By Ron Mock (remarks made at the 2022 Newberg/Dundee Mayors Prayer Breakfast)

Thank you for that introduction. This is my first Mayors Prayer Breakfast. I didn’t know until recently that Dundee was a co-host. It is my pleasure, as a resident of Dundee, to say a few words at this Dundee/Newberg Mayors Prayer Breakfast.

I am going to attempt a little amateur theology today. I say “amateur”, but I do have one credential for this task: I was trained as a lawyer. As anyone who has read the New Testament knows, lawyers have been practicing theology for thousands of years.

Jesus didn’t have a very good opinion of lawyers’ theology in his day, so that’s a problem.

On the other hand, after two thousand years of practice, surely we’ve gotten better at it by now.

Let’s find out.

This morning we are a community bruised by polarized political conflict. We have just had our third recall election in as many months decided by identical 52-48 percent margins.

Feelings have run hot in the last year, and relationships have suffered. Some in our community right across the political spectrum have been the targets of insults, lies, boycotts, and even threats of violence. None of this is any fun.

And there’s no guarantee it won’t get worse. Last month we had an event at George Fox where Mayor Rogers and Newberg’s Downtown Coalition Director Polly Peterson were joined by the mayor of Silverton and a community leader from Canby. I asked them what was the worst case scenario arising from our current polarization. Rick and Polly talked about the possibility that our community could be riven by divisions, with conservatives and progressives shopping at different stores, eating at different restaurants, attending different churches – an ideological apartheid.

But our guests from Silverton and Canby said their fear was violence. In Silverton, a planned demonstration after George Floyd’s death was interpreted by some citizens as a potential violent riot. Marchers in the demonstration found themselves walking past armed citizens guarding their homes and businesses. Demonstrations have led to lethal violence in Portland. It could have happened in Silverton. And, apparently, in Canby as well.

We here in Newberg and Dundee are not immune from that.

Even so, I am here to tell you something:

God designed us to disagree. It’s a precious gift. And we need to be careful stewards of that gift.

Disagreement is not a flaw. It’s not a sin. It’s built into each individual’s unique genes. And

different life experiences.

God made us to disagree on purpose.

In Russia today, diversity of opinion is being suppressed. Most Russians go through their day believing their army is on a special military operation, only killing Nazis, liberating the “little Russians” of Ukraine so they can rejoin their Russian big brothers and sisters. They don’t hear anything else…

unless they happen to have had a cell phone call from a son on the front lines telling a different story.

Which society is in a better place: Russia with its carefully cultivated unity of thought, or us here, where our differences are daily thrust in our faces?

I’ll take Newberg and Dundee, thank you.

Because human disagreement is the engine of human progress: meeting needs, finding cures, educating our children, correcting injustice, making those cell phones.

Why have cell phones developed as fast as they have? Because cell phone makers want to listen to the grumbles and dreams of their customers, who will tell them what’s missing in their products. Those disagreements are gold.

They ought to be gold to all of us.

To turn disagreement into gold, we need it to wrap it in civility.

Civility is easily misunderstood. We usually understand it as kindness, as consideration for others, as the soft words and small gestures that help others get through their day. This IS a dimension of civility, for sure, as individual acts of love toward our fellow children of God.

But if that’s all civility is, then asking for civility might amount to asking you not to complicate my day with your disagreement. That would not get us very far toward a better society.

True civility has to have another dimension, a dimension of stewardship. That person with her complaint is bringing me a precious resource: the gift of disagreement. Like any of God’s providential resources, disagreement needs to be carefully tended.

Disagreement can save lives. When you first thought it might be fun to go 80 mph on 99W, hopefully someone disagreed with you. When people first thought it might be fine to hold someone as a slave for life, and then hold their children, too, they didn’t get enough disagreement. What little they got, they ignored.

Enslaved people paid a nearly infinite price which means – because God is just – those who enslaved them owe a nearly infinite price, a bill that may come due on judgment day, with God’s grace all that stands between them and what is due.

All that could have been avoided had there been more bold, civil disagreement when people first started enslaving other people.

When you disagree with me, my proper response is another level of civility: to treat that disagreement as a precious resource, a gift from God, of which I should be a careful steward. I should listen. I should ask you to help me figure out what I need to learn from you. I should ask you to work jointly with me to discover the best way to do better. I should go home that night thanking God for giving me your disagreement.

Not everyone who disagrees with you is right. Sometimes you are right, and sometimes both of you are right, and sometimes neither of you is right. But you can’t test the right without the disagreement.

So we have civility as kindness, as love toward a fellow child of God. And we have civility as stewardship of disagreements, plugging into the vast creative potential in our God-given human crazy quilt of personal opinion.

But there is a third dimension of civility: as stewardship of our political culture.

Along with our diversity of experience, God gave us the capacity to build political cultures. Political cultures are the concepts, behaviors, roles, norms, etc., out of which we create the processes by which we make decisions.

Healthy political cultures invite disagreements, and respond to them in ways that maximize their value to the group. This generally means patterns of inquiry and conversation that bring disagreements to the surface and sift out good information from disinformation.

To do all this well, members of the group have to trust one another that they can be open and vulnerable without someone twisting their words to hurt them.

We all depend on our political cultures to work well. But common practices despoil our political culture: lies, half-truths, spins, disinformation, straw-man arguments, defamation.

Immanual Kant warned us never to lie. If everyone lies whenever it’s convenient to them, conversation will be destroyed because we can never trust what people say.

The same thing applies to untruth in political discourse. If we misinform in political campaigns, if we dehumanize our opponent, cut him down to an unpleasant meme, we teach the public not to trust any of us, and we destroy the trust political leaders need to deliberate together successfully.

Today both sides despoil the political culture. None are left unbesmirched. Citizens are left with no one to trust.

Human disagreement is central to God’s providential plan for the thriving of humanity. But human disagreement can’t benefit us if we can’t work through it together – if our political culture has no room for trust amid disagreement.

So not only do we need to be kind to each other, in the first dimension of civility –

And not only do we need to treat each disagreement as a gift worthy of our most careful stewardship, in the second dimension of civility –

We also need to be caretakers of our political culture, in the third dimension of civility.

This means, among other things, we need to correct our erstwhile political allies when they trash our opponents with innuendo, insults, and name-calling. All our work to nurture a healthy political culture will go for naught if those who claim to share our views are busy laying waste to our political rivals.

And when our opponents raise sincere concerns, we need to listen for that of God in what they say, that part that can teach us. We need to be ready to work with our opponents, starting from places where we agree and working out from there to find solutions that meet human needs.