Love and Peace

I had the opportunity this past weekend to attend a short seminar held by my church on the topic of peacemaking in political discourse. The keynote speaker was Todd Deatherage, the co-founder and executive director of Telos, a DC-based nonprofit whose mission is to, “form communities of American peacemakers across lines of difference, and equip them to help reconcile seemingly intractable conflicts at home and abroad.” I was excited to learn how to be an agent of peace rather than division. Political discourse in the U.S. is at a fever pitch, and the urge to demonize our opponents can feel overwhelming. So I was encouraged to be there with several dozen folks from area churches, all of whom just by being there were showing a willingness to step back from the cultural precipice and imagine a better way forward.

I felt a similar spirit as I read Arthur Brooks’ recent article in The Atlantic, How To Influence People—And Make Friends. Brooks summarizes in just a couple sentences how it was that Christianity would become the official religion of the Roman Empire. In short, it was early Christians’ love for their enemies that won them over. That love was attractive, it wasn’t exactly popular:

This love was seen as stupid and weak by many Romans at the time, but it eventually won out: The once-fledgling faith gradually drew converts from all over the empire and in the end became the official religion of Rome. If those early Christians had been violent and hate-filled, the faith would probably have come and gone like any number of cults over the centuries.

So much of our political discourse is dominated by questions of power and privilege. Those are important questions—it’s the powerful who write our history and the privileged who benefit in the present from it. But if the early Christians were onto something, it was that power and privilege are not necessary in order to convert a society to a new vision of community life.

For myself, coming out of the past few days I want to commit to being a peacemaker. I generally suck at it. I can think of plenty of reasons to be concerned with the state of our country, and that concern has generated some strong and dearly-held political views. Part of the message from Telos is that’s not something to deny. It just needs to be held in tension with the fact that progress can only happen if we move forward together.