COULD WE JUST LISTEN TO EACH OTHER?
A few days ago, I received an email from dear friends living in a very politically conservative state. They said they did not dare say “a word about anything that might be political.” They do not even dare share the most basic scientific facts about COVID-19 with their dear Christian friends.
We have a theological problem and a political problem.
The theological problem is (as I have tried to say in several blogs) that biblical faith calls us to believe and live the theological truth that our oneness in Christ is more important than any ethnic, racial, gender or economic difference. That is what it means when Paul says: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus“ (Galatians 3:28). Surely that applies to Christians who are both Republicans and Democrats, both pro-Trump and not-Trump Christians. If we believe the Bible, then our oneness in Christ must be far more important than even this huge political difference.
The political problem is that the nation is almost equally divided. (Trump won more votes than he did in 2016 although Biden won even more votes.) We listen to different sources of news – – different TV news, different Facebook, Twitter, etc. accounts. The result is that some people have a vastly different sense of “the facts” (for example, what exactly happened in this election; what science says about COVID-19, or global warming; etc). So we shelter in our separate camps, not truly listening to, and not even talking to, each other. It is not surprising that effective political action dealing with major national problems grinds to a halt.
Genuine political differences explain some of the division. There is legitimate disagreement in the nation about abortion, the size of government, and religious freedom for people with a traditional view of marriage. (I actually largely agree with conservatives on the first and third of those three issues.) But our dangerously huge division comes from much more than just valid political disagreements. We listen to different sources for our news and we no longer talk together or even have serious friendships across the political chasm.
Democracy simply will not work and our country’s future is very bleak, indeed exceedingly dangerous, unless we can start talking and really listening to each other.
I wish I had a good set of solutions. I don’t. So if you have concrete ideas or even successful stories, let me know.
But I intend to pray fervently, and often, that God will show me how to become friends with, and truly listen carefully to the views of those who voted for Donald Trump. We need to pray together. We need to explain respectfully to each other why we think so differently.
That kind of listening does not mean succumbing to relativism. Some statements are true and some are not. I will continue to work hard for the political changes I believe are right.
For example, I continue to be certain that structural racism continues to exist in education, policing, etc. in ways that benefit white Americans and hurt others, especially African-Americans. I believe that widespread white racism is a terrible sin that makes African-American Christians and other non-white Christians turn away in disgust. It makes non-Christians refuse even to consider—in fact despise— Christianity. And it is driving many of our younger Christians away from the church and even our Lord. We must speak the full force of truth against the terrible sin of white racism. Furthermore, at the center of any honest conversation on racism must be humble listening to African-Americans tell their experiences of racism. We must listen to them tell us why they are almost ready to totally give up on any relationship with white Christians who do not work to end racism.
At the same time, I believe that many white Christians with racist ideas truly want to follow Christ. And I want to listen to those who do not believe that structural racism exists and then sit down together and search together to help us all understand and embrace the actual facts.
I simply do not know how to do both honest truth-telling about racism and genuine listening to white Christians who reject even the idea of structural racism. But somehow we must try.
The same kind of insistence on both truth-telling and genuine listening across great differences needs to happen on many issues.
I would hope that followers of Jesus would find a way to model honest truth-telling and careful, humble listening across the huge divisions that threaten our democracy. Unless we beg God to help us do that, we deny the central biblical truth about Christ’s one body. Please Lord help us.
Please share any ideas you have.
As always, invite your friends to join my blog:ronsiderblog.substack.com
As a Christian who has been open to race relations and has raised my kids to be race neutral, I greatly resent it when those with grudges force their negativism in my face. Somehow Mr. Trump and I are being blamed for racism.
Racism has been around for thousands of years. Racism has shown prejudice against a variety of people. Truth be told, other than the Ashkenazi Jews, we are all some type of Heinz mixture. Racism is ignorance. Ignorance of our own ancestry and tales passed down from previous generations. It takes intelligence, hard work, and time to look for and accept truth, to build bridges across rivers of bias, to find others with the same attitudes of growth and unity.
Success in this quest will yield positive results for generations for all people.
Thanks for a well-written, thoughtful blog. As a white woman who has lived for 6 years in a 96% black neighborhood in North Saint Louis, 5 minutes from where Michael Brown was shot, I think I have a unique perspective to bring to the table on the subject of racism. I have also lived for 13 years in the central corridor, a fully mixed race neighborhood, and am now living in Old North Saint Louis, a historic district that is a fully mixed race neighborhood north of Delmar, the street that forms the dividing line between black and mostly white neighborhoods in this city.
One of the means of supporting sytsemic racism is funding our schools by property taxes. Of course the wealthier districts can afford higher budgets for their public schools than the poorer districts. The Normandy School District that served our Northwoods Community had an annual budget of $12,000 per student in 2014, while Clayton, a wealthy mostly white neighborhood in the central corridor had a budget of $18,000 per student. Just before Michael Brown's death, the neighborhood of Wellston, next to Normandy, had permanently closed its high school and its students were sent to Normandy. Now Normandy and Wellston had rival gangs. Now they were all supposed to be studying together. Wellston is a notoriously rough, poor neighborhood, whilst Normandy houses The University of Missouri at Saint Louis, with all its professors and staff, so although they are both strongly black districts, there was a big socio-cultural difference between the two places. The Principal of Normandy said his students who came from stable families were doing well, as well as any students in the country, and working hard on a college track. But that was only 50% of his students! Shortly after the Wellston switch, Normandy High School lost its accreditation. He had to farm out all his students who wanted to go to an accredited school. Clayton agreed to accept 100 of his students. But they insisted that they needed to have $18,000 for each of those 100 students, to fit their budget. Of course, Clayton won that budget battle, being the stronger, whiter and wealthier neighborhood. That left Normandy with an even tighter budget for the rest of its students.
Education is the first major public step that a child takes on its way to adulthood and a productive working life. If we are to provide an equal opportunity for all children to have a good education, then we have to find a more equitable way to fund our schools. This will take a lot of legislative action, a lot of thought, a lot of hard work. But it must be done. And this argument can be extended to multiple areas of life. I am currently reading John Inazu's book, Confident Pluralism. He is a law professor at Washington University in Saint Louis, and a Christian. In it, he discusses property values in black vs. white neighborhoods. Here's an illustration from his book. Let's suppose that a black man and a white man each buy a $150,000 home in the city. The white man's house in a white neighborhood will have lower property taxes and lower insurance than the black man's home in the black neighborhood. Over time, that represents a large loss of wealth for the black man. And we know that owning your own home is one of the primary means of earning wealth in an individual's life. Another example comes with anyone choosing to live in a formerly red lined neighborhood like my current one. The banks still keep property values down there, regardless of the race of the neighborhood. My neighbor 4 doors down invested $40,000 in his 100 year old historic home a few years ago. He completely redid his rental apartment, doing a gorgeous job, and redid his kitchen. When he had the building evaluated it came back at just $2,000 more than it was worth before the investment. This kind of treatment in predominantly black neighborhoods is endemic. It kills all incentive to work hard, invest, strive forward. The miracle is that they do keep striving and working hard.
This is what the Black Lives Matter movement is all about. And they have every right to work hard through the legal system to try to bring about change and improvement. The tragic thing in Saint Louis is that we have had a very corrupt family in politics that has lined their own pockets instead of working for change. In the last election, we finally got that family out. For the first time in 50 years they no longer have a representative in the Federal House of Representatives. We've elected a young, energetic go-getter of a woman who will speak clearly and represent her people well. Her name is Corrie Bush.
95% of the Black Lives Matter protests this summer were peaceful protests. But the media focused on the troublemakers, that were both right wing as well as left wing. We must learn to educate ourselves on what is going on from multiple sources. I have three overseas apps on my smartphone so that I can read more objective news from overseas. They are BBC and Reuters from Europe and Al Jazeera English, also located in London I believe. I saw a super video on BBC, for instance, an interview with a Chinese American couple who have been married for 8 years and live in New York. He is Republican and she is Democrat. They said every Republican should find a Democrat to partner with and vice versa. They said they both have profound respect for each other and listen to each other. They said if you listened to the news on the "conservative" and the "liberal" channels, you would think you were living on 2 different planets. Just that fact alone should tell us that there is probably distortion to some extent on both sides.
Please fact check! And on behalf of the mainline media, I will say that the purpose of having editors was to ensure that fact checking happened and that lies were not printed as truth. One of the huge problems with social media is that there are no editors. Anyone can say anything he wants, regardless of whether it is true or not. It's not a wise place to get the bulk of you knowledge and information from.