Pick Your Poison: Politics or Religion

Well, the holiday season is (finally?) over and most of us have survived our time with our families, often because either we intentionally limited the time spent with our less enlightened brethren and sistren or we steadfastly adhered to the old axiom about avoiding conversations centered around politics or religion. For many of us that’s not an easy task.

I can only talk about sports so long (and once you get past baseball and softball I admit to blissful ignorance, for the most part); then, everything (even entertainment like books, movies and television) eventually gets sucked into the vortex of politics, like water draining from a tub. Besides, I LIKE talking about politics (not arguing, but talking, discussing, even listening). Unfortunately, there’s a lot of “belief superiority” in my family, with generally a hard right bias. I like to think I’m a left-leaning centrist, but that puts me in the crosshairs on most issues in my family.(My family might disagree with that self-assessment, but they’re obviously wrong!)

If there’s one thing I like talking about more than politics, though, it’s religion. Well, I would like talking about religion, because religions and religious beliefs are fascinating (to me), but those are topics people avoid like, well, a plague of locusts, for example. It’s certainly not a topic my family tends to broach, for a variety of reasons, I suppose, and if there’s a topic more treacherous among friends, I don’t know what it is, and I have few enough friends as it is!

I’d like to suggest that it’s really easy to engage these topics as long as no one takes a counter view personally. I really would like to suggest that. Unfortunately, deeply held religious and political beliefs are, by definition, personal, often intensely so. How can you not take personally a pointed question or criticism, either implicit or explicit, of something you believe down deep in your soul? Creating more problems is that sarcasm is a dominant genetic trait in my family; difficult to not take that personally! In discussions with “certaintists” of any stripe, even an ambiguous or non-committal position represents a threat to their particular world-views.

 Studies have shown that those who are most certain of their beliefs are also prone to seeing those who stray from orthodoxy as not just wrong but dangerous or even evil, which explains the bitter partisan divide not just in Congress but in the country. And that brings us full circle to why the old axiom remains the best defense for peaceful meetings of divided families.