Listen to People You Disagree With

When Elon Musk purchased Twitter and promised to open it up to free speech, I heard a word I have never heard before: Bluesky. Bluesky was essentially a social media clone of Twitter, but the crowd on Bluesky trended much more heavily in a left-leaning direction, and that included the moderators. Think of it as similar to Truth Social, but for leftists rather than the MAGA crowd. Now that the left believed it was losing control of Twitter, many of them who were on Twitter (later renamed X) decided they would go somewhere else where they trusted the people running the show. So quite a few left Twitter forever and landed squarely in Bluesky, a safe place.

Now, if you had asked them, most would have cited concerns of hate speech and personal danger (of the emotional kind). It’s hard to shake the impression, though, that much of this migration was driven by a desire to be in a bubble where everyone thinks like me. Before we give the leftists too much of a hard time, we need to be honest that this is something we all engage in, knowingly or unknowingly. We live in a culture where we are relatively isolated, and it’s easy to create an online bubble around me of people who think like me. It’s not easy to intentionally move out of that bubble and to listen to viewpoints you disagree with. But I think now more than ever we need to do that. I want to take a few minutes to think through how we got to this point, and what we as Christians can do about it.

How Did We Get Here?

We live in a hyper-polarized age, at least it sure seems that way. For all of human history, people have argued, groups have formed, and conflicts have brewed. But it does feel that recently, at least here in America, there has been more division than normal. This has likely been the result of several different factors playing off each other.

One such factor is the rise of Donald Trump. Both his unconventional style and the media’s dramatic response to him have led to a further polarization of the political parties. Yet even within the conservative wing of American politics Trump has been divisive. During Trump’s first term, one political commentator had a weekly session called “Good Trump. Bad Trump.” This seems like a fair way of describing Trump’s entire presidency. Trump will do things that are widely celebrated by the conservative party, like declare there are only two genders, appoint conservative justices who overrule Roe v Wade, and roll back taxes. Then he will do incredibly frustrating things like post a meme depicting himself as Jesus, threaten to end a civilization, or tariff close allies. Such behavior leaves plenty of room for opposing takes on the president within the Republican party.

Around this same time, however, has been the rise of social media and the damage that this has done. The problem is that social media companies are financially invested in keeping you on their services as long as possible. After all, the more pages you view the more ads you see, and the more ads you see the more money they make. These companies have also found that one of the best ways to drive engagement is to get people angry and worked up, and to show them what they want to see. This means that most people are seeing all the controversial takes of the day from all the people who already think like them. Advanced algorithms pick the content most likely to keep you coming back, which is normally a hot take you will likely agree with.

Where Do We Go From Here?

So how should we respond to all of this? I think as believers we need to work hard at listening to everyone, even those we disagree with. Now, listening doesn’t always mean agreeing, but it does mean that we seek to hear and understand what others are saying. If you disagree with someone, you should be able to put their argument forward in terms they would agree with. Oftentimes we can end up thinking a position is ridiculous, but only because we haven’t really looked into it. Proverbs reminds us that it is foolishness to answer a matter before we hear it (Proverbs 18:13). Yet we often do that in our hyper-online world where we hear “our side’s” view on a matter and assume that we have all the facts and the context.

One important aspect of wisdom that we must keep in mind is that we should approach every conversation assuming that there is something the other person has to teach us. Job’s stinging rebuke of his friends would sadly be true of how many think of themselves today, “No doubt you are the people, and wisdom will die with you!” (Job 12:2). It is the height of arrogance to think that others have nothing to teach us. Yet if we find ourselves insulated in digital silos that echo back our own thinking, we can begin to really believe that. Too often we go into conversations ready to convince someone that we are right, rather than wanting to learn what they think and why.

We should be able to have friendly conversations with people we disagree with on things like politics, our faith, and other random topics. We need to get to the point where it’s not an attack on someone to say, “I disagree with you,” or to hear someone say to us “I don’t think that’s right” without taking offense. As this begins to happen, I think we’ll realize that we’re not always as far apart as we might think we are. I think that calm, rational dialogue can help bring us to a helpful consensus. I think we should try to listen to people we disagree with. Maybe we’ll convince them. Maybe they’ll convince us. But hopefully regardless, we will both be able to show each other the respect and dignity due an image bearer. And hopefully, as we listen carefully, to everyone, before we speak, we will grow in wisdom.

Ben Hicks is the Associate Pastor at Colonial Hills Baptist Church in Indianapolis. This article originally appeared on his Substack.

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