“Brandan Robertson and I have a pretty unlikely relationship. Brandan is a Christian LGBTQ activist who identifies as queer. I am a conservative Christian writer and media personality who upholds an orthodox, or historically established, Christian sexual ethic. One might expect us to be adversaries, yet sometimes relationships transcend political and theological barriers. To date, my budding friendship with Brandan has.”
These words begin chapter four of a new book, “Redeeming The Feminine Soul", by conservative Christian radio personality and speaker Julie Roys. Throughout this chapter, Julie describes our friendship and recounts a blog post I had written a number of years ago about the myth of “Biblical Manhood”. Julie agrees with me, to a degree, that there has been a toxic notion of masculinity that has far too often been promoted by the Church that is based more on cultural stereotypes of “manhood” than any biblically or theologically grounded model of manhood.
We disagree, however, in our conclusion. I land in a place where gender distinctions are not essential to our personhood and argue that the Scripture lays out a path for how we can be healthy and whole humans, rather than men or women. Julie ends up believing that there are still gender-specific distinctions that the Scripture makes, and spends much of the book arguing for this vision of femininity. Years after this post was written, I still feel strongly about where I stand, and clearly, Julie does too. I disagree with much of what Julie has written in her book, though I do believe it represents a serious step forward in the conservative Christian conversation on gender.
But instead of laying out all of the arguments about where and why I disagree with Julie, I want to hone in on that quote that Julie began the chapter with. Today, I am an openly bisexual theologian, teacher, and pastor of a thriving Christian Church in San Diego. Today, Julie is a conservative author and media personality based in Chicago. We stand firmly on the opposite sides of the political and theological spectrums. We see very few issues the same way. In fact, both of us would say that we truly believe that what the other promotes or teaches could actually be harmful to others. And yet, somehow, we’ve maintained a cordial relationship rooted in our value of people over perspectives.
In a day when our world is divided more distinctly and profoundly than ever, reflecting on mine and Julies relationship has caused me to wonder what we’re doing differently that makes this work. How can we maintain a respectful friendship both as public figures and as individual people, when we see the world so differently? The answer that emerges for me is that we have developed empathic understanding. I define this phrase in my forthcoming book “True Inclusion: Becoming Communities That Embrace All” by saying:
“[Empathic understanding] is the willingness to sacrifice ones own self-interest, security, and privilege for the good of others.”
To maintain a friendship with Julie, I must sacrifice my own self-interest and position privilege to show her love and extend friendship. I must see her as a person and not as her positions. I must listen to her story and know why she sees the world the way she does. And this is precisely how our friendship began. It began with Julie seeing me speak at a conference and getting treated unkindly by the moderators, and she approached me and apologized on their behalf, and prayed for me. She had just heard me declare ideas that she fundamentally opposed, but beyond those ideas, she saw me as a person. And in that moment of true human connection, my walls came tumbling down.
Likewise, in subsequent conversations, I’ve listened to Julies story and felt deep solidarity with her in some of the pain she has experienced growing up as a strong woman in a conservative Christian world. In those moments, I wasn’t thinking about her political positions, but seeing her as a human who had been shaped and formed by life experience, and I understood why she believed what she did.
By the way, empathic understanding doesn’t require us to skirt around the important issues, but rather, opens the door for deeper conversation. Julie and I have always talked about our different perspectives. We jovially debate with one another, but at the end of the day, we know each others heart, we know each others story, and we’re not going to reject the other just because of a disagreement on theology or politics. There are times where I’ve very publicly condemned Julies positions and perspectives- but never her as a person. I’ve been forced to separate the two because I know who she is as a real human being.
One of the crises facing our nation today is our failure to relate to those who see things differently. Instead of listening to opposing views, we all to quickly declare them heretical, dangerous, and offensive, and silence them in our lives. When we do this, we create echo chambers and begin to formulate an image of the world that makes us think that everyone sees things the way we do and that our way is the right way. Such circumstances only serve to cultivate a fundamentalist extremism on both the left and the right, without any nuance or contour in perspectives or opinion.
I once heard it said, “Neither the left, nor the right is the path of truth. Only the middle way.” Clearly, this is an overstatement, but it nonetheless contains an important truth: the ability to hold a middle path only comes when one has listened and understood both the right and left. Yet very few of us truly understand the perspective of our “others”. Very few of us have deep, personal relationships with our “others”. Most of this comes from this myth that we’ve bought into that says the “other” is dangerous, evil, and insidious, but my experience has more often than not revealed that people like Julie are just good people trying to make sense of the world from their perspective, just like me.
By our current cultural standards, Julie should be my enemy and I should be hers. We see almost nothing the same. But through the power of personal relationship, we’ve not only created a friendship, but cultivated the ability to disagree with one another vehemently without demonizing or marginalizing each other. We’ve unintentionally laid a foundation of empathic understanding through moving from a place of human kindness, and in so doing, revealed that the age-old cliché is wrong- that, in fact, two people can walk together even if they disagree. It is my hope to incorporate this into more and more of my relationships in the days ahead, and for the sake of our world, I hope you will too.