"That's not how I see it" - The Grace of Differing Perspective

On Sept 1, 2016, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick knelt for the national anthem instead of standing in respect. He had previously sat out the anthem in pre-season games, but at this game began kneeling in protest, a practice which he continued and which spread to other players.

What emotions do you feel, seeing this?

This touched off an ongoing firestorm of controversy, with people viewing the action in very divergent ways. Some saw the gesture as a brave act of protest, an unwillingness to stay silent in the face of injustice, especially regarding police shootings and the Black Lives Matter movement. Some players agreed with his motives and began to protest in a similar fashion, though not always for the same reasons.

Others, however, saw a highly-paid athlete disrespecting national symbols--and by extension the nation which had given him so much. They argued his refusal to respect the flag and anthem (and to some extent the NFL and the NFL audience) was disrespect of the country, its principles, the soldiers who died to protect it, etc. They considered it fundamentally wrong, regardless of his intent.

My Facebook feed is currently crowded with memes both supporting and decrying the NFL anthem protest. Social media is not a good place to look for balanced perspectives and careful thought on the best of days, and there isn't much of it out there right now. I don't think there's any point in even calling for it, to be honest, human nature being what it is. But there is something we do need to remind ourselves, which I believe could at least keep us from unfriending each other (another rising trend) and exacerbating the thought war online which has increasingly been taken to the streets.

"Thought Nations" - Diversity is more than skin deep.

I live in East Asia. One look is enough to know my ethnicity is not from around here (some kids like to poke my "tall nose" when their parents aren't around to scold them), but the differences don't stop at the physically observable. The Chinese metacultural worldview has some deep fundamental differences from that of the West. Differences that go the core of one's worldview, the kind I enjoy learning about but couldn't entirely adopt even if I wanted to; they're too deep for me to reach. One example would be views on authority and freedom. Many if not most Chinese/Taiwanese/East Asian people believe societal order is considerably more important than freedom. Authorities ought to rescind freedoms if people began to act wantonly, they say, in fact that's an important responsibility of authority. (That in Taiwan democracy coexists with this cultural worldview leads to interesting results)

While people expect some big differences in Chinese and Western values and outlook, they sometimes fall prey to the somewhat-propagandic notion that America has common values and principles. We can say "we are one" all we want, but in truth America has always had different subcultures, and when progressive ideals shifted from melting pot to identity politics, all hope of forging some kind of common identity was lost. (Believers are called to be One in Christ too, but the Church is not exactly a paragon of social unity; why should we expect it from ever-shifting society lacking that underlying spiritual reality?)

What we have now, then, is an array of subcultures. Much has been made of trying to divide America up into its underlying geographical component nations, for example the popular "11 nations of the United States" map. Yet in 2017 these historically-derived distinctions may not be the most practically important; what should we say about various "blocs" of Obama or Trump voters, for example, who can barely maintain speaking terms? They may not fall into any convenient historical or geographical areas, but they do have internally cohesive and mutually incompatible worldviews. Effectively, they are different nations scattered throughout one nation-state. What we saw in the aftermath of President Trump's election was one or more "thought nations" within America refusing to accept the results. "Not my president" meant, "not the president of my nation," the thought-nation that is more real to me than the less personally relevant legal reality of the actual U.S.

It has been reported that former president Obama is currently taking unprecedented (for a former president) steps to oppose President Trump and fund and lead opposition to cause problems for him and his agenda. Obama can do this more or less openly and with great support from many Americans, perhaps including some of you reading this, because he is a leader of their nation, which they consider the True America. Most people from the area where I grew up would see things in the opposite way; Obama's progressive ideals were imperiling True America. Their dislike (to put it mildly) for him was not racism, but due to his position as a leader in the assault on "their America," which like most other groups, they call "America."
Kaepernick kneels for a similar reason; because the America he sees does not resemble the American nation of his own ideals. The America others see may correspond closely with theirs, however, or diverge even more widely than for him. There are diverse nations which share our nation-state in an alliance of necessity which grows less feasible the more they imagine themselves to be the one true nation.

A Ray of Hope - Acknowledging Perspective

While fights over resources between rival groups are unavoidable in the history of humanity, there is a relatively simple and straightforward way to avoid losing friends and making enemies in this brave new ideological world--simply acknowledge that some people live in the same country but a different nation than you do, and they see things very differently. I have friends with worldviews that diverge to the point of complete incompatibility with mine. If you put us on a committee that had to make policy decisions, we'd be constantly sparring opponents at best, if not outright enemies. And it's no good to say "we're all Christians." As I've explained in previous blogs, your convictions, Christian and otherwise, are all twisted together; we can study the same passages of scripture and come away with very different conclusions and priorities, because we never really set those aside without long-term effort and the help of the Spirit, and even then it can creep back in, as it does with famous pastors who after long years of careful exegesis are not immune to blind spots.

But I can recognize that other people's views and values have deep differences from mine, no different in some ways than my Taiwanese friends, and accept them in that sense, if they can accept a similar arrangement on their side. We are really from different cultures, and things are getting to the point where it's more harmful to pretend that's not the case than otherwise.

Is this a complete embracing of postmodernism (even as we leave it behind now for the as-of-yet-unnamed current age), an admittance that there is no truth, only different perspectives, a "diversity of truth"?
"By no means," but we can certainly admit that there is a diversity of priorities. To take our initial example, for some people respecting national symbols is an important priority. For some people that simply isn't much of a priority at all, they never grew up caring about that sort of thing, while for some it's the very importance of those symbols that make them important focal points for protests.

What's happening on my Facebook wall regarding the NFL protests is neither racism nor treason, it's simply people with different cultures and priorities looking at the same action in very different ways, but not really acknowledging that those different cultures and priorities exist. Yet doing so would allow what feel like betraying comrades to become, in a sense, foreign friends. We live in diverse thought-nations while inhabiting the same physical and online spaces. Acknowledging the difference in perspective that comes from that is in fact an acknowledgment of universal truth.

A Useful Theological Example

(Credit for this pic: brazilcarroll)

Scripture makes a lot of what are sometimes called "gnomic" truth statements: not statements wearing little pointy red hats, but timelessly true or proverbial statements which communicate the nature of reality. ("God is good," "birds fly," etc) And whether birds fly is not a matter of your perspective on birds, it is a general truth about the vast majority of birds; at best you could try to pick apart language as a thought exercise, constructing some scenario where what we call what birds do something else, or else deconstructing the idea of flight, but birds still would be flying around outside untroubled by your sophistry.

This recognition that there are divergent perspectives from which to look at the same issue gets hairy when we attempt the sacred challenge of maintaining sound theology. Scripture itself does not allow for a multiplicity of mutually exclusive interpretations of the same passage, even though that's exactly what we have in the Church now, for basically the reasons described earlier in this post. Scripture is making claims about the world, not presenting them for round table discussion. You can discuss them anyway, of course, you can even judge scripture from the standpoint of values themselves mutually incompatible with scripture ("Paul was a misogynist," and other such incoherencies), but the Bible itself teaches us that to do so is neither to believe it nor even to take it seriously.

No, there is a different kind of perspective consideration I'm more interested in, because it resolves some thorny theological debates by reminding us that a valid alternative perspective does exist in scripture--not that of some people vs. other people, but of men vs. God.

While we cannot hope to see from God's perspective even approximately, it is well to remember that He has one. If we accept that He interacts with created man within created space-time, yet Himself exists in a timeless state apart from His own creation, some endless debates resolve themselves almost automatically.

Prophecy, for example, from a time-bound perspective, is something God "knows will happen." Even in a time-bound sense it is not merely that--a lot of prophecy is actually what we called "gnomic truth" above, pronouncements of what has always been true.

But from a timeless perspective, all prophecy is simply a communication by God of what is, either always, or at a specific point in time we humans have not yet reached. We humans have to travel through history to get there, and for some prophecies it seems we travel through multiple instances of the same prophecy being fulfilled, suspiciously like reality unfolds in a way that will suddenly make sense when our eyes are opened. But God isn't waiting for these things to happen as we are; He is omnipresent in time as well as space, but He created both and exists beyond both. The Lamb was slain before the foundations of the world.

Taking this perspective, then, or at least recognizing it, the "problem" of election goes away. To speak of God "looking down the halls of time" is forcing God into a human perspective to which He is not limited. He does not need to look down halls, His presence is in all time as in all space.


***Well it's late, time for some reading before bed, and this post is long enough. I hope to examine the topic again in more detail, as I believe it is very useful for examining the question of free will vs. sovereignty. But for now, if you can't believe you have friends who could possibly hold the opinions they do, consider whether they might not really be foreign friends--from a different thought nation than you, and approach them as if they are from another part of the world. In at least one very pragmatic sense, they are.