Peacemaking in an Age of Polycrisis. Part One: The World We Are Entering

Jesus wept over Jerusalem.

Standing on the Mount of Olives, looking across the valley towards the city, he saw more than stone walls, crowded streets and the gleaming Temple. He saw where the road was leading. He saw a society becoming brittle. He saw tensions hardening. He saw a people losing their capacity for peace.

And Jesus wept.

"If only you had known on this day what makes for peace."

Within a generation Jerusalem would burn. The Temple would be destroyed. The city that imagined itself secure would discover how fragile things really were.

What strikes me is what happens next.

The Book of Acts unfolds with this storm on the horizon. The ground is beginning to shake beneath the feet of first-century Judaism. Yet the church is not consumed by speculation about the future. Nor does it retreat into private spirituality. Nor does it attempt to seize political power.

Instead, it gets on with the slow, ordinary and transformative work of discipleship.

It tells people about Jesus. It gathers communities around tables. It shares possessions. It cares for widows. It prays. It worships. It learns how to live together.

Again and again it returns to the teachings of Jesus: love your enemies, bless those who curse you, forgive as you have been forgiven, do to others as you would have them do to you, blessed are the peacemakers.

The New Testament is saturated with this vision. Paul urges believers to live peaceably with all whenever possible and to overcome evil with good. James writes that peacemakers who sow in peace reap a harvest of righteousness. Peter calls the church to seek peace and pursue it. The churches are repeatedly reminded that the whole law is fulfilled in loving your neighbour as yourself.

As one world trembles, the church becomes a different kind of world within it.

That feels increasingly relevant.

You do not need a degree in political science to sense that something is shifting. You hear it in conversations at school gates and around kitchen tables. In pubs, churches and cafés. On high streets where once-busy shops now stand empty. People are worried about housing, bills, migration, war, crime and the future. Many feel exhausted. Many feel unheard. Many feel angry.

There is a growing sense that something important is slipping away, even if people struggle to articulate exactly what it is.

The commentators call it polycrisis.

Climate breakdown. Political polarisation. Economic insecurity. Housing pressures. Distrust of institutions. War. Loneliness. The long shadow of Covid.

The grooming gangs scandal and the anger it has generated.

Yet perhaps even the language of polycrisis does not quite capture what is happening. The word suggests a series of separate problems arriving at the same time. What we may be witnessing is something deeper: the straining of systems that many of us simply assumed would endure.

Three warnings stand out.

The political warning is that societies can lose their capacity for peace.

The economic warning is that systems organised around endless expansion eventually encounter limits.

The ecological warning is that the earth itself has limits.

The political warning comes first because it is the one most people feel most immediately.

Something has happened to public life.

Trust has eroded. Shared stories have fractured. Political identities have hardened. Increasingly, people inhabit different moral universes, drawing on different sources of information and telling different stories about what is wrong and how it might be fixed.

The civil war scholar Barbara Walter has argued that societies often fracture relationally before they fracture politically. Closer to home, Professor David Betz has warned that Western societies may be becoming increasingly vulnerable to internal instability as trust weakens and social cohesion declines.

Whether every aspect of these warnings proves correct is almost beside the point. The point is that questions once dismissed as alarmist are now being discussed by serious scholars.

Can democratic disagreement become tribal hostility?

Can political opponents become enemies?

Can societies lose their capacity for compromise?

History suggests they can.

Increasingly public life feels less like a shared conversation and more like a struggle between rival camps. The pressure is always to choose a side. Left or right. Progressive or conservative. Nationalist or globalist.

Once politics becomes tribal, compromise begins to feel like betrayal. Opponents become threats. Nuance becomes weakness. Contempt becomes normal.

Some observers have spoken about the possibility of a gradual "Ulsterification" of politics: not full-scale civil war, but a situation in which identity, grievance and allegiance become increasingly hardened and sporadic acts of political violence become more common.

None of this is inevitable.

But neither should it be dismissed out of hand.

Before societies break apart politically, they usually break apart relationally.

Before violence appears on the streets, contempt has often settled in the heart.

Political fragmentation rarely appears out of nowhere. It is often fuelled by economic pressures.

When people cannot afford housing, when wages stagnate, when communities experience long-term decline, when opportunities seem increasingly unequal, resentment begins to grow. The politics of grievance often grows in the soil of economic insecurity.

Yet the economic questions facing us may run deeper still.

For generations we have assumed that continual economic growth would deliver prosperity, stability and security. Yet more and more people sense that something is not working.

The wealth generated by our economies accumulates in fewer hands whilst many struggle simply to get by. Entire generations wonder whether they will enjoy the opportunities available to their parents.

But beyond inequality lies an even deeper question.

What if the issue is not simply who receives the rewards?

What if the issue is the logic of the system itself?

Economists such as Tim Jackson and Kate Raworth have questioned whether endless growth can remain the organising principle of societies living within ecological limits.

It is a profound question.

Can a finite planet sustain an economic system built upon perpetual expansion?

Our economies often behave as though they must constantly consume, constantly extract and constantly grow. More resources. More energy. More land. More attention.

Like the empires of old, they push relentlessly outward.

Yet creation has limits. Human beings have limits. Communities have limits.

When those limits are ignored, the costs are eventually borne somewhere else: by the poor, by future generations, by fragile communities and by the earth itself.

The language of empire is not accidental.

Empires expand.

Empires extract.

Empires concentrate wealth and power.

Empires promise peace whilst generating instability at their edges.

The Book of Revelation names this reality Babylon.

Babylon is not merely a place. It is a way of organising the world around accumulation, extraction and domination.

The tragedy is that many of us have become so accustomed to Babylon that we struggle to imagine alternatives.

Yet both our political and economic crises rest upon a deeper reality.

Every economy depends upon the natural world.

Food.

Water.

Soil.

Energy.

A stable climate.

Climate breakdown is not simply about hotter summers or more dramatic weather. It is about the destabilisation of the living systems upon which civilisation depends.

The UK Government's own climate risk assessments increasingly warn about risks to food systems, water supplies, agriculture and infrastructure. Climate disruption is no longer a distant possibility. It is becoming part of the world our children will inherit.

This is not merely an environmental issue.

It is a food issue.

A migration issue.

An economic issue.

And ultimately a peace issue.

These fault lines do not exist independently of one another.

Political fragmentation deepens economic instability.

Economic insecurity fuels resentment and polarisation.

Climate disruption places further pressure upon food systems, migration patterns and already fragile societies.

Each crisis amplifies the others.

The whole system becomes more brittle.

Politics sits upon economics.

Economics sits upon ecology.

And all three depend upon a moral vision capable of sustaining a common life.

Yet it is precisely here that we appear weakest.

We possess extraordinary technological power and declining moral confidence.

We have unprecedented means and diminishing agreement about ends.

We no longer share a common story about what constitutes the good life, what obligations we owe one another, or what sacrifices might be required for future generations.

At precisely the moment when ecological pressures are increasing, political fragmentation is deepening and economic questions are becoming more urgent, our capacity for moral reasoning often appears weaker than it has been for generations.

We struggle to articulate the common good.

We struggle to imagine obligations beyond ourselves.

We struggle to think beyond the next election cycle, the next news cycle or the next quarterly report.

Public trust has also been damaged by repeated institutional failures, whether in politics, finance, policing, churches or the handling of scandals such as the grooming gangs. Again and again people have watched institutions place reputation, ideology or self-preservation above truth, justice and the protection of the vulnerable.

The crisis is not simply political.

Or economic.

Or ecological.

It is also moral.

Perhaps that is the deepest crisis of all.

We have become extraordinarily knowledgeable and not always especially wise. We can communicate instantly across the world and still struggle to speak with the neighbour who votes differently from us. We can access endless information and still find it difficult to discern what is true.

We are confronting profound challenges at precisely the moment when we seem least able to agree on what kind of people we ought to be.

The question, then, is not merely what sort of world we are entering.

The deeper question is what sort of people we are becoming.

That is where I want to begin in Part Two.

-Rev'd Jon Swales