extremism on the right and on the left

I’m deeply disturbed by the increasing extremism of political views; both on the left and the right. I have close friends on both sides of the political spectrum; I find it increasingly difficult to have a reasonable conversation with either side.

I suppose the extremism on the right bothers me more, because most of my conservative friends claim to be followers of Jesus, and many of them have been life-long friends. My friends on the left are more recent acquaintances and tend to be young, secular academics with a high level of idealism.

The problem is that my friends on the left have no friends on the right to challenge their thinking—by the same token my Christian friends on the right have surrounded themselves with other politically conservative Christians and information sources from the right—there is no check and balance—no civil dialogue. This reminds me of a line from Yeats: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed”.

Apparently I am cursed with the ability to look at both sides of an issue, weigh a variety of news sources from both right, left and center in order to resolve my own views of the specific issue on its own merits without resorting to either left or right ideological paradigms to aid me in my evaluation process. One of my conservative friends this week told me that she likes to keep it “simple.” The problem is, life is not simple--its complicated.

Here is a link to a open letter from Brian McLaren to Evangelical Christians: I heartily add my voice to his in this appeal.

http://www.brianmclaren.net/archives/blog/an-open-letter-to-conservative-c.html

I was disturbed this week in a conversation with a life-long Christian friend to find that we had absolutely no common ground to discuss health care reform. She sent me news articles from some fringe right-wing news sources regarding “death panels” and health care, and I responded with what I thought was a reasonable article from the New York Times. She said, “I don’t know how you can stomach reading that stuff’ … I was left speechless. To emphasize that I am in the center and not on the left, two weeks ago, I found myself in a spirited debate with two leftist friends, in which I was defending Sarah Palin. I was amazed at their vitriol and hatred for this bright young woman. We finally had to agree to disagree. I am perplexed and concerned about this increasing polarization on the right and the left and the inability to have any kind of reasonable dialogue.

This has happened before in history, and religion has been a key part of it. It happened in the late 1920s in Mexico in the Cristero war between Catholic priests and peasants and the secular Mexican government. It happened in the 1930s in the build-up to the Spanish Civil War in which 7000 priests were killed. It happened in 1948 to 1956 in La Violencia in Colombia in which 200,000 people perished. In each case there was a growing Manichean discourse, of “good” vs. “evil” and of the “armies of God” against the forces of the “devil” before the outbreak of violence. In Colombia, our evangelical brothers and sisters were considered to be on the side of the devil and their churches were burned and hundreds of evangelicals were killed by well-intentioned Catholics “in the name of Christ.”

Alexis de Tocqueville correctly saw that the strength of democracy in the United States came from the separation of church and state, and our religious pluralism, in which people learned to “agree to disagree” without resorting to violence. He was impressed that the American public was highly religious, and yet religiously tolerant, willing to allow a variety of religious and public views. This attitude of mutual toleration and civil discourse seems to be rapidly disappearing in our nation.

If you, my dear reader, are on the political right, may I appeal to you to develop some friendships with people on the left, especially if you call yourself by the name of Christ? And if you are on the left, would you consider developing some friendships with thoughtful people on the right? We cannot allow ourselves to become Lebanon, or even worse, Israel-Palestine. Our democracy is at stake, not to mention the influence of the gospel.