“Preoccupied”
I find myself more distracted these days. Mind you, the work is being completed, but when I say “distracted” I mean “preoccupied” with certain trends that pop up in the algorithm.
Today I was sucked into a Business Insider: Authorized Account documentary about the U.S. Neo-Nazi movement, how it recruits, and what it’s symbols mean. I suddenly started seeing all these parallels in my life in church, social life, politics, and discourse, where we have drank the Kool-Aid of being angry and pissed off, looking for someone—anyone other than ourselves—to blame for fill-in-the-blank. For example, in church it’s all too easy to demonize a certain movement/minority interest and use that energy to galvanize support for the cause of Christ. Instead, we should be confident in standing by our doctrinal positions, understanding that cultural capital in our current zeitgeist is worthless in comparison to the glory of God, and—despite everything else—we ought to dedicate ourselves to unrelenting service. It reminded me of being at a Super Bowl party this year and watching my friend cringe at the “He Gets Us” campaign add, cynically remarking on the likelihood that the ad was funded by the Christian-Right. I don’t know if there’s any truth to that, but to view (de facto) the gospel with suspicion is a tragedy. And it’s a wound we inflicted on ourselves when we made the Faustian bargain for secular power in U.S. politics.
Socially, I have encountered this and, at times, even contributed to an atmosphere of division. Usually it’s because I have been swept up into a “struggle” of some kind. Left vs Right, Catholic vs Protestant, Mac vs PC, and so on. I was listening to a podcast debate between a reformed theologian and a catholic apologist, and noted how the Reformed theologian would frame his insistence on certain positions as a concession to his opponent. Rather than pursuing an ecumenical dialogue, his desire was to honor the differences between them. Fair enough. But it’s a slippery slope when a Catholic acknowledges the primacy of the Catholic Church’s ecclesiastical structure, and one’s obedience to it, as a prerequisite to salvation. Likewise, the Reformed theologian builds an argument based on division, which I honestly struggle with. While I agree with most of the rallying Protestant causes, I am hard pressed to say with any authority that not one soul was “saved” between 476AD and 1517AD due to the apparent obsequiousness to Catholic dogma by the majority of medieval Europe.
In the same vein, my daughter contributed to a discussion in class this past week about homeschooling, mentioning my friend, “who loves God and Jesus,” and how his daughter with special needs is homeschooled. Her friend then raises her hand right after and said something to the effect of “my mom and dad say to ignore her whenever she talks about god.” Sure, I was mad initially, but this is obviously an issue of etiquette and pragmatism—what to say, and what not to say—and I don’t fault her friend for saying this. (Second grade is not a place where I would expect impeccable social awareness skills.) It was a response, likely, to what my daughter said a few months prior. In conversation, she had quoted John 3:16 to the same friend while they were talking about who’s “perfect.” The friend’s parents then made the fair assumption that my daughter was proselytizing, which resulted in a very out of the blue text message at 6am confronting us about it. None of this comes as a surprise to me, of course. I’m not expecting any red-carpet treatment for being Christian, and neither should my daughter. But the appropriate response to a disagreement shouldn’t be to pretend there isn’t one. It should be a discussion on how to respectfully disagree, even if the end result is still more persecution.
The fear of losing control contributed substantially to the Neo-Nazi documentary, however. When people are desperate, they lash out and try to gain back control through violence and intimidation. So it was no wonder that the prime recruiting demographic for white nationalists had historically been poor, disaffected white males, coming from abusive households, looking for some external force to blame. It’s a tragedy, then, that these same kids looked at segregated black neighborhoods and established causal connections between the community’s skin color and their apparent poverty, when it was actually the result of decades of systemic oppression. Although there is something to be said about white privilege, with the ever increasing gap between rich and poor, at some point all of us are going to end up in the same shitty situation of being shafted by companies that are incentivized to degrade their employees.
Bottomline, I think if we look at people with empathy, we will be less likely to lash out at them when they disappoint us. I try to follow Jesus’s example, where he will look at someone as a whole before offering his insight. He may have implicitly invited the Samaritan woman at the well to follow him, but it wasn’t before approaching her and getting to know her. My challenge to all of you is to actually get to know someone you vehemently disagree with, attempt to understand why they think the way they do. At the very least, it will get you off your phone. That’s I got sucked into this whole mess in the first place.
