This cannot be repeated often enough:
It’s not about proving oneself morally superior. It’s about winning elections.
It’s not about exposing conservatives for what they are. It’s about winning elections.
It’s not about winning a debate. It’s about winning elections.
It’s not about being right. It’s about winning elections.
(And the way to win elections is by winning people.)
You cannot win people to your side by hating on them, or even by seeming to. Hillary Clinton made a perfectly good observation in the view of and to the cheers of her supporters, but it didn’t work out the way she intended, and by all the evidence it hurt her cause more than it helped. That shouldn’t have been a surprise, though; the people who starting wearing the Deplorable, and Proud of It T-shirts were doing essentially the same thing as the Colonials who proudly sang Yankee Doodle when the British who coined the term meant it as an insult. (Look up “Yankee Doodle” in Wikipedia. It’s a hoot!)
Now, the reason we get angry at thick-headed conservatives is that we lack patience. We want people to come to our side (of course), and we want them to do it right now. And when they won’t—especially when they use bad reasoning to justify their position—then it is natural to get angry at them. Especially when they start it by getting angry first.
I have had a number of conversations with conservative Evangelical Christians. Most of the time I did not succeed in changing their position. But not once did I become angry myself, and not once did I make the other person angry. That’s important because in each case I said some careful things which are highly likely to have had an impact. At the very least, those people were probably thinking “I’ve never heard that before. . .” And it’s the new arguments, not the same old thoroughly “refuted” arguments, that are most likely to cause somebody to think new thoughts.
Here are just a few of the arguments that I use a lot which I can confidently say are not what most Evangelicals are used to hearing:
“The Baptists deserve the greatest share of the credit for establishing the doctrine of ‘freedom of conscience’ in America. So it is ironic that the first champions of that doctrine are now among the ones who are helping to abolish it.”
“The Bible does not say what so many Christians think it says about abortion. Those passages in Psalm 139 and Jeremiah chapter 1 are not talking about when David and Jeremiah became alive, they are talking about when God knew them. One verse even clearly says, “all the days ordained for me were written in Your book before one of them came to be.” God knowing all of David’s days, before they came to be, obviously cannot mean that all of David’s days existed before they came to be, and it is the same things with God knowing David “from his mother’s womb.” The fact is (according to accepted Christian teaching, which I am following here), God knew David from before the foundation of the world, yet that does not mean that David existed before the foundation of the world. The conclusion, then, is that there is no place in the Bible that says that a spirit inhabits a living body from the moment of conception. There is no mention anywhere of when a body receives a spirit, and a body that does not have a spirit (whether because the spirit has left, in death, or has not yet entered in, prior to birth) is not a living human being.”
“There is a passage in Numbers chapter 5 where the High Priest is not only permitted, but commanded to perform an act which will cause a miscarriage if the woman involved is pregnant.”
“To vote for certain lawmakers and judges so that they will restore righteousness to America is to contradict a central teaching of the Bible, which is that righteousness does not come by law, but only by faith. According to Biblical teaching, righteousness is entirely a matter of the heart. A person can obey every law and yet still be unrighteousness, if that obedience is only because of fear of punishment and not a genuine desire to do good. So making America ‘righteous’ at the voting booth is both impossible and also contradictory to Bible teachings.”
“To grant people the freedom to make their own choices does not necessarily mean to approve of those choices. One need not personally approve of same-sex marriage to grant other people the right to follow their own conscience. It is not for me or for the government to limit any person’s freedom if nobody else is harmed by it. Baptist leaders were saying that 400 years ago.”
“The belief that the federal government has no constitutional authority to dispense “charity” to individuals (this is a very wide-spread belief among Evangelicals) has no Biblical basis, but is an idea originated and popularized by extreme fiscal conservatives who did not base their beliefs on any Biblical sources. Furthermore, to claim that it is proper for individuals, churches, and private organizations to dispense charity, but wrong for the government to do so, is to say that private persons do well to imitate the Good Samaritan, but government is constitutionally required to imitate the priest and the Levite who walked past the injured man and did nothing to help. This is preposterous.”
“Denying that government welfare is legitimate because it encourages laziness and irresponsibility is to believe that all poverty is the result of the choices and behavior of the poor person. This contradicts the Bible, which is filled with examples of poor people who were poor through no fault of their own, and who in fact were commended for their faith and righteousness. To deny the legitimacy of welfare is actually opposed to Biblical standards of living, and in my view it is primarily grounded in personal selfishness.”
These are just the bare-bones statements of a few crucial points I like to make when talking with my fellow Christians. There are many more. But fundamental to all of them is a willingness to converse patiently and not to get frustrated if they disagree with me. Even if they disagree strenuously. Even if they dismiss what I say with “Well, that’s your interpretation of Scripture.” In that last case, I can still say, “Yes, but I am not the only one who sees these things in the Bible, so it comes back to freedom of conscience. Are you saying that if I believe something about the Bible that is wrong, that you or some Church authority has the right to condemn me as a heretic? Isn’t that exactly what the early Baptists were willing to fight against even if it meant jail, or worse?
The key is, always be patient, always be civil, always have something relevant to say, and always be willing to finish the conversation without getting a “conversion.” If you end the conversation on speaking terms, you can always come back to it later. If you end on an angry note, you have cut off any possibility of talking in the future.
Maybe you have such conversations with ten people. Maybe only two or three come around. Two or three is better than none, and none is exactly what you can count on if your starting point is to reject the very idea that persuasion is possible. They say that if you never try you will never fail, to which I say:
It’s not about me, and my success or failure. It’s about winning elections. One conversation at a time.
EJ