Q: How do you deal with the people who say they’re Christian, but use their “piety” to justify acting hateful / intolerant / judgemental toward others?
A: This is a great question; thank you for asking it. To be honest, it can be a real struggle. Especially as a public Christian theologian, it frustrates me greatly to see the label of “Christian” so often applied to some of the loudest, most intolerant voices in the public sphere. And in my day to day life, I have felt both anger and grief when people I know — especially family members or other people close to me — sometimes seem to have such radically different ideas from my own of what it means to be a Christian.
I don’t have a cut and dried answer for you — but I do have some advice, which I hope will be helpful.
1. Always speak from a place of love. This is the most important bit of wisdom I can offer, and it’s also by far the hardest one to follow. It is *so* hard sometimes to push through our initial surge of defensiveness and anger and righteous indignation, to resist the temptation to fire off a snappy comeback or insult — but few things will more quickly kill productive conversation. Never let yourself lose sight of the humanity of the person in front of you — because dehumanization is exactly how we begin to slip into intolerance and judgmentalness and hate. Christ himself placed love at the center of all things, reminding us that we and every single person we encounter is a beloved child of God, whom we are also called to love.
2. Be curious about where these beliefs or actions come from for people. Rather than jump to arguing, ask questions about how this person arrived at their conclusions. Don’t assume you already know; genuinely try to understand their perspective and what they consider important.
3. Engage with the heart — theirs and yours. Especially in the current political/social climate, I find that people tend to be more responsive to emotion than to data. (There are exceptions, of course, in which case there’s no end to the persuasive info to be shared.) People often may not have a solid rational reason for why they choose to believe or act a certain way — but there is usually a strong undercurrent of emotion motivating them. They may not be able or willing to name that either, but you can usually kind of sus it out through conversation. When it comes to attitudes of hatefulness, intolerance, or judgementalness, the core feeling in play very often tends to be fear — usually fear of change, which is essentially a fear of loss. Try to figure out what they are afraid of and how it relates to their behavior and beliefs. Sometimes just naming it out loud can have transformative power.
4. Model love and tolerance for the other person. Once you have heard them out and shown that you genuinely care to understand them and their perspective, you can start gently trying to get this person to do the same. Help rehumanize for them some of the people to whom they have been judgemental or intolerant — try to get them to imagine the perspective of some of the people they’ve judged, to be curious about why they might have made the choices that they made.
5. Appeal to shared values. Especially if you are also a Christian, you likely both view scripture as having authority, and that gives you a kind of shared language you can use persuasively. To be clear, I don’t mean taking verses here and there out of context to be used as “clobber verses” (that’s neither a good use of scripture nor particularly persuasive), but speaking more holistically about the way that love and grace are central to everything.
6. Love them and pray for them, if you’re the praying type. Genuinely wish good things for them. It’s good for your own spirit, and it’s also a good way of modeling the kind of attitude you wish to encourage. To paraphrase Gandhi, be the love you wish to see in the world. I find it tends to be contagious.
*Header image is from the movie Saved! (2004)
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