Even within the protests, protests have been born--which is not surprising because hurt begets hurt, and there is no end to the appetite of a professional injustice collector.
I don't know if the anonymity and ease of barfing out coarse, rude, and often threatening comments into any open microphone and all over cyberspace has bled over into real life, but for some reason, people are having trouble relating kindly to others.
Especially to those who think differently than they do.
Part of the problem is that--let's be honest--it is fun to be the one who shuts someone else down with a snappy Facebook comment or a pithy tweet.
Bazaam! We nail it and we smile as we count up the tally of "likes" from our hand-picked cyber-posse. And the invisible audience in our own heads starts the slow clap.
Not only do we get our instant applause, but as we send our zingers out into cyberspace or take the mic at our rally-of-the-day with our gaggle of like-minded compatriots, we imagine our opponents writhing in embarrassment or taking a mental posture of defeat before our intellectual and moral superiority.
And in the rush to join the angry, intolerant mob, screaming about tolerance, many become worse than the problems they are protesting.
In some ways it is almost funny. The same crowd who is demanding to be unquestioningly accepted, and to have every one of their requests for accommodation met, and to be heard and respected unilaterally are the ones who refuse to even listen to a diversity of opinion.
Huh?
Here is a News Flash for the teeming horde of collegiate snowflakes and professional protesters: There must be a stark difference of opinion for "tolerance" to even be necessary. If we all shared the same exact opinions on everything we would never even need to tolerate another person's viewpoint.
Tolerance is by definition offering forbearance to a brother or sister who doesn't share our mind. It does not mean "always agreeing with each other". It also doesn't mean "not trying to explain your position" to one another.
It does mean "a fair, objective, and permissive attitude toward opinions, beliefs, and practices that differ from one's own. Interest in and concern for ideas, opinions, practices, etc., foreign to one's own." (dictionary.com)
Tolerance is best showcased in polite disagreement and it is born of the calm assurance that one's position is reasonable, defensible, and morally right.
But it is increasingly rare these days.
I was wondering why--and then I watched an old movie called "Judgement at Nuremburg". It is based on the real-life trial of four Nazi judges by an American tribunal after World War II.
What struck me was the clear-eyed justification for Nazi war crimes offered by Dr. Ernst Janning, a German judge whose character had been unimpeachable before the war, but who at the request of the Nazi regime had repeatedly sent people whom he knew to be innocent away to be sterilized, imprisoned, and killed.
When asked how he could do such a thing, he replied that "his country asked it of him" and so "he had the duty to obey".
And then it hit me. Isn't this what we all do? Take our sides and pledge our allegiance?
Doesn't it appear we were designed for it?
We are built to be loyal subjects to someone or something. Ideally that Someone would be our Lord and Maker, the only One who really has a handle on the way we are put together and knows what we need in order to flourish and thrive.
We do best when we give Him our allegiance and follow His kind directives, but sometimes we transfer our loyalties to lesser things: nations, parties, movements--even individuals--forgetting that all of these masters are fallible.
And when we blindly follow the fallen, people get hurt.
As I think back through every pharaoh, king, leader, tyrant, despot, president and prime minister I can bring to memory, I cannot think of one who deserved the unquestioning loyalty of another human being.
Every one of them had feet of clay.
Because every one of us has feet of clay.
But in our day we have taken it a step farther. We are no longer giving our allegiance to God or to country or even to "der Furher".
Instead, increasingly we have transferred our entire fealty to our own tiny selves.
And as terrifying as it is to contemplate a nation of people who are all pulling together in the wrong direction under the leadership of a misguided dictator "for the good of the motherland", imagine a nation of people who are pulling in a million different directions under the leadership of a million little tyrants for the good of...what?
Self-realization?
Self-fulfillment?
Self-expression?
God help us.
Well, maybe He would if we hadn't kicked him off the throne a long time ago. And after that, we still felt itchy and under-actualized, so we kicked the traditional virtues off the throne as well--honor, self-sacrifice, commitment, loyalty, compassion, temperance, kindness, humility.
And each man has become his own sovereign nation on the royal throne in his own head.
So we make up our minute little dictatorships, ruling over whomever will allow it, stomping about, demanding fealty, throwing our little fits and shouting "off with his head" at anyone who dares offer dissent.
Occasionally we find a pocket of tiny tyrants with whom we can make an alliance because they are demanding the same things. For a season we encourage each other with the justice of our mutual causes, but the alliance is weak because it has been formed on the tenuous footing of "what I feel" or "what my heart tells me".
But the moment one of your pet issues comes into conflict with one of mine, the coalition is broken because ultimately our issues have no roots and no moral imperative beyond the confines of our own hearts.
So we slide around between our shifting allies. Insecure. Suspicious. Easily defeated. Collecting injustices. Waging lonely battles under our own little flags.
I think we are seeing this increasingly in our society in groups such as Antifa and the alt-right and the white supremacists and everywhere in between. Not only are these groups unable to get along with anyone else, but the souls of their members are fractured internally.
Think about it. Are these movements marked by a spirit of peace? Or by a spirit of fear and anger? Are they looking for any shred of common ground with their opposition or just machine gunning? Are they listening, or just shouting?
The individual members of these groups are shot through with an air of desperation--born, I believe, from carrying the full moral and practical weight of his or her own personal kingdom and the entire burden for its defense.
Don't you see in them a moral outrage that comes from viewing--not God as the offended party, nor even country, but rather themselves as the violated parties? And how that affects their rights and their royal perspective from their own personal thrones of power?
When our allegiance is toward a Being or a movement outside and greater than ourselves, although we still stand firmly in the justice of our position and the need for its defense, we can leave the ultimate responsibility for its justification (and for the outcomes of our moral battles) in bigger hands than ours.
This spares us on two levels:
1) It spares us from panic, which can drive us to commit desperate and cruel acts, and
2) It spares us from pride, which can cause us to see other people as the problem, and ourselves as the solution.
This is of ultimate importance for a Christian especially because our enemies are never other people.
Our enemy is Evil and the sin that is born of its father, and because that fruit is found in our own hearts as much as in the hearts of those we disagree with, our battleground shifts from the destruction of our adversaries, to the defeat of wrong thinking.
Most importantly, it moves the operation from an extermination to an invitation-- an invitation to come and find the only King and kingdom which can give an answer to our deepest need.
This shift in perspective solves both the problem of panic and pride.
It delivers us from panic because the war was never between me and you, but between the forces of evil and a Good God, who loves us both and fights to free us both from our true enemy.
It saves us from pride because we finally come face to face with the truth that we have all been victims to a degree--captured by a mutual enemy.
It finds the common ground between us and bids us lay down our arms.
Christians, we bear the image of a Holy God, and when we speak, we are talking to fellow image bearers, and herein lies our whole duty:
We cannot ever forget to Whom we belong, and to whom we are communicating. (If you are not a Christian, this is not your standard, nor would I expect you to hold it up. Just saying.)
For those who claim to follow Christ, we ought not FORCE each other to act in certain ways, but if we truly believe a person is deceived, or is not living in a way which will best enable them to thrive as their Maker intended them to, we will speak the truth.
In love.
That's it. Simply lay out the ideas in a winsome and articulate manner and pray it is received well. Whether or not minds and behaviors change is ultimately up to God. We are not gods that we should ever be trusted with the fearsome power of forcing our fellow man to bend their thoughts and behaviors to our sovereign wills.
While it is sometimes frustrating to make a solid case and have a person still do or believe the opposite, it is also freeing to know that ultimately it is not our problem.
Because we are laity, not Deity.
God sets the standards and we can follow them or not follow them. While we can urge others to consider His ways, in the end people are answerable to Him, not to us.
He holds all things so we don't have to bear that burden. So we can rest peacefully with one another, knowing that He is good, and He will ultimately make all inequities right and bring justice to the earth.
The only reason I can think of to violently and vehemently insist that those of a different opinion than mine have no right to speak and don't deserve to share space on the planet with me and my fellow "self-appointed guardians of all truth and knowledge" is if God has left the building and left it all in our hands.
In that case, it makes sense to panic and run around with a taser and a roll of duct tape.
But if God is on His throne, we need just keep our eyes on Him and rest in His ability to finish what He started.
This means we can have firm convictions--but since we do not hold the power of definition, they must always line up with Biblical truth.
We can speak passionately--but always in love, which eliminates name calling, epithets, broad-brushing our opponents, attributing evil motives, using derision and ridicule, demanding people shut up, or using violent coercion to make them do our will.
We can care about our causes--but we cannot forget that we don't hold the power of ultimate outcomes. God's shoulders are the only ones big enough to carry that kind of pressure. When we try to take it on, we either become tyrannical or terrified.
Both of which we are seeing too much of these days.
When dealing with those in stark disagreement with us, we must remember that our own hearts have been and are still traitors and spies. If others are deceived, it is only because they are as we once were.
If we see things clearly, it is only because we were found and brought home--and then bidden to go and do the same for our brothers and sisters.
The intelligence and counterintelligence the heart brings must be suspected and evaluated carefully by the only TRUE measure--the Word of God--and the people around us must be treated with the respect due to fellow image bearers, even as we engage them on the field of ideas.
As we would want done for us.
It is the gold in the golden rule and the only hope for a peaceful resolution to the million-front battle we are currently waging.
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2 Timothy 2:24-26
And a servant of the Lord must not be quarrelsome, but he must be kind to everyone, able to teach, and forbearing.
He must gently reprove those who oppose him, in the hope that God may grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth.
Then they will come to their senses and escape the snare of the devil, who has taken them captive to his will.
