Not Quick Solutions (part 2)
Accept anger, but exercise self-control
I get angry when I think about viable babies tortured and killed due to abortion. It angers me that our immigration policy separates families and forces children to become even more vulnerable than they already were. The invitations I’m proposing are not instructing us to hold fewer convictions, or to hold them less passionately.
There’s a principle in the New Testament that many Christians aren’t aware of, let alone the culture as a whole. It says,
Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger. (*1)
Rarely has any significant cultural change happened without someone getting angry first about an injustice. Do you think Lincoln was angered by slavery, and King by discrimination? I’d bank on it. Yet as we’ve already seen with both of them, they were able to separate their anger from their actions.
“Anger is always an outgrowth of love,” explains Pastor Tim Keller. “Anger is that which rouses you and rallies all of our faculties to defend that which you ultimately love. You get angry to the degree you love something. If our loves are rightly ordered, there are times when we should and will be angry.” (*2)
Even when I’m angry over positions that I believe are hurting people, I can still humble myself and recognize that very possibly there are godly motives that are part of the picture for the person holding positions untenable to me.
Gracious leaders still display righteous anger. They are confident in their beliefs and unafraid of befriending those who do not share them. And they model humility, acknowledging their own stereotypes and faults first, before pointing them out in others. (*3)
Self-control means resisting the urge to “share” the latest political dig on Facebook, let alone write it myself. It means refusing to laugh at snappy quips that dehumanize half the country, even if the clever comment happens to align with a view I already hold. Self-control makes us more human as we treat others with greater humanity. Just because there’s less friction in faceless communication doesn’t mean that we need to engage in the ugly side of it.
There’s a section of the New Testament that lists nine different aspects as fruit of the Holy Spirit. (*4) The last one on the list is self-control. The list is commonly referred to as the fruits (plural) of the Holy Spirit, but in the Bible it’s singular. There is no Holy Spirit supermarket where we can go shopping and say,
Great price on joy – I’ll take two. Almost out of love, gotta load up on that. Oh, peace sounds great – five pounds, please. Self-control? No thanks…
The Holy Spirit will produce in our lives more self-control, along with all the other eight qualities.
My son Mike and I have disagreed on a number of topics politically and spiritually. In fact, when he first pitched the idea of helping me write parts of this book – yes, it was his idea! – the conversation went something like this,
Isn’t one of your main points, Dad, that people can disagree and yet still hold respectful and mutually edifying conversations?
Yes, son, it is. Let’s talk!
In one of those subsequent conversations, he introduced me to a new word, sonder. Sonder is
the profound feeling of realizing that everyone, including strangers passed in the street, has a life as complex as one’s own, which they are constantly living despite one’s personal lack of awareness of it. (*5)
I’m not sure how to use sonder in a sentence, but it sounds like a good thing to me! We could all use more sonder as we interact with the people around us.
Build a bigger tribe
Donkey tribes and elephant tribes aren’t big enough. We need to start seeing our tribe as the human race. From a Biblical perspective, we’d say that the tribe we’re working for is the Kingdom of God, something that transcends all the smaller tribes.
While “progressivism” and “conservatism” don’t exactly translate to Democrat and Republican, there’s a strong correlation. From Urban:
Image: Scroft_1/Pixabay
If a nation is a boat, high-rung Progressivism tries to make improvements to flaws in the boat and build newer, better features, while high-rung Conservatism tries to protect the existing boat against damage and deterioration. Given that any nation, like any boat, has some things working well and others working poorly—along with the capacity to be both improved and damaged over time—Progressivism and Conservatism, the way we’re currently defining them, are simply the two sides of the “Let’s make this the best boat we can” coin. Two halves of a single noble quest for a more perfect nation… Evolution [my note: in a societal sense] is driven by progressive ideas and policed by conservative sensibilities. In any of these situations, people with a progressive mindset feel like they’re dragging more conservative people upward to a better place, while people on the conservative side feel that the progressive effort is dragging things downward to a worse place. Progressivism and Conservatism each worry about one half of every issue, and together, they make sure we’re paying enough attention to everything that matters. (*6)
Haidt lands on very similar conclusions, using the term “liberalism” where Urban uses “progressivism”.
Liberalism – which has done so much to bring about freedom and equal opportunity – is not sufficient as a governing philosophy. It tends to overreach, change too many things too quickly, and reduce the stock of moral capital inadvertently. Conversely, while conservatives do a better job of preserving moral capital, they often fail to notice certain classes of victims, fail to limit the predations of certain powerful interests, and fail to see the need to change or update institutions as times change. John Stuart Mill said that liberals and conservatives are like this: “A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.” (*7)
For the health of our country, we simply must find ways to turn more of our political “either/or’s” into “both/and’s”. And the starting place is how we view the people who make up the parties.
Concluding solutions for the country
Let’s end this section with a couple more very practical takeaways. Since we don’t typically get to vote for platforms, and rather must vote for candidates, consider making it your number one criterion that you’ll vote for candidates who treat the other candidates and other party at least respectfully. I contend that our country needs unifiers possibly more than anything else. When one of those isn’t available, I’ve started writing in candidates unless I can clearly identify a “lesser of two evils” candidate. If we continue to function like warring tribes, the prospects are bleak indeed. And if we keep on doing what we’ve always done, well, that’s the very definition of insanity.
I don’t know what kind of traction it’s getting, but I was intrigued to learn of a new Emancipation Party, led by John Rankin, with the Golden Rule (*8) as one of the three founding assumptions of the party:
The Golden Rule in political context is when all other partisan ideas are first given an honest listen. (*9)
Civil Politics is a non-profit whose mission is
to educate groups and individuals who are trying to bridge moral divisions by connecting them with scientific research.
They define civility this way:
Civility as we pursue it is the ability to disagree productively with others, respecting their sincerity and decency. By civility we do NOT mean agreement. We think citizens are well served when political parties represent different viewpoints and then compete vigorously to recruit voters to their side. (*10)
I mentioned earlier in a footnote that I’ve made it a habit for the last few years to visit both Fox News’ website and CNN’s website at least daily. By listening to what both sides are saying, it’s easier to sift out the bias and not get infected by the animosity. Another option would be to attempt to find a more unbiased news source. Newsy is my wife’s and my current favorite in that regard. (*11)
The awesome acoustic band Ryanhood just wrote a new song called The Fight. Here are some of the lyrics to the bridge:
Take the comments section
From the last election
Take the things we write
And take our misdirection
Take the fear that makes us
Wanna drive them out
And makes us act the same
As what we’re mad aboutTake the inquisition
Think of prohibition
Think of “Shock and Awe”
Against Sharia law
Take crusades and hate
And mobs and frenzies
Crews and cliques
The crucifixion
Ethnic cleansingAnd it isn’t only all about the pain and hurt
But also that it never really seems to work
Because the heavier the hand that holds and squeezes
The more you break the thing into a million pieces
And every little spore is gonna grow again
You can call that hell or you can call that sin
But the only revolution is the one within
Until we throw ourself into the light
We will never win the fightTake me
Take me
Take me
Take me (*12)
Donkey Christians and elephant Christians need to lead the way in civil, positive, honoring, solution- based conversation. Jesus said that we’re salt and light – not that we should be, but that we are. We will either flavor the world with maturity or immaturity. There are many others calling for the same thing, so we need to link arms with anyone, regardless of their faith background, in promoting common kindness and the common good.
The next post will dive more deeply into some invitations specifically for the Church.
Greer, p. 174.
Greer, p. 185.
“The Spirit produces the fruit of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self- control…” Galatians 5:22-23, NCV
Urban, Chapter 9.
Haidt, p. 343.
Do unto others as you’d like them to do to you. Matthew 7:12
https://www.teii.org/first-the-gospel-then-politics/emancipationparty/
Used by permission of author, Cameron Hood. The song hasn’t been released yet, but you can find the band at ryanhood.com.