The concept of disagreeing with someone’s worldview yet still loving that person or still maintaining a good relationship with that person seems to be a forgotten one in 21st century America. Polarization— the act of forcing a Republican who might be moderate into the right- wing, reactionary club because he disagrees with the Supreme Court’s rulings on Obamacare and same-sex marriage, or deeming a liberal who agrees with those initiatives a communist who hopes to spread hate between the haves and the have nots of this nation; we have proven this tendency to be dominant in our daily lives. And the liberal might actually lean towards being a communist, the Republican might really wish for some things to return to a certain standard set in our nation’s past, but this is not the issue. The issue is this: can we love those who we do not agree with? If not, why the impossibility? If so, how?
A modern secular person who cares about social justice, like an NAACP worker or an LGTBQ activist, will judge any other person’s worldviews based on their take on social justice; a Muslim will be asked why women cannot hold any authority in most Muslim communities, a Christian will be questioned as to why gay persons cannot be married and enjoy the equal benefits of marriage, a center-left politician will be criticized for not pushing hard enough to end LGTBQ discrimination in the workplace. The activist’s disappointment in all three instances will arise from the lack of egalitarianism in each person’s worldview. “It is common knowledge,” the activist would think, “or if it isn’t, then it should be to all people, that social justice for all who are discriminated against should be a fundamental and integral part of any worldview/belief system. And if it is not the center of all beliefs from which everything else flows, then this belief is wrong and culturally regressive.”
The activist has blindly stumbled upon a trend, or in this case a presupposition about the nature of worldviews/beliefs. That what is common knowledge to some should be common knowledge to all is the definition of an objective truth; that because Christianity, Islam, Orthodox Judaism, Asian and Middle Eastern culture neglect to include all people, whether gay, straight, female, of different origin ethnically or racially, in their doctrine of truth and equality, inflaming the social activist who holds equality as supreme in all worldly functions, proves that the activist believes in objectivity. The same applies to the optimist, the cynic, the liberal, the conservative, the anarchist, the atheist, the religious— all of these worldviews judge other worldviews based on the objective nature of their own creeds.
I believe that the polarization of America, the right demonizing the left and vice versa in all spheres of life, stems from objectivity, which maintains that a certain group of people claim to know the truth and the ones who do not believe in it are wrong. This leads to fundamentalism, which we see in almost all religions and in almost all political parties. We are right and they are wrong is the base of many evils in this world: jihad and terrorism, “the cosmic war,” takes this principle to the most extreme, oppression of ethnic minorities like the slave-owning portion of the antebellum South applied this principle to racial relations, the Pharisees of 1st century Jerusalem held themselves so in the right that they felt an urgent need to brutally torture and kill a man who claimed to know something that they didn’t. I see this in the way conservatives deem America as a country headed down the path of damnation because of the SCOTUS decisions; I see this in the way liberals scoff at conservatives and deem them culturally regressive, evil and ignorant. We can’t seem to separate the person from the politics, both become targets for sometimes undeserved criticism.
But what is it about believing in a truth so vehemently and with all of a person’s might that causes a like-minded group of people, when opposed to a group who disagrees with their claim of the truth, to become so enraged that the fragile line of respectful disagreement and inappropriate hostility willingly becomes blurred? Why are humans prone to attack not an opposite view point, but the people who own the view point, with a blinding anger? C.S. Lewis, in his essay The Inner Ring, discusses how each person longs to be in a small group of people who really “know,” who really have a grip on things. But he goes on to say that most of the fun of becoming a member of this proverbial inner ring is the joy of excluding others. A fraternity with half the vigor of the one in Animal House takes joy in hazing the incoming crop and getting to handpick the ones who passed their exam. Only a small group can be in the know about things; if everybody was in the group, then all the fun and secrecy of it would disappear.
Humans wish to be right and in that small slice of the population that is really in the “know.” And part of the fun is excluding those who have yet to, and hopefully never will, stumble upon the secret truth about the universe that you and your select group of peers hold as secretly as a note being passed during class. I keep using liberal vs conservative as a way to show the failure of America to love the people we disagree with, only because of the recent developments in our social/cultural sphere. It seems to me that both have a sickly amount of fun criticizing the other, as if the other had no idea about the real way things should go. The desire to be on the inner circle of things has proven to become a way for people to justify hating people who hold opposite viewpoints. Where does the hatred and unwillingness to even hear the opposition’s worldview come from? It must come from fear: from the fear of being wrong or worse, the quiet yet constant fear that spans over a whole person’s life manifested in a person’s worldview, fear that turns to anger and hostility.
The Pharisees were afraid that they were losing influence over their people, so they grew to hate Christ and had Him killed; Dylan Roof was afraid that he meant nothing, so he placed his worth on being racially supreme to other people in hopes of making himself feel worthwhile, if even in a sick and twisted way. We are afraid that we aren’t desirable, aren’t needed, aren’t valuable, and so we look for things that can give us desirability, the sense that we are needed and are valuable. To some, political views and the belief of having the correct policies, both economic and social, to fix the nation’s problems provides those longed for feelings; religion or a certain philosophy or a certain field of knowledge does it for others, or maybe having a certain gift that others don’t, etc. So again: how to balance the act of love and anger, how to love those who we disagree with even on a deeply personal level, and how to discover the real objective truth so we can fulfill our need once and for all to become a part of that inner circle proven to be so allusive.
“It is foolish, generally speaking, for a philosopher to set fire to another philosopher in Smithfield Marketplace because they do not agree in their theory of the universe. That was done very frequently in the last decadence of the Middle Ages, and it failed altogether in its object. But there is one thing that is infinitely more absurd and unpractical than burning a man for his philosophy. This is the habit of saying that his philosophy does not matter…” (GK Chesterton, Heretics)
To say that a person’s viewpoint does not matter and is irrelevant is to imply that you are crucifying the person along with the viewpoint. If you dislike liberals, it surely is not simply because of their politics. It is also because you dislike the liberals you know personally; you see no common ground with them, there is minimal virtue or competency in them in your opinion. But to say a person is meaningless because of their politics is to say you are meaningful due to yours. We wonder how to reconcile love with anger— it must start here, with ridding ourselves of the notion that a human’s worth comes from their worldview.
Granted, we must judge others not on ethnicity, race, gender or sexuality, we judge based on character, which stems from worldviews and takes on truth. However, deriving a personal meaning, saying I am somebody because I believe x, y and z, from a particular worldview leads to all kinds of prejudice: to dedicate one’s life to a certain cause implies that you demonize others who are in opposition to yours. We should not derive personal worth from worldly truth, but from cosmic truth— to think I am important because I am liberal can only mean that my worth is measured by a perception of being a more humane person than most conservatives. But to think that I am worthy only because God sees me as such, without any rhyme or reason, with actually more reasons not to think of me as loveable— this leaves no room for prejudice. It is not because of anything I believe or do, which must mean that I am not superior to anybody on this planet. None of us can please the Father solely on our actions or on our resumes; it is only an act of grace that we can be called Children of God.
You can say that we all have dignity regardless of our beliefs solely because we have a higher level of conscience when compared to the rest of the animal kingdom (I disagree with you, but still love you) or that, added onto our higher level of consciousness, God’s love has given us a meaning transcendent of all things we can do to make ourselves feel better. And this is where I agree— that God doesn’t love us because we are conservative or liberal, Catholic or Protestant, a gifted writer or an average one, He loves us because we are His, and nothing else. This attitude eliminates, or at least it should when practiced, all racism, classism and sexism; we have no reason to believe that we are better than others, or that we have God’s love based on our own merits. The Bible makes it clear that all fall short of God’s glory, and are in desperate need of a Savior, of a truth so powerful, so promising, that it can indeed save your life, mortal and immortal.
To rid ourselves of the fear which creeps into our personal lives and personal convictions, we need a love that makes us feel completely desired, delighted in, valuable and loveable. I can see no human love or human action or anything worldly that can provide such a profound gift. I do not even see a religion or belief system that offers such a profoundly intimate promise and that makes such a startling claim as Christ when He says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one reaches the Father except through me.” He is either what He claims to be or a lunatic or a liar, but He is not Mohammed or one of the prophets of the Old Testament or Buddha. He is not simply a moral teacher; He is one of the three: liar, lunatic, God in human flesh. If He is God in human flesh, then my friends, everything changes. If He rose from the tomb, all of life suddenly takes on a new perspective. Learning about Christianity is the most important thing you could study: it claims to be the truth about life, and if it isn’t, then it means nothing, but if it is, then we must adhere to it.
I mentioned how we can discover the real objective truth that quenches our thirst to be really in the know, and this is how. Christ makes the claim for us; He tells us that He is the truth of the world, and all attempts at discovering other truths to live by will end up futile. Again, you can shake your head and claim Him to be a liar, you can gaze at His words in bewilderment and claim Him to be crazy, or you can jump for joy and sing praises to His name, but you cannot claim Him to simply be a moral teacher like the rest of the religious teachers. He never claimed to be that, and neither did His followers. How can Christ provide the balance of love and anger? By providing the truth: we are loved beyond all comprehension, doted upon like a grandma and to her grandchild times infinity, delighted in as “an artist delights in his work.” This truth puts the water on our fiery hearts, consumed by the need to be right and be in the right to make ourselves feel worthwhile.
We are worthwhile, regardless of any human construction or social convention we fail to live up to. We have love, and no further use of fear; anger and disagreement can fit properly in their place. What is anger but the hatred of a good thing becoming corrupted, of something right being tainted with wrong, that has the dangerous power to consume an individual, but when used correctly, has the power to change lives for the better. Anger is not the issue; we should not rid ourselves of anger. If you saw a woman being mistreated by a man, it would be wrong for you not to step in and stop the mistreatment. And to interfere would require you to be a little angry with the man. Anger can be good; it is fear that corrupts it. The only thing powerful enough to conquer the legions that fear sends up the hill of our heart is to raid its armies with the Calvary of love. We can only balance anger with love, not with more truth or more knowledge.
The apostle Paul walks the tight-rope nearly perfectly.
16While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols. 17So he reasoned in the synagogue with both Jews and God-fearing Greeks, as well as in the marketplace day by day with those who happened to be there. 18A group of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers began to debate with him. Some of them asked, “What is this babbler trying to say?” Others remarked, “He seems to be advocating foreign gods.” They said this because Paul was preaching the good news about Jesus and the resurrection. 19Then they took him and brought him to a meeting of the Areopagus, where they said to him, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? 20You are bringing some strange ideas to our ears, and we would like to know what they mean.” 21(All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas.)
22Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: “People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. 23For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship—and this is what I am going to proclaim to you.
24“The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. 25And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. 26From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. 27God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. 28‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’b As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’c
29“Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by human design and skill. 30In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. 31For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead.” (Acts 17: 16-31)
Paul sees all of the false gods and idols being worshiped, and becomes angry. But instead of becoming blind with his anger and allowing it to evolve into the hatred of Greece and its inferior pagan worship, he brings his faith to the marketplace, where everybody met to discuss philosophy, religion and life. He loved Greek culture so much that he even used their poetry to prove his own faith; he was emotionally invested in them, regardless of their religious beliefs. Paul did not come to condemn them; he did not thump the Bible and claim all are going to hell, he appealed to their logic since he knew they were a logical people, and wished to engage their minds. Love and anger— Paul was angry with their idols, with their mythology, only because he knew the real truth that they were trying to discover. He brought to the marketplace the culmination of their mythologies, Jesus Christ, with a just anger but an endless love— the perfect balance that sparked their intrigue as well as their logic.
Paul knew the fiery passion God had for those people, but also His disappointment with their idol worship. The more we understand, the more the truth seeps into our hearts, that God is ravished with us like a bridegroom and his bride, the more our view of others begins to adapt to His way. We begin to look upon others and have love for them; we begin to enjoy people for who they are: God’s creation. But we also will begin to understand how much God wishes for us to put our hearts’ desires on Him, how much he longs for us to delight in Him as He has delighted in us our whole lives. This is where we must find our balance.
So how to walk the tight-rope? Look at Paul, better yet, look at Christ, who was able to look through peoples’ exterior and into their interior, and have compassion on them. Paul had the real truth, Christ was the real truth— the inner ring, the real objectivity we seek, lies in the cross and the empty tomb. And in this inner ring, there is no desire to exclude others, but only to welcome with open arms. Christians wish to spread the good news, not to keep it a secret only for the elect few to harbor. Christians should be angry with the way of the world, with sin and its implications both culturally and personally, but should be consumed with love and grace that God has lavishly bestowed upon us. We cannot end the endless cycle of bigotry and fundamentalism without the Eternal Man. What will it take for you to discover Him?
