Faith Works 11-30-19

[Getting ahead for Thanksgiving week, expecting advanced deadlines . . . pax, jag]

Faith Works 11-30-19

Jeff Gill

 

Can we disagree without being disagreeable

___

 

Tomorrow, Dec. 1, is the first Sunday of Advent for many Christians. In this column, you've got four weeks of holiday good cheer ahead, and then we're into a new year.

 

Before we drift into our seasonal daze of sugarplums and angel songs, I might just want to disagree with you. About what? Well, as Marlon Brando said in a movie once about rebellion, "whaddaya got?"

 

Thinking about a persistent disagreement I've been in for a while on social media with a couple of people, I have found myself reflecting on that fact that for centuries, it was actually kind of hard to find a major difference of opinion. You could subscribe to a periodical – I'm reading my way, page by page, through the 1820s right now – but they were monthly at best, and usually aligned according to faction or ideology or theology. Disagreements were featured briefly in their pages, just enough to allow for their dismissal in detail.

 

And in your average Ohio county community, you had mostly unanimity. I know, I'm certain of it, there were other opinions, but they tended to be kept quiet. There's documentation of that in letters and diaries, but it is told to support the fact that public disagreement was rare, and mostly "not done."

 

Every two years, an election season would whip folks up into a disputational frenzy, but it seemed to pass quickly. Religious revivals swept the land, but as I read my trove of 1820s and 1830s journals, they didn't seem to be a subject of everyday conversation. It was more a question of public meetings, sermons preached, and when a couple of key leaders changed their sense of how baptism or communion should be, the village or church as a whole followed suit.

 

Today, if you want to hear someone vigorously disputing what you think, just post it online. They'll find you if you don't think you know anyone of a different opinion.

 

There's a painting, made into a print, which I have an obscure fascination with titled "Politics in an Oyster House" which could be depicting a tavern on Courthouse Square in Newark, or a stagecoach inn along the National Road. An older gentleman is abstractedly looking off into the snug, the common room, as across the table, about to kick over a spittoon, a bewhiskered younger man leans in making a vehement point. It's from 1840 or so, and became popular because of how it seemed to sum up the peculiarity of America, where people took their polemics so seriously.

 

But it wasn't part of everyday life. The oyster house or courthouse, newspaper or magazine, perhaps, but it didn't consumer people as they shoed horses at the forge or harvested corn as the first snows fell. Or so it seems.

 

Our challenge today is that disputes and disagreements are eating away at us from get-up to go-to-bed, and even for too long after we've put on our night cap and pulled up the covers. Through phones and tablets and devices, we can hear the shrill call of "you're wrong, and here's why!"

 

I think this is what's made the whole "fake news" debate take on such unpleasant urgency. For at least a century or more it was understood that news came with a partisan spin. Independent journalism, both political or cultural, is a fairly recent historical development. The American experience has largely been until the last few decades a place where each periodical came with an official position, and if you didn't agree with that stance . . . you didn't read that paper. Or if you wanted to find disagreement, you had to go looking for it.

 

We've lost much of that non-partisan ideal in news coverage, but we've not yet figured out what to replace it with. And as a preacher who writes, I've done articles for denominational and religious outlets for years: most of them don't exist anymore. So the blogs and websites that solicit content today usually have a very strong stance (not to say bias), and the combination of partisan output that way with the ongoing argument that is social media and the comment threads below posts and tweets, we just don't now what to make of. Yet!

 

The Newark Advocate is entering, in 2020, our two hundredth year of continuous publication. For much of its life, it was a Democratic Party paper, though you might be surprised to go back and read what that meant in application in, say, 1859. I'm glad in the ongoing disputes of modern life, they make room for some conversation about faith, opinion, and truth.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; tell him what you do to read different viewpoints at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.