Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - How to Have Impossible Conversations | Keith & Patrick

Episode Date: October 30, 2019

What happens when it’s Thanksgiving dinner and conversations about disagreements in politics, culture, morals and religion start up? What about in the office? Among friends? Today it feels like it's impossible to talk about these things without an argument or causing offense. But Christians should be able to lovingly engage in conversation with others—no matter how impossible it feels. This episode will teach you how. To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Books – How to have Impossible Conversations by Peter Boghossian and James Linsey -The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to drive across town. I'm Keith Simon. And I'm Patrick Miller. On today's episode, Patrick and I are going to discuss how to have hard conversations, especially conversations with friends or family members you might be seeing over the holidays. You may have followed along, but we have been having lots of hard conversations around here ourselves. And it's kind of brought back to mind that it's a skill, almost a loss skill. of how to talk to people that you don't agree with,

and how to do that in a respectful way, how to do that in a way that you really learn something and maybe get to share something important to you. And now we're all kind of hitting that holiday season, and it reminded us that many of us will be in a situation where we're talking with people that come from a real different place on the political spectrum or religious spectrum

or just culturally different than us. Also, we have created a really helpful, checklist, seven items you can think about before you go into an impossible conversation and during an impossible conversation. If you want to download that, it's free. You can find a link in our show notes. And it's perfectly sized so you can screenshot it, have it on your phone, and use it on the go. Keith, let's start off the episode by trying to talk about what kind of conversations we are going to talk about today and what kind of conversations we aren't talking about. So we're not talking about the hard conversation that you need to have with your roommate or your

spouse or somebody at work, that they're offending you or bothering you in some way. That's not the way we're going today. Those are really important conversations and maybe we'll handle those some other time. But we're talking about the kind of conversation you might have over Thanksgiving dinner, the kind of conversation you have with people who come into your life infrequently. And now you're going to talk about something that is important to both of you, but you come out of from completely different worldviews. Like I said, politics, religion, culture, matters. Yeah, I think that's great. And I don't really care who you are. It's not just at Thanksgiving dinner. These are the kinds of conversations that we can have sometimes in the office or at a Christmas

party for the office among friends. We all experience it. And we all know how awkward it can be when someone brings up a political, moral, or religious topic. And you know inside, I disagree with this, but I'm not sure how to respond. And I think part of that is something that's happening in our cultural moment where it feels like talking about these topics is walking into a field full of landmines. And I want to be careful, because I'm afraid if I say the wrong thing and the wrong way, I might just blow everything up. I come from a family in which it was very politically oriented. Both my parents were involved in state politics, and it was really common to have people

from all kinds of different political persuasions in my house. They'd negotiate things. Sometimes they would just talk and have fun and enjoy a party together. but I grew up an environment where there were a lot of different ideas all in one room. And that room was often in my kitchen. And that even played out into our dinner conversations at our house. It was fine for me as a kid to have a completely different political viewpoint of my parents, but I had to be able to explain it, defend it, answer questions about it.

And so I felt really equipped to be in dialogue with people that I don't agree with. back to tell you the truth, I really enjoy it. I seek out those kind of conversations, but I know that's not everybody's experience. So I'm curious, because you're older than I am, it feels to me as though it's gotten more difficult to talk about some of these topics than it was in the past. I mean, I even remember 10 years ago, I could talk with friends who I disagreed with it. And there would always be some tenseness. There's always a little bit of nervousness when you're talking to someone who disagrees with you, but now it feels different. Now it feels like if I disagree with someone, it's not even a question of why do I disagree? Sometimes I'm sitting there thinking,

do they think I'm a bad person? I'm an immoral, almost evil kind of person for holding my view. I think one of the reasons that's true is sociological. There was a book that came out, I think, in 2004, but it could be wrong on that, called The Big Sort. And it is a phenomenon that sociologists are seeing play out and accelerate, really. And that is that people are living by people who agree with them. So they're choosing to cluster in certain geographical areas with like-minded people. I mean, we even see that in our own city and state. If you look at Missouri and just have it on a red-blue political spectrum,

what you find is, at least the one I looked at, is that St. Louis, Kansas City, and Columbia are blue dots in the midst of a sea of red. So we live in a blue city in a red state. But how that plays out in our conversation today is that when you get together for Thanksgiving dinner, it might be with people who come from a really different perspective. You don't live with them anymore. You don't live around them. And so now they pop into your life a few times a year. And you're used to talking with everybody who already agrees with you. And now this is foreign to speak with people who, who don't agree with you. That's interesting. Again, though, for me, it feels like it goes beyond just,

I'm not used to having conversations where people disagree because I certainly have those conversations. It also seems like there are assumptions that people on both sides of the argument begin to make about each other before they even hear the other person through. I read an interesting quote the other day by Thomas Soul. He said one of the most dangerous signs of our times is the growing number of individuals and groups who believe that no one can possibly disagree with them for any honest reason. I thought, man, that strikes me as true of my own experience. But don't you think that's because we don't know. We don't spend that much time with people who disagree. The people that disagree with them, we see them on television or on a screen and what they might post on Facebook,

but they are not in our friend group. Because when people are in your even largely defined friend group, acquaintances, people in your neighborhood, then there's a sense in which you're more apt to believe the best about them. But when they are people who live in a different place, a different place in the internet or a different place in where they get their media or maybe a geographically different place, when you don't interact with them very often, you tend to start believing the worst about them and attributing bad motives to them and go away from, well, they are good people who disagree with me to they are bad people who need to be shut down. Well, I definitely think that's

true on Facebook. This is common knowledge that Facebook's algorithm is designed to give you stuff that you want to see, which usually means stuff that agrees with you. And because I think it's so challenging to have face-to-face conversations, I see more people turning to Google, turning to articles on Facebook to shape their ideas on things like religion, politics, ethics, morality. That's really problematic because chances are you're only reading people. who agree with you. And speaking for myself personally, one thing I love about having conversations with people who disagree with me is that it cross-examines my own assumptions. It cross-examines my own ideas, and it helps me to, if I believe what I believe, believe it more firmly because now

it's been tested or to maybe adjust and change my perspective on something. It can almost be intimidating to have these kind of difficult conversations. And you might just say it's not worth it. I'm just going to avoid it. But that's not an approach I would recommend. I think life is a lot more interesting. You learn a lot more and just more enjoyable if you're willing to interact with people about substantive topics. Now, you're going to have to think through, and we've got to get to a second to how do you do that, which we'll get to the practical in just a moment. But it's a lot more interesting to talk about politics or religion or cultural matters than it is news, weather, and sports. If you want to have significant friendships, if you want

to have substantive relationships, then you're going to have to talk more about deeper issues and less just focus on superficial things of the day. I have to take this challenge personally because I'm not wired to be the kind of person who wants to be honest with all of my ideas. You know, if someone's disagreeing with me, usually I'm trying to talk around my ideas because I don't want to offend that particular person. And so for me, when I'm in conversations, it's easy to avoid topics that I know could lead to offense or could lead to a disagreement. But the thing that happens to me in almost every instance where I resist that feeling is, what you just said. I get a deeper friendship. I have an interesting conversation. Again, it just seems like culturally we are more and more on both the left and the right trying to

map each other out of reality, right? You think about years ago when hyper-conservative people all tried to boycott Disney because I disagreed with some of Disney's films and the things that were in them. Not only did that not win anyone to their cause, I think it closed them off to having conversations that might have helped them deepen their thinking. And you see that kind of cancel culture growing today, where instead of dialoguing with people that I respect but disagree with, I'm now talking to people who I disagree with and have come to the conclusion that they're therefore bad people. And so instead of dialogue, what I should do is shut down bad people. And cancel culture is having a tremendously negatively, to my opinion, a tremendously negative impact.

Well, it's causing more polarization and isolation and an unwillingness to listen to one another. And we've got to figure out, do we want to build a life together on common ground, or do we want to emphasize where we disagree? Of course. So you got both. You got things you agree on and things you don't agree on. Which are you going to emphasize? I think it's a good question. I try in a conversation to remind myself that my goal is to humanize the person I'm talking to and to actually appeal to the things that we hold in common, to try and draw a bigger circle rather than. trying to draw a tiny circle around myself and a tiny circle around them. Perfect illustration of that in my life is that my family and I that already alluded to, we've kind of disagreed on political and cultural issues for decades. But when I hear them talk about what they believe and how they vote

and how they process information and their religious beliefs and all that, it helps me put a human face on ideas that I don't necessarily agree with. And when I don't have a human face on those ideas, then it's easy to mock or to attack. But when I remind myself that these are people who are good neighbors and hard workers and parents that love their kids, they just have a different belief system than I do. In other words, when they become human beings to me, it helps me build bridges to them instead of put up walls. We as Christians, I think, should know above everybody else that the line between good and evil can't be drawn between us and them.

The line between good and evil runs down every human heart. I am a mixed bag of both good and evil. And here's the deal. When we start trying to divide society up into the good people and the evil people, that works great if you want to watch an Avengers movie or live in a superhero world. But for real society, trying to divide the world up into good and evil, I think is terrible for society. Not only because it's dishonest, I don't think I've ever met someone in my life who's all evil, but because it causes us to become unable to build bridges. Maybe one last thing I'd add is the kind of person who's going to do better with these kind of conversations, these difficult, hard conversations about sensitive topics, is the kind of person who realizes they don't have all the answers.

If you think you're 100% right and the world would just be better if they all followed your way, then it's going to be hard for you to enter in dialogue with people. You're going to devolve into lecture and teach and follow me, and you're going to come across as prideful and arrogant. The reality is there's a lot of things that you and I believe that are probably wrong or probably at least need to be modified or adjusted in some way. And if we have that attitude that I'd love to learn from those people who I disagree with because it will help refine and shape me, I'm more interested in pursuing what's right and true and good than I am in giving. getting my way or winning an argument. Well, I think that kind of approach will do a lot better. So when I enter into dialogue with people I disagree with, I almost always come out having learned something from it. That's a great way to go into conversation, especially if the person you're

talking to has no interest in changing. I often tell myself, okay, you know, they don't necessarily want to hear what I have to say, but I have an excellent opportunity right now to learn from them, to listen to them, hear their perspective, and understand where they're coming from. One little exercise to your point of, hey, we need to be humble people who hold our views open-handedly. One exercise I've tried to do with myself is I think through some of my core beliefs. And I ask myself, on a scale of 1 to 10, how sure, how positive, how confident am I of this thing? And on those things that I score 9s or 10s on, I stop and I think about them and I ask, what would I have to see to disprove this view? And if I've got pretty rational things, like,

yeah, if I saw this, this or this, it might disprove my view, then I can say, hey, I'm justified in choosing a nine or ten on this. But if I don't have any questions or anything that can change my mind on an issue that are rational or reasonable for someone else to come up with, it tells me something. It tells me I'm probably being an ideologue. It tells me I probably haven't thought very hard about that particular view. I'm just holding it because I'm so confident. And those are precisely the places that I want to go and talk to people and let them ask me questions so they can think through it more fully. So maybe without even realizing it, we've switched from the why part of our conversation to the practical. And in other words, why have these? Well, we've already kind of

given you some of those reasons. Why have these conversations? But we need to talk about practically, how do you maximize them? How do you make them mutually beneficial? And we've been discussing here the last couple of minutes about kind of what's your goal. And if your goal is to kind of quote unquote convert someone to your view of the world, then, well, good luck with that. See how that turns out. But if your goal is to go in and listen and learn and engage and have fun and sharpen yourself a little bit and see what you need to change, well, that's going to produce a whole different kind of conversation. Yeah, my goal in my ideal world when I'm talking to someone is not to win. If you're having a debate, the goal is to win, but I have very few debates

in my life, in reality. I'm just talking to friends. Our goals should be, I think, to give life, to love someone. Proverbs 1821 says that the tongue has the power to give life and death, and those who love it will eat its fruits. And so I try to just ask myself the question, when I talk to people, am I giving them a fruit of life or a fruit of death? Are my words helping them grow? Are they helping them live the life that God wants them to live, or are they causing them harm? So back to this imaginary Thanksgiving dinner you're having or time you're spending at Christmas or, of course, other environments as well. I think one thing to keep in mind, super practical. And some of you are going to think it's silly and not that big of a deal. And that's just tone and body language.

And by body language, I mean facial expressions, the whole deal. If you're leaning forward, kind of talking in a more intense voice or maybe just a slightly louder, if you've got kind of intense eyes, it just communicates something totally different than if you're leaning back in your chair and talking in your normal voice, body language and tone of voice, facial expressions, they all make a big difference on how your words are interpreted. You can say the same thing, the exact same words, and they will be interpreted completely differently based on tone and body language. I think along the same lines, a great thing for us to do before we walk into a conversation that we know might be difficult or even during it, is to check our emotions. And in particular, to check the

emotion of anger. I think right now we kind of live in the age of outrage, and that means that sometimes the angriest person is assumed to be right. But as Christians, we're called to be aware of our anger. Proverbs 29-11 says, fools give vent to their rage, but the wise bring calm in the end. And I think it's exactly right. I don't want to be someone who gives vent to my anger in a conversation. I want to keep my emotions under control. By the way, brain science has actually shown that you get more stupid the angrier you get. So if you're trying to have a good conversation, anger is totally counterproductive. And if you're so angry, you can't keep going, then it's okay to change a subject or just stop.

So that brings us to timing. When is the right time to have this conversation? When Christine and I were raising teenagers, we would often say, is this the right time to talk to him or her about this topic? Is this when they're going to have the best reaction to this issue that we need to bring up? And I think you can take that into your conversation with your friends and family and just ask questions. Are people tired? Are people grumpy? Are people worn out? Have people had too much to drink? You know, whatever it is in your context, just ask the question, is this the right time for me to bring up this topic? I think the right time is maybe at a time where people are relaxed and,

after they've kind of acclimated to one another. And then you maybe bring it up with a question, something like, have you guys thought about, and then you can fill in the blank? I hesitate to bring up too many issues here because I don't want to get a sidetracked. We're talking about how to have these conversations, not what your position should be on them. But what have you been reading about this? What have you heard about this? What are you interested in happening in the world today?

What's bothering you about the world? And then they might throw out some topics that might be in. interesting to discuss. I think another great thing to do is to fight to be a listener, to be the person who is asking questions, and not in the sense that you're trying to prosecute someone, but just the person who wants to hear and understand someone else's view. Again, I keep quoting from Proverbs. I apologize, but in Proverbs 18, too, we read, fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Now, I am someone who kind of likes airing my own opinions, if I'm going to be honest. But this reminds me that true wisdom actually means being the kind of person

who listens and asks questions. A famous Christian theologian, Frances Schaefer said that if he had an hour with someone, he would spend 55 minutes asking questions and only the last five speaking. And I think that should be our goal, too, that we should listen so well that we can actually articulate someone else's view as well as they could or even better than they could. So let's try to be practical for just one second, even though I'm a little scared to do so. Let's say the topic, let's pick one that's not a super hot button right now, but has been recently, and that's immigration. And so let's say that somebody in your family is very pro-immigration and has this idea that we should let everybody in to our country who is hurting or poor or maybe looking for political asylum. And let's just say

hypothetically that that's not your position. The way you could ask a question is just to say, Now, I hear you that you have a heart to let people in here to our country, and that's really important to you because you think that's what our country is built on, accepting immigrants. So you're repeating back to them what they've told you, say, but how would you respond to some people I heard say that our social welfare system can't handle that? That the people who are coming in will need social resources that we don't have the ability to provide for everybody in the world or everybody who wants to come here. How would you respond if somebody were to ask you that kind of a question? Because I've been wondering about it. And so what's

trying to do is not make this an argument between you and them, but to ask a question that helps draw them out. And either it might expose to them, they don't have a good answer to that question, or they will have a good answer, and that will help you refine your perspective. I think one of the things that happens both inside of our minds and inside of other people's minds is what I like to call the unread library effect. We think we believe what we believe because we've come to it by thinking about it, by making rational conclusions. But more often than not, the reason why we believe what we believe is because someone who we agree with on a different topic told us to believe it. And so I think what Keith's saying here is huge. When I'm talking to someone, I want to understand

why they're taking their perspective. And what I often discover is that both them and I, We know far less about the topic than we think we know, and we're far more certain than we ought to be. And that creates common ground. It's a great way of realizing, okay, we both have more to learn here. We both could develop our perspective on this particular issue. If you want to do something that I think is really disarming, that is admit that you learn something from their response to say something, hey, that's a really good point. I hadn't quite thought of it that way.

I hadn't heard of it that way. Or I'll need to think more about that. That's pretty interesting. Yeah, fair point. I might need to readjust what I'm thinking on this issue. If you can build a bridge by agreeing with them and showing that you're flexible and that you're in this to learn, there's a really good chance that they will mimic that back to you. That just like anger can produce anger, so tension can produce tension. So humility, openness can produce the same thing on the person you're talking to. That's a great principle. Model what you want the other person to do. I mean, it's a golden rule, right? Do unto others as you would have done unto you. Along the same lines of listening charitably, I think we also need to fight not to be mind readers. We are actually terrible at telling what other people think. There's all kinds of tests out there that show that we're not nearly as good at reading faces as we think we are. We're terrible lie detectors in general. And so as a result, we are very confident about knowing what's in someone else's head when the reality is we're not. don't really have any idea. And so listening charitably means asking a question rather than assuming the worst about what's happening inside of someone's heart or mind. So some practical advice on what to do

if the conversation starts getting more tense than you want it to be. Maybe you feel yourself becoming a little bit angry and you know that soon there's a snarky, sarcastic comment ready to come out. Or maybe it's just becoming uncomfortable and you can read the body language in the room and everybody would like this to kind of tone down a little bit. Maybe you could say something like this. You could say, hey, I really respect that you're passionate about these issues. But it seems like that we both have more to learn. Or it seems like there might be a better time to have this conversation. Or I wonder if you could even, if you notice another person getting upset, just ask them, clearly you're passionate about this issue. Why is this bothering you so much? Why are you getting

so upset with me right now. So you're not mind reading. You're not coming to conclusions, like Patrick just said, falsely coming to the wrong conclusions, but you're acknowledging that there seems to be tension in the room, and you're trying to figure it out. And you might even throw yourself under the bus and say, am I doing something that's communicating to you, disrespect, or anger? Is there anything I'm doing that's frustrating you right now? And just see what they do and how they respond. Maybe it'll take the tension. out of the room. Yeah, and if you're good enough at reading these kinds of emotions, you can get on top of it before it actually ends up happening. Something I've done before is when I start feeling things get

tense, I just take it myself and say, you know what, I'm starting to feel a little bit frustrated, I'm starting to feel a little bit angry. How are you so good right now at keeping yourself cool? And it's strange, but people answer the question, and I've seen it turn a conversation around where both people are saying, okay, we're in this together, we're fighting not to get too tense and have a healthy conversation. Now, at some point, I think it's fair. to share your beliefs. So up to this point, we've emphasized asking questions, we've emphasized listening, believing the best about people. But I think it's okay to share your beliefs. Now, as you get better at this, you can kind of share your beliefs through your questions.

Your questions can kind of make a point in a way that's not threatening. You know what we call that. We call that key thing someone. I love to do it, but sometimes it backfires on me and everybody knows my tricks. My tricks, I guess that's what they are. I wish they weren't, but they probably are. But it's okay to state your beliefs. But if you ask questions, first of all, maybe somebody will ask you a question about what you believe. And so you can just answer their question instead of going into lecture mode, teach you a little something mode. Or maybe you could say to them, if they haven't asked you your opinion, maybe you could say, would it be okay if I shared my opinion with you? And then you can say what you believe. But you want to say it. And a way that's persuasive. You want to say it in a way that leads them to go, huh, I hadn't thought about that. So you ask them a question and maybe they will respond by asking you questions and then you can share what you believe in response to the question. Or maybe you ask permission from them to share your beliefs. Like, would it be okay if I told you a few things

I've been thinking about in this area? Then they'll probably say, sure, I'd love to hear or something like that, and you've gotten their permission to tell them what you think. At this point, I would keep it short. This isn't lecture mode. They're not looking for a lot of content for you to download to them. They're not looking for 10 minutes. They're looking for little nuggets. So you can share something that you believe that you think's important and why it's important, not just the what, but the why, and then say, what do you think about that? What's your feedback on that? So again, we're going back and forth like a tennis match as opposed to just me verbally vomiting all over them. One thing that some people will say is that somehow it's harmful to try and evangelize, to share about Jesus,

to talk about your religious beliefs or political beliefs or whatever it is, that that's harmful. You should just keep those things to yourself personally. But as Christians, I think if we genuinely believe that Jesus really is, is the way, the truth, and the life, then the most loving thing that we could do is make sure that we share about him with other people. There's this great YouTube video. You can search for it online, a Penn Gillette, who talks about a guy who came to him after he's a magician, so after one of his shows, and he gave him a Bible. And the guy was really nice. He told Penn that he loved his work. He thought it was a great magician. And Penn took the Bible, and he said that the conversation

really impacted him. One, because the guy was really nice and obviously cared about him. But two, he saw that this guy wanted to give him something that had changed his life. He wanted to give Penn Gillette the way the truth in the life. And Penjolette saw that, look, if you really love me, if you really care about me, then how could you do anything less than that? If you have the truth, if you have something that can give someone life, why wouldn't you want to share it? And so, well, it can be hard to talk about these things. I think that as followers of Jesus, it's something we're called to do. And it's not something we expect to happen in a one-time shot. It takes patience and lots of process and many conversations over time. That should be our attitude. But because we love

people, we should be willing to speak honestly and share about him. You know, they say that the things you shouldn't talk to people about are religion and politics because they're controversial, right? People get worked up animated. But on the other hand, that's what you want to talk about, things that people care about and value enough to get worked up over. And so it's kind of fun to acknowledge at a gathering of people that, hey, everybody says, as we shouldn't talk about religion and politics, but we're a close family or we're good friends. Let's talk about it, but let's just do it in a way that's respectful and fun and listens. And then maybe you could just ask them, what do you believe?

What do you believe about God? What do you believe about truth? What do you believe about the Bible? Have you ever been to church? What do you think about Jesus? You know, depending on the context and what the group, you might ask a different question. Do you consider yourself a spiritual person? Tell me about it.

And so a lot of the same things that we've been talking about regarding politics can obviously apply to a conversation about religion, Christianity, faith, Jesus. And it's far more important, right? I'm sure this is true for you too. But of course for me, it's far more important what a person thinks about Jesus than what they think about health care policy or immigration policy or the impeachment proceedings or whatever political topic you might want to come up with. Jesus is a far bigger deal. So you could take some of these same principles and apply them to spirituality. But I think if you can disarm the group by saying, hey, everybody says don't talk about this, but that's going to make this a fun night. Let's talk about it. Let's just do it in a way that everybody feels good when they leave.

It could turn into maybe one of the best Thanksgiving or one of the best nights out that you've had in a while. That's a great place to close our conversation. And again, if you forgot, check out our show notes because we have a little seven-part checklist that you can bring into any conversation before a conversation during it to help you have a great conversation. And it's perfectly sized for your phone. So you can just take a screenshot of it and have it with you as you go. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this content, please subscribe and give us a rating. That helps others find this podcast more easily.

Also ask yourself who you could share this podcast with. Texting an episode to a friend or family member is. is a great way to help them grow spiritually. If you want to go deeper, check out our show notes for book recommendations.