A Bridge to Nowhere

During one of the recent Democratic debates my 10-year old climbed into bed between me and my husband. He had some questions. “Why are they talking over each other?” “Don’t they all disagree with Donald Trump?” “Why are they arguing?” 

We explained that even though the candidates agree with each other more than they disagree, they have some differences. This piqued his interest. Somewhat surprisingly, he wanted to keep watching. 

Even though he has lived more of his life under a Trump presidency than his 15-year-old brother, he remembers far less of the deep divisions that the 2016 election revealed, not just in our country but in our family. After my older kid texted me to warn me in advance that a close family member had MAGA stickers on their refrigerator, we unintentionally started to pull back from talking politics in front of him and his little brother. My husband quit social media all together. I stopped reposting articles I read, knowing it would incite debate instead of discussion with my extended family. We quickly shut down conversations with loved ones when we sensed they were headed in that direction.

This is not the kind of political parent I thought I would be. After all, in Bless This Mess, Molly and I write about how to talk with our kids about every third rail topic: money, sex, politics, religion. When my son started asking questions on the night of the debate, it was a wake up call that, with him, I haven’t so much been practicing what I preach. 

I know I’m not alone. While we have always lived in a deeply divided world, the ubiquitousness of social media and events of the past four years have made public what used to be private divisions within families. More than policy differences, it has revealed fissures in fundamental values with people we love. We forego real conversation for re-posts and comments, which we can walk away from without having to deal with our loved ones’ reactions. 

When that gets too contentious or frustrating, we block each other and pretend never to have “spoken” of our differences when we see each other at family dinners. Some of us make the painful decision that we can no longer even sit together at the same table. What are our children learning from witnessing this? 

I want my kids to be politically informed and active. Even more, I want them to be bridge builders. I want them to be able to listen as well as they speak, and to find points of commonality even with those who are very different from them. How do I do this when instead they are warning me in advance not to bring up politics with the people closest to us, the people with whom we know we share values...and DNA?

Recently, Molly and I have found ourselves a teensy bit frustrated. Marketing our book has been challenging. Much of this can be chalked up to the realities of being an author in the digital age, when social media presence, or getting read and promoted by the right influencer matters as much or more as the words on the page. Yet we’ve had a nagging frustration that some of what we’ve faced is a reluctance to cross the bridges we are trying to build, not only between science and faith, but between the Christian right and left. 

Somehow, being a Christian in America today has become synonymous with being fundamentalist and both politically and socially conservative. Equally, being a liberal has become synonymous with being a moral (or amoral!) relativist. Spiritual has become code for agnostic, atheist or religious-lite. 

An overall positive review of our book had just one criticism: “While many [readers] will feel attracted to a book custom-made for progressives, others will feel immediately excluded, especially because that terminology is the main feature of the introduction. Right from the beginning, there is political territory drawn to what could otherwise be a genuinely inclusive text.” 

What, though, does it mean to be “genuinely inclusive”? Does it mean compromising our core values for the sake of a false unity or centrism? Watering down or not talking about our political as well as spiritual beliefs? No. It means having real and respectful conversations - in public and in private, and in front of our kids.

Molly and I thought we had an opportunity to do this when a popular evangelical Christian parenting podcast invited us on. We hoped to find areas of agreement and talk respectfully about areas of disagreement without resorting to facile compromise or false equivalencies. We could agree on the science, define some good strategies for raising the kids we love (because all parents love their children), and affirm that God is with us as a co-parent. 

Maybe in the scrum, we could even begin to gently approach the hot topics that have historically divided us theologically, including patriarchy, authoritarianism and white supremacy. We were hoping to stand together in the center of a bridge, dangling the Gospel into deep waters as a plumb line for right living, rather than wielding the Bible as a blunt instrument with which to beat our opponents. 

Then, a day before we were to appear on the podcast, we were canceled. Maybe they weren’t interested in meeting us halfway across our bridge after all. 

We can’t lay all of the blame on the conservative Christian camp. Algorithms show that more extreme positions that vilify the other side do better. Never Trumpers. MAGA boys. Bernie Bros. Exvangelicals. You are almost required to define yourself in opposition to something or someone else to be heard when attention is the commodity. 

The problem is, our kids are paying attention. At exactly a time in their development where they are defining themselves, we are teaching them that to do so means standing stubbornly on your side of the river in opposition to those on the other bank. We do this in parenting as much as politics, reflected in the polarizing, scornful and ultimately ephemeral debates around attachment parenting, mindful parenting, free range parenting, tiger mothering, and on and on. 

If we only create and stay in our own spaces, we risk shouting into an unbridgeable canyon so vast, the only voice that returns to us is our own. And if we insist on taking polarizing positions in public, there will be less and less room for gray in our families. 

From everything our kids see in the media, and from conversations (or the lack of) at home, we fear they are learning that respectful disagreement and discourse is dead. When they disagree with us (and it is when, not if) they may not even attempt to engage us, fearing it’s futile or even dangerous. Decades of psychological science tells us this is disastrous for family cohesion, and we need our kids to know they can talk with us, for their safety and well-being. Just as parents need to hear from “experts” that no one has all the answers, our kids need to hear from us that we too are still learning, and open to opinions and realities different from ours. 

The conversations we would love to have are not hard as we might think, whether with our oppositional teenagers or Fox-News-loving Uncle Fred. They are marked by: listening longer than you talk. Not planning your defense while the other person is speaking. Asking a lot of questions with genuine curiosity. And, ultimately, affirming your care for the other person, even if you disagree with them. One of the strongest marks of maturity is when two people or groups can disagree and still maintain calm contact, even: love one another. 

Parenting is a spiritual practice, one that will humble us daily. It is also a transformative one, and at its best pushes us to transcend beliefs or ideas we may have once thought we would never waver on. For me, for now, I’m going to practice talking more about politics- including ideas different from my own in small and big ways. The uncertainty of 2020 is presenting more teachable moments than I might want. But if we want to create a generation of better bridge builders, we need to apprentice humility, flexibility and curiosity in our most intimate spaces, starting with both ends of the dining room table.