Scottish Catholic Observer

Today, both within society and the churches, we are finding it ever more difficult to resolve our differences because our conversations are shot-through with non-civility, name-calling, character-assassination, and disrespect.

What is particularly worrying is that we are doing this in the name of truth, cause, the Gospel, and Jesus. We are giving ourselves permission to hate, demonise, and disrespect each other in God’s name. Our cause seems so important to us that, consciously or unconsciously, we give ourselves permission to bracket some of the essentials of Christian charity, namely, respect, graciousness, love, and forgiveness.

This is wrong: No cause allows me to exempt myself from fundamental charity, even if I see myself as a ‘warrior for truth.’ There is a Gospel imperative to fight for truth and ultimately we all need to be prophets who fight for what is right; but even war has its ethics. Even in war—perhaps especially in war—disrespect may never be rationalised on the basis of claiming that God is on our side. Indeed, if God is on our side we should radiating respect for others.

Respect, graciousness, love, and forgiveness are non-negotiable essentials within Christian charity. They are also part and parcel of all that is noble within humanity. Whenever we step outside of these, as we often do today in our discourse with those who are not of our political or ecclesial mindset, we should not delude ourselves into thinking that the high cause we think we are serving justifies this fundamental lapse in our humanity and charity. Whenever our words or our actions show disrespect we are not serving Jesus or truth, no matter how high the canopy under which we put our reasoning. Rather we are serving some ideology or, worse still, working out some personal angers and pathologies.

Some years ago at a theological college at which I was teaching we had a student who was so obsessed with defending Catholic orthodoxy that he became such a negative presence in every classroom that none of the faculty wanted to teach a class within which he was enrolled. Eventually the situation became so intolerable that the faculty, after considerable and pained discernment, asked the dean of the faculty to ask him to leave the college. Immediately after his expulsion he wrote a letter to his bishop complaining that our college had expelled him because he ‘was too conservative and too orthodox’ to fit into our ethos. He copied the dean with the letter. The dean wrote his own letter to the young man’s bishop, telling the bishop that the college had asked him to leave, not because he was too conservative and orthodox, but because he lacked basic courtesy and respect for others.

The example here is one of a conservative pathology, but liberals do this just as well. Neither side should delude itself. Whenever we lack basic respect and basic manners the real issue is never orthodoxy or cause, but bad health.

We live in bitter, highly-polarised times, both inside of society and inside of our churches. The causes are real and what is at stake is critical: war, injustice, abortion, poverty, the ecology, racism, immigration, multi-culturalism, the economy, democratic principles, law and order, freedom of speech, proper authority, proper dogma, proper ecumenism, legitimacy within ministry, Christians relating to other religions, and the proper freedoms and limitations within secularity itself. All of these are, in the end, life and death issues which, precisely because of their importance, are invariably emotionally-inflamed. Anyone who has any real concern for the world and the church and their future will sometimes find himself or herself at odds with others, sometimes bitterly so, over some of these issues.

And the perennial temptation, especially when the issue at stake is critical one, is to bracket the essentials—respect, graciousness, love, and forgiveness—on the basis of cause and, in essence, fall into a way of thinking that says: This issue is so important that I need not be respectful, gracious, and loving. I may demonise my opponent, assassinate his character, name-call, and use everything in my power, perhaps even violence, to have my truth win out. Because I am right and this is so important, I can bracket basic respect.

What is wrong with that? Beyond deluding ourselves that lack of charity and respect may be justified in the name of the Gospel, all that is best within our humanity and all that is best within Christian principles call for the exact opposite. The urgency of a situation and the bitterness already inherent within it call for more, not less, care in our rhetoric and in the actions we undertake. The more we encounter anger, hatred, disrespect, demonising, name-calling, refusals for real a conversation, and spoken and unspoken threats, the more we are called to bear-down on the essentials of charity—respect, graciousness, forgiveness, openness, and the offer of a true, mutual conversation. Why? Because in the end, we do not win moral battles by beating someone, we win them by winning someone over.