Why can’t we talk?

December 14, 2007 by Pastor Dan.

“Why can’t we talk about religion or politics?”  This is the opening question which Jim Wallis poses to begin his important 2005 book God’s Politics:  Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It.

It is an old aphorism that these two subjects are taboo “in polite society,” and that says something about politeness–that it’s main rule is to not do or say anything which might be “unpleasant.”  (My friend John in Atlanta says that Southerners used to refer to the Civil War as “that recent unpleasantness.”)

A quick test drive of Google will tell us that people do in fact talk about both religion and politics, constantly, and often in strident tones.  Those who hate religion are equally as vocal and earnest as the salespeople and brokers of religion.  And politics, oh my!  Those on the extremes of both Left and Right are no less vocal than those who are committed to cynicism about the public arena and refuse to identify with the Left or Right.

Well, really, politeness would also forbid us (at a dinner party for example) from talking about sex, or cancer, or for that matter, obesity.  Politeness knows that people have strongly-held opinions, or they do not want to face certain information, or opposing persuasions, in a situation in which they feel trapped such as around a friend’s dinner table.  Years ago an acquaintance was known for going ballistic at a dinner party over the Shroud of Turin, and it became a running gag to try to “set him off” every time he was at a party or other social setting.

My favorite translation of 1 Corinthians 13:7, in St. Paul’s well-known “Love Chapter” is the New English Bible:  “There is nothing love cannot face.”

My loved ones faced cancer with me.  I know a morbidly obese lady who will soon have the bypass surgery, and is facing it largely because she found love in our community and was able to take the first steps with the loving support of another lady who had the surgery to stop her obesity years ago.  In love, we have talked about her obesity and her fears and her dream for a much better life after the surgery.

Is it possible that, if we all practiced love, we could talk about both religion and politics and remain polite?   I realize this sounds like flimsy, pathetic liberalism to some — that, instead of “being right” we would have to be satisfied with “being loving.”  It is the slippery slope of that dreaded liberalism that love could so easily slide or collapse into condoning, accepting or even approving of things which should be considered absolutely wrong!

For example, Jesus himself must have already slid off into liberalism when he said to the woman caught in the act of adultery, “Neither do I condemn you,” John 8:11.

Ah, but what about where he says, “Enter by the narrow door,” Luke 13:24.  Who is it that is making the door narrow—God or human beings who don’t want to condone anything but their own behavior?  That is general advice, in its context in the story of Jesus.  Clearly, he spoke with great fervor about the particulars of moral narrowness, and scolded scribes and Pharisees for their self-righteousness.   How does anyone, or an entire society, know what ethical standards ought to guide us, if we can’t talk about it?

But round and round we go.  Polite society composed only of dedicated Christians will never agree until they surrender their hard-edged “rightness,” and agrre to be open to the influence and maybe persuasion from another source or another point of view.  That has certainly been the case with the huge controversy about human sexuality and homosexuality.  The other point of view, the other experience, which has most influenced the discussion of sexual ethics in our times, has been the “coming out” of individual men and women to their friends, families, employers and churches.

Wallis, who is the respected Editor of Sojourners and an avid, committed evangelical Christian, makes the persuasive argument that if Christians got their religion right, their politics would change.  Perhaps both left and right would find an ethical, responsible, moral, and polite, position somewhere near the center.

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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