The Election, Your Spirituality, & the Soul of our Nation #10: Debates

   Tomorrow night, many of us will try to watch and absorb the Trump-Harris debate (or perhaps you feel you just can’t bear to watch). When I was in 8th grade I joined a debate team, and there were pretty clear, reasonable rules regarding how to proceed, how rational arguments were to be presented and weighed, heard, and assessed. The purpose wasn’t to win the debate or impress your pals; it was to hone your skills in thought, logic, communication and self-confidence.

Oh my, how different the presidential debates (which seem utterly un-presidential…) have become. Most tune in to cheerlead for their favorite, and to fault-find with the opponent. Candidates talk over one another, conjure up mocking expressions, and try to ding and out-nasty the other. There’s no uglier symptom of the toxic soul of our nation.

I have a fantasy – that once in my life, during such a televised debate, one candidate will make a good point, and the opponent will say “Hmm, good point, I need to rethink my position.” Political suicide? This is what we need, and maybe even crave. For a debate shouldn’t be about crushing the opponent, or embarrassing your foe, or being more smart alecky than the other guy. A debate could be a much-needed opportunity to learn, not how my foe is stupid, but in what way I’ve mis-heard or mis-understood the other side.

If the debates are disappointing to you, if they are little more than a sideshow of barbs, insults and gotchas, it may be because we ourselves do not know how to debate ideas that matter. Jean Bethke Elshtain wrote that the virtue of a democracy ought to be that we can disagree and not have to kill one another. We have forgotten how to disagree, and how even to learn and grow from the disagreement.

I wonder if we were all to hone our own debating skills, our ability to listen, suggest, reiterate, and resolve, and even change our minds, we might in a couple of decades have more intelligent presidential debates. Christopher Lasch wisely told us that “It is only by subjecting our preferences to the test of debate that we come to understand what we know and what we still need to learn. Until we have to defend our opinions in public, they remain half-formed convictions based on random impressions and unexamined assumptions.”

I even shared a more fabulous if laughably impossible idea in my sermon two weeks ago. The debates adopt a new format: you begin by saying 5 favorable things about your foe. The other guy does the same. Then you compete for the win, based on Paul’s hopeful, challenging words to all of us: “Outdo one another in showing honor” (Romans 12:10). Or as John Wesley instructed the early Methodists when divisions broke out: say all the good you can about the other guy; refrain from criticism.

Christians, of all people, have good cause to be humble, to acknowledge we don’t have it all figured out, that we have probably thought wrongly and self-indulgently and not very broadly on issues that matter. So every opportunity to receive critique, to hear other viewpoints, to broaden our perspective, is welcomed, and even pursued zealously.

So watch the debates, if you can. Believe you and I can and will do better. Trust that an honest, humble, passionate exchange of ideas is something that would be productive within a democracy, and even pleasing to Jesus.