PLM v. NLM

Finding a way beyond polarization and wrath

“Someday you’ll be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”

—C.S. Lewis

In a former house we were able to host family and friends in a spare guest room. It was a luxury I do miss from that house! We hosted several college students for various amounts of time, and one of those housemates gave our kids her childhood copy of a storybook with adaptations of Jesus’ famous parables.

I have conflicted feelings about children’s Bibles and storybooks that oversimplify, flatten, or often distort the story of God with cutesy flourishes or historical misrepresentations. I know that art, beauty, and storytelling are keys to unlock our imaginations, and these books can potentially be helpful, but they can also do harm if God and the story of Jesus are twisted into something askew from truth. Our kids have enjoyed this storybook from Rebekah, though—or at least the voices with which I narrate! Yes, I do voices. I’m that guy.

Last night while reading one of these stories, I began to reflect on our current social and political climate. Here’s my simplified retelling.

Ned is a gruff, bullying bulldog, the sheriff of Dogtown. Nicholas is a gentle farmer feline from the countryside. Every time Nicholas comes to the city, Ned finds a way to make Nicholas feel unwelcome. One weekend, though, Ned takes a trip out of the city on the country roads and a band of canine thieves attack him and leave him for dead. Several dogs from Dogtown pass Ned by, but it is Nicholas—on his way to a family reunion—who stops, binds up Ned’s wounds, takes him to the hospital, and pays for Ned’s medical bills with produce from his farm. Ned is astonished when he wakes up and finds it was Nicholas who came to his rescue. From that day on, when Nicholas comes to town, it’s Ned who stands and publicly welcomes Nicholas to the public market.

The power of Jesus’ parables lies in their representation of reality that leads the imagination on a transforming journey of “there and back again,” away from the current status quo, into a surprising metaphor encounter, and back to the present moment with a new, scandalous view of reality. This alternative view typically led some of Jesus’ hearers toward a positive change of mind and posture of heart (the old word “repent” is appropriate) with curiosity and questions about how to inhabit this alternative reality.

When not reading children’s bedtime stories, one book I’m currently wrapping up is Elizabeth Oldfield’s Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times. Oldfield is a former BBC journalist turned think tank leader, writer, intentional community dweller, and host of The Sacred podcast. In this book she takes the ancient framework of the seven deadly sins and refreshes the language for our age. The first chapter is timely word for our present moment, “Wrath: From Polarization to Peacemaking.”

Oldfield presents the idea of “People Like Me Syndrome,” from Jon Yates’ book Fractured, and expands this into two groups, People Like Me (PLM) and People Not Like Me (NLM), to interrogate our polarized climate in the West. Not to be a finger-pointer hypocrite, Oldfield shares about the log in her own eye and the NLMs she is prone to avoid.

What alternative way does Oldfield present? Is there a way past polarization and false peace?

First, Oldfield suggests a simple journaling practice to help us diagnose the presence of PLM and NLM in our own lives:

1. Who are the PLM and NLM in my life?

2. Why do I think of them this way?

Now, there are very good reasons that some of us want to, or need to, keep distance from certain, unsafe people who would do us harm, e.g. the middle school student whose classmates dehumanize her need not seek out more time together. Oldfield is not encouraging us to spend our energy and attention in such ways, but rather to make an honest assessment of our lives, our tribes, ideological factions, or shared bubbles of contempt that keep us entrenched in polarized behaviors and rhetoric, preventing us from moving toward true peacemaking (not false peace!).

The bedrock belief undergirding Oldfield’s argument is that acts of mercy and peace-making toward NLMs—especially those who are vulnerable, suffering, or oppressed—is a hallmark of the alternative politic of the Jesus Way. Consider the famous passage from Matthew 25 where Jesus tells us that when we work for compassion, mercy, and generous justice toward the least of these (Jesus names the hungry, the sick, the incarcerated, the naked, the homeless, the persecuted), we are doing these acts of love unto King Jesus himself.

There will indeed be a measure of risk to our own felt safety when we approach NLMs. Understandably. It was risky for the “good Samaritan” in Jesus’ famous parable, who stopped and stooped to care for his enemy, the wounded Jewish man. It was risky, as well for people like the Ten Boom family in the Netherlands who welcomed Jewish refugees into their home to escape the Nazi terror. It was risky for Beyers Naude, a white Afrikaner pastor, to stand in opposition to the dominant nationalist of the Dutch Reformed Church and stand in the gap for his Black and Coloured South African neighbors suffering under apartheid.

I share these stories not to shame us. They are meant to expand our imagination beyond the dominant narrative in our current American media environment. These stories can give us courage that another way is possible.

Dangerous? Possibly. But living as a servant of fear is also dangerous in a different way. We each choose our danger, I suppose.

Returning to Oldfield’s remedy for the polarization vice, she proposes:

1. Disrupt the tribes. She points to the example of Jesus surrounding himself with NLMs from vastly different camps.

2. Stand your grand. She shares the writing of civil rights activist and writer James Baldwin in the American South, who chose to stay present with a white oppressor as shared in his book Hard Kind of Courage.

3. Love and blessing. She argues that Jesus’ “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” is rightly scandalous, but the act of praying for others will shift our emotions and attitudes toward others.

4. Interrupt the cycle. She acknowledges that teaching and practice of forgiveness is often misused or misunderstood in Christian circles, but that there is real power in honest forgiveness. Sharing a delightful anecdote from a bus-ride encounter with an elderly woman, she reframes forgiveness as “Can we start again?” Again, not as a dismissal of harms or injustice that need restorative justice, but as a refresh on our language in certain relational spaces where biases or presuppositions have unhelpfully skewed the “story we tell ourselves” about NLMs.

I’ll add one more remedy presented by psychologist and author Richard Beck:

5. Moving from low quality listening to high quality listening.

Beck cites a helpful 2020 study conducted by [Guy Itzchakov] that showed:

“…exposure to high quality listening reduces social prejudice. High quality listening, also known as reflective or therapeutic listening, involves empathic attention and providing a non-judgmental space which creates a sense of what Itzchakov calls "psychological safety." Empathic and non-judgmental listening provides opportunity for insight, self-exploration, and attitude change. Poor listening, by contrast, tends to create defensiveness and causes people to more deeply entrench into currently held views. Defensiveness is particularly characteristic of extreme views. Consequently, poor listening tends to exacerbate prejudices…In our increasingly polarized political climate, where viewpoints are getting more extreme and social prejudices are on the rise, we often wonder what can be done to change people's minds, especially people we are close to. Well, one thing that might help is listening to people rather than debating them. Debating increases defensiveness and exacerbates extremism. High quality listening, by contrast, tends to reduce bias and prejudice…Specifically, do we have the psychological and moral capacities to provide high quality listening for others? To be sure, wisdom and discernment are needed here. There are public spaces and group contexts where listening to extreme viewpoints wouldn't be warranted. But such spaces aren't the private, intimate, one on one contexts where high quality listening occurs, the conversations we have with friends and family. Itzchakov's research suggests that in those contexts listening rather than debating can be the better path forward, at least if we want to change people's views. Listening isn't passivity, a failure of courage, or capitulation. Listening is a prejudice-reduction intervention that can gently lead some people out of the darkness and into the light.”

—Richard Beck

I want to hear from you. What do you think of this PLM and NLM framework and guidance for following a way other than polarization?

Thanks for reading, liking, commenting, questioning, or sharing,

Jonathan