Tribalism

Tribalism feels like belonging. It feels like loyalty. It feels like taking a stand for what’s right. And it will quietly dismantle every relationship you care about, if you let it.

Val & Bruce

Let us start with a confession. For most of our lives, both of us had teams we loved. And — like everyone else we knew — we also had teams we were supposed to hate. That was just how being a fan worked. You cheered for your people, and you rooted against the other people, and somehow that meant something about your identity.

We didn’t question it. Nobody around us questioned it. It was just the water we swam in.

The Jazz game is a harmless enough example, and it makes us smile now. But it captures something that is not harmless at all when it shows up in the places that actually matter — in marriages, in families, in faith communities, in the tender and consequential relationships of a real life.

Tribalism isn’t really about divorce

We need to say this up front. Tribalism is a pre-existing human tendency. It lives in all of us, long before any particular hardship gives it somewhere to go. Divorce does not cause tribalism. But divorce is one of those fields where the culture and prejudices we already carry get to show up in their full and destructive power — because divorce is painful, and when we are in pain, we look for people to stand with us.

That looking is not wrong. We were made for connection. We were made to be witnessed in hard seasons by people who love us. But tribalism is what happens when that healthy longing gets crossed with something else: the need to be right, the need to be vindicated, the need to see the people who did not show up for us the way we wanted as less than fully human.

The path down

Here is how it usually happens. Not all at once — slowly, over months, sometimes over years. We wouldn’t do it if we saw it as a single move. But there is a path, and the path has places where we could stop, and we keep walking past them. Step by step, we descend into something we didn’t set out to find.

Look at that trail again. Notice that every step is smaller than the step before felt like it would lead to. No one starts at the top intending to end at the bottom. But once you are three markers in, the fourth seems perfectly reasonable. And once you are at the deepest part, you genuinely cannot remember that the person at the top is the same person — a complicated, loved, tender, flawed human being who, at the start of all this, simply did not say what you needed to hear.

We know this descent because we have walked it. In small ways and in larger ways. We suspect most people have.

What tribalism does to us

The most expensive thing tribalism costs us is our vision. It is the cousin of confirmation bias, but a much more aggressive one. Confirmation bias is selectively noticing evidence that supports what you already believe. Tribalism is confirmation bias on steroids — you stop just noticing the evidence and start manufacturing it. Things the other person didn’t say. Motives they didn’t have. Slights they didn’t intend. You fill in the picture your story needs, whether or not the facts are there.

Meanwhile, we become very good at the binary. Us or them. For me or against me. Good or bad. Saint or sinner. Right or wrong. The middle ground, the complexity, the full human being — all of that disappears. It has to, for the tribal story to work.

And here is what makes it a false summit: it feels like conviction. It feels like clarity. It feels like arrival. You have finally figured out who is who. You have finally stopped being naive. You are finally seeing things the way they really are.

But you aren’t. The summit you think you’ve reached is an illusion. What you are actually standing at is the bottom of a narrow canyon, and the walls are closing in around you, and the light is failing, and you cannot see the people above you anymore — including the ones who love you and are trying to call you back.

Where it shows up in divorce

Because pain wants witnesses, divorce is a place where tribalism can bloom quickly. Friends and family members get sorted into those who “stood by you” and those who “didn’t get it.” The former spouse becomes not a person but a category — a character in a narrative you are telling and retelling until it hardens. Their new partner, if there is one, gets the same treatment. The in-laws you loved for twenty years become “his family” or “her family.” The ward members who said something that didn’t land right become “those people who judge.”

And perhaps hardest of all — tribalism shows up inside families. Adult children are sometimes invited, subtly or unsubtly, to pick a side. Siblings divide. Cousins stop calling. The holidays get quieter. The group text goes cold.

But the most damaging pattern may be when young children are drawn into tribes. When a child is asked — overtly or through a hundred small cues — to prefer one parent over the other. To report back on what happens at the other house. To carry an adult’s grievance as if it were their own. To understand their own identity in part through which parent they are loyal to. That kind of pressure on a child is devastating in ways that echo for decades, and it is one of the most important things a divorcing parent can refuse to do, even when every tribal instinct is pulling the other way.

We have tried, with varying success, to include our former spouses in the ongoing life of our family. It has not been a smooth journey. Sometimes it has worked beautifully and sometimes it has not worked at all. There have been seasons of welcome and seasons where, for reasons of our former spouses’ own choosing, the invitation could not be extended or could not be received. We hold our idealism with open hands — knowing it is real, and knowing it runs into real limits, and still believing it is the direction to keep walking.

Val once said something to me on the drive home from a funeral that captured, in a single sentence, what we have been reaching for all along. I had been reflecting on how sad it was that our family had been broken. She thought for a moment and said: “I don’t see our family as having been broken. I just see it as having expanded.”

That is what the opposite of tribalism looks like.

Who is my neighbor?

The question Jesus was asked, in the story of the Good Samaritan, was a tribal question. A lawyer had just been told to love his neighbor as himself, and he was looking for the workaround. Who is my neighbor? In other words: who is in, and who is out? Whom do I have to love, and whom can I keep at arm’s length with a clear conscience?

The story Jesus tells in response is well-known. A man is beaten and left for dead. A priest walks past. A Levite walks past. And a Samaritan — a member of the very group the lawyer would have put firmly in the “them” category — stops, bandages the man’s wounds, pays for his care, and shows him mercy.

Then Jesus asks the question back: Which of these three was neighbor to him that fell among the thieves? The lawyer, unable even to say the word “Samaritan,” answers: “He that shewed mercy on him.”

The tribal question — who is in and who is out — turns out to be the wrong question entirely. Jesus does not answer it. He dissolves it. The neighbor is the one who showed mercy. Full stop. The tribe of the neighbor is irrelevant. The tribe of the man in the ditch is irrelevant. The only relevant thing is what love actually does.

This parable is one we return to often. It may be our favorite in the New Testament — partly for what it teaches about tribalism, and partly for how gently Jesus refuses to play the game the lawyer is trying to play. He doesn’t scold. He doesn’t draw a different line. He just tells a story in which the categories dissolve, and invites the lawyer to see what remains.

Coming back up

Getting off the false summit — or, more accurately, climbing back out of the canyon — is not complicated, but it is not easy. It starts with noticing. Noticing when you are telling a story that makes someone into a caricature. Noticing when you are gathering evidence to support a conclusion you already reached. Noticing when the circle of people you love is getting smaller instead of larger.

It continues with specificity. The person you have placed in the “them” category has a name. They have a story. They have pains you have not thought about in a long time, and tenderness you may have forgotten they had. Getting them back into full view is slow work. It is also some of the most freeing work available to a human being.

And it depends, always, on the willingness to let the Savior take the sorting hat out of your hands. He does not put people in categories. He does not divide the world into your team and their team. He walks, in every story he tells, toward the people his own culture had given up on — and he invites us to do the same.

We are not all the way back up yet. Neither of us. But we are further than we were. And what we see, on this side of the work, is not a shrinking world but a larger one. We have no enemies. There are no people we are not trying to love. That may sound like a small thing. From where we stand now, the view is glorious.

If you find yourself somewhere on the path we described — angry at a whole category of people, tired of carrying a story you no longer want to be carrying, suspicious that the descent has not taken you where you thought it would — we want you to know that climbing back out is always possible. It is slower than the descent. It is harder on the knees. But the view from the real path is worth it. We know, because we are walking it.

— Val & Bruce

About this site

Peace After Pain is written by Val and Bruce — two people who have been through divorce and found healing on the other side. The content here is for informational and educational purposes and is not a substitute for professional advice. If you are in a difficult or dangerous situation, please seek help from a licensed counselor, your ecclesiastical leader, or appropriate authorities.

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