Today, I want to tell a story from my past which I believe has some relevance to current political turmoil.

In my first two years of grad school, I struggled with the coursework. It constantly felt like the material was way over my head and I was just barely staying afloat. I had finished my undergraduate studies with nearly straight A’s, and had started to feel like I knew a lot – but I quickly learned otherwise. In grad school, I still got good grades in my classes, but with a constant and increasing awareness that I only managed to do so because of the mercy of my professors, not because my mastery of the physics I was studying. I learned that people could spend their whole careers studying just one tiny piece of the field, so no wonder I – and most of my classmates – felt overwhelmed. We were putting in 70+ hour weeks, and still barely managing to survive, we felt.

Eventually, though, we realized there was one guy in our classes who seemed unaware of the nearly overwhelming complexity we were studying. He didn’t seem to understand better than we did, and in fact asked questions which seemed to reveal he was far more lost than most of us were – fundamentally confused, even. Yet he seemed blissfully unaware. He had outside hobbies, a broad range of interests, and seemed not to put in nearly the hours we were trying to wrap our heads around the subject, as if he thought it was not really that challenging. In short, he seemed simultaneously totally lost and quite self-assured.

Somehow, though, this guy managed to pass the classes and hang on. Here I was, really struggling through every assignment and exam, concerned about how little I understood, and feeling like I was at risk of failing out of the classes – and then there was this guy who seemed completely clueless breezing through like it was no big deal.

Eventually, my classmates developed a great animosity towards him, and had an unflattering nickname for him. It wasn’t just mild annoyance – no, it went further than strong dislike, though not quite as far as hatred. I refrained from the nickname, but I noticed I had the same attitude. I was bitter against this guy. That puzzled me, because I couldn’t figure out what he’d ever done to me. He was a nice enough guy – polite, with a good attitude. What was his offense?

It took me a while, and looking deep inside at my own thoughts and desires, before I understood what was going on. I wanted to believe that I was something special. I clung to the idea that I was making it through these tough classes, and staying afloat in this tough field, because I was talented, gifted, exceptional, and so on. The fact that this guy could survive in the same program as me, when he was so apparently clueless, well, that was a blow to my pride. I felt it as though he’d personally hurt me. I was bitter not because of anything he’d done wrong, but because I WANTED to be proud, and his success got in the way of my pride.

The Bible clearly declares that pride is sin, but here, not only was I proud, but I wanted to be proud. I loved my sin, I realized. I had to turn to God in repentance, not only for the sin of pride, but for my sin in resenting the success of this innocent man.

This was so foolish on my part. 1 Cor. 4:7 tells us:

For who considers you as superior? What do you have that you did not receive? And if you did receive it, why do you boast as if you had not received it?

James 1:17 says:

Every good thing given and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights…

Both of these make very clear that everything I have is from God, including all my abilities and gifts; that idea is throughout Scripture. When I attempted to take credit for my own success, I was attempting to steal from God.

We don’t always know why we feel the way we do

I told this story not so much because it was a major turning point in my life, but because it helps illustrate something important: We don’t always know why we feel the way we do (Proverbs 20:5, NIV):

The purposes of a person’s heart are deep waters, but one who has insight draws them out.

This verse tells us that what we intend, what we purpose and desire, may be hidden deep, like something buried in a deep lake or the depths of an ocean. It can take great effort, or great insight, to find out what’s really going on under the surface. In my case, I had to look into the deep darkness in my own heart to understand why I resented and was angry towards this innocent man. There, I found great pride. And I suspect a similar thing was going on in my classmates, because there was a great deal of animosity towards this man.

In the years since grad school, I’ve noticed this same feeling many times. I catch myself in anger or resentment towards someone who’s succeeding and bring myself to ask “why”. Sometimes, I find it’s exactly the same reason – their success is a blow to my pride. Other times, I find it comes out of envying or coveting; I want what they have, their success. If the Bible speaks seriously about pride, it speaks equally so about these. They’re included in Gal. 5:19’s list of the “works of the flesh”:

Now the deeds of the flesh are evident, which are: … enmities, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, … envying, … and things like these, of which I forewarn you, … that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.

These are serious sins, potentially fatal, if we don’t repent and receive forgiveness through Christ. And as Christians, we’re commanded to no longer live in this way but to instead walk to please the Spirit (Gal. 5:16). Thus, I’ve found that I need to take time to look deep inside when I feel this type of anger, reject these attitudes, and repent.

How does this connect to political turmoil?

As I’ve explained, in grad school, my classmate’s success hurt my pride. I wanted him to fail so I could feel proud of my own success. I wanted to be able to look down on him from my “high position” of success and feel superior.

Well, I think that same attitude of superiority drives a great deal of the political conversation on social media at present. I see a great number of memes from all sides which dramatically oversimplify people’s positions to the point of absurdity (in a recent post, I argued with one such meme), and then they get a large number of reactions from people who agree that anyone who believes as the meme indicates is an idiot/racist/sheep/fill-in-your-favorite-epithet. However, usually the meme simply dramatically oversimplifies a complex issue.

Why, then, are these memes so popular? I think the heart behind them may be similar to mine in dealing with my classmate: If I can believe anyone who disagrees with me on this political issue is an idiot, then that must mean I’m far smarter or superior to them, right? Then, suddenly, I can look down on roughly half of the population from my high position. In some way, it’s the equivalent to my classmate failing: In our own minds, with just a simple meme, we bring our opponents down to a low place and rejoice in our superiority over them in some way.

The Bible urges us to do better. We must reject pride because we, too, are sinners, and even if we were smarter than our opponents, that intelligence would be a gift from God. Not only that, but Paul instructed Timothy in how he should interact with his opponents (2 Timothy 2:25):

The Lord’s bond-servant must not be quarrelsome, but be kind to all, able to teach, patient when wronged, with gentleness correcting those who are in opposition, if perhaps God may grant them repentance leading to the knowledge of the truth.

I saw quite a few folks on social media who were hurt by the closeness of the election; they wanted Trump to lose more resoundingly. They were hurt to find out that they live in a country which is (as they see it) so racist that Trump came close to winning. Take, for example, these two reactions on Twitter:

Joe Biden is going to win. But what people of color have long understood should be clear to everyone now: Donald Trump is not an aberration, he’s a mirror. And that ugliness we see in him is America’s.

and

A useful exercise is to imagine this election without COVID. It all points to a landslide by Trump, which tells you everything you need to know about racism and hate in the GOP.

The attitude, here, is that no one could possibly support Trump unless they are ugly, horrible people, or racist and hateful.

I don’t mean to single out the liberal side of politics for this, though. While I don’t have any quotes on hand, I see the same thing to some extent from both sides. And I hate it.

While I hate it, though, I have to admit that there’s a small part of me that sees memes that support positions I agree with which I want to agree with. Part of me wants to be proud of my political views, and wants to look down on others who don’t agree. Memes make such a nice, easy way to look down on others. But when I see these, I try to remember my grad school classmate and I keep scrolling. Or, if I have the time, I take a minute to try and explain why the issue is more complicated than the meme portrays. I try to remember that my desire to just click “like” may come from a very dark place.

May God help me, and us, to truly love others, even those we disagree with profoundly. May we not simply reduce them to a set of memes we can disregard and denigrate. All people are made in God’s image, even those with whom we disagree.