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No, you’re not toxic just because you’re conservative

No, you’re not toxic just because you’re conservative

Last updated on: May 5, 2016 at 9:46 am by Morgan Guyton

No, you’re not toxic just because you’re conservative 2016-05-05T09:46:24-05:00 Morgan Guyton

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I was going to write a nanny-nanny boo-boo post about Donald Trump becoming the Republican nominee, basically arguing that the toxic theology of my adversaries was entirely to blame for his rise to power. I figured I could cash in on the trending topic for some easy traffic and promote my book about antidotes to toxic Christianity. But it didn’t feel right. At a book event last night, I was talking about my final chapter “Kingdom not Stadium” where I say that God’s kingdom has to be big enough for people who completely disagree with me. So I was convicted. And I thought about a moment when I was preaching in Kansas this past weekend that’s been haunting me.

I was looking out at the congregation I was visiting last Sunday morning, and something about the faces in the room made me think, “My God, they’re all Republicans. When they see my book title, they’re going to think I’m calling them toxic, and they’re not toxic.” It was a beautiful, inter-generational church. It seemed like the children felt safe and loved. A middle schooler was the lay liturgist. The people were very friendly and welcoming.

I had tailored my sermon for a more conservative crowd. My text was the prodigal son parable. Instead of laying into the judgy older brother who had become for me the representative of all the evils of American middle class sacrifice, I decided to talk about how confusing and hard it is to be a father since I thought that would connect across ideological lines. I talked about my friend who’s an army colonel and has faced very challenging circumstances in his fatherhood (partly because I needed them to know that I have a friend who is an army colonel).

As I was preaching, I saw a really tough-looking guy in the audience who had a devastated look on his face. My sermon had been pretty raw because I shared the story of accidentally giving my son a partial black eye when I was in the process of disciplining him and then being scared to death that the school was going to call child protective services on me. When I showed up at his school two days later to chaperone a field trip, the huge grin on his face when he saw me walk into the room was one of the best things that’s ever happened to me. It felt like being a prodigal son and having your heavenly father run out into the road to throw his arms around you, except that I was the daddy and my son was the one who forgave me.

I wanted the tough-looking guy to smile when I got to the resolution in my story. But he didn’t. He just kept on staring off into space with a frown the way you do when you’ve reached the end of your rope. And I seemed to see one of his older teenage daughters crying. And my heart was broken. I felt guilty for having preached such a raw sermon and having wanted it to make people cry. Who knows? Maybe he was spacing out about something completely unrelated and his daughter had allergies. But what was running through my head was how much I wanted to pour myself into loving that family. And I wanted to flip through my book to make sure I hadn’t pissed all over everything they held sacred just in case they wanted to get a copy.

I really wanted my book to be something Christians across the ideological spectrum could use to deepen their discipleship. At times, I think I was able to be honest and circumspect and gracious enough for conservatives to read it without cringing and maybe benefit from it. At other times, I got too much pleasure out of stomping all over the American Dream and the middle-class values of people who really do love their kids and their communities and are genuinely doing the best.

My conundrum is that I feel like I’m supposed to be writing in solidarity with the outsiders who have been silenced and pushed out by conservative evangelical culture, particularly the LGBT community who have played such an instrumental role in how God showed me the gospel. It feels right to ruthlessly denounce their critics the way that Jesus jumped all over Simon the Pharisee for judging the woman who anointed Jesus’ feet in Luke 7. But then when I spend time with conservatives who are genuinely kind, humble people, I feel sheepish about all my diatribes.

I still think it’s legitimate to validate people who have been bullied by talking back to their bullies. But I also want to name the fact that being conservative doesn’t make you toxic. In a world where things are changing rapidly and people are so intolerant of being around opposing viewpoints, those who want to hold firmly to the wisdom of the past are extremely valuable and often unfairly maligned.

I respect that many conservatives feel like God’s truth is getting kicked to the curb by a consumer-oriented culture where the customer is always right and “defining yourself” is something you do on a shopping spree. I respect that they feel like people are being pressured into a sort of Orwellian group-think by political correctness. As much as I want conservatives to listen better to people who are different, I respect that the collapse of the gender binary feels to conservatives like a catalyst for utter social chaos.

And I realize that many conservatives are mourning the way that Donald Trump has captured the presidential nomination. All the ones I know have been fighting it fiercely since the beginning of the presidential race. It doesn’t feel good to say, “Haha, you’re going to get slaughtered in November; hope this helps you realize how much you suck.” I wrote a sentence recently that I thought was awesome: the culture wars are an emphatic defense of the right not to listen to people whose identities make your world too confusing. But what if that’s true on both sides? Conservatives who are humble and compassionate make my world too confusing. It’s much easier to say, “Ha! I don’t have to listen to anything you say because Donald Trump proves you’re completely invalid.”

I really do believe that accusation is the work of Satan. Obviously, there’s an important place for speaking prophetic truth. But lobbing delegitimization at our ideological adversaries seems like a much less effective way to seek mutual growth than to listen deeply and try our best to find whatever is honorable in their values. It seems more important to build a space free of demonization than to make sure that conservatism gets utterly discredited and stomped out by all the Donald Trumps we can jeer at. Whatever introspection and repentance that conservatives need to undergo in response to Trump’s ascendancy is not anything that will happen because I write a patronizing, concern troll blog post about it.

So if you’re conservative, I don’t think you suck. I’m not going to share my convictions with any less passion, but I do need to take the extra step to make sure that everything I say is thoroughly seasoned with grace. I do need to give you credit when you’re thoughtful and compassionate. I need to become a detoxified Christian.

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