If I prefer vanilla ice cream, that doesn’t mean that I hate those who eat chocolate 

I have a habit that causes me no end of frustration and yet I can’t break it.

I’m an incurable news junky. I subscribe online to six newspapers, not to mention substacks and blogs. That’s not the problem.

Here’s the problem. As addicting as the news itself can be, I find myself more addicted to reading the comments that tend to follow online stories or op-eds in, say, the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal.

I don’t know why I do that. What the comment sections amount to is screen after screen of furious people spewing bile at anyone who even slightly disagrees with them. If I’m reading the Times, it’s typically liberal readers shouting down perceived conservatives. If I’m reading the Journal, it’s conservatives blasting perceived liberals.

There’s rarely any complexity, nuance or grays. If I could sum up these mini-screeds into one prototypical comment, it might be, “You disagreed with me on my sacred ideology! You’re evil! Eat moldy granola and die, you anti-American scumbag!”

The obvious question is, why don’t I just quit reading the comments? I don’t know. It’s like any addiction—I shouldn’t, but I can’t help myself.

The other day, though, I scrolled down through the muck to a comment that was so different it’s stuck with me. I can’t remember which newspaper this was in or what the topic of the story was. I wish I’d saved the comment, but didn’t think to in time.

In the midst of all the hysteria and outrage and egomania, a commentator had written something like this: “How did we decide that to say I prefer vanilla ice cream means I hate chocolate ice cream and everybody who eats it?”

That described our ongoing American culture wars precisely.

I’ve felt like that commenter myself. If I write in a column that I’m a rural Pentecostal pastor, somebody instantly takes that to mean I’m an atheist-hating, right-wing crank trying to strip away everyone else’s freedoms of thought, speech and religion and willing to convert them at gunpoint.

Um, no. All I mean is, this is the worldview that works for me. If you don’t like it, don’t adopt it. I neither hate nor fear you. Indeed, I wish you well.

So often, we lose sight of the fact that we’re all individuals and we won’t always, or ever, see things exactly the same way. Actually, that’s to be expected. It’s normal. It can be … good. Differences of opinion can be healthy and even helpful.

At church, I lead a Wednesday evening Bible study for adults. On a typical week, we’ll have 10 to 15 folks.

I like to remind everyone there’s an ancient mode of studying the scriptures that starts with the premise that the words in the Bible are not dead ink on lifeless pages, but are instead spiritually alive. God uses the same words to deal with each pilgrim individually.

Under this time-honored premise, God gives each of us our own portion, our own insight, which is often tied to our family background, life experiences, culture. Yet it’s from God.

So, when you and I read the same verse, we’ll often arrive at different interpretations.

We don’t need to fight over this. It’s not a zero sum game. If I understand a verse to mean one thing and you another, that doesn’t mean one of us is holy and the other a heretic, even if our understandings at first seem opposed. We might both be right. We’ve each discovered our own little portion.

It then behooves us to compare the two portions. We’ll begin to see a little larger picture emerging. If we’ve got a dozen people studying, we’ll have a dozen interpretations, each containing its own nugget of insight. The revelation just keeps getting bigger. It expands way beyond anything we’d have ever discovered alone.

This is a good thing and a God thing.

It’s long seemed to me this approach could be applied to all manner of problems, not just biblical interpretation. You wouldn’t need to inject God into it unless you wanted to.

What if we began hot-button discussions from the assumption that we’ve all got a measure of the truth? Maybe the people who oppose abortion and the people who support the right to choose both have valid concerns. Maybe the folks who support universal healthcare and those who fear its massive costs both are partly correct.

A guy can disagree us without necessarily hating us or being a dupe of Satan. Maybe he has legitimate reasons for disagreeing.

Whether we’re considering abortion, healthcare, gun control, trans rights, critical race theory or putting in a new stoplight at the entrance to our subdivision, we could explore how each of us understands the issue, rather than assuming we’re automatically right and everybody else is wrong and we’ve got to defend our holy position at all costs.

What might happen if we listened—genuinely listened—to others without dismissing them as mortal enemies?

Paul Prather is pastor of Bethesda Church near Mount Sterling. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.