Bad Strategy
The first step to being part of the solution is to stop being part of the problem. Last November (2019) my wife was driving along and saw a pair of bumper stickers on the same car that grabbed her attention. The first said, “In God we trust.” The second said, “Annoy a liberal: work, succeed, be happy.” I imagine the car’s owner is rather proud of his/her religiosity and cleverness. But that pair of messages is a classic example of being part of the problem. Presumably, someone who trusts in God would like to attract others to place their trust in God as well. That ain’t gonna do it, either on the faith side or the politics side. In my daily time with God I was reading a sidebar about the family of Herods (*1) in the Bible and came across this:
Religion was important only as an aspect of politics. (*2)
And this may be a jump, but I have to wonder if bumper sticker guy isn’t a current application of the Herod problem.
Consider what terrible strategy it is to demonize the opposition. You’re certainly not going to win someone over who’s currently on the other side. As Dr. King is particularly famous for saying,
Darkness can’t drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate can’t drive out hate; only love can do that. (*3)
Love and respect will gain a far greater audience than ridicule.
What about those in the middle, the “independents” whether officially or just philosophically? I would wager that a majority of them landed there out of their disdain for partisanship, so additional partisanship sounds patently unwise. Biblically speaking, our “enemy” is never other people, but rather the spiritual forces that seek to divide and conquer. (*4) And just in case there’s someone we’re thinking of who’s so sold out to the dark side that we might at least consider their actions evil and therefore see them as an enemy, how does Jesus say we’re supposed to treat our enemies? Love them and pray for them. (*5) So it’s not only bad political strategy, but unbiblical as well. Of course, part of the problem is that social media (and old school social media – bumper stickers) aren’t usually aimed at people whose names we know, just the faceless straw man we paint as an idiot so we can destroy them.
The eighth commandment (*6) is:
You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
In politics it seems like bearing false witness against our neighbor is standard operating procedure. Martin Luther in his Small Catechism explains the eighth commandment as instructing us to put the best possible construction on our neighbor’s words or actions. (*7) When have the donkeys and elephants ever done that when talking about the other one? Answer: not in my lifetime. If we’re going to wait for the political parties to do that, we’re likely to wait indefinitely. But we don’t have to wait for someone else – we can decide both to stop painting the other side as negatively as possible, and start looking for positive motives behind even the policies with which we have the most trouble. 2016 Presidential candidate John Kasich writes,
Societal change flows from the bottom up, and not from the top down, and it’s almost always driven by the passion and purpose of selfless individuals who push for a way to make these changes happen. (*8)
He continues,
I’m troubled at how so many of us seem to hold fast to our narrow points of view, without making room in our thinking for different perspectives. (*9)
I wrote earlier how particularly passionate I am about protecting the life of the unborn. It was only in the writing of this book that I came to realize the magnitude of how much I’d demonized the other side of the abortion issue. Do I really believe that pro-choicers wake up in the morning hoping they can kill babies? No, of course not. The vast majority arrived at their position out of a loving concern for women with unexpected pregnancies. That’s a praiseworthy desire, even if I strongly disagree with the conclusion that taking the life of the baby is the best/only way to care for the mother. Demonizing and dehumanizing the other perspective is both biblically wrong and politically short-sighted.
Image: JESHOOTS-com/Pixabay
My hope and prayer as you read through the positions in the last several posts held by the other side is that you began to recognize the validity of the concerns, possibly for the first time.
Do most Republicans wake up hoping they can shove their beliefs down your throat? Unlikely. They just want the freedom to express their faith in the “marketplace of ideas” (*10) on level footing with everyone else. All people of faith would want that, I would presume. That’s what’s behind the call for religious liberty.
Do most Democrats hate America and hate Anglos? Of course not. As every parent knows, pointing out things that are wrong is an act of love, not hate. Do most Republicans hate all non-whites? Again, ridiculous. Equal opportunity for all people regardless of skin color is a godly perspective. All life matters to God. Affirmative action can be debated – for instance, is there a point at which it’s no longer necessary to truly create equal opportunity, and instead becomes reverse discrimination? How would we know if we’d arrived at that point? But those arguing for or against are certainly not all racist individuals.
Do most Republicans hate immigrants and refugees? Of course not. Even though national security and caring for those around the world in dire situations is a both/and, not an either/or, I recognize the legitimacy of a concern for safety and respect for a nation’s laws. It’s simply bad strategy to play the “race card” indiscriminately, especially when racial intolerance is still a present reality that needs to be confronted head on. We damage our ability to fight the real problem when we label everything as racism.
Do most Democrats hate rich people? Of course not. Some Democrats are rich people! They just want to be sure that when the tide rises, it brings all the ships with it, not just the yachts, as Jim Wallis said. Do most Republicans hate poor people? Of course not. When/if they’re advocating tax breaks for the business owners and more well-off, it’s out of the belief that that’s the best way to see the economic tide rise for everyone. Jesus calls all of us to care for those experiencing poverty. I believe we’d arrive at a lot more common-sense solutions if we’d holster our guns instead of firing away at the other side. For instance, there’s broad consensus on both sides that a hand up is better than a handout. If we saw the other side as an ally whose life experience leads them to some perspectives we probably lack, we’d have a lot more success working together for solutions that benefit all.
Do most Republicans hate gays? The ones I know don’t. There’s a logical fallacy at work that says that if you say something is wrong, you must hate the person who you see as doing the “wrong” thing. Do parents hate their own kids when they correct them? Of course not. Parents who do nothing to teach their children about morals would be widely and correctly viewed as negligent. Connect the dots here with me:
a) if there is a God, He’s smarter than I am by definition;
b) the God Christians worship desires to communicate with people made in His image;
c) humbly desiring to stand under the written Word of God usually leads to a belief that God designed sexuality for lifelong marriage between a man and a woman;
d) Jesus showed what it looks like to uphold truth and at the same time treat people with grace.
A critique that someone isn’t treating others with grace is a fair critique; what isn’t fair is to call a proclamation of truth that you happen to disagree with “hate speech.” And flipping it around, the motivation for the vast majority of those advocating LGBTQ rights isn’t to abolish marriage between a man and woman, but a civil rights concern for people who’ve been oppressed. This could be a book all of its own, and I recognize the risk I’m taking in raising it at all when the focus of the book doesn’t allow me to fully explore the topic. My point in this context is merely that demonizing the other perspective is not only unbiblical, but unwise and thoroughly unhelpful.
One of my new friends (*11) from the other side of the tracks, Tim Urban, says
There’s a term we need to start using: political bigotry.
He goes on to note that we typically haven’t viewed political intolerance as negatively as, say, racial intolerance, probably because we see politics as a field of ideas rather than a group of people.
But isn’t that the very definition of dehumanizing – forgetting that there are actual people being referenced who hold the political views we’re mocking?
It’s a short step from mocking ideas to mocking the people who hold them, as 2019 rhetoric has shown us all too frequently. A study was done showing scientifically that political intolerance is worse than any other kind in terms of its severity, and equally pronounced on both the right and the left. (*12)
Urban shares personally why he’s particularly concerned about our level of political bigotry.
Here are four reasons this scares me:
1) We’re losing our ability to gain knowledge.
2) We’re losing our ability to think together.
3) We’re losing our ability to cooperate. A polarized country that isn’t capable of building broad coalitions can’t take forward steps—it can only self-inflict.
4) We’re doing that thing that people do before really, really awful things happen. Disgust should scare you as much as it scares me. If our species were a person, it would have a mix of beautiful and unadmirable qualities—but its darkest quality would be the ability to dehumanize. (*13)
My other new friend, Jonathan Haidt, concludes something similar.
We all get sucked into tribal moral communities… We think the other side is blind to truth, reason, science, and common sense, but in fact everyone goes blind when talking about their sacred objects. [(*14) We end up in] ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say. (*15)
Herod the Great was on the throne when Jesus was born; son Herod Antipas was involved in Jesus’ trial; grandson Herod Agrippa I persecuted Jesus’ followers after the resurrection and killed one of them, James; and Herod Agrippa II was one of the Apostle Paul’s judges.
Life Application Bible, Herod Agrippa 1 sidebar.
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, Strength to Love.
Seventh commandment depending on whether 1 and 2 are listed as one, or 9 and 10 are listed as one. Sorry for the confusion!
Martin Luther, Small Catechism.
John Kasich, It’s Up to Us: Ten Little Ways We Can Bring About Big Change (Toronto, Ontario: Hanover Square Press, 2019), 18.
Kasich, p. 35
Credit goes to Tim Urban for his brilliant use of this term in his Story of US series.
We’ve never met or conversed. I just find his analyses incredibly insightful, even though he uses language for shock value at times, that I think unnecessarily alienates people he could otherwise attract.
Urban, Chapter 10.
Haidt, p. 364.
Haidt p. 366.