Focus on the soft-hearted, not your hardest opponents

Set boundaries with people with whom you are diametrically opposed, but call in those who have softened hearts.

Photo by 🪷 🍄 on Unsplash

During my freshman year at Temple University, I joined our parliamentary debate team. I’m not much of a debater, but I enjoyed the sport quite a bit. I enjoy exchanging ideas, trying to convince people of a certain point of view, and even learning something new. Twenty years ago, when I did these debates, it honestly felt like a different time. It felt like a time where we could exchange ideas and not reduce ourselves strictly down to partisan ideology.

These days, it seems like we are far too polarized to have similar discussions. For many people, that polarization is a problem to be fixed. But the material conditions that resulted in that polarization aren’t what some argue that we should be addressing, but rather, a return to some idyllic time of peaceable political discourse.

Some people argue that we are polarized because of social media, because of online discourse, because the news media profits from an ad nauseam partisan war. And sure, maybe that’s all part of it, but the deeper issue is here that we’ve moved from debates about the issues to debates about human beings themselves, their dignity, their lives, and their material conditions.

It’s not lost on me that we’ve been discussing and debating serious issues for a long time—and that in the early 2000s, when I was debating college teams at Swarthmore College and even as far as Lithuania and Estonia, we were dealing with existential issues. At the time, the Bush Administration was leading us in pre-emptive quagmire wars based on faulty and dishonest premises, killing thousands of innocents.. I remember how activated those conflicts made me and how passionate I felt about the futility of those wars. But even then, we could have had reasoned, even if passionate, discussions. What’s more, people seemed to have softer hearts. I remember discussing the War in Iraq with people and getting them to see my perspective, and for my part, I also could see theirs. There was a softness, perhaps one that I am idealizing, that doesn’t seem to exist anymore.

These days, not only is the dialogue more vitriolic, but the stakes seem a lot higher. Even the Bush Administration, dare I say, adhered to a modicum of decorum and decency. We now live in an era of misinformation and a complete disregard for decency. Basic medical facts and research are ignored. The CDC is in disarray. Trump’s moral record is apparently awful, and yet those who, just a few decades ago, were clutching their pearls at a president’s moral behavior have discarded those convictions for the sake of political power.

And what’s more, basic human rights are on the table, while white supremacy is on the rise and being emboldened. Say what you will about the Bush Administration, but even he didn’t scapegoat an entire people and religion after 9/11. These days, xenophobia and Islamophobia are Republican talking points.

There was a time, and maybe I’m the one who is being idyllic here, where we at least could agree on the ends, even if we didn’t agree on the means. But now, even a relatively simple moral agreement isn’t something we can come by. We can’t agree to condemn a genocide. We can’t agree that concentration camps are evil. We can’t agree that elections should be free and fair. Armed people are killing children, literally, and we can’t agree that gun control and gun safety should be something we prioritize collectively. The military is patrolling our cities, and people cheer it on. Our “culture wars” aren’t about policy, they’re about people. Our politics has shifted from debate about issues to debate about people.

There are many reasons for this rise in polarization, but I found Barack Obama’s perspective helpful here. When he ran in 2008, Obama claimed he could walk into a predominantly white town in Middle America and maybe even convince a Republican to vote for him. By the time 2012 came, though, Barack Obama claimed that the racist vitriol was too intense for such a discussion to happen. Sometimes people blame Obama for that divisiveness, but a clearer answer, to me, is that the candidacy and presidency of Obama awakened a relatively dormant American white supremacy. The 2016 election of Donald Trump was a White lash, as some commentators suggested.

Hearts are now hardened in a way I haven’t experienced in my life. Conversations with people who disagree are painful to have. I know folks who simply don’t go to family gatherings where political disagreement is on the table. For my part, I go, and try to be polite while setting boundaries about what I will and won’t talk about. The cost of those boundaries is intimacy, but without the boundaries, the cost would be my mental health.

Because we often see our political opponents as totally calcified, it may seem that we are paralyzed in our ability to share ideas, to learn from one another, and to try to make the world a better place. But I do not feel hopeless for three reasons.

The first is a spiritual conviction. No matter how polarized and hard-hearted we are, hope isn’t lost for those who defend fascism, oppression, and genocide. But I place my hope not in my own winsome arguments or ability to empathize with my enemy, but rather I place it in God. I place it in the Holy Spirit. I believe that over time, hearts can be softened, and we do see that in real time. At least in the example of the genocide in Gaza, even hard-line supporters of Israel seem to be softening. And that’s a credit to the work of activists and journalists who have risked themselves to speak out for the truth even when we were harassed and threatened.

But the second reason I have hope to transcend this polarized world is that not everyone is ideologically sorted. Many people are ignorant or indifferent. That’s a good thing. We can talk to people who have softer hearts to help them see where the trouble of the world is and how we might overcome it. Look for those people first. Chances are, they aren’t terminally online.

Finally, I have hope because I think my job is not to convince my hardest political opponent, but to comfort the afflicted. My job as a follower of Jesus is to care for the most vulnerable. And in many ways, that means caring for one another. It means praying together, singing together, eating together, and laughing together. It means embracing one another, hugging one another, and just being human beings together. There’s hope in that.

My admonishment and encouragement, then, is to set boundaries with those with hardened hearts, find opportunities to dialogue with those who are not ideologically calcified, and finally, to comfort the afflicted and most affected by the oppression around us.