As a Democrat who lives in the middle of one of the reddest counties in the country, a county that has only become more conservative as its reputation as a safe harbor for the right wing has become known, I have to say that I get so disgusted with how tone deaf liberals can be. It's just unbelievable to me how arrogant and smug my fellow liberals sound. Even when I agree with them (which I do on most issues, nothing has happened in the past ten years that has convinced me I should start voting Republican), I cannot believe how rude, disdainful, and disrespectful my fellow Democrats can be of our conservative neighbors.
I'm pretty sure it only happens because they've so thoroughly isolated themselves in their liberal social media feeds and their favorite liberal commentators and their liberal friends that they no longer have any contact with every day normal conservatives, and they think all conservatives must be racist, homophobic nut jobs who don't deserve to be heard or respected.
Freedom of religion is bedrock in this country, but right now no one (on either side) is paying any attention to it. Conservatives want to believe that we are a Christian nation and thus it's OK to discriminate against anyone who isn't. Liberals want to believe that every religion deserves respect except conservative Christianity. When I first decided back in 2016 that I needed to do a better job of listening to my conservative friends and neighbors, I was surprised how often this came up: there is a build-up of decades of bitterness and resentment about how liberals will go to the mat for pretty much any religion in the world, but they have nothing but sneering disdain for conservative Christians.
I understand about punching down vs. punching up, and that's the way I used to feel, too. Until I started actually listening. So many of us who are over-educated liberals see Christianity as optional, maybe because so many of us who were raised Christian have left it behind. It seems like something you grow out of, something that no intelligent person could believe. I've ended up becoming deeply re-committed to a more progressive version of Christianity as I've aged, but that was how I felt 15 or 20 years ago. But I've learned, and I was wrong.
Let me assure you, there are millions of people who feel differently. Their faith is not optional to them, it is deeply embedded in their hearts; it is fundamental to their identity. And when you sneer at them, or say dismissive things about their beliefs, or ignore their legitimate concerns about things that are happening in our country, you don't help your position. You are not convincing them that you are right. You are not changing minds. You're just pissing people off.
Over time I've come to see our reaction to faith as something that is wired into us. Some of us never felt like we fit in with the faith we were raised in and left as soon as we were old enough to get away. Some of us (me) wanted to believe it, but for various reasons were unable to make it work and left it behind.
But I think some other people are just wired into their status quo. They are not going to question it, they are not going to appreciate your ability to make mincemeat of their theology, and they are not going to change their minds. In fact, the louder you get, the more critical you get, the more you mock and bluster and shout about your outrage at conservative Christians, the more you blame them for all our social ills, the more resentful and bitter and angry they will become.
Until eventually, maybe because of the accumulation of years of bitterness, maybe because you've finally hit the one issue they will not compromise on, or maybe because you've just become so unbearably smug that they can't stand to listen anymore, eventually they feel that they will follow anyone who is willing to support them in what they should have been supported in all along-- the right to practice their faith in a country that promises them just that.
I write these posts fairly often, but then they just sit in my drafts folder for weeks or months because I can't believe I'm defending conservatives. Some of the things they've done this year make me sick to my stomach--but that's the power mongers in Washington. The conservatives I know personally are people who are volunteering at the food bank, or visiting sick people at the hospital, or knitting afghans for folks in nursing homes. They're not perfect, and we disagree on local politics about as often as we do national politics. But at least I can see them as people, people who love their families and work hard to make ends meet. Sometimes you just have to bite your tongue, not say what you're thinking, and listen.
I become more thoroughly convinced every day that the kind of intellectualism that I have admired and loved and practiced for my entire adult life is not going to solve this problem. We've argued our differences, and argued and argued, and if we could convince each other through arguing, it would have happened by now. Instead, we just get further and further apart.
I've told you before that Doug and I were separated for almost a year back in the 90s. We spent a lot of time finding the right marriage counselor, and then we spent a lot of time talking to her, and then we had to figure out what we were going to do. And finally one time she told us, you can talk yourselves to death trying to agree on what's wrong and who is responsible for what. but if you want to stay together, at some point, you've just got to let all that go and move on.
To apply that to our national situation would be a vast oversimplification, but it also is kind of true.
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