Can joy be anything but denial in a rage-filled public life? Michael Wear joins Mark Labberton to reframe politics through the kingdom logic of hope, agency, and practices of silence and solitude. As 2025 closes amid political discord, we might all ask whether joy can be real in public life—without denial, escapism, or contempt.
"… Joy is a pervasive and constant sense of wellbeing."
In this conversation, Michael Wear and Mark Labberton reflect on joy, hope, responsibility, and agency amid a reaction-driven politics. Together they discuss the realism of Advent; the limits of our control; how kingdom imagination reframes anger; hope beyond outcomes, dignity under threat, and practices (including silence and solitude) that restore clarity.
Episode Highlights
"Joy is a pervasive and constant sense of wellbeing. … Joy is not a technique to then get people to do what you want them to do."
"God's Kingdom is the range of his effective will."
" Someone whose hope is rightly placed sees that a dignity denying culture does not have the final say."
"Our will is effective and those things in which our will is not effective."
"The pattern of domination and violence is an old one."
About Michael Wear
Michael Wear is the Founder, President, and CEO of the Center for Christianity and Public Life, a nonpartisan nonprofit that contends for the credibility of Christian resources in public life, for the public good. He has served for more than a decade as a trusted advisor to civic and religious leaders on faith and public life, including as a presidential campaign and White House staffer. He is the author of The Spirit of Our Politics: Spiritual Formation and the Renovation of Public Life and Reclaiming Hope: Lessons Learned in the Obama White House About the Future of Faith in America. Learn more and follow at https://www.michaelwear.com.
Helpful Links and Resources
Show Notes
- End of 2025, cusp of Christmas; fraught public moment; joy as the lynchpin for faithful presence in politics and public life
- Joy held with pain, suffering, complexity
- Refusing denial while trusting a God who relentlessly pursues the world in love and hope
- Joy intertwined with hope, responsibility, agency
- Where does responsibility end and faithful agency begin?
- "Willard would say joy is a pervasive and constant sense of wellbeing."
- " It is very difficult to have joy if you are taking responsibility for things that are not your responsibility."
- Public life as joyless space; lacking imagination for joy amid provocation, antagonism, and constant political showmanship
- "If there are places in our life where we can't conceive of joy, it's a problem with our view of God."
- Misplaced responsibility, misplaced hope; joy collapses when taking on burdens that aren't ours and treating agency as ultimate
- "God's kingdom is the range of his effective will."
- "We each have our own little kingdoms … where what we say to be done is done."
- Politics reveals limits; a clarity about what we can do, what we can't do, and what we must import into the rest of life
- "Our will is effective, and there are things in which our will is not effective."
- "Faithfulness is not the ability to determine a righteous outcome … to everything in which our lives touch."
- False responsibility, obscured agency
- Are we taking charge of what isn't ours while ignoring the real choices we do have?
- "That's a recipe for joylessness."
- Poked and prodded by provocations; entertainment, antagonisms, and helplessness normalize reaction and justify complicity
- Anger as political fuel
- Many assume that raising your voice is the only faithful posture inside the public arena.
- "I've had people respond to me: 'How am I going to get anything done in politics without anger?'"
- "Political imagination has been taken over by a political logic as opposed to a kingdom logic."
- Relearning responsibility and agency; hope not grounded in our effectiveness, but in what God is doing beyond our reach.
- "Ultimate hope lies outside of the range of our effective will."
- "It is in that realm in which we are perfectly safe."
- Hope is for a life that pervades all things.
- "So when your hope is in the right place, you can hope for a whole range of things."
- " Someone whose hope is rightly placed sees that a dignity denying culture does not have the final say."
- Hope and joy "when your back is against the wall"
- Allen Temple Baptist Church: Joy at the margins of culture
- Fannie Lou Hamer
- Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited
- First Presbyterian Church in Evanston, IL
- Michael Wear, The Spirit of Our Politics
- Psalm 23 as distress-psalm: Enemies are still present, yet God leads beside still waters and cares most in greatest distress.
- "Take off the old self with its practices and put on the new self."
- "Put on Christ now in a way that will affect everything around us."
- Herod: The paranoid leader
- Advent into Christmastide—what it means to dwelling in Emmanuel
- "This is why the incarnation is such an extraordinarily important cornerstone: It's that God enters in through Jesus into our world, in a world in which, yes, there may be great praises in heaven and on earth from those who understand something at least of who he is and what he's there to do. But it also lands him in a world of immediate physical and familial vulnerability of political and social, if not military, violence."
- Are we protected from vulnerability, or living in precarity?
- The pattern of domination and violence
- Refusing forgetfulness as 2026 approaches with fresh pressures and fresh calling.
- National call to silence and solitude; disinvesting from reactionary instincts to engage the world with renewed vision and clarity. silenceandsolitude.org
- "Silence and solitude… can infuse your public activity with right vision and right clarity."
#MichaelWear #MarkLabberton #ChristianPublicLife #ChristianPolitics #SpiritualFormation #Joy #Advent #SilenceAndSolitude #Hope #PublicWitness
Production Credits
Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment Magazine and Fuller Seminary.
