Evangelizing for Better Angels?

One of the initiatives that Better Angels Convention organizers left us with is the "4 by the 4th" challenge: sign up four new BA members by July 4, 2019.

As I've shared with a few people stuff about the conference over the last few days, I recognize a truth: Better Angels impresses me. I liked that Convention a lot. I like the workshops I've seen and participated in. I think the work they do is legitimate and important.

Maybe, I think, I should try to get some signups.

But.

I hate hate hate the idea of proselytizing. I spent countless hours as a kid screwing up enough courage to broach some truly cringe-worthy conversations with friends and strangers about "getting saved." Like: on more than one occasion, twelve-year-old, introverted me approached a total stranger and asked if they were saved. (I can't hear myself say those words in memory save in the voice my mother used when she was trying out some "cool" bit of jargon--and failing miserably to carry it off.)

My aversion to evangelizing probably led me to study evangelical outreach techniques generally. And sure enough, lots of the literature of, by, and for evangelicals about outreach acknowledges that the process is soaked in awkwardness.

It doesn't help that we live in a society full of tell-your-friends recruitment schemes and multilevel marketing (i.e., pyramid scheme) strategies. Back in 2015, designer Frank Chimero tweeted that the phrase "Hi, I'd like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn" should be named one of the universal, all-purpose New Yorker cartoon captions (alongside "What a misunderstanding!" and "Christ, what an asshole!"). We've all gotten such push invites. We've all deleted them. It's creepy and mechanical, unctuous and insincere, making us feel like nothing more than a mark. 

My father once preached that we get inoculated against proselytizing in this culture. We get just enough of something (Christianity, in the case of my father's sermon) to develop antibodies capable of recognizing and rejecting it instantly. The ubiquity of conversion attempts sours the appeal.

So I'm wary of asking folk to join me in this thing I like that I think is good. That's part of my reticence.

The other part of my hesitation, though, comes from the drawbacks I see to the Better Angels approach. I mentioned the other day about how a lot of my friends and colleagues react to the notion of depolarization and civility with revulsion: how dare you expect me to make nice with bigots and nazis? 

Or, as one of the people I spoke to at Better Angels put it, "I'm just having a lot of trouble with this"--this in her case being all the walk-on-eggshells circumlocutions blues and moderators go through to avoid alienating reds. Moderators are trained, for example, to avoid uttering or affirming statements that code "blue," such as "Humans are the primary cause of global warming." Such statements are points of ideological contest for reds. They activate teamist dynamics.

But it's also unambiguously true. Humans cause global warming. Global warming constitutes one of the biggest threats to humanity we can perceive. No action to mitigate those effects can get off the ground without base-level acknowledgement of that truth. It hinders the cause, then, to regard that basic assumption as charged enough to avoid or politely bracket away.

Things get even more complicated when the bracketed truths involve things like race, immigration, sexuality, gender, or any of the other cultural flashpoints. (Reds, I'm sure, have their own list of statements they're frustrated at not seeing easily agreed-upon in BA for the sake of civility.)

I have some reservations, then, about how fully I can endorse BA for friends. It's similar, I think, to my reservations about endorsing the United Methodist Church for LGBTQ+ folk right now. I've had great experiences, but it's not perfect. It's work. It's not for everyone.

Still thinking, in other words.

More tomorrow,

JF