About a year ago, I made a new friend. My friend is into white identity politics and what’s known as “race realism” (the idea that there’s a genetic component to why different ethnicities have different average SAT scores and different rates of incarceration in the United States).
Recently I was describing my friend, and I called him a good man who believed some bad things. One of the people I was talking to pushed back: she told me that he was a bad person, and I could tell that because he believed bad things. I had been working to showcase my friend’s humanity, but she said that I should take a different approach: I should let him feel the shame of his badness, because that was the only way he was going to change.
When my interlocutor said this, it was like a bomb went off inside of me. I spent the next half hour fighting back tears (this is highly unusual for me; even my wife has only seen me get teary in this way once or twice).
I wondered why I was reacting so strongly. It wasn’t what the woman said. I barely knew her, and I also knew that she said what she said out of kindness and respect for me (and, perhaps even, for my friend).
The reason her comments hit me so hard, I finally realized, was because I felt like they summed up how I was often treated when I was a libertarian commentator in my twenties.
To be clear, many of my friends back then were kind and gracious about my political advocacy, even when they disagreed. I am deeply grateful for that. But some really did treat me as though I was a bad person for espousing ideas with which they disagreed. I think, just like the woman I spoke to, that some of them wanted me to wallow in shame for my beliefs.
Those people, few as they were, left scars.
One of the reasons that I’m so adamant that my race realist friend is a good man with bad beliefs, rather than a bad person as evidenced by his bad beliefs, is that I don’t want to make him suffer the way that I sometimes suffered. I don’t think that would be very Christian.
Indeed, I don’t think Jesus ever treated people this way. If he had lectured prostitutes and tax collectors about how they were bad people and they needed to wallow in their shame, I think he would have had a very different mix of disciples.
I’m reminded of the story of Zacchaeus, a wealthy tax collector who had fleeced a lot of innocent and hard-working people. When Jesus saw him, he didn’t condemn the man. Instead he told Zacchaeus that he would be staying at Zacchaeus’s house that night. Zacchaeus changed and became an honest and generous man, not because Jesus condemned him, but because Jesus reflected back to him the best of who he was.
Of course, Jesus convicts us. But He doesn’t shame us, and I think there’s a world of difference between the two.
As a quote attributed to Pastor Tim Timberlake goes, “The love of Jesus doesn’t wait at the finish line. It meets you in the wreckage and walks you home.”
One of the things I love most about Jesus is that, no matter how often I sin, He never condemns me. He never leaves me to wallow in my shame. Instead He reflects back to me the brightest parts of who I am (which is what ultimately helps me to change). If He’s willing to treat me this way, how could I do the opposite to my race realist friend?
But even apart from the morality of it, I think treating people with bad beliefs as though they’re bad people is bound to backfire on a practical level.
When I was a libertarian commentator, I wrote a piece for National Review arguing that we should privatize Social Security. I was 25 years old. Prior to writing this piece, I talked to exactly zero people who would be negatively impacted if Congress took my recommendation and privatized the program.
Now, was this boneheaded? Sure. And it was boneheaded regardless of what you think about Social Security, because I didn’t take the time to understand the human costs of the policy for which I was advocating.
But at the same time, I wasn’t pushing to privatize Social Security because I wanted to stick it to the elderly. On the macro level, I truly thought that Social Security would be a net loss for my generation and I wanted to lift what I saw as an onerous burden off of our backs. On the micro level, I was fresh out of college, grossing $35,000 per year while paying back taxes and student loans. I struggled to pay rent. Not having to pay into an entitlement program would have given me a little bit of financial breathing room.
Neither of those strike me as bad motives.
When people attacked me for my politics, their insults didn’t make me repent. Instead, they just made me feel unseen. That pushed me away from those people and deeper into my circle of libertarian friends, because I felt like the latter actually saw me. Inasmuch as critics tried to change my mind by shaming me, those efforts backfired.
I see this idea all the time in our culture: “So-and-so believes bad things, therefore is a bad person, and we shouldn’t love him and should instead make him feel shame for his beliefs.” I think it’s wrong both practically and morally.
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