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You should have liberal friends

This past Sunday, NPR’s Weekend Edition ran a spot on a company that helps conservative people move from blue states to more right-leaning locales, namely Texas. You can read the full transcript here.

The piece focuses on the Stokes family, particularly Mr. Stokes, who is frustrated with the ever growing leftward tilt of his home state of California. The people of California have recently passed a number of measures he voted against: legalized marijuana, higher gas taxes, and the early release of some non-violent prisoners.

Feeling increasingly marginalized, Mr. Stokes contacted Conservative Move, a company that specializes in “helping families move Right,” which in practice means helping them move to north Texas, a place blessed with not only a Republican majority but also a booming economy and affordable housing. Conservative Move’s founder, Paul Chabot, reports that over 2,000 families have enlisted his services since the company began operations in May.

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As a political conservative myself, I both sympathize with and am troubled by this phenomenon. Not that I think that it’s a very important phenomenon in and of itself - I’m pretty sure that politics is not the primary motivation for the vast majority of interstate moves. Rather, the Stokes’ move is interesting as a clear expression of an impulse that is at once very natural and potentially dangerous.

It’s natural because, for most of us, it’s not all that much fun living on the political margins. Today marks two years of my serving at a truly wonderful church in southern Illinois, a largely conservative region in a state whose politics are dominated by the decidedly non-conservative city of Chicago. This is evidenced by the fact that, every four years, Illinois turns blue on the electoral map of the country, and there isn’t much anyone in the southern part of the state can do about it.

It’s understandable to seek out a community that is shaped by your values and beliefs. Most conservatives in blue states stop short of moving to Texas, but they do tend to at least find like-minded company in order to weather the storm of leftwing mismanagement together. This is fine as far is it goes.

But there’s a dangerous side to this impulse: it can lead to a kind of self-segregation (if you are conservative) from liberal people and ideas.* This is a very bad thing for at least a couple of reasons, one less important, one very important indeed.

First, the less important reason. It’s your job as a mature and responsible conservative participating in the public discourse to make the best case you can for limited government, lower taxes, fiscal responsibility, a strong national defense, traditional moral values, etc.

But the problem is that self-segregation (the wonderfully evocative term “echo chamber” comes to mind) makes for pretty sloppy thinking. That is, if everyone in your circle of friends or on your Facebook feed is voicing enthusiastic assent, then you’re not going to have much incentive to refine your thinking or consider new data, resulting in arguments that aren’t going to convince anyone but the already convinced.

For example, in order to make a serious case that abortion-on-demand should be illegal, you’re going to have to deal in one way or another with the fact that thousands of women die every year from illicit and unsafe abortions in countries that outlaw the practice. But it’s unlikely that this disturbing reality would come across your radar unless you’re willing to at least give a hearing to pro-choice perspectives.

Secondly, and far more importantly, it’s dangerous to make critical or pejorative statements about broad groups of people (e.g., liberals, or for that matter conservatives or Muslims or Catholics) without really knowing any individuals from that group. This is how some really nasty stuff gets started. I remember listening to a nationally syndicated talk radio show in which a caller proposed that the best way of dealing with liberals was to “hang ‘em high.” He was hopefully speaking in jest, but we know from history that, once a certain level of “polarization” is reached in a society, threats of violence stop being jokes.

It’s just too easy for the people who disagree with you to become a nameless, faceless Other whose own beliefs are grounded in either incomprehensible stupidity at best, or in malicious intent at worst. They become not interlocutors to be reasoned with, but enemies to be fought, or suppressed.

This is the true danger of political self-segregation. It’s best averted by forming actual (i.e., non-digital) relationships with the people on the other side of the aisle, getting to know their own backgrounds and hopes and struggles. It turns out that people usually have pretty good personal reasons for believing the way they do, even if their beliefs are wrong or misguided. Short of this, at very least read the work of thoughtful liberal commentators (to my mind, Paul Krugman is the best of the best on the liberal team).

As conservatives, we should reach across the aisle to the real, richly complex people on the other side. We owe it to them, to ourselves, and to our society. * Clearly, the converse holds true as well. It’s been my experience that folks on the left are just as prone to create insulated mutual admiration societies. It’s kind of a human problem. 

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Pride and moral outrage

“‘Scripture said with perfect truth, The beginning of all sin is pride, for it cast down the devil with whom sin originated.”   

- St. Augustine, Nature and Grace

In the days of St. Augustine and the other church fathers, “pride,” the deadliest of the deadly sins, meant something like self-satisfaction or self-worship. A proud person is, for whatever reason, someone who is rather impressed with himself. This is not at all, according to the church fathers, a good place to be. Pride is dangerous for a host of reasons, not least of which is that it leads to one’s damnation, since a person enamored with himself is not about to beg God for the grace necessary for salvation.

In modern English, the word “pride” has acquired a pretty wide range of usages. A man is proud of his son; an engineer takes pride in her work; this past June was Pride Month; we’re proud to be Americans, ‘cause at least we know we’re free. These usages are connected with the old sense of “pride,” in that they deal with satisfaction or admiration, but they don’t obviously refer to something wrong or bad or sinful.

In our language, then, we can’t simply label “pride” as a deadly sin and then move on without further explanation. There is nothing nefarious about this. Words shift in meaning over time - that is what words do.

At the same time, it’s important that we still be able to talk about “pride” in the old, Augustinian sense, even if it means calling it “conceit” or “self-satisfaction” or something else. It’s important because we need this concept in order to think carefully about phenomena like white nationalism (or the “Alt-Right,” or white supremacy, or whatever you want to call organized racism with a political agenda).

Now, white nationalism cannot be boiled down, with no remainder, to “pride” in the old sense. We need all kinds of economic, cultural, historical and moral concepts to account for it. But pride is a necessary ingredient, without which there would be no white nationalism.

It goes something like this. The need for self-admiration seems to require building a case for why I should admire myself. Pretty much the easiest way to do that is to compare myself favorably with other people. Now, if I receive a certain upbringing and have had certain experiences, I might come to believe that being white implies that I am generally more creative, intelligent, beautiful, virtuous, etc. than people who are not white. Being white becomes shorthand for being better, and being better than others is necessary to satisfy my own internal need to be impressed with myself.

Of course, people join white nationalist organizations for all kinds of other reasons as well: to vent frustration, to find a scapegoat for one’s personal pain and dissatisfaction, to redress perceived wrongs, to be edgy. But without pride (again, in the old sense), there is no white nationalism, because at its core white nationalism is the exaltation of the self over others.

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Moral outrage has its dangers. To be clear, if anything is worthy of moral outrage, it’s young men in Virginia waving the banner that flew over Treblinka. That is evil, and there is no other word for it. It is evil to celebrate and advocate racial segregation and subjugation. It is evil to associate with people who do these things, regardless of whatever cause one might be trying to promote (the preservation of Confederate monuments, etc). To knowingly march alongside self-avowed Nazis pretty much removes you from the “fine people” category.

But outrage can blind us to the uncomfortable reality that we have, in ourselves, some of the raw materials that white nationalists have forged into an ideology of racial hatred. Namely, not a one of us is free from pride. It will not do to forget this fact in the midst of justified anger against racism.

This pride, thankfully, manifests itself in full blown politicized racism in only a tiny fraction of our society. But every one of us finds ways to admire ourselves, to congratulate ourselves, for being just a little bit better than that other guy. The avenues for this are endless: moral, religious, intellectual, athletic, academic, artistic, aesthetic.

(And, if you’re dimly aware that you’re not that impressive a person, you can always find solace in, like, not being a Nazi. There’s an old Batman comic in which the Joker, upon discovering that one of his criminal associates is in fact a card-carrying member of the National Socialist party, recoils in horror and says something like, “I might be a psychopathic criminal, but I’m an American psychopathic criminal!”).

For example: last week, I emerged from a restaurant after waiting an hour for my takeout order (“Sorry, dude, this is the busiest we’ve ever been on a Tuesday”). I was immediately accosted by a lady asking for money. She had an elaborate, emotion-choked story describing her desperate need for this money. Instead of forking over some cash, I explained that I had a Subway gift card in my car that I would be glad to give her.

But I already kind of knew what would happen. Instantaneously her eyes dried and her face took on a faraway expression. In a bored tone, she said, “Oh, you know, that’s okay. Thanks,” and very efficiently proceeded to accost another person trying to sneak past her.

I walked to my car quite pleased with myself. For one, I had this lady figured out. The more emotional the story, the more blatantly fake it is, almost guaranteed. But, at a deeper level, I was congratulating myself for not being the kind of person who manipulates others into doing him favors. I’m better than that. I’m better than her.

It is a lot of fun to feel that way. It’s very pleasant, addictive maybe, to feed my inner compulsion for self-admiration, to build my case for why I’m pretty cool.

And it’s also incredibly dangerous, for at least two reasons. It, this pride, makes me forget that I, being white and coming from a middle class background, have received advantages that huge swaths of other people have not received. If I feel like I can give myself a higher moral grade than that lady, it’s almost certainly because I’ve taken a much, much easier exam. Pride desensitizes me to the real disadvantages that others face, which desensitization has enormous social and political consequences.

Secondly, it’s spiritually dangerous. The Gospels are very clear that God is unimpressed with people who are impressed with themselves (e.g., Luke 18:9). Salvation, a right relationship with God, is wholly dependent on accepting God’s free gift of grace. Self-admiration, building the case for why I can be justly impressed with myself - pride -  is the ultimately enemy of grace, and grace is the ultimate enemy of pride. One or the other has to go.

Outrage is good when it is directed towards protecting the vulnerable and marginalized members of our society. Such outrage is in fact our moral duty. But we must not allow the heat of our emotions to blind us to - or, insidiously, to become the occasion for-  our own little imagined supremacy.

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Vanity of vanities

Ecclesiastes is awkward. Its placement in the canon accents its awkwardness. Proverbs offers thirty-one chapters of instruction in living a well-ordered, productive life pleasing to both God and one's fellow man. Turning the page, the reader finds Ecclesiastes, which says, “I certainly hope you weren't expecting any of that stuff to make you happy.”

Because it doesn't. Wisdom might keep you out of trouble, but the process of acquiring it is so long and painful that it's not even worth it (1:12 – 18). After all, the wisest and best of us die just like everyone else and are forgotten (2:14 – 16). Working on a grand project provides a measure of satisfaction that disappears upon completion (2:1 – 11). After you die, your life's work will pass on into the hands of others who will probably ruin everything (2:19). No matter how carefully you plan, no matter how hard you work, your empire will crumble into dust and be replaced by another, which will in turn collapse under a sun that keeps to its same mindless course day in and day out, indifferent to all our striving.

“All things,” writes the Preacher, “are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it” (1:8).

Under the circumstances, then, the best we can do is to keep our noses clean, our heads low and our aspirations in check; and to enjoy the real if fleeting pleasures that God has built into this world before our inevitable deaths (3:12-13).

It's understandable that some early Jewish readers struggled with Ecclesiastes, even questioning its place in the canon. It's a little difficult to reconcile the Bible's message of God's eternal, covenant love for his people with the pervasive pessimism of this book. But I think that God included Ecclesiastes in the Bible for about the same reason that Jesus chose Thomas as an apostle: there is a certain kind of skeptical, pessimistic (cf. John 11:16) voice that we need to hear.

When we read Ecclesiastes, let's avoid trying to explain away the pessimism. Sometimes interpreters either focus on the book's exhortations to fear God  to the exclusion of its moments of despair, or else argue that Ecclesiastes is a graphic example of the hopelessness of an essentially secular mindset. But I think that we, as Christians, should take the darkness of this book seriously.

We cannot avoid the reality that life often appears to be, as Shakespeare wrote, “a tale / Told by an idiot , full of sound and fury / Signifying nothing.” Our lives are mired in futility. You eliminate Saddam Hussein and ISIS takes over. You pour your life into your children only to watch them make heart-breaking decisions. You build the better mousetrap (or MP3 player), the world beats its path to your door, and then you discover that you have cancer.

You and I, and Bill Gates and Jonathan Edwards have all had days in which we've left the office muttering “vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” Christian or not, you're going to have periods of your life, perhaps lengthy, in which the meaninglessness is palpable; in which you make little or no spiritual or professional progress; in which you feel that your best energies are being poured down a corporate or academic or relational drain; in which you have no energy to pour at all.

And the message of Ecclesiastes is that this is what life is like. Sometimes, the feelings of futility are not a punishment for bad choices. It's a fantasy to imagine that you could be living a perfectly integrated, meaningful, consistently rewarding life if only you had made better decisions in college, etc.

When you feel stuck in life; when you feel the walls closing in; when you feel that you could fit an aircraft carrier in the gap between what you hoped to get from life and what you actually have: don't ignore these feelings. Do not wallow in them, but do not stuff them down or drown them out. Do not automatically assume that they are indicative of some moral failure on your part. Let yourself feel them. Let yourself grieve. This is part of what it means to be a person.

Hundreds of years after the time of the Preacher, and perhaps in conscious allusion to him, another Jewish writer declared that “the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Romans 8:20 – 21).

The futility is real, unavoidable, and indigestible; it is not, however, permanent. Futility is the inevitable consequence of living in this world, but this world has been overcome by Jesus Christ.

Do not be surprised, then, that so much of what happens in your life and in your world is incomprehensible, meaningless, silly, cheap, boring or pathetic. This is no accident. The tale is full of idiocy, and worse, but it is not being told by an idiot. The creation, yourself included, has been subjected to futility so that it might one day know what freedom truly is.

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Mediocrity

Antonio Salieri (1750 - 1825) 

In college I had an economics professor who, in the most cheerful and grandfatherly way imaginable, called things as he saw them. Once, during an informal Bible study at his house, he remarked that “Christians usually aren't the best at what they do.” From those gathered came a murmur of sorrowful agreement.

But there was no followup. My professor did not remind us that we have the Holy Spirit living inside of us, nor did he exhort us to excel for the glory of God, to claim culture for Christ, etc. He just started talking about something else.

Looking back, I don't think he intended to hand us a reproach but rather an insight into the nature of being a committed follower of Jesus Christ. In any given field, and even for the most talented, the pursuit of greatness requires enormous outlays of time and energy, time and energy that Christ might very well call upon you to use by checking in on that college student who suddenly stopped attending your church, or by inviting your Hindu neighbors over for dinner after living next door for two years, or by passing out flyers to raise awareness of sex trafficking, or by playing Just Dance with your wife after she had a miserable day at the office knowing full well that you will endure a string of humiliating defeats.  

“Let each of you look not only to his own interests,” writes the Apostle Paul, “but also to the interests of others,” an exhortation that does not necessarily mesh well with being great.

Now, many believers, when they are confronted with the reality that they are not great, shrug complacently and go outside to help their kids build a lemonade stand. Blessed are they. Some of us, however, like the highly fictionalized Antonio Salieri in the movie Amadeus, are regularly nagged by perceptions of our own mediocrity; by the fear and reality of having made no discernible impact on society; by the realization that, so to speak, no one is going to play our music after we're dead. “I am the patron saint of mediocrity,” declares Salieri at the end of the film, resigning himself to a joyless existence living in Mozart's shadow (and in an eighteenth century insane asylum). And some of us understand where he's coming from. Time will flatten our paltry accomplishments into the mass of obscurity that comprises 99.9% of human history. Our great-grandchildren will struggle to remember our names.

When this anxiety hits, we need to do (at least) three things. First, we need to face facts. There is a reason that, when my wife and I recently went to the symphony, they were playing Mozart and not Salieri. Every human pursuit has its standards, and our work will be evaluated by these standards. If we are seeking to live the others-focused life that Jesus Christ has called us to live (or, to be honest, even if we're not), odds are very good that we're going to end up average. Even if we torch family time and shirk church obligations in order to claw our way to the top, odds are still pretty good that they won't be reading about us a hundred years from now.

Secondly, the standards of our profession matter, and it is important that we try to meet them. Shoddy work by Christians doesn't do much to advance the kingdom. I'm fairly certain that the tents made by the Apostle Paul kept the rain out.

Thirdly, in an infinitely more important sense the standards do not matter. When you accepted Jesus Christ, at that very instant you died, forever and irrevocably, to the evaluations and value judgments of this world. You work (and play, and rest) to honor Christ, and for no other reason. It is entirely possible to be judged a mediocrity by the world and to please Christ at the same time. It's possible to be judged an abject failure by the world and to hear “well done, good and faithful servant” on the last day. And, of course, the inverse is also true.

“Whatever you do,” Paul tells the Colossians, “work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men,” or for Pulitzers or Emmys or Fields Medals or employee of the month or an invitation to speak at Together for the Gospel or positive self-image. The entire mindset of trying to move to the right hand side of the “failure – mediocrity – greatness” spectrum is done away with in Christ. It must be understood and resisted as a temptation. For the believer, that game is over (and it's apparently not worth winning anyway, cf., Ernest Hemingway).

When it comes to the quality of our work, it's easier to keep score with Pulitzers; it's harder to know if Jesus is pleased or not with what we're doing. The latter requires a vibrant and intimate relationship with Him that itself requires time and dedication. The difference is that one path leads to apparently incurable anxiety or, far worse, to pride; the other to real joy.