Humans are placed in so many no-win situations.
One of the silly ones I’ve observed for years is drying your hands in a public bathroom. Many public restrooms have resorted to air dryers, perhaps to save money, maybe even to cut back on paper waste to save the environment a little. But these inventions don’t quite measure up to their intended purpose. First of all, nine times out of ten they don’t actually dry your hand. Second of all, they aren’t as good at getting rid of the germs on your hand compared to paper towels and might actually spread more germs around the bathroom (as seen on this MythBusters’ episode).
Okay, but on the other hand, you have paper towels which are not a sustainable and environmentally friendly option. Every single day, more than 50k trees are cut down to become paper towels. It takes 20,000 gallons of water to produce a ton of paper towels. So yeah, it’s not great for the planet to keep mass-producing flimsy paper we use for 2.5 seconds then toss toward the trash (I saw toward because the paper towels don’t always make it into the trash!).
So which option is better? Do we universally adopt hand dryers with their poor cleaning ability or do we universally adopt paper towels with their negative environmental impact? Which is better?
IDK.
You might have an opinion one way or the other and that’s okay. But this silly example illustrates how we are so often caught between a rock and hard place, forced to either go to the mythical Charybdis or Scylla in order to be killed. Taking a firm stance on either extreme leads to an imperfect result.
Yet our world is so full of binaries. You have to be on this side. You must adopt this extreme position or you hate puppies (or something like that). Polarization is rampant. Look at any chart on political data and you’ll see how the dots are moving toward the outside while the dots in the middle of the spectrum are sparse.
But there is a movement to reject the polarization. There’s a (in my opinion, much-more rational) movement that recognizes both sides are flawed and both sides have advantages.
I recently had a semi-viral tweet and it demonstrated that many people are right there with me. There’s cringy stuff on either side. Neither side lives up to perfection. But both sides have advantages over the other.
For me, what I was trying to explain, is not so much that I’m in the political middle but that I’m not even on the map–neither the precepts of “conservative” or “progressive” line up completely with my political or religious views. These groups don’t align with what I am convinced God wants of my life. I can’t even justly but Jesus or the Bible in either category.
Unfortunately, there isn’t a great solution to this delicate balancing act. Certainly, there is no solution I can give in a short blog post!
I just hope you are aware that it’s okay (and preferred) not to throw all your chips in with one extreme over another. Real-life is much more complicated. Jesus himself navigating a weird in-between place–hanging with wildly different characters from anarchist zealots to tax collectors totally in bed with the empire. He ate with “sinners” and sparred with “saints.” He said some things that get him labeled a “liberal” and some things that get him labeled a “conservative.” A true enigma. Oh he definitely took firm stances on many issues but he doesn’t quite fit any modern socio-political categories (Jesus wasn’t a capitalist nor a socialist FYI).
I’ll admit that some groups might get closer to the ideal but I’m not going to pledge my allegiance to anything but Christ. As I write in my book Who We Are:
“The Kingdom of God transcends ethnic, national, political, social, geographical, and cultural barriers. Certain groups might display Christian values better than other groups but we cannot say that those groups are synonymous with being a Christian. Our Christian identity is found in the Kingdom; those groups that seem acceptable to us have merely stumbled upon Christian virtues, but they themselves are not to be equated with the Kingdom. The Kingdom of God stands above and often against the groups we form in this world. It changes everything.”
Balancing truth, goodness, and beauty in a polarized world is no easy task. But we have to try.
Ultimately, however, our allegiance is in the Kingdom of God and not whatever label our favorite talking head says we need to adopt.
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