On election night, a Facebook (and real life!) friend, Brandon, posted a status update to the effect that Americans were naive for voting for Obama. I took issue with Brandon’s remark, which he had first delivered to me over iChat, and it prompted a couple days of discussion and disagreement between us. This was standard issue stuff: he’s one of my oldest and dearest friends, but we disagree about many things political, theological, and sports-ical.
To his great credit, Brandon reflected on his update, retracted it, and
offered a reflection on what he meant to express. (Also standard issue–he’s truly a mensch.) But what struck me about all this was not that Republican evangelicals were disheartened–duh–but that they were able to express their feelings in a public space apparently without being concerned about how their remarks would be heard by friends who disagree. Did they not have any Obama supporters among their Facebook friends? No one who would take their abject disdain for Obama’s voters as a personal affront? Were they able to be so straightforward in their reaction because their community consists entirely of people who share their views?
I’m not talking here of people who used appropriate language in one way or the other—statements that express support or disagreement of a position are fine in a public space. I’m talking about those of us who traffic in the cold language of culture war, those of us who have never sat over coffee with someone who holds the opposite point of view, have never strained to make ourselves understood by someone with a wholly other position, and, worse, have never strained to make ourselves listen to the other side express its views. Listening does not mean “forming a rejoinder while waiting for them to finish.” It means paying attention in a way that causes you to consider what it’s like to hold their position. It means seeing that position as embodied–as coming from within a fully human experience.
I was reminded of this last night while reading
The Blue Parakeet, Scot McKnight’s fine new book on how to read the Bible. McKnight develops a metaphor for Bible reading from this world of social media I’m describing above. He says that one way
his blog has successfully managed to solve the problem of harsh, ad hominem attacks in typical blog comment threads is that he makes each commenter identify themselves:
[T]hose who drop comments in the comment box on a blog can do so anonymously or with a fictitious name. Under the cloak of anonymity, they can become bold and brazen and can blast away. Incivility makes blogs far too often. … Knowing one another restores civility. … Since I believe “context is everything,” context-less comments and faceless comments, which are what fictitious names or anonymous comments are, are not permitted. Anyone who speaks up anonymously or fictitiously is context-less. Until we know the context or until we know who is saying what and why, it is difficult to know how to respond.
McKnight applies this, quite smartly, to learning to read the Bible in context. (It’s in chapter 4–very much worth reading.) But I thought his metaphor elucidated the basic problem with culture war speech: It’s completely depersonalized. The people lamenting (or being poor winners) on Facebook were not imagining interlocutors–they were speaking freely into a space where no persons existed who would not share their views. (A tool like Facebook ought to offer an easy solution for them, but that’s another matter.)
American Christianity is in need of many things, but one thing we need most is a deep examination of our speech. How do we communicate with those who do not share our views? How do we respect our brothers and sisters with whom we don’t see eye-to-eye on core issues? The first step, I’d wager, is to get to know those people, and listen to them. When we do, we’ll realize that if we’re going to make any sort of persuasional progress, we’re going to have to stop talking as if we’re the only ones listening.
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