Once upon a time, we went years without knowing our friends’ politics. We could attend their birthday parties and holiday dinners and never once bring up who we’re voting for.
That era is long dead.
I’ve wondered whether it’s better that way. What if, after years of playdates with your kids as you sip coffee in a friend’s living room, you find out they support a cause or take a stance on a particular issue that you find deplorable? Or they support a candidate you think is utterly despicable?
Does the foundation of friendship and respect matter? Are you more inclined to hear them out and attempt to understand, as opposed to the neighbor down the street whose campaign yard sign is all you know of him?
Division runs deep
Finding out you harbor deep disagreement with someone you care about can be upsetting. It’s also disappointing to scroll through potential matches on Bumble BFF (the platonic friendship app, not the dating one) and see profile after profile of basically the same thing: “If you’re voting for XYZ, swipe left.” “If you’re anti-this, you can go delete yourself.” In response to the question of pet peeves: “People who believe this or that.”
It’s exhausting. Sometimes I swipe right just to make a point: that I, a conservative Christian, am being the more tolerant one. But I’ve been the intolerant person, too: the one who shut people out because our differences in politics felt more like differences in morality. Having been triggered by Trump’s casual “locker room talk,” and troubled by comparisons of his rhetoric to Hitler’s, I saw support for this candidate as a personal betrayal.
If someone I knew, even someone I knew well, admitted to voting for Trump, their “why” did not matter. They were gone from my life.
Conversely, in 2016 when I shared that I was voting for Hillary, I was summarily disowned by one of my closest friends, and her entire family. I’d known her since junior high, and we were in each other’s weddings. That’s a loss I still have not recovered from.
With the clarity that hindsight can offer, I see now that there were situations in which I definitely overreacted. In others, I still don’t know whether I did the right thing.
Cards on the table, or not?
Personally, I’m more inclined to offer someone the benefit of the doubt when they disagree on an issue I care about if we already have an established relationship. There is a degree of trust that has been earned when someone has had meals in my home (and I in theirs), when I’ve watched their children, and when we’ve allowed ourselves to be emotionally vulnerable in each other’s presence. I don’t take such connections lightly.
When it comes to meeting new people, I admit I am less inclined to want to talk to someone who is holding a protest sign I disagree with. I won’t go out of my way to extend an invitation to someone who says “No conservative Christians, please” in their Bumble BFF profile (true story). It’s what I call the “cards on the table” approach: what you see is what you get. There are no surprises, and no one feels like they wasted any time.
Politics matter because people matter
I don’t want to say “we are more than our politics,” because politics are important. They are an extension of our moral values. As Allie Beth Stuckey says, “Politics matter because policy matters because people matter.”
However, I also recognize that the American political system frequently offers imperfect candidates that require compromising our values in order to support them. I’m much more willing to hear someone’s “why” for the candidate I don’t like than I once was. It took a lot of healing and growth to reach that point.
Ultimately, I can’t say I regret ever having patience for someone on the other side of the aisle. I can’t say that I regret attempting a genuine conversation (though I may not always have the emotional bandwidth to do so). There are very, very few times in life I’ve regretted being kind. Actually, I can’t think of one.
Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash
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