A cautionary tale

In 1984, the later Easter Sunday service at the socially-prominent Presbyterian congregation where I had been received as a new member just a month before got some, shall we say, unwelcome visitors — a lay activist group comprising unemployed steelworkers and a group of pastors who shepherded the churches they attended. They complained that upper management of the steel companies who were members of our congregation were disrupting their lives by closing plants and thus throwing them out of work. Over the next year or two the groups deposited dead fish in safe deposit boxes in branches of one of the local banks and threw balloons filled with skunk oil at members after a Christmas program later that year, among other things.

Most people probably would have dismissed these people as a bunch of hotheads wanting attention or money. But leaders of the congregation did something different: They listened.

I’m not privy to any specific things that my congregation did, but I do know that some back channels were opened with folks in the valley areas where the closed plants were located. Because the church responded properly to what many would have considered a violation of its sacred space, the demonstrations eventually ceased due to losing popular support. In the 14 years I attended that church, it proved to be its finest hour.

I bring that up in reference to such Republican figures as Sarah Huckabee Sanders, press secretary to President Trump; and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell being accosted by demonstrators. Many conservatives have complained that they’re being targeted simply because they, in the words of some, “think differently,” and that the demonstrators are simply hooligans engaging in temper tantrums and being paid by George Soros to troll them.

It’s not that at all, because if that were the case and they were truly interested in moving the process forward they would talk to their political opponents. The thing is, Trump’s base is not, and in fact never has been, interested in talking with anyone who disagrees, even dismissing its opponents out of hand and displaying its arrogance in the process. And it’s that arrogance, not the positions, to which they react.

Many, many people have talked about restoring a sense of “civility” to American civic and political life, but when one side regards the other as a disease to be eradicated that would be tough, if not impossible, to pull off. I can tell you that, because I personally know some of its adherents, the political left these days won’t be mollified (read: “know its place”) and that, if attitudes don’t soften on the other side, such demonstrations and disruptions will not only continue but get even worse.

There’s a biblical principle here: “You reap what you sow.”