It’s campaign season, and with that realization also comes the realization that for a couple of months anyway, the hyperbole, the accusations and recriminations, the name-calling, and the apocalyptic warnings that seem more and more to be the norm in our body politic will reach epic levels. I can’t wait.
Well, actually I can wait. Or more accurately, I will wait. I’ll wait until the second Tuesday in November, and then I’ll cast my vote for the candidate I feel is best suited to lead our nation—based not primarily on what I read in the press (an increasingly unreliable source these days, in terms of objectivity), or even so much on what a candidate says he or she will do if elected, but largely on the kind of human being the candidate seems to be—as evidenced by his or her actions. Actions, as most of us were taught, speak louder than words.
My job here, though, is not to outline what I see as the pros and cons of any candidate. Our current candidates for President, like all candidates before them and all who will come, are flawed children of God. The suggestion that our only choices are between the lesser of two evils is simply a product of political marketing. I honestly don’t think of either candidate as “evil”. Each in his or her own way may be misguided—but not evil. And my job is certainly not to endorse one or the other. As I see it, the church is decidedly not a place for political endorsements, as if God would stoop to such a mortal convention.
What about debate among Christians? Perhaps. But I have become so skeptical of our ability to engage in respectful dialog about politics or pressing societal issues even in the church that I’m inclined to believe we’re better off leaving debate for the public square. After all, we’ve plenty of work to do around our primary Christian imperatives—feeding the hungry, sheltering those experiencing homelessness, clothing the ill-clothed, visiting the sick and imprisoned, and advocating for peace and justice, especially for those who are oppressed and unable to fend for themselves.
I would hope, however, that we could all agree that the quality of our political discourse has been debased well below the level of acceptability for people who worship the power of love to transform lives. Regardless of our individual political beliefs, it seems almost axiomatic that we Christians especially should be disturbed, if not outraged by the level to which the campaigns of the people who would become our leaders have been characterized by name-calling, ugly insinuations, a poverty of truth, generalizations, and (perhaps most of all) fear-mongering. None of it is biblical. None of it reflects the teachings of Christ. None of it, frankly, will lead us one bit closer to becoming a society that looks anything like the Kingdom of God.
Reading a recent essay by Christian ethicist Dr. David Gushee, “Words Still Matter”, I found myself nodding in agreement—albeit sadly—that “[w]e are genuinely at risk of becoming a society in which there is no such thing as truth.” Granted, questions around the nature of philosophical truth have been debated since the dawn of humankind, and the debates won’t likely be resolved in the foreseeable future. But Dr. Gushee’s focus is more on truth as an essential element of the statements we make during political discourse.
In his essay (available here), Dr. Gushee describes an “ethics of speech” that, a) insists that statements we assert as truths have corresponding bases in reality; b) some statements we make are promises, and we must keep those promises; and c) our statements should always reflect an “awareness of the dangers of verbal misdirection, deception, innuendo, half-truths, and sarcasm.”
While his comments in the essay are specifically related to the Presidential campaigns of the two major-party candidates, we Christians as individuals and as representatives of our faith are hardly exempt from the demands of the ethics he outlines. In fact, helping to change the tone of our public discourse through minding the words that we ourselves use is, as I see it, very much a part of our witness. If we don’t model love, a respect for truth, and an openness to different points of view in our speech, who will?
Love it or hate it, social media has in many respects become a legal tender of communication these days, and thus a nidus of what Dr. Gushee might call unethical speech. While tools such as Facebook and Twitter are quite useful for sharing information with a wide range of people, their use as a means of dividing people and bearing false witness against others—without the accountability inherent in face-to-face dialog—has become epidemic. Posts that feature generalizations or hyperbole about whole groups of people (e.g., “Conservatives are racists who don’t care about the poor” or “Liberals are Godless people who are OK with killing babies” to cite just a couple of well-worn memes) are neither Christian in their tone (i.e., not what Jesus would say) nor do they have any basis in reality. Such words can only alienate and stand as empathy-proof walls between people. Why perpetuate them?
I know I’ve been guilty of not minding the ethics of my speech at times, and I suspect that most of us would admit to having gotten carried away in a moment from time to time. Fortunately, as Christians we know that by grace we’re forgiven for those moments—but we’re also aware of the admonishment that we go and sin no more. By that same grace, it is incumbent upon us to remain ever aware of the fact that the ethics of our speech constitutes a witness to those around us as we talk and/or post about political campaigns—or anything else, for that matter. By that grace we may actually begin to change the tone of our public discourse.
Regardless of who wins and regardless of the apocalyptic predictions of the loser, we will likely survive as a nation. The poor, the outcast, the hungry, those experiencing homelessness, the refugee, the prisoner, the sick, the lonely, the oppressed and enslaved—they’ll all still be with us. The words they will most need to hear are words like, “we care about you just as you are”, “how can we help you?”, “welcome to our country”, “tell us your story”, “the Peace of Christ be with you”… Such words—and the louder actions that flow from them—will tear down walls and transform lives. Words indeed matter. Use them as if Christ himself were listening.
