The utter miracle of disliking an election result

Voting is a profound act of love, argues Luke Bretherton, Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford University.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

Crowd barrier surround empty space at a night time political rally.

After the Harris rally at Georgetown University.

Well, there we have it. It’s done. Donald Trump has won. History has been made.

Today, and for the days to come, there will be celebrations on the streets. There will be weeping on them, too. And that is somewhat of a miracle.

Earlier in the year, I interviewed a political theologian, Professor Luke Bretherton. It was, and still is, the most enlightening conversation about politics I have ever had. It was for an episode of our Re-enchanting podcast, which is apt, because that’s exactly what it did for me. Luke was able to scoop me up out of political disenchantment and remind me just how miraculous of a thing true democracy is – even if, no, especially if, it doesn’t go the way we hoped.

What should you do if you’re feeling bereft about the result of this almighty election?

Well, I should imagine there are a number of things – but one of them could be to acknowledge the imperfect, rare, paradoxical, beauty of such a feeling.

I’ll let Luke explain a little better, shall I? Here’s a snippet from the Re-Enchanting episode (recorded months before this American election), you can find the full episode here.

But, for now, if you should need it, allow Luke’s wise perspective to be a balm for your sad soul.

Politics is really the name for the formation of a common life. We can't survive, let alone, thrive as humans without others, and so, to have any kind of life - let alone a flourishing life – you’ve got to form a common life with others. As soon as you do that, as soon as you try to navigate and negotiate some form of common life, you’re going to come up against people that you dislike and disagree with.

At that point, you have a choice of one of four things: you can either kill them, which of course, appears to be the solution throughout a lot of history. You can make life so difficult that you cause them to flee, you can create a system to coerce them – to get them to do what you want without having to listen to them, without having to negotiate a common life with them. Or you can do politics; you can negotiate some form of common life without killing, coercing or causing to flee. And those really are the only options. We make it very complicated, but that’s really what’s going on.

Are you going to form a common life with people? Or are you going to kill them, coerce them, or cause them to flee? I think Christians should be pretty invested, both for theological reasons and for practical reasons, in the option of doing politics. Part of that politics is what we might call statecraft – laws, bureaucracies, parliaments – but politics is wider, simpler, and more important than that. It’s a social practice through which we form a common life.

And our commonalities may not outweigh our differences… we can have very real differences. As we know from a Christmas dinner, or a thanksgiving meal, the uncle who drives you bonkers is also the person who passes you the Brussels sprouts. So, it’s learning that we can hold tension, that life is complex, that people have multiple loyalties and that politics is the negotiation in the midst of multiple loyalties, ambiguities and tensions. Otherwise, politics dehumanises others and ourselves.

And so, the act of voting is, in itself, an act of loving your neighbour. Because, if you’ve voted, you’re not looking to bomb, torture, or kill in order to get your way.

And this is beautiful.

It’s an extraordinary paradox, it’s called the loyal opposition: if you lose the election, you’re prepared to stand on the opposite benches. You don’t take to the hills because you don’t like the results.

It’s the water we swim in, and so we don’t see the miracle of that, the miracle of agitational solidarity. The notion that I can be utterly opposed to your view on tax deferential policies but I won’t kill you.

That’s a rare thing in human history.

Let’s just take a moment to realise the miracle of that.

Review

Culture

Music

Politics

25 July 2025

6 min read

As the congregation gathers Bruce Springsteen leans hard into hope

Chords of confrontation and communion

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Bruce Springsteen crouches down and holds a hand out to a sea of outstretched hands

Springsteen plays Manchester.

Brucespringsteen.net.

I finally got to experience a Bruce Springsteen concert recently. Which is to say, for three hours, I touched a land of hope and dreams.

We walked along a canal to get to the arena – my husband, my father-in-law, and me –Manchester shimmered with the arrival of summer, and light bounced off red brick and still water. We neared the arena and the air felt dense with anticipation. T Between us we carried heartbreaks, elections, hopes, failures, and a collective return to music that had accompanied and clarified it all. We were drawn by loyalty and nostalgia and joy, but also I sensed by a hope that Bruce would meet the moment — the frayed, furious, anxious now — with something that mattered.

We found our seats and gripped our drinks as the lights dimmed. Thousands of people stopped individual conversations, and hushed, and then joined voices into a deep and reverent chant. “Bruuuuuuuce”. To my right, the glow of a screen, the woman holding it sending a text – “yes babe, 1pm, lovely” – and it seemed incongruent and true. In the tension before the release, in the dark before the light, we hold our breath even as the ordinary carries on. The ordinary carries on even as the world fractures and glows. The ordinary is what Bruce often sings of, it is one reason why fans feel heard and seen by him. That night though, all the ordinaries he sang of formed something extraordinary.

Then there was light, and Bruce walked slowly from the side to the front of the stage, his guitar suspended across his body, his face a relaxed, broad smile, his bandmates and companions beside and behind him. Then there was music. No videos, no pyrotechnics; just old songs that felt as if they existed for the now. My City of Ruins, Death to My Hometown, Land of Hope and Dreams, The Promised Land. The song Long Walk Home was introduced as a “prayer to my country”. It is a country that he embodies, despairs of, and loves. He sings of his home with fury, sorrow, tenderness, and love.

Riffs and rhythms that were decades old were being made urgent again. Springsteen’s music holds both grit and glory, and hard-won joys leave space for sorrow. I write this and lines by Mary Oliver come to mind: “We shake with joy, we shake with grief / what a time they have these two / housed as they are in the same body.” What a time they had, joy and grief, that night with Bruce.

The evening unfolded not as spectacle but as liturgy; all of us involved in something like devotion – in part to Bruce, but also to moral clarity, to the power of poetry, to the promise of who we could be. At times the crowd seemed silent, ushered into something deeper – not entertainment or escapism, but something like confrontation and communion. We were being offered the joy of music and memory, but also an opportunity to reckon with who we are.

Between songs, Bruce spoke. He apparently rarely does so in his gigs. His voice slowed and deepened – not chit chat, not to entertain, but to bear witness and stand defiant and call us to the best versions of ourselves. “I’ve spent my life singing about where we’ve succeeded and come up short in pursuit of our civic values,” he said. “I just felt that was my job.” He proceeded to describe how those values are being torn apart, and why they matter. The crowd roared. He was making civic values shine, speaking about them with urgency. He acknowledged both the dream and the failure, but still he believes in the promised land and he asks us to as well. Before he belted out Rainmaker, he said, “when conditions in a country are right for a demagogue, you can bet one will show up.” He spoke of America, and really of the world – what it is, what it is becoming. His honesty and poetic rage situated us, then became a map for how to keep going.

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts.

I found myself wondering: why is it that Bruce can sing and speak about justice, warped politics, and who we are becoming, and be met with cheers, while so many churches avoid doing so, preferring instead to whisper in neutral tones while the world burns? That night, I stood in a crowd of thousands and I heard a kind of moral clarity that orientates the soul and made me cry. It wasn’t partisan, it was human. Why can it feel riskier to speak specifically and prophetically in a sermon than in a stadium? I wonder if it’s because Springsteen has always rooted his politics in people’s real lives – in work, family, grief, memory. He doesn’t gesture toward abstract ideologies for fear of alienating people, or in the hope of retaining fans: he tells stories and gives names to problems and injustices, singing about crooked institutions, boarded-up factories, buses that never come, lovers who don’t come back.

The evening felt, for me, like the kind of church I long for and sometimes touch: no tidy answers, no insincere lyrics, no vague calls for justice, but rather honesty and specificity and the chance to stand alongside strangers and feel something challenging, beautiful, true.

I scribbled a question as the music soared: can a chord be mystical? Because that’s how it felt. As if there are progressions – minor then major, dissonance into harmony – that can reach past language and speak directly to the part of us that longs for love more than cynicism, to the part of us that still dares to hope even when there is very little obvious reason to do so, to the part of us wondering how to be truly alive.

Near the end, Bruce quoted the American writer James Baldwin:

“In this world, there isn’t enough humanity as one would hope. But there’s enough.”

There’s enough. It was a small phrase but it hung in the air like incense. For Bruce, there is enough humanity to keep singing for, and about. Now, he seemed to ask the crowd, what will you do with that enoughness, with that humanity?

In the final stretch, Bruce leaned hard into hope with songs like The Rising and Born to Run. The energy in the room felt like resistance – not against something, but for something. He didn’t pretend everything’s fine, but he sang anyway. “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts. Gladness is being asked to stand its ground now, and to do something with our improbable aliveness. For the final song, Bruce played Bob Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom. It is a song about lightning and exiles and freedom, about the trembling of the soul and about a sky that “cracked its poems in naked wonder.” He sang it slowly, tenderly, like a prayer – which can also be a trembling of the soul, a song of naked wonder. Perhaps he prayed to God, perhaps to some other sacred thing: our better angels, or the fragile hope of who we might yet become.

In a BBC documentary about Bruce Springsteen’s history with the UK, someone says “there’s something in Bruce fans, you know you can implicitly trust them.” As we filed out of the arena, it felt like 25,000 of us briefly knew each other, trusted each other, could take on the world together. Perhaps we just had.

Soon it was just me, my husband, my father-in-law, and the silent dark canal as we walked back into the night. We were tired, we were awake. I thought of Bruce’s belief in the promised land, and of Baldwin’s line: there’s not enough humanity, but there’s enough. These are beliefs that can feel risky. So can belief in God. But enough is plenty. Enough can turn up the volume and let the spirit be our guide. With 25,000 other people, I’d turned that volume up and I could hear the spirit defiant, unifying, guiding. It is – has always been – time to go and sing of it, despite everything.