but solutions as well. We see that perspective present in this book. While she does seek to offer solutions to these problems we face, she acknowledges that there are limitations when it comes to solutions. Part of the problem is that when it comes to suffering, even Christians seem to have a high tolerance for certain forms of suffering—at least when the suffering affects the lives of others. We see the complicated nature of responding to suffering illustrated in the topics she lifts up in the book, topics that run the gamut from immigration to mass shootings. As for healing, she doesn’t expect that everything will be made perfect, comfortable, or making things controllable on our part. Rather, in her view, healing “means reconnecting what has been torn apart or exiled, making whole what has been depleted. To heal is to remove barriers between us and respond to suffering with compassion” (p. 8). When it comes to defining compassion, she means solidarity, such that it “erases the false line between loving thy neighbor and loving thyself” (p. 8). The pathway forward involves “narrative reorientation,” which she believes is necessary “because the instinctual position that my suffering is less tolerable than your suffering has led to, predictably, a lot more suffering and entrenchment” (p. 9).

With this call to engage those who suffer with compassion, McNeel starts with two chapters that focus on how we tell stories of suffering and the elements that are found in these stories. The first chapter is titled “Into the Desert We Go,” in which she speaks of judgments, contexts, and trade-offs. Being a journalist, she knows how to tell stories, and in this case, the stories we tell about suffering are defined by context, and contexts are not always clear. Then there are the tradeoffs, which are not always equal, but which complicate things. After describing ways we tell stories of suffering, she moves on in chapter two to a discussion of an “Us versus Them” approach to suffering. She notes that these dividing lines are not merely political, but they do involve questions of power. The divides can center on nations, race, gender, or religion. She also speaks here of the role that distance and blame play in these discussions. It’s with context, judgment, tradeoffs, us vs. them framing, distance, and blame, that she invites us to view and evaluate suffering stories. These chapters are foundational to what gets reported in the subsequent chapters.

Much of the remainder of the book focuses on the hottest of hot topics of our day, many of which drive our political discussions and voting patterns. These topics include immigration, school curriculum, abortion, climate change, COVID-19, and mass shootings. What she reveals here is that the way we tell suffering stories determines where we stand on these topics. That is, how we tell the stories influences how much suffering we will tolerate (usually the suffering we have in mind involves another person’s suffering). The way we tell the stories will differ from topic to topic. She lays out each of these topics in two separate chapters. She first tells the story of suffering, explaining the issues at hand. Then in the second chapter, she seeks to help us tell a better story, one that takes into consideration context and brings to bear a call to compassion. Since she writes for Christians, she points us to Jesus. Thus, McNeel brings the Gospels into play with these topics, helping us view the subjects through that lens.

To give a sense of how McNeel deals with these topics, I’ll use immigration as an example. In Chapter 3, which she titles “Immigration—The Legal Drama,” she tells migration stories, that include how people have responded to them. She notes that “When people would explain to me their tolerance for suffering of immigrants, they often speak in terms of law.” For many, the law allows for a lot of suffering on the part of the migrant. She writes: “We’re not a nation apt to shed a tear for the death of those we fear, and our justice, military, and political systems reflect that” (pp. 39-40). So, when it comes to evaluating the suffering narratives of immigrants, she speaks of context. Here, the American viewpoint is that we’re a legalistic society and rulebreakers are expected to suffer. When making judgments regarding the suffering of migrants, “Nationalism tells us that those outside the nation should not have to suffer for the sake of the outsider.” Then there are the trade-offs. The first tradeoff is that “every immigrant allowed in is a native son crowded or somehow endangered.” Secondly, the other tradeoff is one that we welcome the one that benefits the nation, such that those who suffer the most in their home countries likely are the ones excluded. When it comes to the “Us vs. Them” framing, begins with the view that the United States is the “city on the hill,” such that to be truly included involves living up to numerous criteria, which often leads to Black and Brown immigrants being treated as outsiders. Finally, when it comes to distance and blame, “when no one is shouting about the dangers of immigrants, we find it difficult to care about immigration. We rarely notice their suffering until someone is blaming them for our ours.” (pp. 47-48). The second of two chapters, which is titled “An Immigration Autobiography,” calls for an imagination reboot that is rooted in the Gospels, noting that the Gospels describe Jesus being the foreigner. Part of that story though is the biblical mandate to care for the stranger. When it comes to healing in this context, McNeel writes that “Compassion and dignity for immigrants becomes much more plausible if we change the elements of our nationalistic story. It’s not that we must disregard the nation, but we do have to reckon with the way we’ve imagined it—and how that imagination creates suffering. The best part about imagination is that it can change, and so can the elements of our immigration story” (p. 55). Whether we do this in a time when the immigrant is the threat to national identity will not be easy, but as she notes, we can change the story.

 As I read This Is Going to Hurt, I could see how the stories of suffering that she had reported on had affected McNeel. However, instead of leading to cynicism on her part, it called forth a sense of compassion and understanding. To give an example, when she discusses COVID, which continues to divide our nation, and which often led to virtue-sharing on both sides of the “us vs. them” divide,” she took note of the effects of the lockdowns on children and their schooling. It's good to remember that children were caught in the middle of the battles over the proper COVID response. The fact is, children suffered greatly, and continue to do so, in a variety of ways that we're still seeing revealed. In creating an alternative mythology of COVID, she notes that there isn't much to be said about the federal response to the pandemic, which was a mess. So, she invites us to consider how to tell a better story that is rooted in compassion and draws us together rather than separates us, which is the reality we face at this moment. That involves letting go of the politicized responses and instead following compassion to places where politics can't go. That is the heart of the matter here. Politics tends to get in the way of actually responding to suffering.

McNeel doesn't offer us a full set of answers to why suffering occurs or even how we might respond compassionately in every case, but in writing, This Is Going to Hurt, she does point us in the right direction. The path forward seeks to overcome the polarized nature of our responses to suffering. She speaks in the book of the value of taking up our crosses, but she also understands that this has tradeoffs. She recognizes that while suffering is inevitable in life, the question for us to engage in is asking how we might respond in ways that express compassion and not division. When she speaks of the cross, she understands it to be "a rebuke of power-hungry systems and those who maintain them." (p. 179).

Many books explain the realities of life, something that McNeel seeks to do in discussing the hottest of topics of our day. However, she does much more than that. She reveals pathways to healing. It won't be easy. There will be suffering and sacrifice involved. Nevertheless, there is hope. While the government may play a role, the solution won’t be found in the government. It will take something that involves our lives given to God and others, especially to those on the margins who suffer the most. Thus, she seeks to turn on its head Nietzsche’s belief that "What is injurious to me is injurious in itself." Instead, she invites us to embrace the principle that "What is injurious to you is injurious to me." (p. 185). Indeed. Therefore, in This Is Going to Hurt, Bekah McNeel has written a powerful response to the causes of suffering in our day, offering us both a description of the issues and suggested paths to healing. In developing her responses (solutions), she points us to Jesus and asks us to consider what it means to follow Jesus in this context. That involves taking up our cross.