Talking with people we disagree with has become hard, but the disagreements are not the new part. What has changed is how we see the person on the other side. Dr. Walter Kim, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, describes a habit of shrinking people down to their opinions, and often to their worst moment, so the conversation is over before it begins. The Christian response he and Lisa Fields describe starts with posture rather than technique. Listen longer than feels natural. Refuse to treat the other person as the enemy. Pray for them. Practiced where others can see it, that posture is a form of public witness in its own right.
That is a bigger claim than “be nice online.” To see why it holds, start with what Kim thinks has broken.
What exactly has broken?
Kim’s description of the moment is vivid. He says “we seem to be playing this kind of cultural whack-a-mole,” and the image fits: a holiday meal, a small group, a conversation after the sermon, a workplace, each one ready to erupt when the wrong topic surfaces. He lists the usual flashpoints: race, immigration, politics, human sexuality, the place of religion in American life, and climate, where he notes that views may split by generation.
His central observation is that the topics are not the root problem. In his words, “we can’t even get into the dialogue about any particular issue because we don’t seem to know how to talk to each other anymore.” That is why the series he leads at the NAE deliberately steps back from settling positions. He wants Christians to step back and “not just even think about what’s the right position, but what’s the right posture that we should be taking with one another.”
The fracture he names first is specific: “we no longer seem to be able to detach an idea from an individual.” He contrasts this with what relationships used to carry. You might disagree with someone in your Bible study, but you had watched each other’s kids grow up. A church community might have walked with you through the loss of a family member. That shared history gave a disagreement a setting. Now, Kim says, “we reduce people to their ideas, their ideology, and oftentimes we reduce them to their worst moment.”
His explanation for why this happens is not simply a story of moral decline. Kim points to complexity. There is so much information and so much emotion that people reach for anything that simplifies. “Not only are we simplifying issues, but we’re simplifying people.” Once a person fits in a box, we know what to do with them. We push the box aside and ignore it, or we kick it. What we stop doing is opening it. If Kim is right, the repair means recovering the context that lets a person be more than a position.
Is everyone really this divided?
The obvious pushback is that the country simply is this polarized, and asking for better posture ignores reality. Kim answers with a claim about who is driving the conflict. He says a set of studies indicates that only about 13 percent of people, on the hard right and the hard left, are dominating and polarizing the discussion, while roughly 87 percent sit in a center that is not as polarized. Those figures are his summary of research mentioned in conversation, and they should be read as his report. The argument does not rest on the exact numbers, though. It rests on a distinction between who is loud and who is representative.
For the loud minority, Kim borrows a label from Amanda Ripley, one of the people interviewed in the NAE series: conflict entrepreneurs. These are voices that, as Kim puts it, may be incentivized by money or clicks to keep polarizing. Lisa Fields makes the same point about extremes and their incentives. Some voices may look like they are speaking from conviction alone, she says, but look at their views and the revenue that follows. “They’re making the profit.”
Notice what this does to the moral language of public argument. When conflict is a product, words like enemy, traitor and sellout stop describing anyone accurately. They become marketing. The person who absorbs that vocabulary begins to experience a neighbor’s disagreement as an attack, even when the neighbor never meant one. Kim, drawing on another expert in the series, describes the result for the rest of us: “It’s not like we are driving the polarization, but we’re being swept up in the polarization of others.” He adds that people get swept up because they think the fighting is part of everyone. The distortion is partly a false picture of other people, and a false picture can be corrected.
That is why Kim’s hope is aimed at the middle. He does not expect to reach the people profiting from the fight. He wants to reach the exhausted majority, and his plea to them is plain: “can we sit down and have some sanity here.” The series he describes also offers counterexamples. One conversation pairs Francis Collins, former director of the National Institutes of Health and a leader during the COVID pandemic, with a truck-driving manager from a Midwestern town that responded to the pandemic very differently. Kim says the two have modeled a newfound friendship. Another set of episodes takes up racial conflict and justice. These are exactly the issues where the loudest voices insist friendship is impossible.
Why does nuance disappear when we are hurt?
Lisa Fields adds the most personal observation in the conversation, and it sharpens Kim’s diagnosis. She says people often praise her for handling gray areas well. Then she names the exception: “I realize I’m very black and white when I’m the person that’s hurt.”
Her conclusion widens the point: “our difficult conversations are harder when we’re closer to the things that have hurt us.” Someone who can weigh both sides of an abstract debate may lose that ability entirely when the issue touches their own family, their own history, or a betrayal they have not recovered from. Lisa describes what that looks like. When hurt comes, we want to escape it. If we cannot lash out at the person, we start cataloguing their faults to justify our anger, instead of letting God heal us so we can engage them again.
Kim connects this directly to his point about reduction. Anxiety and fear, he says, are responses to things we cannot control. Reducing someone to their worst statement is a way of managing feelings too complex to hold. The trouble is that the other person is probably doing the same thing, and the cycle spirals.
This relocates the problem. The hardest conversations are rarely hard only because the ideas are difficult. They are hard because the ideas are attached to wounds. A person who wants to talk well with an opponent has to ask an honest question about themselves first: is my certainty here coming from the evidence, or from the place where I was hurt?
Isn’t a call for gentleness a way to silence people who name injustice?
This is the strongest objection, and it deserves full weight. Many readers have watched appeals to civility used to quiet people who were naming real wrongs. If the price of a calm conversation is pretending injustice is not there, then gentleness becomes a tool for whoever already holds power.
Neither Lisa nor Kim asks for that. Lisa Fields affirms that Jesus turned over tables, and she adds that “we ought to when we see these injustices.” Kim says the same: Jesus overthrew tables, and “Did he speak woes against the religious leaders? Yes.” Confrontation is part of the record, and neither of them edits it out.
Kim’s point is about proportion. Jesus confronted, but he was “gentle and humble of heart as the default position.” Jesus describes himself this way in Matthew 11:29: “Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls.” The KJV’s “meek and lowly” is the older wording for what many modern translations render gentle and humble. Meekness here is strength that does not need to dominate.
Lisa Fields passes along a line she heard from a conference speaker, and she gives it her own emphasis: we have to remember that Jesus “sat at more tables than he turned over.” She adds that he built bridges with people who did not share his background. The question, then, is not whether a Christian may ever confront. It is whether confrontation is the deliberate response to a specific wrong or the everyday stance toward everyone who disagrees. Kim’s concern is that many Christians have reversed the pattern, and he admits that gentleness and humility are “not what we are often known for” as followers of Jesus.
There is also a practical answer. Naming injustice to someone who has already decided you are their enemy rarely changes anything. A default of gentleness is often what keeps the relationship intact long enough for a hard truth to be heard.
What would repair actually involve?
Lisa notes that churches put enormous effort into helping married couples work through conflict and very little into helping friends, or brothers and sisters in Christ, do the same. Kim agrees and goes further: “we need a national marriage counseling moment.” As a pastor, he once reworked his couples counseling tools for two friends whose friendship had fractured. The same tools apply to a divided public. Learn where a person comes from, including how their family handled conflict, what region they grew up in, and whether their setting was urban or rural. Spend time in empathetic listening before you try to persuade.
Kim anchors this in James 1:19-20: “Wherefore, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath: For the wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God.” His reading of the middle phrase corrects a common misunderstanding. Slow to speak does not mean tongue-tied. “We’re slow to speak because we spent the entire time being quick to listen, not the entire time being quick to figure out what our rebuttal is to what’s being said to us.” Slow to wrath follows, Kim says, because real listening builds empathy for how complex the other person’s view is. James wrote to fellow believers, so the first application belongs inside the church, but the posture carries outward.
The last shift Kim describes is the one most likely to change a conversation. In marriage counseling, he says, the work is to see that “the problem is not the other person. And it’s not even a problem between us.” The problem becomes something both people face together, something Kim calls “an intruder against peace.” Two people on the same side of a problem argue very differently from two people on opposite sides of each other.
Why would a gentle posture count as witness?
Lisa raises Ephesians 6:12 as a reminder of who the real opponent is: “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” Paul is not saying human wrongs are unreal. He is saying the person across from you is not the ultimate adversary.
Kim notices what Paul does after describing the armor of God. A reader expects a command to charge. Instead, Kim says, “the thing that you’re to do at the end is pray.” In Ephesians 6:18-19, Paul asks for prayer for all the saints and for his own boldness in making the gospel known. Kim joins this to Jesus’ command in Matthew 5:44: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.” He is clear that this is not naive. “Jesus doesn’t deny the fact that there are people who are hostile to you,” he says. What changes is us: “the transformation of our heart happens as we pray for those who are our enemies.” Prayer, in his account, is not a technique for winning. “Prayer is not just the thing that we do to resolve something.” It is “the life that we live before God in communion with God.”
Here the public dimension comes into view. Kim points to Jesus’ prayer the night before his betrayal, in John 17:21: “That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.” Unity among believers is tied to what the world comes to believe. Kim’s hope is that outsiders would conclude “we are encountering peacemakers that can only be supernatural.” In a culture where conflict is rewarded with attention and money, people who stay in relationship across disagreement are doing something the market does not pay for. That is why it gets noticed.
Kim saw a version of this at a global gathering of evangelicals in Korea. His table included believers from Vietnam, India, and Uganda, among them a man whose family had been threatened as Christians under Idi Amin. “And I realized the table represented every single political possibility.” What he noticed was their joy in worship, which hid histories far harder than anything most American Christians face. His word for an anxious election season came from that table: “Jesus is still on the throne. His good news is still good news.” Political conditions did not decide whether those believers could share a table.
The move all of this requires is a willingness to go first. Kim puts it simply: “I’m gonna take the first step, and even if it’s not reciprocated, I’m gonna follow the way of Jesus.” Waiting for the other side to soften keeps a Christian inside the same exchange of grievances that conflict entrepreneurs profit from. Taking the first step with no promise of a return breaks that exchange, and it is the kind of behavior that makes a watching world ask where it came from.