Reconciliation in a Polarized Age
What I learned from having difficult conversations with my conservative Mormon Mom.
November 8, 2016 sent shockwaves through my family.
Donald Trump, a reality TV star with a history of sexual violence against women, blatantly racist views, infidelity in his multiple marriages, shady business deals, and cruel and unkind rhetoric, was elected president of the United States.
And my parents were part of his victory.
It wasn’t just that they voted for him. It was that their support seemed to contradict everything they’d ever taught my four siblings and me. My parents are devout, conservative Mormons — genuinely decent folks who raised us to love God, serve our neighbors, and lead morally upstanding lives.
Their support of someone like Trump felt breathtakingly incongruous with our rigorous religious upbringing. So much so that not a single one of my siblings, including some who had voted Republican their entire lives, could stomach pulling the lever for Trump.
And none of us could figure out why our parents had.
The fallout from the election was fierce. One of my sisters yelled and cried in a heated argument with my parents at their house. Another walked out, furious, in the middle of a family dinner at The Cheesecake Factory. I unfriended my dad on Facebook and dramatically rage-quit the family text chain (only to ask, sheepishly, to be re-added a couple of weeks later).
Our once-close family relationships had never been so strained.
“Gradually, then all at once”
Although, if I’m honest, they had been pretty strained.
Over the previous decade, four out of five of us had left the Mormon church. This caused heartbreak and resentment that remained mostly unexpressed, splitting the family into two informal but nonetheless observable factions: those who left, and those who stayed.
I was one of the leavers.
I experienced a profound spiritual awakening and an unexpected call to ministry that pulled me from Mormonism to orthodox Christianity, much to my parents’ (and, to be perfectly transparent, at times my own) dismay.
We drifted from one another, like Hemingway’s description of bankruptcy in The Sun Also Rises: “Gradually, and then all at once.”
November 2016 wasn’t the beginning of a fissure, but the final cleavage in a break that had been long coming.
And none of us were sure we’d survive it.
Difficult Conversations
Then something strange happened.
We started talking.
I don’t remember exactly when or how it started. It was probably my mom who suggested it. But all of a sudden, one of my sisters and I were getting on Zoom every Sunday afternoon with our mother to have difficult conversations.
I use that term intentionally; “difficult conversations” were the stated point of the exercise. We wanted to see if we could learn to hear and understand one another better. At first, we read books together (we started with a more “liberal” suggestion, The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, and Divided We Fall by conservative David French), but our discussions soon became much more wide-ranging. We talked about racism, politics, patriotism, and faith. More importantly, we talked about our relationships: in particular, where we’d gone wrong, and what we needed to do to correct it.
We established guidelines to help us navigate our way through emotionally intense moments, such as:
Assume good intentions of one another
No name-calling or accusing
Stay committed to our relationships, even when things get hard; no “retreating” or “rage-quitting” (that one was for me)
Ask questions: “What strikes you about this?” or “Why does this stand out to you?”
Use “I”-statements
Listen actively and carefully
We didn’t keep to these perfectly. Each of us had moments of anger, of accusation, of refusing to hear one another; each of us had times when we needed to seek forgiveness for a knee-jerk reaction or unkind word.
But over time, we began to experience a miracle: that of reconciliation.
The Ministry of Reconciliation
I should be clear: by “reconciliation,” I don’t mean something cheap and unearned, in which we never discuss real things or pretend as if the differences that divide us don’t have profound implications and impacts.
I mean something much more challenging — and rewarding. Specifically, I’m talking about the “ministry of reconciliation” that Paul commends to followers of Jesus in 2 Corinthians 5, in which God “reconciled us to himself through Christ” and called us to be “Christ’s ambassadors.”
This type of reconciliation requires us to deal deeply with differences, to be honest and present with one another, yet in the process to regard each person as God’s precious image-bearer, worthy of dignity and respect. More challenging still, it requires us to be changed as much as we seek to change our conversation partners — not necessarily to change our minds on matters of conscience, but to change our perspectives about those with whom we disagree, to love them as Christ first loved us.
Through our difficult conversations, my sister, mom, and I began to understand that we were coming from wildly different worldviews — not just in terms of values, but in terms of our information sources and, by extension, our very conceptions of reality. In her information ecosystem, my mother had never heard of some of the incidents that so bothered my sister and me about Trump, nor had she learned about mass incarceration or the vast racial disparities in policing and prosecutions in our country. In my sister’s and my more “mainstream” media diet, we were unfamiliar with just how disorienting many of the rapid shifts of the past decade or so have felt to those not steeped in elite culture.
As we talked, we saw each other’s hearts and perspectives, we challenged our own assumptions, and we even changed our minds on a few things.
More importantly, we built up the trust to say hard things to each other while remaining in relationship.
We live in an era characterized by suspicion, distrust, and hostility between partisan factions. We are driven not only to defeat the political other, but to utterly destroy them. We don’t just disagree; we despise.
My family’s experience was a microcosm of the fracturing taking place in American life more broadly. And what we learned is that you can’t hate, cancel, rage-quit, scream, cry, accuse, or unfriend your way through such deep divisions.
You have to love your way through them, by the grace of Christ who died for all, so that we no longer live for ourselves but for him (see 2 Corinthians 5:15).
The reconciliation God worked in our midst was a painful one. It remains imperfect. But every Sunday, we still hop on Zoom and show up for difficult conversations. We do it to show up for one another. We do it for the sake of Jesus Christ, who has “committed to us the message of reconciliation,” that we — and all people — might be reconciled to God.
