Last year I served as volunteer chaplain at a hospital in Saint Louis. One afternoon, in the course of my rounds, I visited a black patient with an extra-large King James Version Bible situated prominently on his tray. I asked him about it, and he immediately asked me what I thought about salvation. Giving the standard grace-through-faith-in-Christ answer, I quickly found myself on the receiving end of an increasingly aggressive declarations that Jesus was, in fact, a black man. At first I voiced disagreement, but then I realized discussion was useless and instead asked the patient why this belief was so important to him. He ignored my question and continued to explain that the apostles were black, as was Moses, as were the people of Israel (it seems that modern Jews are impostors).

As he continued pontificating on the all-black cast of biblical characters with growing vehemence, I felt my heart beating fast and my blood pressure rising. Eventually I interrupted him and repeated my question: “Why does this make such a difference to you?”

“Because only black people can be saved,” he said. I excused myself from the room. He wished me a nice day.

“Only black people can be saved” – what seems inarguably true to him is obviously false to me. And not just false. I felt – and to some degree still feel – that only a hateful person can hold such a belief, even when I take into consideration the historical reality that white people have treated black people like dirt in this country. It’s hard for me to deal with the fact that there is a man out there who sincerely believes that I, my wife and daughter, and most of the people I love will suffer an eternity of torment because our skin happens to be white.

Now of course only a handful of people actually believe that stuff. But what if millions of my fellow citizens strongly adhered to ideas that I thought were incomprehensibly stupid or vile? And what if they felt the same way about me for disagreeing with them?

Back in October 2018, writer Scott Alexander published a short story on his blog entitled “Sort by Controversy.” A few caveats: there are spoilers ahead, the story contains some language, and it’s pretty darn scary. The narrator is a former employee of an online ad-company that has accidentally invented an algorithm producing “Scissor statements.” A Scissor statement is a proposition (or idea, or belief) engineered to fracture a society. It’s obviously true to a large group of people while obviously false to another large group, in such a way that the disagreeing parties can’t fathom how the other can be so idiotic, intellectually dishonest and/or downright evil. Anything approximating debate rapidly descends into vitriol, name-calling, and worse.

Being not exactly stand-up people, the folks who discovered the scissor algorithm try to market it to the Pentagon. A colonel suggests that they test-fire it on Mozambique. They drop the 10th-most divisive scissor statement (the narrator mentions that it has something to do with Islam) into a Mozambican subreddit . Presently the African country collapses into chaos (the chaos part, by the way, is currently going on in real life).  

Around the halfway mark of the story, the narrator discovers that someone else has already invented the Scissor statement algorithm and is using it against the US. He somehow obtains a list of the top 100 most controversial statements and realizes with horror that many of them match up with recent American political events:

“Kavanaugh was #58 and Kaepernick was #42. #86 was the Ground Zero Mosque. #89 was that baker who wouldn’t make a cake for a gay wedding.”

And then he reads through the entire list. As the statements become controversial to a destructive extent, the narrator realizes that he can’t bear to share the planet with people who could possibly believe opposite him:

“How do you know there’s not an issue out there where, if you knew it, you would agree it would be better to just nuke the world and let us start over again from the sewer mutants, rather than let the sort of people who would support it continue to pollute the world with their presence?”

He says this, incidentally, in context of discussing the effect the third-worst Scissor statement had on him. The narrator concludes by advising readers to delete social media accounts and to stockpile water, canned food and ammunition, because “one day, whoever keeps feeding us Scissor statements is going to release one of the bad ones.”

“Sort by Controversy” is a great piece of sci-fi, but I don’t seriously think that any one nefarious agent (not even, say, Putin) is responsible for the social discord in the US. Still, the concept of a Scissor statement feels distressingly plausible. Even without anyone specific pulling the strings, it seems that large swaths of Americans not only disagree with each other over various issues – in and of itself, that would be healthy – but increasingly cannot comprehend how the other team could be comprised of normal human beings.

Is American society doomed to unravel, then? Maybe. Alexander makes the point that the ordinary defense against despising someone you disagree with – i.e., putting yourself in their shoes – becomes less and less tenable the further down the Scissor list you go. By the time you get to the bottom, you want the people you disagree with to die. You might even take part in trying to kill them.

And that has happened before in America, in large part due to the worst Scissor statement in our country’s history, something like, “Black people should be enslaved to whites.” For abolitionists then and the vast majority of us now, it’s difficult to even imagine how anyone could agree with that statement. But for 19th century slavery apologists, it seemed perverse folly – even rebellion against the manifest will of God for humanity – to disagree with it. Argument descended into violence; the resulting death toll was 620,000, or two percent of the American population at that time.

Probably the only Scissor statement approaching that level of vitriol in our present society is “Abortion is morally acceptable / unacceptable” (second place might go to gun control). On the other hand, an ever-growing number of issues appear to be crossing the boundaries of reasonable disagreement into the realm of the Scissor.

Here’s a relatively minor example. It’s possible to have healthy debate about things like, say, tax policy and the American healthcare system. But then along comes a charismatic individual like freshman Democratic representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who says that we can pay for cool things like Medicare-For-All and other social programs by ramming the marginal tax rate on the very richest Americans up to 70%. A great multitude, myself included, think that AOC is either dishonest or doesn’t understand how math works at a very basic level. Conversely, a growing number of people (particularly around my age) would likely consider me either deluded at best or, at worst, a inexplicably heartless stooge. All of which feels less like an actual policy debate and more like two people speaking different languages, trying to communicate but succeeding only in offending each other.

Scissor statements hit you at an existential level in a way that ordinary disagreement does not.  Either you or the other guy has to be a fool, or malevolent, or some combination thereof. There can be no middle ground, no mutual respect.You don’t debate a Scissor statement. You fight, not just for your position, but ultimately for your right to be considered a minimally decent and intelligent human being worthy of existence.

But what would happen if we were to own up to a profound lack of minimal decency? In other words, what if we were to take seriously the Biblical teaching that we are sinners – not just imperfect, not just flawed, but by nature children of wrath (Eph 2:3), the enemies of God (Rom 5:10) – the kind of people who would string up the Righteous One and go home feeling pretty dadgum good about ourselves (Acts 2:23)?

Which is not to say that everyone is as bad as, e.g., Himmler, or worse still, that Himmler was somehow not that bad. I’m saying that there’s no ontological difference between myself and Himmler. We have the same disease, which manifests itself differently. There are sinners who try to earn their own righteousness by good deeds, and there are sinners who try to enslave and exterminate whole races. We might have to fight the latter kind to save the innocent; but recognizing our common brokenness, our shared desperate need of Christ crucified for us, is the only thing enabling us to love our enemies as Christ has loved us.

It’s only when we own up to the reality of who we are that the Cross really makes sense, that Christ claimed us not at our best but at our very darkest – in the words of a drunken, obscene anti-Semite named Martin Luther, “The love of God does not find, but creates, that which is pleasing to it.” And it’s only then that we can look across the Scissor and not hate.