Politics and religion make for wonderful conversations during the holidays . if you don’t feel like you have to win. Here’s where I’m coming from. For several years I was the religion reporter for this paper and for the Wednesday Journal. I wrote enough articles to fill a 520-page book titled, The Soul of a Liberal Village. I interviewed people with a wide range of worldviews and theologies ranging from a woman who was ordained a Catholic priest (seriously) to a Catholic church that still does the Mass in Latin; from a secular humanist group whose motto is “good without God” to the pastor of a Bible-believing Evangelical church; and from Jews to Muslims. My job was to describe them as accurately and with as much empathy as possible whether I was drawn to or repelled by them. My opinions were irrelevant. My task was to neither judge nor argue, but to get inside them and have them tell me after reading the article, “You got me right.” I don’t think that “you got me right” meant I had pandered to them, but that I set any issues I had observed in a context that explained them to readers according to their way of thinking. I was writing about religion and that meant trying to catch a glimpse of what was going on in the interviewee’s head and heart, and that meant if people trusted me enough to let me have a peek inside, I was obliged to let them know one way or another that I understood I was treading on holy ground. You see where I’m headed? I was not trying to win. I was trying to understand. I was not being altruistic. I was doing my job. Nevertheless, at the end of the interview most people thanked me even though they were the ones taking time out of their day to do me a favor. They were the ones taking a risk by being vulnerable. When I tried to figure out why, I decided it was because folks rarely experience having someone else attentively attempting to understand them without setting them up for a sale or an ideological knock-out punch as soon as they let down their guard. Intimacy requires vulnerability My interviews were transactional in the sense that I was trying to get a good story. But that didn’t seem to bother the people I was interviewing. One of the events I covered was a meeting with Jewish members of Oak Park Temple and Muslims from the Islamic Center in Villa Park. I had to laugh. In their attempt to be sensitive to the dietary restrictions of both faith traditions they settled on pizza! I listened to a conversation between two older men, one a Muslim and one a Jew. As they shared how they faithfully live out their faith traditions which they both trace back to Abraham and Sarah one of several things they discovered that they had in common was the worry that their children would become so assimilated to secular American culture that they would abandon the religious traditions that were so precious to those two old men. Intimacy was achieved. The goal was not to win but to understand. Years later, I imagined that if they got into a discussion about what’s happening in Gaza, they might disagree one taking the side of Israel and the other the side of the Palestinians but because of the understanding that had been built up between them, they would do so as friends and maybe even as brothers. This holiday season we don’t have to fear discussing politics or talking about religious differences if our goal is not to win but to understand, to frame the exchange as sharing seeking understanding and not as an argument, which by definition means someone has to win and someone has to lose. Religion and politics can be very personal and emotional. I hear many people pleading for us to “lower the temperature.” The way to do that is not by avoiding talking about it but by building relationships of trust with folks who think differently than we do, bridges of understanding across the chasm of polarization. We don’t have to pretend that we all think alike if we build on the foundation of understanding and respect. If you want to go deeper, Google Braver Angels, the nation’s largest movement to bridge the partisan divide.
https://www.oakpark.com/2025/11/25/great-topics-for-holiday-conversation/
Great topics for holiday conversation
