Late last year I was contacted by a staff member at a church in Florida. She explained that their church sponsored an annual Peace Conference to which they invited the community to hear speakers talk about various aspects of what peace means for our time as well as what it can mean for the future. The Pastor, staff, and volunteers wanted the 2020 theme to be something like “Finding Peace in a Polarized Time.” Scouring the internet they found the book I co-authored with Keith Parsons, Polarized: The Collapse of Truth, Civility, and Community in Divided Times, and How We Can Find Common Ground. Our treatment of the subject, they thought, could be a great connection to their proposed theme for the conference.
Because they preferred a person of faith to be the presenter, as well as budget constraints that prohibited inviting both authors, they ushered an invitation to me to come and speak. I was thrilled by the request, and delighted that our book was getting some national buzz. Travel arrangements were made, the church bought copies of the book for sale in their bookstore, and I began pulling ideas together for my presentation.
In late February I received a call from the Pastor. “I’ve been giving it a lot of thought,” he said, “and I’ve talked it over with the church staff, and I’m going to cancel the Peace Conference.”
I was stunned. “Why?” I asked.
“Some people got your book and read the introduction and told me this topic was too controversial for us. They said we risked alienating church members as well as people in the community.”
“Granted,” I replied, “in the book, Keith and I make no secret about the 2016 election being the reason we wrote it, and we don’t mince words about political shenanigans we believe are harmful, but if people would read the entire book they would find we try to find ways to bridge the gaps between us all.”
“I know. I know,” said the Pastor. “I thought we were ready to talk about this subject because it’s so important. Evidently, we are too polarized to talk about being polarized.”
I hung up the phone with a deep sadness in my heart. Yes, I was sad to lose an opportunity to speak at the conference, and have a few days afterward for a mini vacation with my wife in the Florida sun, but I was brokenhearted about the reason for the cancellation. How can we, as a people, ever get beyond the partisan divides that are ripping this nation apart if we cannot even sit down and calmly discuss them and try to understand each other?
“Too polarized to talk about being polarized”—what an indictment on all of us.
As things turned out, of course, the Peace Conference would have become a casualty of the coronavirus pandemic anyway. But that is scant comfort to me. Even worse, our national polarization now sets the agenda for our response to the pandemic. Those who refuse to wear masks and call for the economy to fully open are painted by the other side as buffoons who don’t care about infecting and killing people. Those who wear masks and advocate for a cautious, measured response based on science are called socialists and enemies of freedom. Shouldn’t we talk about this? Apparently, we cannot. We are too polarized to talk about being polarized.
By the way, I had planned to use St. Paul’s letters to the Corinthians as a starting point for a discussion of polarization. The Christian congregation in the city of Corinth was rife with divisions, and Paul’s words are still instructive for us: “Now I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you be in agreement and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same purpose” (1 Cor. 1:10).
The crowd at the conference would not all have been Christians, but that’s not the point. If Christians alone would heed Paul’s directive, perhaps the rest of the nation would follow.