A Purple Nation

Take a deep breath. Pause. Then release. Keep doing that until you feel your anxiety going away, because the election is going to be a very narrow one. And the fact that we don’t know the winner shouldn’t be surprising to us, because that’s more the norm then knowing on the night of the election. That’s the reason states have dates well after the election to finalize their numbers and that the Electoral College members don’t meet until December. It’s to give time for everything to be sorted through.

But, one of the problems with elections is that there are “winners” and there are “losers.” Some in the country, and in our congregation, will feel happy and others will mourn, with little of the in-between. Or at least that’s how it often gets cast. And if you look at the maps of red states and blue states, it looks like there is a deep divide in the country, an “us” and “them.” That seems to be true even if you break it down by county. And yet that’s not really true.

A number of years ago, political scientists tried to come up with a better way to represent voting in the country. Dr. Robert J. Vanderbei, a professor at Princeton, said his county was showing as red, but it had a split 51-49 in the presidential election. Which meant that saying his county was red wasn’t true at all. So he began looking for a different way to show elections and came up with using the color purple: (This is from 2016)

It turns out that we are a lot more purple than we are red or blue, and I think that’s a good thing to remember.

One of the our core values we have at our church is that of being inclusive. While there are lots of things that that means, one of them is that we welcome a wide spectrum of belief, and I certainly see that represented in the congregation. It also means that we are just going to love people, even if we might disagree with them. But we also believe that we can disagree without being disagreeable. And of course that also goes along with that whole loving neighbor thing.

What this also means is that there are a lot more things that unite us then things that divide us. And, as I wrote last week, those who seek to divide us are not offering good news and they should be called out, because it doesn’t have to be this way.

I just finished a biography of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and I knew about her close friendship with Antonin Scalia who was her polar opposite in many ways. But, what I didn’t know about was her relationship with Sandra Day O’Connor, who, as it turns out, was farther away from her on court decisions than any other justice while they served together.

When Ginsburg was set to deliver her first majority opinion, O’Connor, who wrote the dissenting opinion, handed her a note that said something like “Relax, you’ll do fine. It’s a good opinion and I look forward to hearing many more in the future.” That is called collegiality.

We don’t have to agree on everything to get along, and we don’t have to reject someone simply because we disagree. Our table should be larger than that because we are enlarged by being around people who are different from us. And, more often than not, as we get to know people it turns out they aren’t all that different after all.