What If I’m Wrong?

Digging in even deeper with our personal opinions may not be the answer…

Photo by Brandon Wilson on Unsplash

We live in a culture that thrives on opinion. I’m a writer. I understand the impulse to pick a thesis and support it with as much gusto as possible. That’s what drives clicks and views. People don’t want to see nuance. They want hard-nosed opinions.

But what happens when everyone starts sharpening their own opinions into finer and increasingly blood-soaked points?

Before we go any farther, I must acknowledge my own complicity. Just last week, I shared a post on Facebook that was clearly political. I’ve started to do this with more regularity since college, especially on Facebook. I do that, because I know my Facebook feed tends to be more conservative. I’m probably not as conservative as many of my Facebook friends, but I’m surely more conservative than most of the people I follow on Twitter. Theoretically, I like finding the middle ground that affords. In practice, though, I must admit that I sometimes stray too far from that middle ground.

This particular post sparked a slew of comments. Fine — no problem yet. I think it’s a *very* good thing to foster discussion. The thing is — this discussion didn’t end up being very healthy. I did something that I usually never do — I deleted the post. I deleted it because I just didn’t feel right. I felt restless knowing that I had sparked that. Once I hit the delete button, a weight was lifted.

But that made me think — why had I even posted that in the first place?

Sure, I wanted to share my opinion. Yes, I wanted to challenge the opinions of some of my Facebook connections. Again, in theory, I don’t think those are wholly bad things. But they must be handled right, and this gets me to the reason for this post’s title.

Faith and Politics

Did this header make you put up your guard at all? They’re the two things we aren’t supposed to talk about, right? But see, to me, these are two extremely important topics. Why would we stay silent about them?

Because things get so heated so quickly, right?

Yeah, I hear you. It’s really hard to have healthy conversations when it comes to politics. We can’t…