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This week’s discussion has a lot to do with talking respectfully and civilly about political differences. For more on that specific to voting, you might want to check out one of the recent A Clear Lens podcast episodes, where I moderate a discussion on that with my fellow co-hosts Nate Sala and Gene Gosewehr. Also, as a reminder, you can pre-order my upcoming science fiction novel A Prison in the Sky by going here.
Since I started this newsletter, I have emphasized a departure from the culture war model in favor of bridge-building. That means approaching people outside of our camp with the intent to sway rather than strike. The way to do this is to lecture less, ask more questions, and to nurture genuine relationship. A recent Twitter squabble is actually a great implicit example of that.
Several Avengers stars are holding a virtual fundraiser event for Joe Biden, a list that Chris Pratt is absent from. Robert Downey, Jr. is as well, although as far as I can tell, he has not received any attention for this. The vitriol to which Pratt has been subjected has been immense, and his Christian faith has been a subject of attack as well. It’s hard not to recall last year’s controversy, in which Pratt was accused of being hateful for attending a church with orthodox sexual ethics, particularly regarding LGBTQ issues.
While he has never been outspoken on politics (he’s not publicly said who he’s voting for), Pratt is known as a conservative, at least relatively speaking within Hollywood. The subject of much of the hate against him has included that he follows conservative accounts such as Ben Shapiro, Turning Point USA, and Dan Crenshaw, as well as that he is explicit about the fact that he’s a Christian. But the backlash does not include any political tweets or endorsements. He has yet to respond to the controversy itself.
But do you know who *has* responded? His liberal co-stars. Mark Ruffalo, infamously one of the most political celebrities in the Twittersphere, spoke pretty strongly in his defense. One of the tweet responses to Ruffalo’s was quite succinct: “Die.”
He wasn’t the only one, either. Robert Downey Jr., Zoe Saldana, and James Gunn all jumped to Pratt’s defense, as well. But it’s the Mark Ruffalo tweet that grabs my attention, because the guy is So. Dang. Political. Just take a look at the rest of his tweets. I follow some liberals on Twitter (just like I do conservatives and libertarians and moderates) but I unfollowed him a while back because, to be frank, it just became obnoxious. And the stereotypical “wild-eyed” liberal celebrity came to his conservative co-star’s defense, not because he suddenly changed his mind on the policies, but because of “how he (Pratt) lives his life.” I’m reminded of the now famous friendship between Supreme Court justices Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Scalia was once asked if their friendship ever resulted in getting a vote to turn his way in a case of significance. He said, “some things are more important than votes.”
There’s a big lesson here about bridge-building. Namely the reason Ruffalo listed for defending Pratt. We often think about culture in terms of ideas in the big-picture sense. For Christians, this is whether or not Christianity is true, as well as Christian worldview issues like objective truth, marriage, the sanctity of life, and so on. But we do not spend enough time thinking about how we present these values. Methods are actually values in and of themselves. Jesus includes in the beatitudes things like poor in spirit, meekness, merciful, and most notably for our purposes here, peacemakers. Ephesians 4:15 emphasizes “speaking the truth in love,” and it’s perhaps even appropriate to pull in 1 Peter 3:1, in which Peter says that “even if some (husbands) do not obey the word, they may be won without a word by the conduct of their wives.” What’s true in marriage can also (for admittedly different reasons) be true in friendship.
The values of objective truth, Christian marriage, the sanctity of life, the fallenness of man, all of those are absolutely enormous things that need defending in the public square. But so are meekness, peacemaking, humility, and of course, love.