by Stephen P. White.

Let's do a little thought experiment. Do you think you could guess my political affiliation based on what music I listen to? Does my preference for, say, Jimmy Buffet, yacht rock, and country music from the late 1990s tip my political hand at all? These hypothetical musical preferences might tell you something about me (I have eclectic tastes, I'm probably part of Gen X, etc.), but would they tell you very much about how I vote? Probably not.

One person is a tiny sample size and, as the saying goes, there's no accounting for taste. What if I asked you about a larger group?

What if there were 1,000 people or 10,000 people who all liked Jimmy Buffet, yacht rock, and country music from the late 1990s? Now, do you think you could, with reasonable accuracy, guess the general political leanings of that group based simply on their shared taste in music? Has the larger sample size made that guess about political preferences easier, more difficult, or about the same?

Now, what if I told you (again, hypothetically) that I attend Mass every Sunday and that my three all-time favorite hymns to sing are, in no particular order, "On Eagle's Wings," "City of God," and "Be Not Afraid"? I especially like it when these songs are accompanied by an acoustic guitar.

Do you think you could venture a guess about my politics now?

I bet you do. At the very least, most of you have a hunch. Prudence might convince you to withhold that judgment. You might make some objection about "inductive fallacies" or "correlation not implying causation." You know you shouldn't judge, but that doesn't mean you're not also pretty confident that you could judge. The answer is already there in the back of your head. Even if you're withholding it, you know what judgment you're withholding.

Let's leave that (admittedly loaded) hypothetical for a moment and turn to the reality of the Church and the country in which we live. We hear a lot about political polarization these days, for obvious reasons. We also hear a lot about the ways in which political polarization has seeped into the Church.

While political polarization may exacerbate our ecclesial divisions, our most significant ecclesial divisions - e.g., about liturgy or sexual morality or the proper interpretation of Vatican II - long predate the current moment of political polarization. Moreover, as I've written before, it's hard to see American political polarization as the prime driver of our ecclesial divisions when so much of the Church outside the United States, and thus well removed from our domestic polarization, is dealing with very similar divisions.

Political polarization is at least as much a symptom of our ecclesial divisions as it is a cause. And I'm not the first to observe that many of our political divisions are underwritten by much deeper disagreements about the nature and ends of human life.

Those anthropological questions are, to the Christian mind, inherently theological questions. So we shouldn't be surprised to discover that the way we pray (or even what we like to sing) somehow shows up in the way we view our political life and the responsibilities of citizenship. Lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi. The way we pray shapes the way we believe, which in turn shapes the way we live. To which we might add, lex civitandi - the way we pray eventually shapes the way we exercise our citizenship.

Now, of course, we can't really tell much about people's political beliefs based solely on what sort of liturgical music they prefer. No doubt, there are progressives out there who love to chant the Regina Coeli and conservatives who long to "Sing a New Church" into being.

Nor am I suggesting that liturgical renewal ought to be seen as a means to some political end, even a worthy political end. Instrumentalizing the worship of God is a wicked and disordered thing to do. But it is the case that right worship cannot but be a boon to the life of any community that so worships.

In a recent h...