Rebecca Burnham has served in various roles in the Primary, Sunday School, Relief Society, and Young Women’s organizations and currently serves as a temple ordinance worker, family history consultant and pianist. After her mission to Sao Paulo Brazil, she worked as a journalist until her first marriage, when she became a full-time homemaker. She is now a disability support worker by night and a community builder/entrepreneur/playwright and composer by day, who is recently launching Summit Stages an initiative to build beloved community through the creation and promotion of musicals that lift and unite. She is passionate about building peace in an increasingly polarized world and writes about gospel topics at 4MutualRespect.
Enter Rebecca…
I grew up in a deeply religious family with a strong sense of being different from, and defensive against, “the world,” a term that I understood to apply to people who didn’t believe in God and who therefore, kept promoting destructive paths in their pursuit of happiness. The godless liberals were “them.” The believing conservatives were “us.” I believed they were attacking us, and I was excited to stand up in defense of institutions and the values we held dear.
Reporting News with a Mission
My big chance came when I was hired by publisher Ted Byfield to write for his recently launched, unabashedly conservative, and Christian-based BC Report Magazine. I sought him out and asked him to be my mentor because I appreciated his reasoned and principled editorials. He hired me because I was female, conservative, and Christian. He needed someone who could credibly cover the “war on the family” without getting sucked in by feminism.
My beat was faith, family, and education. I cranked out weekly articles about current events, most of which reflected what we saw as an assault on traditional families, parental rights, academic strength, and Christian voices. I saw myself as a keyboard-wielding soldier, raising a warning cry against all forms of crazy, big-government liberalism that threatened the foundations of our freedom. I was flattered when the head of the BC Teachers’ Federation made a special announcement to the 666 delegates at their annual convention that no-one was allowed to speak to me.
My first hint that I needed a change in perspective was in the fall of 1991.The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission called for public comment on a proposal to ban “broadcast programming that is abusive on the basis of sexual orientation.” We at the magazine suspected an anti-Christian agenda that would be used to muzzle good faith, free speech on a moral issue. I was sent to look through the letters that people had sent in so we could hold the CRTC accountable for whether they considered the public’s response.
I was shocked and sickened by the content of the letters; page after page of dehumanizing vitriol against homosexuals. One said they didn’t deserve human rights. By this time, I actually had a close personal friend who was gay. All that hatred was aimed at someone who was precious to me. And I suddenly felt a deep connection to the reasons for the CRTC’s proposed ban – that it wasn’t about muzzling Christians, but about protecting gays from real abuse.
Until that moment, I had not realized that my camp of “believers” included a multitude of people who actually, virulently hated homosexuals, in the name of religion. It shook up my definitions of “us” and “them.” I soon began to see that many of the people I had seen as enemies were actually people like me, trying to create a better world. We just didn’t agree about the how. That didn’t stop me from being a warrior, but it moderated my tone. I wanted to take extra pains to fight fair, and to focus my criticism on ideas, not people.
Lobbying for the Family
The next quantum shift came in December 2004. By this time, I was a single mom of five, having fled my first marriage for safety. I had come to see parental rights as a mixed bag, and to be a lot more interested in focusing on the best interests of the kids. But I was still a culture warrior, heading up the Canadian branch of a pro-family lobby during the Parliamentary debate on same-sex marriage. The strategist for our parent organization drafted an angry action alert for me to send out to our thousands of subscribers. It focused on how the Liberal government was betraying Canadians on this issue, and urged them to email the Prime Minister or their Members of Parliament. Only, I didn’t actually believe that the government was behaving in bad faith. I figured they were well-intentioned, just wrong, because marriage was not about validating adult relationships; it was about protecting, as best we could, the right of children to be raised by their father and their mother. I didn’t want to enrage our subscribers against the Liberals. Instead, I wanted to send out a calm and reasoned email, urging them to bring our message to the attention of their elected officials.
That’s when the strategist explained something I had never understood about culture warfare. He said that calm and reasoned emails don’t work. They don’t motivate people to act. What you have to do is make your readers angry. And then, when they’re mad, give them something to do with their anger. That’s how you lead a political movement.
Rejecting Anger
That conversation is what drove me out of the trenches. I just couldn’t be okay with peddling anger. For me, it was primarily a spiritual thing. My faith teaches that a peaceable walk with others is a core component of Christian discipleship. In a key passage of The Book of Mormon, Jesus says,
“He that hath the spirit of contention is not of me, but is of the devil, who is the father of contention, and he stirreth up the hearts of men to contend with anger, one with another.” (3 Nephi 11:29)
It was also a pragmatic thing. Anger is counterproductive. When we assume our opponent is bad, we invite him or her to react poorly to whatever we demand, and our efforts become counterproductive. Furthermore, every extremist movement rides piggyback on a just cause. When you redress the underlying injustice, you cripple the movement. If, however, you deny the injustice and double down to defend the status quo, you may enjoy a temporary victory, but you also entrench the movement and sow the seeds of your ultimate defeat.
Once the politics of anger had been unmasked for me, I stopped being pulled in by the infuriating emails that kept finding their way to my inbox. I started looking into the incendiary stories they were spreading and discovered, almost without exception, that they were gross distortions or outright lies. One of the first was an urgent appeal to sign a petition aimed at stopping atheists from getting “Touched by an Angel” banned from the airwaves for being too religious. I looked it up and discovered this was a hoax that had been circulating since 1975. Who comes up with such nonsense? And—what might be a more important question—why? Whatever their promulgators’ goals, these outrage-inducing distortions create a siege mentality among groups that leads to chip-on-the-shoulder defensiveness. I believe the polarization that threatens our democracy has deep roots in distorted stories we’ve been circulating and stewing about for decades.
Learning from Hard Knocks
There’s something else that has driven me from the trenches of culture warfare: my own hard knocks and becoming acquainted with others’. It was easy to hold rigid views and mistake them for principles when I had no experience of situations where they did more harm than good. I could dismiss third-hand stories about such situations as exaggerated or self-inflicted. But when I got to see them up close and personal, I had to adjust my understanding. For example, it was easy to decry no-fault divorce before I had to carefully navigate the dissolution of my marriage to a partner who was in a volatile space. It was easy to champion parental rights before I learned that they can turn children into powerless pawns between warring parents. It was easy to suspect gay rights were just a cover for a predatory, anti-family “gay agenda” back when I didn’t know any gays and before I read the rantings of people who didn’t think they deserved any rights. And so forth.
Building the Beloved Community
I have learned that life experience is designed to lead us past black-and-white, two-dimensional thinking, beyond the simplicity on the near side of complexity. It’s designed to challenge and humble us, to strip away our self-serving, convenient answers, and carry us into the light of deep, steady, and courageous love. We can’t do this without each other, without authentically sharing our contrasting stories and courageously listening to understand. We need to learn from our good-faith differences and find the beautiful commonalities that can unite our hearts across them.
So I am done with culture warfare. I want to overcome alienation and build the Beloved Community instead. There are still differences that I find too threatening to want to engage across. I’m not going to push myself to go where I don’t feel safe. But I am going to practice courage where I am led by the light of my conscience, even though I’m not entirely sure of my way.
I’d love to hear from you!
How have you grown from engaging with someone who believes differently from you? What kind of differences do you feel able to collaborate across, while still being true to your core values?
