OPINION:
After President Trump was shot Saturday afternoon, the first attempted assassination of a sitting or former president since Ronald Reagan was wounded in 1981, I issued the following statement to the press and social media:
“We are grateful that President Trump was not seriously injured in the tragic shooting at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania this afternoon. We are praying earnestly for Mr. Trump and his family and the loved ones of the bystander who was killed – and we ask our fellow Christians to call on our mighty and merciful God to comfort all those affected.
While the full details of what occurred are still rightfully being carefully investigated, it is in no way premature to call for Americans of all ideological perspectives, Republicans and Democrats alike, to commit to bringing greater civility to their advocacy in the public square.
We should and must be better as a nation in our ability to lean into our shared humanity when we disagree on matters of public policy. Today’s events should steel our resolve to do just that moving forward.”
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I thought a lot about my words the rest of the weekend. Specifically, about just how we who claim the name and calling of Christ should set about doing what I exhorted us to do. The Scripture that came to mind, and remains there as I write these words, was Matthew 5:9: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.”
It’s from the Beatitudes (a word whose Latin root means “happy” or “blessed”) of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. I’ve read this likely hundreds of times through the years, but I have been struck afresh while pondering it in light of the attempt on Mr. Trump’s life, it is not a call to think differently, but to act differently. To be a peacemaker requires that we do something.
Noah Webster’s very first dictionary, published in 1828, defines many words in light of their biblical meanings. It says a peacemaker is “one who makes peace by reconciling parties that are at variance.” This, I believe, is what the Lord would have His followers do at this contentious – sometimes perilously so, as we saw on Saturday – time in our nation’s history.
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Our ship of state is listing under the weight of far too many heated and ever-deepening disagreements about ideological and political matters. We have, much too frequently, lost our ability to disagree civilly; rather than thinking someone who holds a different position than us on an issue we care passionately about is misguided or misinformed, we many times think and act as if they are malevolent. We lose sight of the truth that they, like us, are created in God’s image and therefore are due being regarded and treated with dignity.
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Christian motivational speaker Chris Singleton has discovered the power of extending that dignity, that simple but profound humanity, to others. The young man whose mother, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, was murdered June 17, 2015, when a white supremacist killed nine people during a Bible study at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., opens every speech with an exercise for the audience. He asks them to stand and hug someone who looks different than them and say, “I love you.”
“It gets people out of their comfort zone and it can change someone’s mind forever,” Singleton has said.
The practice is an extension of his mustering the compassion and Christlikeness to forgive his mother’s killer: “I’m a believer, and I think that wholeheartedly God put forgiveness in my heart.”
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Singleton has laid down the hatred for his mother’s killer the world says he would be justified to embrace and, what’s more, he has extended to those who hear him speak the hope he found in his decision. Hugging someone, he realized, makes it harder to hate them. It’s a platinum example of being a peacemaker.
It’s a mantle each of us must pick up, in our own unique way, to reduce the coarseness in our culture. People of different faiths, different races, and, yes, different political views, are not our enemies. Wishing them ill or celebrating when ill befalls them is not the answer to any question other than “How have I sinned against another person?” In fact, it is only in seeing that those who don’t think or believe precisely as we do are just as deserving as we are of respect, and an opinion, and the right to advocate for his or her position, that we can ever hope to find our way to civility in public discourse – and humanity in our interactions with others. The immediate and ongoing demonization of those who think differently than we do, whose values don’t align with our own, does nothing to help us persuade others to the course of action we believe to be right. Worse, it degrades the greatest and freest country in the world.
Abraham Lincoln knew this well. Our 16th president, in his first inaugural address, was speaking to a nation on the brink of civil war, which had already lost seven states to secession. He was directly addressing not his countrymen but those political opponents who had recently formed the Confederate States of America when he said this:
“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
In the rhetorical aftermath of the attempt on President Trump’s life, in the discussion of President Biden’s cognitive qualifications for office, on every subject in which our deeply held beliefs or opinions run contrary to a friend’s or family member’s or a complete stranger’s, we must find and act in line with the better angels of our own natures.
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Jim Daly is president of Focus on the Family and host of its daily radio broadcast, heard by more than 6 million listeners a week on nearly 2,000 radio stations across the U.S. He also hosts the podcast ReFocus with Jim Daly.
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