A Way Forward

Saturday afternoon, exhausted from a week of Election tension, I didn’t want to take any incoming calls. While relieved at Biden’s win, I didn’t see cause for celebration. Half the nation still regarded the other half as monsters intent on destroying our democracy. A new president wasn’t likely to get this toxic tribalism back in the bottle—not so long as media could profit by fanning it.

But the caller was my Uncle Bobby, a retired pastor who, at 91, is nearly the last sibling to survive my mother. So I answered.

“It’s a great day for this country,” he opened. “My hope has been restored!”

I felt a fizz of optimism rise in my chest. If Bobby, a lifelong Republican and evangelical Christian, rejoiced in Biden’s election, then maybe the Red/Blue divide wasn’t the blood feud I perceived it to be. “I’m glad to hear that,” I said. “But I’m guessing your sons”—whom he has told me are Trump supporters—“don’t share your enthusiasm.” I myself was struggling, I admitted; I couldn’t see how we’d come together to solve our most pressing problems if we couldn’t even agree that a pandemic was one of them. “How do you see us moving forward, Bobby?” I asked. “Let’s start with your congregation. If you had to preach tomorrow morning, what would you say to them?”

My uncle gave this some thought. “I would share with them what happened to me in November 2016.”

Here’s what happened: Bobby had been agonizing about whom to vote for. He’d done his homework on Trump and concluded this was not a man he could support. But he couldn’t stomach voting for Hillary, either. “I prayed on it,” he says. “And whether you believe this or not, God spoke to me. He said, ‘Vote with the blacks.’” Bobby pauses. “So I voted for Hillary. Because to vote for Trump was to support Jim Crow in some form or another. And as a Christian, I could not, and cannot, side with the oppressors.”

I was gob-smacked by the simplicity, and power, of this story. “Of all the things you could say, that would likely be the one thing people could hear,” I said. He agreed. “People will argue the facts,” he said, “but no one can argue with personal testimony.”

But then how is it, I asked, that so many Christians do side with the oppressors?

“We all have blind spots,” Bobby began, “usually because we don’t get the opportunity to understand people unlike ourselves.” By way of explaining, he told me how, at the height of racial conflict in the South, his church supported the ministry of John Perkins, a black Mississippian and civil rights activist whose brother was murdered and who himself was nearly fatally beaten by white police officers. For an entire week, Bobby lived with Perkins and his family in Mendenhall, a few miles from where Perkins had grown up. At the end of his stay, Bobby treated his hosts to a steak dinner at a renowned restaurant. The all-white clientele stared at the Perkinses, and their white companion, with naked revulsion. “That was an experience every American should have,” Bobby observed.

Yes: if we’re to come together as a nation, he and I agreed, more of us need to live someone else’s reality. “We need a new Peace Corps,” Bobby mused. “Instead of sending young people abroad, we’d send them into their own country.”

It’s a good place to begin.