Can't We Be Friends?

Last week, I wrote about the passing of Congressman John Lewis. You can read the whole thing here, but I need to highlight a portion to set the context for what I’m about to write.

Lewis was a partisan Democrat. He hated Donald Trump and was openly contemptuous of Trump. Years ago, John Lewis recorded a radio spot for a candidate running for Chairman of the Fulton County Commission in Atlanta that claimed Republicans running the Fulton County Commission would be as bad as the dogs in the street and hoses of the white supremacists in the Civil Rights era. He ended the spot telling black voters their “very lives” depended on this voting for John Eaves for Fulton County Commission Chairman.…

John Lewis did not stop his partisanship from allowing him to have friendships with those with whom he had disagreements. He worked behind the scenes with Republicans to do what he could to help Georgia. He cultivated friendships with conservative members of congress with whom he could find no agreement on politics.

A listener of my radio show emailed me about this. “I understand what you are saying, but I do not think I can reconcile John Lewis’s support of killing children with friendship. I cannot be a friend with anyone who supports abortion.” This is part of our problem in society these days. Do you know who could be a friend of John Lewis’s? Jesus Christ. He did not stop someone’s sins from building relationships where, through that friendship, he could honestly call for them to repent.

We, as a people, have decided we must reject friendships with those with whom we disagree because we see their sins so clearly we cannot see our own. John Lewis saw the sins of Southern white people up close as they were kicking him in the face and it did not preclude him from building friendships with Southern white people. We should not let our disagreements over policy or sin preclude friendship among sinners.

I have a number of people from my time at CNN who I consider friends whose politics do not align with mine. James Carville, Paul Begala, and Donna Brazile all treated me very kindly and I think very highly of them. I keep in touch with Donna the most. She once stood on the side of a New Orleans street at a Mardi Gras parade to collect a pile of beads and coins so she could ferry them to me in Arizona at a CNN debate. She knew my kids would want them. They still have them in their rooms hanging up.

By the time she go to the debate, the bag was half empty because a plane full of soldiers had arrived back in Arizona just after her plane arrived and she passed out half the bag to the soldiers. How can you not like a person like that?

And yet some of you abhor her and only know her from television. Your mind is made up. It is very similar phenomenon to having a favorite actor whose roles you follow only to encounter them in person and realize they are completely different than the person they tend to play in movies.

Politics, again, is weird and we judge people by the three minute soundbites on television and we judge books by covers even when we deny it. We develop simplistic views of complex people with stories that often are common to ours are backgrounds and worldviews where we can find common ground, but we don’t know that side of them.

In the same way the serial killer’s next door neighbors go on television and say the serial killer was always quiet but kind and kept to himself, we decide the pundit or partisan is bad and awful because they were not quiet or kind in that three-minute appearance on television. Or, better yet, we read about them in our favorite partisan rag and know they must be terrible because someone we don’t know any better than them, but whom we read, said so.

For a group of complex creatures made in the image of the living God, we all sure do have a tendency to reduce everyone around us to caricature as two dimensional objects.

Jesus saw humanity for what it was — flawed, distrustful, deceitful, corrupt — and yet Christ Jesus wanted not just a relationship with us, but laid down his life for us. We can’t even tolerate someone of our tribe daring to strike up a friendship with someone from another tribe who might see the world differently.

Thankfully, missionaries are willing to go into foreign lands of hostile people and show Christ’s love. Some of us don’t even want to sit in the same restaurant as someone on the other side.

If you saw the recent survey on cancel culture, a double-digit minority of both the left and the right think people should lose their jobs for supporting opposing politics. It is much more pronounced on the left, which likewise is much more secular. But as cultural Christianity replaces actual Christianity on the right, the number of conservatives who feel the same way is growing. The Christian who spends his Sunday in front of the TV never darkening the door of a church is just as willing to cancel the other side as the rabid atheist is willing to cancel the right,

Literally, just this week, I lost subscribers for daring to think cities should have to deal with their rioters themselves and because I think the press keeps playing Calvinball to best the President and avoid culpability for how the press has handled some recent stories.

There’s just no winning and it has a lot to do with the abandonment of grace and an abandonment of the commandment to love one’s neighbor. We now want to quibble over definitions instead of taking Christ as His word. We’ve gone from what the meaning of is, is to what the meaning of neighbor is.

Do better. I’ll do better too. Just remember that people are complex, you can’t be friends with everyone, you wouldn’t want to be friends with some people, but a lot of the people you think you can’t be friends with are the ones who you’d be best friends with if you got past thinking their sins were worse than your own.