The divide between left and right
in North America is well-established. The political antipathy that renders the
Senate and House of Representatives unable to function has penetrated families,
churches, and educational institutions. We are locked in a battle that threatens
to consume us.
Many people have observed this
divide, and many have made recommendations to bridge the divide. My suggestion
is not unique or better than others. Rather, it is my effort to think through
how I can live in a divided society.
I am conservative, but I find
attractive many causes espoused by liberals. I have progressive tendencies, but
I find that tradition gives me a firmer foundation than simply following the
most recent cause in our society. I value personal responsibility, which aligns
me with conservatives. I value justice and equity, which aligns me with
progressives. I hold traditional values, which aligns me with conservatives. I seek
a full life for marginalized peoples, which aligns me with liberals.
I suspect that I am not unusual in this
blend of conservative and traditional on the one hand and liberals and
progressive on the other. This blend means that I cringe when progressives
demean conservatives, and I am wounded when conservatives demonize liberals. I
believe, as Solzhenitsyn said, that the line between good and evil runs through
every human heart. I do not believe that either the left or the right has a
monopoly on good or evil.
What I want, then, is a way for
left and right to hear each other and to back away from the abyss of division. The
following comments explore a path drawn from the discipline of anthropology.
A Basic Insight
I studied anthropology over 30
years ago. The discipline has grown and changed, and I have grown and changed –
not necessarily together. I remember, however, a basic stance within
anthropology, one that is still (I suspect) relevant to the discipline today.
Anthropologists tend to be cultural relativists. They seek to explore each
culture on its own terms, rather than compressing the culture being studied
into the observer’s own categories.
We can call this exploration an
emic or insider’s view of the culture – as compared to an etic or outsider’s
view. The fact that I refer to culture and ethnicity is a sign of the kind of
anthropology in which I was trained. I know that these concepts are disputed
and perhaps outdated, but that fact does not alter the basic point I am making:
We seek to understand others on their own terms, not judge them by our ways of
seeing the world.
My background is in working with
the global Christian church. Therefore, the anthropology training I received
might be called missionary anthropology. Missionaries assume that the culture
of the people to whom they have gone with the gospel needs correction, just as
their own home culture needs correction. But missionaries also must suspend
judgment when they approach a new culture. The outsider does not know the host
culture and has no right to judge it. In fact, judgments by newcomers to a
culture are often misplaced.
An example from missionary
experience. Brethren in Christ missionaries in the early 20th
century came from a North American context in which evangelical Christians
fought against any use of alcohol. Most BICs would have approved of the temperance
movement and the prohibition of alcohol.
They arrived in a culture where
traditional beer was brewed from maize or sorghum. Unlike North America, beer was
as much food as it was drink. Sometimes, people did become drunk, but more
often they used the beer drink as an opportunity to socialize, exchange news,
and strengthen the bonds of community. The first missionaries who came to
Zimbabwe – including Robert Moffat and David Livingstone – accepted traditional
beer as an appropriate drink to participate in at the end of a long journey.
When BIC missionaries arrived in
Zimbabwe, they assumed that the traditional beer drink was a replica of the worst
they knew from bars in the USA. Prohibition was the only stance they could
imagine as possible for Christians, so converts had to cut themselves off from
one of the basic community-building activities in their culture. Later
missionaries (such as Fred and Grace Holland) noted this loss, but the cultural
intervention remained as a basic part of Christian faith. Today, prohibition
remains the church position in Zimbabwe, long after the North American church
has moved on to a more nuanced stance.
Another example. When missionaries
arrived in Zimbabwe, they found monogamous and polygamous families. Older men
of means would often take a second or third wife. The missionaries came from a
culture in which such an action was interpreted as unfaithfulness and lusty –
they assumed that the older men had tired of their older wife and wanted
someone younger and more desirable. Human nature suggests that this analysis
was sometimes correct, but culturally one discovers it is also incomplete.
In traditional cultures, polygamy
serves a variety of functions. One is to provide shelter and security for
childless widows, as was also the case in Old Testament Hebrew culture (see
Deuteronomy 20). Another is to ensure that childless women have an opportunity
to bear children (also true in Deuteronomy 20). In traditional cultures, to be
childless is a great grief, and an unmarried woman faces real loss.
The missionary response typically
was to rule that the polygamist must give up all his wives after his first wife
(adding divorce to the sin of polygamy). What happened to the additional wives
was a necessary tragedy. As missionaries contemplated this situation, they
recognized that the issues were more complex than they had first thought. BIC
missionaries in Zimbabwe petitioned the home church at General Conference for
direction on how to handle these difficult situations. (The home church sent
the issue back to the church Zimbabwe and said, “You deal with it!”)
African views of polygamy were
complicated by the testimony of Scripture. As they learned to read the Bible,
African Christians discovered that not only does the Law accept polygamy, but
Ruth and Boaz are held up as examples of faithfulness, Abraham was a
polygamist, Jacob’s wives and concubines combined to aid in the formation of
the Children of Israel, and David – the man after God’s own heart – was a
polygamist in the grand fashion of a King.
In short, the missionary approach
to polygamy would have benefitted from an anthropological stance of cultural
relativism. Missionaries could usefully have bracketed their initial judgment
of polygamy and waited for African Christians to give direction to the church.
The Basic Insight Restated
Let me restate the anthropological
insight. Anthropologists explore new cultural situations through the
methodology of participant-observation. They bracket their own cultural
understandings and enter the host culture as fully as possible (seeking to
become participants), and then they record their observations in as neutral a
manner as possible, allowing the host culture to indicate what the elements of
their culture mean and how they should be understood.
In my own teaching as a
missiologist (student of mission, specializing in missionary anthropology), I
have emphasized the priority of the host culture in establishing church
structure (the indigenous church), understanding Christian teaching
(contextualisation), and preaching the gospel. Missionary outreach struggles to
adapt fully to new cultural settings, and the task of communicating the gospel
cross-culturally requires a constant stance in favour of the host culture.
This does not mean that the
outsider can never speak against elements of the host culture that have gone
wrong. It does, however, mean that the right to speak out is earned over a long
period of time. Outsiders routinely misunderstand what is happening within the
host culture. We must always be ready to accept correction and renew our
engagement with our hosts.
This critique of missionary
practice resonates within our contemporary society. When I was young, many
people in our society admired missionaries. People like my parents were assumed
to be good people, respected for their willingness to make personal sacrifice
for the benefit of others. Today, many people in our society assume that
missionaries were complicit in the colonial project, part of an imperialism
that we now see as misguided at best and tyrannical at worst. As a missionary
myself, I hear the voices questioning our right to think that we can go to
places like Zimbabwe and tell them what to believe.
There is truth in this critique.
Missionaries have sometimes acted in ways that betrayed the gospel they
preached. The gospel assumes an essential equality between all God’s children;
missionaries have sometimes acted as though “all people are equal, but some
people [we] are more equal than others.” The critique fails (in my view) at two
points: 1) I know from my own experience and study that many missionaries broke
this stereotype – missionaries were an essential part of undermining the
colonial project; and 2) where the stereotype holds true, it is a human problem
rather than a problem with the gospel itself.
Pursue the second point. Human
beings tend to evaluate others based on their own understanding of the world.
This is true of missionaries, because missionaries are human. It is true of
people in general – including progressives and conservatives. Therefore, if the
perceived missionary tendency to judge others by their own standards is wrong
(as a demonstration of colonialism), the actual practice of conservatives and
liberals alike judging others is equally wrong.
In the political arena, we see this
tendency worked out routinely. As I type these words, President Trump has said
that he will withhold funds from Honduras if its citizens vote for the
candidate he opposes. This threat is a clear example of imperialism. Some years
ago, some liberals pressured President Obama to withhold aid from Uganda
because of Ugandan laws that punished homosexuals. Their effort to make Uganda
conform to their standards was an equally clear example of imperialism. People
on both the left and the right are inclined to practice the kind of imperialism
they condemn in others (such as missionaries) – or worse.
What About the Political Divide?
This brings us to apply my basic
anthropological insight to the political divide in Canada and the USA. To state
the application is straightforward; to carry it out is extremely difficult. We
begin by stating it. Just as the anthropologist and missionary enter a culture
as guests and suspend judgment on that culture, we seek to enter the political
arena of the left or the right as guests: suspending judgment and allowing our
hosts to define what they say and what they mean.
As people wrestle with the
political divide in our country, they often say how important it is for us to
begin to speak with each other and seek common ground. I am suggesting that the
anthropological method gives us a tool for such conversations: We recognize
that our hosts (liberals hosting conservatives and conservatives hosting
liberals) are in charge of what they have to say, and we seek to understand
them on their own terms.
A remarkable effort to do precisely
this is Jonathan Haidt’s work on moral philosophy (for example, The
Righteous Mind). Haidt began life as a self-described atheist liberal who
became a political centrist. As part of his doctoral work, he entered a
socially conservative Indian family, seeking to understand how conservatives
came to their moral positions. He did not become a conservative, but the effort
to understand has transformed his life.
We can’t all do the kind of
in-depth study that Haidt did, but we can all take a stance of suspending our
judgment of the other side. Liberals can stop referring to conservatives as racist
and conservatives can stop referring to progressives as communist. (I omit the stronger
epithets intentionally.) Instead, we can see each other as coming from
different worldviews and seek to understand the other’s culture.
In the process, there will be
culture shock and there will be times we retreat to the relative comfort of our
own cultural group; but the longer we persist – neither judging nor condemning
– the more likely we are to understand what energizes people who support choice
rather than a blanket right to life, or people who are suspicious of government
help for the disadvantaged.
It is easy to say, “Don’t judge.”
It is far harder to continue to engage while withholding judgment. It is also a
necessary step towards healing the divide between left and right. We will not all
end up in the middle as political centrists; I see no reason why we should. The
best result would be that we become able to speak with each other again so that
the political leaders of our country can draw on the best of progressive
thinking and the best of conservative thinking. A winner takes all attitude
only seeks to destroy, and we are already on the path to mutual destruction.
A Modest Proposal
So, a modest proposal. Make a
friend who sees life differently than you do. Build the friendship slowly. Test
the waters gradually. Explore their view of life, seeking to understand why
they think that a particular stance towards LGBTQI+ is important, or what they
think we should do as we respond to homeless people on our streets, or any
other subject important to you. Don’t try to “convert” them. Try to understand
them. Keep voting for the leaders who promote your view of the world. Vote
against leaders whose personal style is to divide and destroy. Vote for leaders
who have clear convictions combined with a real ability to connect with the
other side. (I have no idea who these leaders are!) Decide today that those you
oppose are worth listening to. You are God’s image-bearer, and so are they.
I don’t expect my proposal to solve all the problems we face. I am too old to expect the kind of miracles I thought were possible in the
60s. But I hope and pray that we can learn from anthropologists and
missionaries to act wisely in our own sphere of influence.
Daryl Climenhaga
30 November 2025
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