In which I do even more re-hashing about church, or maybe it's just hashing this time, and continue to fail to get to the point.

So when I left off this topic last Tuesday, our little presbyterian church, which has been in the same location for over 100 years, had seen a steep drop in membership, but we still have our dedicated loyal survivors of about 180 members. We're lucky that includes a broad range of opinions, viewpoints, and outlooks on life.

I say lucky because that's really hard to find right now. People tend to congregate (pun!) with the likeminded. Our church is one of the few places I know where people with markedly different opinions about all sorts of things coexist and actually function well together to accomplish good things in the community--we're actively involved in working with at-risk teens, the homeless shelter, feeding the hungry, and an array of other activities.

I highly value that diversity of opinion. There are churches in our town that are more in line with my own opinions, but I don't want to go to church in an echo chamber. I grew up with that, and it's stifling.

It works for awhile because you can get that warm glow of "I know I'm right about this because everyone around me agrees with me," but eventually that sameness becomes restrictive. If your opinions change as you learn new things and have new experiences, you may find that the people you thought loved you for who you are, actually only love you if you fit in. Or they say they still love you (and maybe they genuinely do), but they don't want you in the group anymore.

At least that was my experience. I'm getting way off track here.

About a month ago, someone spoke up during worship with an opinion that was phrased in decidedly liberal/Democrat language.* The person that spoke is so immersed in that segment of our culture that she didn't think she was being partisan, she thought she was just stating The Way Things Are, with a ringing call to champion social justice.

But the conservatives heard a liberal saying "only Democrats care about this issue" and suddenly a wide-open rift has occurred right in the middle of our church. And we're finding out that this particular rift has been on the verge of breaking open for a couple of years now.
It's worth stating the obvious here and pointing out that these conservatives are not way-out right-wing nutcases. They go to a church--some of them for decades--that has no problem with women in church leadership, in a denomination that states that a woman's pregnancy decisions should be between her and her physician, and also allows gay ordination and same-sex marriage.

And yet they vote Republican, and they don't see a problem with that. (I don't either.) They're Republican because they were raised that way, or because of their views about fiscal policy, or banking regulations, or the military, or foreign policy.

In the aftermath of this incident, we're coming to realize that the reason we've been able to coexist for so long is because we don't talk about politics. And I find myself in the unusual situation of being a liberal who is defending the conservatives. It's making me a little nuts. The noise that's being drummed up on the part of the more liberal members of our congregation has become so unbearably tone-deaf that I can hardly stand to be involved. But I'm on session (church leadership) right now and so, voilà. I'm involved.
The whole situation has made me realize how clueless some liberals are about some conservatives. I live in a community that usually votes heavily conservative--in 2016, President Trump took 65% of the votes, and since various other parties took 6%, that means less than 30% voted Democrat. So I have a front-row seat on understanding conservatives, something I think liberals who live in more populous areas don't really have. I can't avoid the Trump base, or the never-Trumpers, or the Libertarians, because I live right in the middle of them.

So as a service to you, my gentle readers, I'm going to pass on some things I've learned about Conservatives in the past two years. Because when President Trump won the election, I made a small promise to myself that I would try to learn, and not just dissolve into anger and despair. (I confess I haven't always been successful.)

Please note that I'm not doing this because I'm trying to convince you that they're right, but because it is time, it is long past time, for us to start building bridges instead of continuing to yell at each other about how wrong the other side is. 

Good grief, how do these things get so long? I was planning to get started on what I wanted to say, but this is already too long. To be continued, and since I want to get this done because I need to sort it out for myself, I may actually post Out Of Schedule. Wtf is the world coming to.

Happy Tuesday.

* Apologies for the lack of details, I'm being purposely vague so if anyone local reads this, it will be unidentifiable.