I’ve been thinking about useless conversations.
I've been thinking. . . about the painful and divisive conversations that took place during the recent election season, many of which continue.
We hear about family members who have stopped visiting or talking to one another in the past four years, and friendships that have been badly damaged over political differences. My closest experience to this kind of tension is with a man I’ve been close friends with for thirty years; he voted for Donald Trump in the past two elections. What has saved our relationship is that we’ve learned never to push the political conversation very far because we both know the outcome will not change our very different political convictions but might damage the love and trust we share.
I learned about such conflicted conversations earlier in my life.
I was raised in a fundamentalist Christian church in which there actually were, and still are, alternative facts. No matter what science or historical studies teach, If the Bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it. I clung to these beliefs because what was at stake was eternal life or eternal death, God’s way or the Devil’s. Call it insane or stupid, but when you’re in such a religious or political community these alternative facts are the only truth that matters.
I’ve been out of that fundamentalist mindset for decades, but listening to recent political arguments raises memories and lessons from those conversations. What I realize now is that such conversations are not about facts, whether scientific or otherwise. They are about convictions, beliefs, opinions that are rooted in a complex mix of reason and emotion, personal histories and our current social circles.
So when I recently heard a CNN newscaster saying something like We cannot move forward unless we learn to agree on a common body of facts, I wanted to whisper into his ear-piece This will never happen. Reason, logic, science, conventional wisdom – none of these, nor the force of all of them together, will break the rock-hard convictions of a true believer, whether religious or political, whether left or right.
We have to find a better way to relate to one another.
To begin with, we have to decide that this relationship matters more than winning the argument. If being right matters more, if winning the current dispute is your main goal, don’t waste your time. The conversation will be useless at best, more damaging in the worst case.
Rather than confronting our political differences, my Trump-supporting friend and I have shared at length how each of us arrived at our current political convictions. My friend’s father was a high-up executive of a major Midwest corporation, so he grew up in a wealthy, well-educated family. My parents and grandparents were working class; we ate dinner each evening with the money my father brought home that day. I was the first in my extended family to go from high school directly to college. His father was a leading Republican recruited into a significant position in the Nixon administration. My parents were Roosevelt Democrats who relied on government programs to sustain them. In some ways, each of us is the loyal heir of our family’s politics.
Where you stand on political issues is often highly influenced by where you sit to worship, and in this my friend and I are very much alike. We both grew up with deep religious convictions that continue to govern our mutual commitment to issues of social justice. Still, the differences in our economic and social backgrounds, and decades of defending and deepening our individual political convictions, hold sway in our voting choices.
Perhaps more significant than understanding our differing backgrounds, we have bound ourselves to one another through decades of conversations about what each of us cherishes in life. He walked with me through seasons when my marriage was shaky and when I left a job under pressure, and wrapped his arms around my family when our son died. I introduced him to the woman he is married to, conducted their wedding, and for twenty-plus years have shared the delights and dangers he’s been through in raising their two daughters.
Though we disagree, we respect the thought and effort each of us puts into our political convictions. We read and listen and wonder and write our way to our differing beliefs. We share them on occasion, but we’ve stopped arguing about them.
Perhaps the one consistent lesson that is most worth sharing is this: what keeps us close is that for thirty years we have loved one another, trusted one another with our secrets, honored what each of us cherishes, believed in one another. Thanks be to God, to date even our fierce political differences have not overpowered these deep affections.
That's just what I've been thinking. I'd love to hear how you bridge the gap with your loved ones.
Blessings,
– Rick
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