Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Some of you know that I love America. I am an Americophile. I travel there three or four or five times a year, or I used to before they changed the world. I can't wait to get back there.
And I listen to CNN just about every day. I know that will lose me some listeners, but I also listen to political podcasts from the US, from both the left, the Pod Save America guys, and the right. Yes, I listen to Ben Shapiro regularly. I love all things American, and I've watched these last few months and watched...
What we've all really seen are Americans at war with each other, so to speak, at least rhetorically. And I wanted to do something on it, even just a little single, a little reflection. But no matter how much I thought about it, I just didn't feel like I was the one to do it.
So I've invited the Undeceptions friend, our very own Georgia girl, Dr. Laurel Moffat, to offer us a little reflection about the soul of America. Twenty years ago, I moved from America to Australia. I've struggled at times with the differences between the two countries of accents and idioms, customs and sensibilities.
But in recent years, it's the divisions within America on any given topic that stand out most starkly to me. According to researchers who've tracked national indicators of well-being and political polarization since 1800 to the present,
The United States has become more divided in recent years than it has been for a very long time. We're in the thick of what some describe as the second age of discord, second only to the American Civil War. When the well-being of a nation is healthy,
A citizen's affinity for their chosen political position, what's called in-party love, is stronger than their aversion to the opposite position, or their out-party hate. Researchers have found that as divisions in America have grown and the sense of national well-being has diminished, out-party hate has steadily grown over the last 40 years
so that it now outweighs in-party love. At this time in history, it is more accurate to say that most Americans are drawn together by what they hate rather than what they love. And when this happens, a nation doesn't function well. We don't have to look much further than the American capital in the early weeks of 2021 to witness this hate in action and the destruction it causes.
It's easy to assume that the deepest lines of division in the United States are drawn in the public square. They're often the most visible. But there are private ones, too. Families have become like the country itself, with lines of division drawn not just between parties or geographical areas, between rich or poor,
or between the color of skin or the shape of a religion, but between a family's individual members, with fault lines formed by differences of ideology and sectarian political belief. Siblings have stopped speaking to one another. Friendships have ended.
It's not that people merely disagree with one another, but somehow, both in our country and in our families, we've allowed our disagreements to grow into an abhorrence of the person with whom we disagree. This is a sad truth that I know firsthand. It's tempting to draw lines between things and attach labels to them.
to separate ourselves from those we dislike and label them wrong and us right, to call others bad and ourselves good. We learn this skill from a very young age. One of the first things we learn to do upon picking up a pencil is to draw a line and stay inside of it. My daughter likes to draw and color in.
For her birthday, I bought her a coloring book filled with pictures of one of her favorite characters that she could color as she liked. She chose a picture. I suggested that she stay within the lines. She picked up a marker and began. When I checked on her progress later on, I found that she had filled the page with a single color with no reference to the lines on the page. I asked her why. She told me that it was because she loved the color so much.
Her love for a certain color was stronger than the weight of any line. The researchers who have charted the rise of hate in America suggest antidotes to the discord that hate engenders. There is a way for America to mend and function well again, and it begins with considering the positive things about a family member or a friend with whom we disagree.
In other words, it begins with remembering the things we love about one another. Really love, not just like with a kind of watered-down affection, but love that's generous, expansive. Perhaps there's a lesson in my daughter's coloring in. Letting love get strong like that, so strong it crosses through the lines we draw between ourselves and colors the way we see one another.
Perhaps we need to learn how to color in the world guided by love rather than lines. I wonder if it's this kind of love that the novelist Marilynne Robinson had in mind when she wrote in the New York Times that "America is many things. It is both an idea and a fraught reality.
but it is also something that you can love like a family. This love fosters a hope that any person who happens to, quote, fall under the definition of family will thrive and will experience even a difficult life as a blessing because his or her worth is a fact without conditions. She continues, human beings are sacred, therefore equal.
We are asked to see one another in the light of a singular, inalienable worth that would make a family of us if we let it. If we let it. I hope that we will. Whenever people hear Laurel, they say, man, she sounds like a girl off NPR. She really does. Thanks so much for that, Laurel.
I hope you enjoyed that single. We're going to be offering a few more interviews and some reflections from me in this single format over the next few weeks. And God willing, we'll be back with a full season of episodes real soon. See ya. You've been listening to the Eternity Podcast Network.