Illustration Courtesy of Morgan Guyton
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My wife Cheryl has integrity. I often make fun of her for it. When she’s being an insufferable rule-follower, I call her a Girl Scout. I tend to be much more of a pragmatist. People who nuance and qualify everything to death irritate me. What I learned early on as a union organizer is you have to oversimplify your message if you want to build a movement. Even if the company president was a good Christian man who seemed friendly enough, he was a greedy oppressor if I needed to mobilize people to fight for the rights of his employees.
We have entered into a time when we desperately need people who are stubbornly, obnoxiously committed to the truth for its own sake and not compromised by their commitment to propagandizing one side or the other. Cheryl and I had a spirited conversation yesterday. She had been frustrated by the way people on Facebook have been mean and personal in their attacks on their political opponents. She was struggling with finding the right way to phrase comments that were truthful and respectful in the midst of contentious conversation threads.
Unfortunately, I was patronizing and scornful in response to her because I thought she was wasting her time on trivial issues. So she helped me appreciate her point of view. And I remembered a conversation I’d had with students in our Prism LGBT group the night before. We were talking about the abuse of the “safe space” concept in communities where “safety” means that everybody agrees about everything and any alternative viewpoint causes panic. One of my students said that a true “safe space” must always also be a “brave space,” where it’s okay to contradict the predominant view. To put it in biblical terms, it needs to be okay to speak the truth in love.
With this in mind, I realized that speaking out and contradicting unfair scorn even about trivial matters is an important practice of integrity during our dark times. The more that our society is bifurcated into two monolithic tribes who simply lob scorn at each other from their trenches, the worse it’s going to get. The more we make ourselves okay with perpetual propaganda, the more easily we will be herded into dangerous mobs when the time comes. We need truth-tellers who are willing to contradict their tribes even in small ways. The truth-tellers are more important to the long-term survival of our society than the propagandists who are on my side.
Every time we dehumanize anyone on the other side, we are doing the work of Satan even if it makes us feel galvanized with self-righteous zeal.
What does this have to do with Satan? The New Testament has a Greek word “diabolos” which was bastardized over time into “devil” in English. Diabolos combines the words ballo (throw) and dia (amidst), so devil means the one who throws drama into our midst. I don’t know if Satan is an actual person or an anthropomorphic label for the dangerous rage that is bubbling over in our society right now. But I do know Satan is very real. He is constantly instigating mistrust and contempt to make us all the more outraged and disdainful of the other side of our conflicts. Our one true enemy is the one who convinces us that we are each other’s enemies.
Every time we dehumanize anyone on the other side, we are doing the work of Satan even if it makes us feel galvanized with self-righteous zeal. We have to figure out how to stand firm for justice without taking cheap shots and losing our humanity. Satan is super tricky. Sometimes it’s right to contradict people who are being scornful or untruthful; sometimes we’re being baited into losing our humanity. Sometimes the best we can do is to simply let others know we see and care about them. But every time you see someone act with integrity, especially when they’re contradicting you, take a deep breath, count to ten, and then thank them with all your heart, because they are the ones who are making it safe to be brave in a post-truth world.
The Rev. Morgan Guyton
The Rev. Morgan Guyton serves as director of the NOLA Wesley Foundation, which is the United Methodist campus ministry at Tulane and Loyola University in New Orleans, LA. He blogs at Mercy Not Sacrifice on Patheos.com, from which this post is republished with the author's permission.