“My mom’s the greatest!”
Those are fighting words to many a child: “Oh yeah, well MY MOM’S the greatest!”
An adult, on the other hand, likely smiles and says, “Yep, mine too.” Adults do nuance, and this includes adults who don’t know the word “nuance.”
Chris Caldwell
Growing up, we learn that every coin has two sides and every story has two versions. In other words, grownups know the world isn’t simply black and white.
In that grownup spirit, I need to affirm something House Speaker Mike Johnson did when he changed his mind on providing funding to Ukraine. I challenged him to do just that about a month ago here on Baptist News Global. Who knew he was a reader, or that I was so persuasive? In reality, however, it would appear that intelligence officials were persuasive when they told him what would happen if Vladimir Putin’s forces took over Ukraine. This, he says, is why he changed his position, and I choose to take him at his word on that.
A liberal ideologue, however, would resent my affirmation of Johnson’s actions. An “ideologue” is someone who thinks like a child about their side. Either you’re all in with them, or you’re an enemy.
“Grownups know we never get anywhere without being able to affirm the positive actions or positive traits of an opponent.”
And these days, America has ideologues aplenty, especially on the right. But because rigid ideological thinking is ambidextrous, a left-wing ideologue would say to me, “How can a man who loves and supports his nonbinary child, and who teaches at an HBCU, say anything positive about a leader of a party that fights gender-affirming care and curries favor with white nationalists?” My answer is simple: Why? Because I’m a grownup. And grownups know we never get anywhere without being able to affirm the positive actions or positive traits of an opponent.
The great Vaclav Havel, a once-imprisoned Czech dissident who became the Czech president, wrote this: “Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them.”
I agree. And I would go further by saying ideological thinking is immoral. If you believe team-you has all the answers, this is a sinful path to hatred for, as a Graham Greene character once observed, “Hatred is a failure of imagination.”
Jesus was many things, but we give him too little credit for how imaginative he was. He could look at a person, see how everyone else was looking at them, and then imagine something different in that person or in their situation. For Jesus, imagination and grace were allies. He always could imagine something better, which is why he wept over Jerusalem, saying, “’If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes.”
If we are to move toward peace in our land and in places like the Middle East, the ideologues — the mentally stunted, selfish, childish ideologues — will not get us there. Pray and work for peace. Pray and work for worlds, nations, communities and churches led by grownups.
Chris Caldwell serves as professor and director of church engagement at Simmons College of Kentucky, a historically Black college in Louisville, Ky. He is a member of the BNG board of directors and a former board chair.
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Ukrainian Baptists should be shocked that Baptists in America are abandoning them | Opinion by Chris Caldwell