Talking Across the Divide: How to Communicate with People You Disagree with and Maybe Even Change the World - Softcover

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Justin Lee has spent more than twenty years building bridges between conservatives and progressives on matters of faith and public policy. He is the founder of the world’s largest LGBT Christian advocacy organization and the author of Torn: Rescuing the Gospel from the Gays-vs.-Christians Debate. Learn more at geekyjustin.com.

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Chapter 1

Echo-Chamber World

Physically speaking, we can not separate. We can notremove our respective sections from each other nor build an impassable wallbetween them. A husband and wife may be divorced and go out of the presence andbeyond the reach of each other, but the different parts of our country can notdo this. They can not but remain face to face, and intercourse, either amicableor hostile, must continue between them.

—Abraham Lincoln, 18611

We are a nation divided.

Turn on the TV or hop online, and it doesn’t take long tosee evidence of our polarized mentalities. We disagree on race and religion, onscience and social issues—but we don’t just disagree; we’re baffled by eachother’s views, and we have no idea how to get through to one another. Partisanbickering has created a gridlocked government that struggles to get even widelysupported things done. Important scientific research is being stalled bycompeting groups’ agendas. Culture wars are fracturing our families and tearingour communities apart.

“It’s like we live on different planets,” my friend Ryansaid to me the other day.

He was talking about a rift between him and members ofhis family. They’d been close at one time, he told me. But in recent years,they’d found themselves more and more often on opposite sides of culturalbattles. They were bitterly divided by national politics, by matters of faithand morality, and by shifting cultural views on a variety of issues.

Ryan wanted to be able to sit down with his family andtalk through their differences—to help them understand where he was coming fromand to hopefully change their attitudes on the issues that mattered most tohim. But every time he tried talking to them, he just wound up frustrated.Their views didn’t make any sense to him, his didn’t make any sense to them,and every conversation seemed to wind up in an argument. Their communicationwas breaking down somewhere, and the rift between them was widening into anuncrossable chasm. Ryan had eventually fallen into the habit of swallowing hisemotions and trying to “make nice” at family events, but it was eating away athim. He couldn’t help wondering what could have happened to cause the people heloved to be so stubborn and to see the world so differently.

And Ryan’s far from alone. I’ve spent twenty yearsfocusing on divisive issues in our society, and in that time, I’ve metthousands of people just like him—people whose families, churches, communities,and workplaces are being torn apart by controversy and conflict, each sidebaffled by the other, each pointing to different “facts” and making differentassumptions. It is, as Ryan says, almost as if we live on different planets.

Competing ideas have always been part of the American wayof life. Our political system is built on contests between differing ideas, andour Constitution reflects the hard-fought compromises of founders who did notsee eye to eye on everything. But those compromises wouldn’t have happenedwithout communication across lines of disagreement, and our politicalmarketplace of ideas begins to fall apart if we’re hearing completely differentversions of the truth from completely different sources. For this “Americanexperiment” to function, we have to be able to talk to one another.

But our attempts to communicate are failing, and nowhereis this more obvious than in the current state of American politics. Since1994, the Pew Research Center has studied America’s political polarization, andin that time, the value divide between Republicans and Democrats has only grownlarger. In 2017, Pew found the largest partisan divide in the history of theirresearch—a value gap nearly 250 percent as large as it had been.2 Meanwhile,hostility between the parties has skyrocketed.3 Fewer of us are moderate than everbefore, and as we drift toward the left or the right, most of us who identifyas either Democrats or Republicans report that we have “just a few” or no closefriends in the opposing party.4

Ultimately, though, our political troubles are only asymptom of the underlying disease. An us-vs.-them mentality is taking over ourpublic and private lives. Increasingly, we take our disagreements not to thepeople we disagree with but to our own echo chambers—spaces where we can talkabout, rather than to, the other side—where like-minded people echo our ownbeliefs right back to us. Our opponents, too, are stuck in their own echochambers, having their beliefs reinforced by people on their side rather thanbeing encouraged to consider what we have to say. That’s a problem, becausesome of our biggest challenges as human beings require working together.

A Foot on Each Side of the Divide

My own interest in this problem began with the issuesclosest to me.

I grew up on a cultural battle line; I don’t rememberever not being aware of the culture wars. I was raised in a conservative,evangelical Christian family, with a faith that has stayed with me my entirelife. I learned from a young age that my church held certain views on a varietyof controversial issues, and I quickly embraced those views as my own—includinga staunch opposition to homosexuality. As a teenager, I tended to lecture myfriends on these issues, earning me the nickname God Boy, a badge I wore withpride.

But puberty brought complications. I wasn’t attracted togirls like my male friends were; I was attracted to guys. At eighteen, Ifinally had to admit to myself that I was gay, a realization that turned myevangelical life upside down and forced me to rethink a lot of what I thought Iknew about gay people. As I struggled to make sense of all the new information,I increasingly felt trapped between two worlds. And in college, when I madesome gay friends for the first time, it was easy to see how far apart these twoworlds were. My gay friends didn’t understand my evangelical friends andfamily, and my evangelical friends and family didn’t understand my gay friends.It was, indeed, as if we lived on different planets.

I began speaking and writing about this faith-sexualitydivide, and soon I was hearing views on the subject from frustrated people allacross the spectrum. I started a nonprofit that worked successfully for sixteenyears to bridge the divide and bring families back together that had been tornapart by their disagreements. My first book, Torn: Rescuing the Gospel from theGays-vs.-Christians Debate, resulted in a flood of letters to me from parents,pastors, and others telling me that I had completely changed their opinion onthe topic. There was an advantage, I realized, to being caught between worlds:It made me culturally bilingual.

Meanwhile, as I worked to bridge that divide, I foundmyself in the middle of many others. I was called in to consult withconservative faith leaders and progressive social-justice activists. I spoke tocrowds in rural towns and booming metropolises, in red states and blue. I gotto see the inside of other people’s echo chambers and to hear what they saidwhen “the other side” wasn’t present—and hours later, I might be in a room ofpeople on that other side, listening to them do the exact same thing. Theissues these groups raised weren’t just about faith and sexuality. They wereabout race and gender, guns and abortion, personal struggles and publicpolicy—and all sorts of other issues that divide us. These are issues we can’tafford to get wrong,...