Do not be unequally yoked together with unbelievers. For what fellowship has righteousness with lawlessness? And what communion has light with darkness?
2 Corinthians 6:14
[Chris Murphy] I am a progressive Democrat. But I’m friends with Republicans. I frequent businesses owned by Republicans. I root for sports teams full of Republicans. I’ve devoted my life to politics, but I’m careful to not let my politics consume me.
Social media was a mistake. – Joe (a different one)
[Progressive Tweeter] Senator. Black, brown and LGBTQ+ people don’t have this luxury because Republicans want us dead and don’t want us to have civil rights. It’s not a difference of opinion to us. It’s survival. It’s our existence. You should know better.
LAST WEEK, I WONDERED ABOUT FRIENDSHIP IN A FRACTURING CULTURE. What is necessary for a relationship to be considered a “friendship”? Is it possible for you to be friends with people if you don’t share values? How much of your whole self do you need to have involved in a relationship for it to be authentic and valuable? How much of yourself can you hide before you are no longer present in your relationships? Is Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell viable, desirable, necessary for relationships across political divides?
Each question applies to more than friendship – they have to do with love, affection, goodwill, meaningful relationships and the ability to live in common as such. Many relationships are suffering from the politicization of everything. This week, I’d like to share four stories of relationships being devoured by the abyssal maw of our political moment, and reflect on love and purity.
Neighbors
In her February 5, 2021 LA Times column “What can you do about the Trumpites next door?” Virginia Heffernan wrestles with an ethical problem: how much thanks does she owe her “aggressively nice” Trump-voting neighbors who “plowed [her] driveway without being asked and did a great job”, given that her neighbors “supported a man who showed near-murderous contempt for the majority of Americans”? Is it possible, she wonders, for her to appreciate an act of kindness from her Trump-supporting, Blue-Lives-Mattering, Hezbollah/Farrakhan/Nazi-like neighbors without giving their beliefs and behavior a moral pass?
Her conclusion:
At the time, I seethed; the Capitol had just been desecrated. But maybe my neighbor heard Sasse and was determined to make a bid for reconciliation. … Free driveway work, as nice as it is, is just not the same currency as justice and truth. … But I can offer a standing invitation to make amends. Not with a snowplow but by recognizing the truth about the Trump administration and, more important, by working for justice for all those whom the administration harmed.”
Friends
– Through good times and bad! At least until I think you’re evil.
Last week, I wrote in response to Joe’s post about how a friendship was breaking because of the January 6 riot. He was kind enough to share more about what happened.
“I’ve been fortunate to have a small group of longtime friends – we’ve been friends for 15 years. We travel together, we’re there for each other in good times and bad times. Three of us are conservative, two are liberal, but politics was never a thing for us. Up until a few years ago, I wasn’t political at all.
“The guy I wrote about is a wonderful, caring person. He’s been there for me during dark times in my life. But politically, he’s a loud liberal. He likes to tell whoever’s listening about the injustices in the world, without doing much about them. He also doesn’t do much to develop a balanced perspective about world events. This was clear during the Obama administration. Obama could do no wrong, it was the ‘awful Republicans’ who kept getting in the way of Obama’s heroic agenda. When Trump was elected, he got dramatic about how dangerous Trump was for the country and the world, saying the typical stuff about how he was racist and sexist and bigoted, how he would start World War III, how he colluded with Russia to steal the election in 2016. He talked about Trump far more than anyone else. And anytime we pushed back, he couldn’t tolerate it. Conversation was impossible.
“So, the January 6 riot happens, and he texts me and the two other conservatives in our group – keep in mind that we’ve been friends for 15 years – ‘anyone who can support a political party that produced these terrorists has no place in my life. I’m sorry.’
“I got upset. I don’t know how to describe it other than going through the stages of grief. In a few days I went from feeling hurt, to wanting desperately to work it out, to being furious, to accepting it. It was rapid. I didn’t respond to his text.
“About a week later, he texted me something random. I ignored it. He called me, and I ignored that too. Then came another text: ‘So… are we not talking or something?‘
“I replied that he should review his recent texts to me and see if one sticks out to explain why we weren’t talking. He called and asked if we could meet up. We did. And this is where I have to admit I’m stuck: he never recognized how unreasonable he was being. He went on and on about how no one can blame him or ‘most people in the country’ for being furious about what Trump supporters did, and about how he can’t understand how any of us could have voted for Trump or supported him to begin with.
“This is when I had my say. I told him how much it hurt for him to toss years of good friendship away over something that complete strangers chose to do, something that I had nothing to do with. I told him that I was sorry it happened too, and that he doesn’t get to hold me accountable for a riot I had no part in. His response was, ‘I know you weren’t a part of it, I know that.’ That’s it. We talked more or less normally after that, but I never got an apology.
“We’ve reconciled a bit since then, to the point where we can talk about our lives like normal. But things aren’t the same. Maybe they never will be. Maybe the aren’t meant to be. The two other conservatives in the group didn’t have this problem: they faced him down, kind of put him in his place right away, and were back to ‘normal’ sooner than me. This tells me something. I cowered to his tantrum, when I should have stood up for myself right away and fought back in a productive way. That might have helped.
“I love him, and I want what is best for him. But I don’t know that ‘back to normal’ is possible now.”
Families
Guy Reffitt, a Texan with apparent ties to a right-wing militia (the Three Percenters), participated in the January 6 Riot and was arrested by the FBI on January 16. His 18 year old son, Jackson, tipped the FBI off about his father weeks before the riot because “he would always tell me that he’s going to do something big.”
There aren’t many details publicly available beyond Jackson’s statements and interviews, so much of what we have is one-sided. Here’s my attempt at summarizing events, pieced together from several sources (New York Times, CNN, MSN, Local).
Jackson and his father have had a strained relationship for years due to political differences. He says that his father’s political views have radicalized over the past four years – that his father had been manipulated and changed by Trump, that he began talking about the world as if it were in the end times, that the country was on the brink of collapse, and that he was going to “do something big.”
Jackson says that his father gave him an ultimatum about “choosing a side,” suggesting that if he picked the “wrong side,” his father would have to “do something he didn’t want to do.” After the 6th, when the FBI launched a public campaign to find people who’d participated in the riot, Jackson says that his father told him “if you turn me in, you’re a traitor and you know what happens to traitors – traitors get shot.” Jackson says he was a “nervous wreck,” that he felt threatened by his father’s words and scared about the way his father had changed, and that he might actually do something dangerous. He tipped the FBI off about his father’s apparent radicalization, out of a sense of concern for his family’s safety. It had nothing, he says, to do with their political differences.
In the wake of the news that he turned his father in, his mother and sisters distanced themselves from Jackson and cut him off. They had no idea he’d done so until his CNN interview with Chris Cuomo. His sisters confirmed that their father made threatening statements, but that “he definitely wasn’t saying he would shoot [them]. That claim is so, so out there it doesn’t even make sense. It’s so out of context.” Jackson started a GoFundMe and has raised more than 100 thousand dollars.
Jackson says he is sorry things happened this way, but that he’d do it again because he did what he thought was right – just like his father did what he thought was right.
Partners
After reading my post last week, a friend reached out to me about the challenges his marriage is facing as a result of deep political/moral differences and noncommunication about them.
“How did I end up married to such a leftist?” I knew S had been having marital issues with his husband. They disagreed about politics, and it had become increasingly obvious that their differences ran deep. But disagreement wasn’t the main problem.
“It’s just awful. For four years, I’ve had to be silent. He tells me I’m not allowed to talk about what he says are ‘political topics.’ I can’t ask him what he thinks about Biden approving the airstrike in Syria, or about kids taking hormones without parental consent. He shuts the conversation down. If I bring up something I heard about, he says that he’s going to go to his own news sources [PBS and The Economist] to find out what really happened.”
If it were just no-political-talk, that would be one thing. However the political embargo goes one way: “He and his friends make the most ridiculous jokes about conservatives and call conservatives racists and sexists and whatnot, right in front of me. They justify the BLM riots, they believe in open borders, they say that Trump colluded with Russia to steal the election, they accuse Republicans of perpetuating ‘the Big Lie’ for questioning the 2020 election integrity, they condemn January 6 as domestic terrorism. Democrats got 1000+ days to claim election fraud in 2016. I was told 16 days after the election in 2020 that I was not allowed to question the integrity of the election. I’m supposed to just take that?”
Before they were married, S knew that he and his husband disagreed on political issues, but he thought they had a common base of morals and that they could work through them. However, “he doesn’t want to talk about our disagreements. He just believes his own media sources, who say that conservatives are Nazis and white supremacists and that their perspectives don’t deserve one minute of his time.”
I asked him whether he thinks the marriage can be saved. “I want to love him. We’re starting counseling. But over the years, he’s taken positions and justified stuff that to me seems immoral – and he doesn’t want to talk about it or work through our disagreements. I guess we could just not talk about meaningful stuff for 60 years and have a roommate-marriage. But why? In order for things to improve, we need to be able to communicate. I need him to be willing to talk with me. I need him to acknowledge that calling a whole group of people racists or sexists without specific evidence is just wrong.”
The good news is that, after some counseling, things seem to be improving. S says that his husband is more aware of the communication issues, and they’re in a better place. Their project now is to carve out time every week that they dedicate to open discussion about issues – political or otherwise- that didn’t have space before, where they can air their disagreements and talk through them with the understanding that they still love each other and believe in ‘us’ despite their disagreements.
Do Not Be Unequally Yoked
In Paul’s second epistle to the Christians in Corinth, he advises that they not intertwine their lives with people who do not share their beliefs, values, ethics. He was not telling them not to live among unbelievers, but rather to be careful about becoming close to people with different “sacred canopies” than them, since co-mingling belief systems diluted them. Jesus himself, in a striking passage, told his followers that “If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple. And whoever does not bear his cross and come after Me cannot be My disciple. … So likewise, whoever of you does not forsake all that he has cannot be My disciple.” (Luke 14:26-27, 33).
I’m a natural mediator. I’m someone who can see all sides of an issue, and holding strong beliefs is foreign to me. Passages like this make me terribly uncomfortable because I see how strong beliefs can cause social strife. The ferocious pursuit of purity – religious or political or anything – has led to tribalism and catastrophe in the past.
But here’s the thing: if you believe something to be true and right, why shouldn’t you fight for it and pursue it single-mindedly? Why should you value a relationship over truth and the good, as you see them? One reason the postmoderns undertook the project of dismantling certainty and truth and morality – dismantling metanarrative – was to prevent the next wave of totalizing war. You can’t have ideological clash if you don’t have ideology! But humans can’t live without beliefs, and ironically, the postmodern beliefs-that-aren’t-beliefs undergird a new totalizing ideology sweeping the West – Wokism. The new Puritanism certainly lives by Paul’s dictum, knowingly or not, and nonbelievers are paying a hefty social price for their apostasy.
In her piece about the Trumpites next door, Heffernan mentions “Love your neighbor” in passing – unironically taking a swipe at people who only love neighbors who are like themselves. She has a conception of who her “Trumpite Neighbors” are, what they believe and do, and feels cognitive dissonance between that conception and her neighbors’ act of kindness. She rationalizes this by seeing hidden motives that must have come from dark places – it’s easy to hold people accountable for their evil, if you can mind-read and interpret their every action as evidence of that evil. Her neighbors aren’t given a voice in her piece. I’d love to see how they responded to it.
But there’s a point buried here – some understanding of “neighborly love” that doesn’t require that your neighbor share your ideological purity. After all, the early Christians lived among and found ways to care for people who hated them. Christ himself, on the cross, prayed for those who killed him.
IF we want to continue our experiment in liberal self-government, then we need to consciously choose to figure out what the heart of neighborly love is and work on cultivating it for the real people in our lives and communities. We need to let go of the political narratives that have crusted over the flesh and blood. We need to relearn to see the human that we’ve been taught to believe is a monster. We need to look past the convenient narratives being spun about “political others” and create space for meaningful dialectic, communication about what we disagree on and why. We need to reassert a love and belief in “us” that can survive vigorous disagreement. Otherwise, our pluralistic “sacred democracy” will not last much longer.