Try going through your Facebook timeline without finding a post from one of your “friends” picking a fight over some contentious political issue. See if you can get through an hour of watching the Sunday morning talks shows, any of the prime time cable news shows, or a radio talk show without somebody saying something disparaging about their political opposition. If you haven’t already figured out how to mark as “spam” those emails from people you know that just send out political propaganda, your mailbox is full of it.
It’s getting ugly out there, isn’t it?
As I was teaching on Galatians, a quote from Scot McKnight‘s commentary on Galatians jumped out at me:
Paul says literally (in Galatians 5:15): “If you keep on biting and devouring each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other.” Technically, Paul could have said: “If you keep on biting and devouring each other, you will be destroyed by each other.” The addition of “watch out for” puts emphasis, emotionally, on the sin. The problem of the Galatians is typically human: egos enter into the debates between people and before long the issue is who is going to win; it becomes who is right, not what is right.
The “typical human” problem for all of us is this: More important than humbly seeking “what is right” is to be the one “who is right.”
This, sadly, is one of the worst besetting sins of evangelicals (of whom I am one). We are so enamored with being right that we do not listen to others’ insights, especially if we have successfully labeled them in a category that we can dismiss outright.
If you can label someone something that disparages them, you can go ahead and devour them with your words. You can see them as less than yourself and attack at will. This is what propaganda does during wartime – the Germans and Japanese are no longer humans, they are Krauts and Nips. All the easier to kill them. This is what we do in political wars as well.
This comes from both sides of the political spectrum, which uses terms like these:
- “liberal” or “fundamentalist,”
- “radical gay agenda” or “homophobe,”
- “baby killer” or “anti-choice,”
- “socialist” or “obstructionist.”
I’m sure you can add to this list.
I certainly do not expect our politicians and cable news pundits to live up to Christian virtue in their dealing with their opposition (even those that confess a Christian faith have showed that their hypocrisy is the norm, not the exception). It is readily apparent that what is more important to politicians in today’s contentious congress is that they oppose the other party. Instead of seeking what is right, they want to be seen as the ones who are right (and I’m talking about both the Republicans and the Democrats here).
But there is a better way. As we discuss the important issues of our day, we need to be careful of how we treat each other.
We need to check our egos at the door, decide to humbly enter into dialog, and (even while holding fast to our convictions) be willing to accept that, yes, at times, we may need to change our minds.
Can we let go of our need to be right all the time?
Image by Luke Addison. Used with permission. Sourced via Flickr.
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