Identity Restored
Editor’s note: Since this week’s blog picks up where last week’s left off, the last paragraph from last week is repeated here.
Americans love competition – it’s built into our free enterprise system, and it dominates much of our entertainment, whether sports, musical shows like American Idol, or reality shows like Survivor or Bachelor or Shark Tank. I’m as competitive as they come, so for me to argue against competition would be hypocrisy of the highest order. The problem isn’t competition; it’s in misunderstanding the opponent. The opponent isn’t an enemy to be demonized. (*1) Healthy sports competition brings out the best in all involved. Political “competition” is supposed to do the same – in a healthy exchange of ideas, new and stronger possibilities emerge. Wishing the worst for the other party is like passengers on an airplane hoping for the pilot’s demise. If the pilot goes down, we’re all going down with him/her. When “declaration of war” is the language used to describe the relationship between the donkeys and elephants (*2) , we’re engaged in another Civil War – words for now, but what comes next?
I used to eagerly anticipate flipping news channels on the first Tuesday evening in November with the same thrill I got out of a University of Arizona basketball game when the season was on the line. Who’s winning, red or blue? By how much? If my team was winning, I went to bed happy; if not, the sky was falling. Winning by a little was good; winning by a wipeout was better. “The donkeys must go down!” I thought.
Identity restored
Then I met some donkeys. Not just met, but really got to know them. In the height of the Presidential election campaign of 2012, African American Apostle Warren Anderson called me with a question. “It seems to us,” he began, and I knew that meant fellow African American pastors,
that there were a lot more Evangelicals praying for the president back when the president was Bush than now that it’s Obama. Could we talk about that?
Image: Free-Photos/Pixabay
There’s this filter in our heads between our brains and our mouths, and I’ve rarely been more thankful for that filter than right then. We aren’t required to voice every thought that crosses our mind! I was still an Elephant News junkie back then, so my initial thoughts were all defensive. I’d been in training, you see – just the wrong kind. I literally started rifling through the files in my brain for the best comebacks. But thankfully, the filter kicked in, and what came out of my mouth instead was, “That sounds like a great idea.” Disaster averted. A tremendous plane flight could have been aborted before it ever left the ground if I’d taken the enemy’s bait and responded defensively. Instead, this flight not only took off but soared to worlds previously unknown to many of us. Pastor Partners was born, and seven years later we’re still meeting monthly.
The upfront out-in-the-open question of Pastor Partners was this: Was our unity in Christ as fellow Christian pastors sufficient that we could actually talk politics and live to tell about it? Many of us had met one another at citywide prayer or service events, so we weren’t complete strangers. But neither were we friends… yet. We may not have been strangers, but I believe a majority of us would have seen the other side’s political persuasions as strange at best. Early on we all agreed to what we knew to be true in our heads: we’re here as brothers in Christ first, and Elephants and Donkeys second. Our primary identity is children of God; political affiliations need to be way down the identity list. But that right-answer-on-a-religion-test had to be tested by entering into the hard conversations. Our early meetings began with one or two of us simply telling our stories, highlighting the parts where racial identity and assumptions may have been birthed. We prayed together regularly, and learned that while we might not use the same words, we were voicing the same passions. When we started talking about Donkey concerns and Elephant concerns, we made liberal (no pun intended) use of the statement, “Help me understand.” By this point we knew that we were in the company of brothers in Christ. We knew we’d be spending eternity together, so we actually cared what made the other person tick.
Our relationships were what made hard political conversations possible. Haidt writes,
The main way that we change our minds on moral issues is by interacting with other people. We are terrible at seeking evidence that challenges our own beliefs… When discussions are hostile, the odds of change are slight… But if there is affection, admiration, or a desire to please the other person, then (we) try to find truth in the other person’s arguments. (*3)
Keep in mind, Haidt is an evolutionary social psychologist, and a self-described atheist. He’s not starting from a Christian worldview at all, but rather basing his statements on 25 years of research on moral psychology. Yet his conclusions describe what ought to and actually could be a common experience among a unified Body of Christ. He continues,
Each individual reasoner is really good at one thing: finding evidence to support the position he or she already holds. But if you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system. (*4)
In another gathering called Tucson Ministry Alliance, we discussed the hot potato of Immigration back in 2013 – a particularly challenging topic in our border community of Tucson, AZ. Afterwards several people confirmed the same observation, stating that because the people sharing opposite viewpoints from their own were fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, they actually heard and considered perspectives that in other contexts they would have rejected out of hand. Pastor Partners and other similar experiences like Tucson Ministry Alliance are the reasons my last seven years have led to the greatest growth of my life. Assumptions I’d made my whole life were exposed and challenged – and I loved it! Now we have dinners at one another’s homes, celebrate one another’s victories, exchange pulpits, watch movies together with racial themes and talk about them afterward, attend sporting events together, and on and on. I would go to war with those donkeys – with them, not against them. We view our experience as the country’s best hope – perhaps its only hope.
Our experience has been that it takes something larger than the gap to bridge the gap. The gap between cultures ethnically and politically is massive. But the Cross is bigger – big enough to bridge the gap. And now we like to say that regardless of how we vote, we don’t see ourselves as belonging to the party of the Elephant or the party of the Donkey, but the party of the Lamb. (*5)
Ironically, the Bible in Ephesians 6:12 says that there is a demonic enemy, but it’s not other people in other political parties or any other group, for that matter. “For we are not fighting against flesh-and-blood enemies, but against evil rulers and authorities of the unseen world, against mighty powers in this dark world, and against evil spirits in the heavenly places.” (NLT)
Fox News, November 1, 2019, as quoted on page ???
Haidt, p. 79
Haidt, p. 105
Lamb of God is a common title in the Bible for Jesus. It dates back to the Old Testament Exodus, when the Passover Lamb was sacrificed, leading the Israelites to freedom from slavery. Reverend Amos Lewis is the first person I heard coin the phrase, “Party of the Lamb.”