Jesus loves a quitter

I’m not here to convince you about the divinity of Jesus, Christianity, or even the existence of God. After all, the Bible warns what happens if you do that poorly: “It would be better for them [the people trying to spread the Christian faith] to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around their neck than to cause one of these little ones to stumble” (Luke 17:2). I am not a great Christian, have a thing about drowning, and do not want to go out that way.

What I want to do is connect some ancient wisdom to an age-old problem that is with us today in the 21st Century: people talking at each other with neither side listening. Think of Trump supporters on one side of the street and Trump haters on the other, yelling at each other. Sometimes, people just need to shut up and go home. There will be another day and another opportunity with other people in other places. Jesus said it with more panache, “And if any place will not welcome you or listen to you, leave that place and shake the dust off your feet as a testimony against them (Mark 6:11).”

The message is clear: if people won’t listen, stop talking and leave. Quit trying. Embedded in this is also the rejection of compromise to be liked or accepted. He doesn’t say, “Focus group that message and tell it in a different way.” He doesn’t suggest meeting halfway (here’s a great secular book on negotiation that argues the same Never Split the Difference ). Quit. Leave. Go elsewhere.

As for the people not listening, we can’t help but judge them. If you are a parent, you know this to be a bedrock truth about life because you rarely call your children little demons when they are listening to you, but you sure as hell do when they don’t. How many dates end because one party realizes the other isn’t listening? Do you think highly of the person ignoring you? How many deals go south when one side doesn’t hear what the other is saying? Judging the other side is an enticing response to their obtrusiveness.

Judgment, however, comes with its costs to the person judging. How much resentment is built up in relations where listening is a one-sided affair? People A don’t listen, which means People A are arrogant, abhorrent assholes. How dare they ignore our logical reasoning, our moral superiority, and our greater love for our country and/or humanity? Confronting someone is a dangerous act because, at the very least, a confrontation expects an idea or behavior to die (stop). Some ideas, behaviors, and the people who hold them are not happy to oblige. This puts the confronter in danger from others, but the insidious danger is the danger of self-harm. The confronter becomes the idea or behavior confronted. I will bully you into not being a bully. I will prove you are close-minded by being close-minded myself. They are the arrogant, abhorrent assholes, not me.

This is why Jesus added the dusting off of the sandals. He knew you had to let that shit go! Quitting, true quitting, doesn’t carry resentment. Regret, maybe, but not resentment. To be done with something includes being done emotionally. There is no anger – okay, maybe a little. If there is, it’s meant to be left in the sand where it happened, not carried to the next encounter. If we carry it with us, we don’t see the new person in front of us, only the image of the last person we challenged, and we all know how we judged them. We don’t have to call names or accuse those who will not listen to anything. Our walking away is our testimony.

Moving on to the little ones from Luke’s warning: Who are the little ones? Were the disciples going around bearing witness to children? Hey little Timothy, stop picking your nose long enough for me to tell you about Jesus Christ. I strongly doubt that. Instead, it’s safe to argue that the little ones refer more to comparing the innocence or naivete of childhood to the same in someone new to the faith. This doesn’t have to be religious – just think of the hope and naivete of a first-year 5th-grade teacher compared to the haggard and weariness of the competent ten-year veteran. They are not the same, and for those who don’t have kids, fifth-grader b.o. in boys is off the chart. Sorry, stinkos, but you need to wash those pits. Of course, the real killer is the paperwork and testing that gets in the way of actual teaching, but we need to get the teachers in the door first before we deep dive into the complexity of our educational system. The same rule applies to learning anything, from sports to chemistry to morality: part of learning is to learn that each new bit of knowledge creates more questions than it does answers; part of teaching is understanding that there is some knowledge that will never be learned until the student is in a place to receive it (think trying to teach someone calculus as her house is burning down).

Now that we have the who (beginners), we need to ask why would they stumble? The massacres of the 9th of Thermidor, or the 27th of July, 1795, as we Americans call it, is a great example of stumbling. For those who slept through the French Revolution portion of World History in school, the 9th was when the French revolutionaries finally went too far. They killed so many people and branched out in their search to kill more that, eventually, enough people said, “No thanks, we will kill you now.” This turning is called the Thermidorian Reaction. Off with their heads! Zealots are great at starting things but not so good at the day-to-day management of the new world they want to create. The passion that outpaces reason and compassion will end in destruction.

For a more relatable and less French stumble, let’s talk about your clothes. Not your go-to party clothes, not your respectable business attire, nor your favorite sweats. Let’s talk about the clothes you no longer like or fit into anymore. What should you do with them? Did you think of donating them to a local charity or maybe sending them to a country that just had a natural disaster to be a good person – both a recycler and a humanitarian? If so, you just might be stumbling.

I’m willing to bet your great-grandpa didn’t buy new outfits at the rate you and I do. Fast fashion is the term for the speed at which inexpensive clothes are pumped out and we rush to get them. They are cheap so we can keep buying them fashion season by fashion season. Anyway, those countries in need don’t need are out-of-style clothes. They need their clothing industry to provide work for their people. When we donate our clothes, some go to our neighbors who I am sure are glad to get them, but tons of our clothing are shipped overseas to do damage, not good. If you want a quick read that gives the sordid details, check out: Why we should stop donating clothes to Africa  Elizabeth Cline’s Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion from 2012 is a great deep dive ( her work  ).

I could follow this with the horrid story of where many of our computers go to be “recycled,” but I don’t want this to turn into a list of cruel things we do that we get to feel good about. Okay, here’s the link: Digital Dumping Ground Welcome to the tip of the iceberg. The world, and its people, are so damn complicated and interconnected that we rarely see the actual consequences of our actions. We get to feel good about doing something, even something that is ultimately terrible and move on. Yeah!

This complexity is why talking to people who aren’t listening leads to stumbling. If you aren’t listening but you keep talking, you will only be repeating yourself and not hear the challenges to your thinking. If they aren’t listening, ditto. Say you get your newbie believer on your side and you teach them the shouting match game. At some point, and this may be years down the line, they might just learn about that complexity. What happens when that certain and simplistic rationale for something bursts? How many people will feel betrayed? How many will realize that their entire worldview is simplistic? That the people they believed the most were lying to them (not telling all the details is a lie)? You will take a supporter and turn her into a heretic, and we know what we do with heretics. How many witches can you burn before that Thermidorian reaction comes for you?

Another reason talking to people who won’t listen is stupid is because it doesn’t work. Your time would be better spent being with your family, helping a neighbor, or walking your dog. If you keep talking, not only have you wasted the time that could have gone to actually helping someone or walking that chonky dog, but most likely you just made the non-listener even more incalcitrant. One of the reasons is cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is a name for the pain that is caused when people hear information that is counter to what they believe. Yes, it can physically hurt. For some of the psychology of this using events of Jan. 6thas an example, check out Thomas Hendricks's article “Doubling Down: Why People Deny the Facts: article The point is, arguing with people who do not want to listen is only going to get people to believe their ideas even more. Walk away before you do more damage to your cause.

Henricks is talking about denial of the facts, and it assumes the facts are actual facts. How many “facts” have turned out false? Misrepresentations? Bullshit? Pick a war and you will find a mountain of bullshit leading up to it described as facts. Pick a corporation that has paid a hundred million dollar fine and you will find that their “facts” were bullshit as were their experts. Big Pharma alone has paid billions in the last couple of decades on marketing bullshit alone (https://www.drugwatch.com/manufacturers/ ), and that’s not counting the times their drugs, like Vioxx, killed people (https://www.nature.com/articles/450324b ). If we build our arguments on these types of “facts,” how much of our arguments/beliefs are bullshit?

Let’s take Christians as another example of how doctrines (settled explanations and beliefs) can go from bedrock certainty to bullshit: when Christianity first exploded in popularity in the 300s, it took all the way until 325 for the first ecumenical council to be called. An ecumenical council was set up to decide which teachings were correct and which were bullshit and had to go. Everything was settled, luckily, in 325 with the First Council of Nicaea (yes to the Trinity). Just kidding – 381 the First Council of Constantinople was called (nothing human in Christ, just divine), in 431 the First Council of Ephesus was needed (Nestorians, shut up),  in 451 the First Council of Chalcedon calls for a reverse back to earlier belief (Christ back to human and divine), and in 553 Second Council of Constantinople was upset some of the canceled beliefs were not going away  (seriously, Nestorians, shut up already). That’s basically a council every 50 years, give or take. Religion, like life, people, and politics, is complicated.

If you take from this that people shouldn’t protest, please read this again. Jesus wasn’t talking about protests and neither am I, though I did use them in some examples to make points. I am saying this: if you want to share your beliefs, share them with people willing to listen. If you share them with people who won’t, you risk turning yourself into an ass, alienating the people who support you, and making people who disagree with you even more certain in their beliefs.

This will be hard. You will have to go to other places to find allies or people open to your ideas. You will have to learn about the people you are talking to better communicate with them. You will have to learn not only what other people think but how what they think is shaped by the lives they have led. You will have to learn humility. You cannot do that blindly rushing ahead and shouting your ideas at people who won’t listen, as exhilarating as that might be. That is the path to ruin.

Jesus was a fighter, a temple trashing, boundary and orthodoxy breaking badass who knew that quitting was sometimes the best thing to do. He not only advised his disciples to walk away from those who would not hear but took breaks himself, even from those who would listen. Walking away to find an open audience or take care of oneself is an idea thousands of years old. In the age of clicks and social media outrage (left and right), it’s a lesson that needs relearning.

You may be a fighter, a temple trashing, boundary and orthodoxy breaking badass or maybe a temple, boundary, and orthodoxy protecting badass, but do you think you are Jesus? Are you sure that you are sharing the full, 100% truth straight from God’s ear or science’s microscope? You must have at least a little doubt in knowing everything or you would not have read this far (if you hate-read to find fault, that’s a personal issue you may want to take up with a counselor). That doubt is good. Pause, reflect, and think about what you have to say. While you are walking to your next destination, think about who is and is not listening and if you are leading people into the promised land or back into the desert.