In 2010, I knelt beside a family member as they cradled my laptop in their hands.
We’d just spent 17 agonizing minutes watching the WikiLeaks’ Collateral Murder video, which contained footage of the 2007 Baghdad airstrike during which US troops killed at least a dozen civilians, including two Reuters journalists, jeering as they opened fire.
Tears welled in the corner of their eyes. The horror of watching US armed forces fire upon innocent people, laughing even as they injured children in the process, struck hard.
For many, the Collateral Murder Video was a wake-up call. For others, like the person sitting next to me, it did the opposite.
“It’s not real,” they said.
The words hit me like a slap.
“It can’t be real. I just … I don’t believe it.”
I’d brought up the video in a last-ditch effort to repair yet another relationship fractured by political differences. Instead of building a bridge, however, it highlighted the widening divide between my past and present.
•••
I grew up in rural Indiana in a predominantly white, conservative bubble. I went to church three times a week and led prayer groups around my public school flagpole. I was desperately proud of my country, cheered when George W Bush won the 2000 election after “voting” for him in the middle school mock election, and viciously argued in his defense four years later when a classmate dared to criticize a sitting president.
In a high school bracketed with cows and cornfields, I found belonging in my beliefs. This is what I knew – what my parents knew, what my friends knew, what my church knew – and nothing could convince me otherwise.
It took attending a private Christian university less than an hour away to change everything. As a freshman, I eagerly signed the school’s “community life agreement”, pledging to abstain from all vices (sex, gambling, alcohol) until after graduation. I agreed to a campus-wide ban on R-rated movies and non-choreographed dancing. I attended mandatory chapel twice a week, went to a local church on Sundays and, instead of chafing in the sheltered environment, I thrived.
Everything should’ve stayed the same, and for countless students it did. But after my first year, while my fellow students kept on finding answers, I started to find questions.
I had a British academic adviser who taught outside of the American perspective, and whose classes challenged the gleaming American idealism I held so dear. I learned about how the US carpet-bombed Cambodia during the Vietnam war, dropping over 2.7m tons of bombs on the country over an eight-year period, and was shocked to learn this paled in comparison to the combined 2m tons of bombs the Allies dropped during the second world war, even when factoring in the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Next, I learned about the My Lai massacre, in which US soldiers raped, tortured and killed hundreds of innocent Vietnamese people while several orders to stop the killings were systematically ignored.
The more I learned, the more I realized that my Christian beliefs didn’t line up with the so-called Christian nation in which I was raised. The Bible told me to care for the sick, hungry and poor, while my fellow Republicans raged against universal healthcare, food stamps, and argued poverty was the result of laziness. As the veil slipped away, I realized American exceptionalism wasn’t some God-given duty to protect democracy around the world, but a delusion sold to the American people which fueled our military-industrial complex. And we were falling for it hook, line and sinker.
The more I tried to share what I’d learned with my friends and family, the more they wrote me off as a lost cause. My parents joked that I had “turned liberal”, and couldn’t wait for me to leave my conservative Christian college so things could go back to normal.
In person, the conversations I tried to have about religion and politics were stilted and brief. Online, they were vicious. Social media was particularly brutal, and the older members of my church were among the most bloodthirsty. No matter how delicately I tried to broach a conversation, share sources or ask questions our conversation ended in a bloodbath. Once the personal attacks started – led by friends, church members and even the occasional family member – I gave up.
After finishing my degree and moving to the UK to pursue a master’s degree in history, I realized I couldn’t keep the US on the pedestal I’d placed it. Life in England solidified my changing perspectives. Not only were the people wildly different than the ones I’d grown up with – my friend group included both socialists and blue bloods running in the same circles – even the Christians I met surprised me. Gone were the puritanical attitudes obsessed with the battle between sin and virtue, and in its place were some of the most welcoming and warm-hearted people I’d ever met.
Returning to the US in late 2012 was a culture shock. I moved back in with my parents while applying for jobs only to realize that my idyllic home town didn’t feel quite as safe as before. The open-mindedness I’d encountered at university was replaced with vicious political discourse, where even a kind neighbor warned me to be the “good” kind of journalist, leaving me to realize that – if I wasn’t careful – I’d be labeled as the enemy.
It didn’t matter that I grew up in the same zip code, attended the same schools, went to the same churches. A simple difference in opinion was enough to place a target on my back, and I knew I needed to get out. I took a job in marketing that moved me out of state and headed to Nashville, finding a tiny liberal pocket in the Bible belt, where I met countless others who shared a similar experience.
One woman, Marie*, reached out to me after reading a lengthy conversation I had with another Republican on Facebook. A pastor’s wife in a moderately sized congregation in a conservative state and a lifelong Republican, she felt shocked by the growing support for Donald Trump.
“I feel like Trump is using Evangelical Christians,” she wrote in her initial message. “[But] I don’t understand how a human can think these things are ok.”
We reconnected recently, and she told me how she watched in shock as more and more people around her began to follow Trump with what she described as “cultish” fervor, with some going so far as to believe that only Republicans could be considered Christians. While she and her husband refused to express overtly political opinions from the pulpit, she described the anger she saw in some people as proof that something wasn’t right.
“With family, it was a whole lot harder ’cause we were all raised strongly Republican,” she explained. “So for any of us to break away from not totally agreeing 100% with a candidate, it was like I had gone to the other side.”
In the end, she found herself asking many of the same questions I had, especially as she watched those closest to her, including her siblings and daughter, begin to espouse radically different ideas. It was heartbreaking to watch, she told me, and while she tried to remain optimistic, she said it felt as if the whole world was changing around her, and nothing made sense.
“I was like, ‘Where are these crazy comments coming from?’ This is not foundational, this is not Christian,’” she said. “Why are people following Trump so blindly? What am I missing?”
For casual observers like Marie and myself, it can be mind-boggling to watch someone disregard what you perceive as concrete evidence. Unfortunately, logic has little to do with it.
“Most people assume that deeply held beliefs are held because they are logical, and that is often the assumptive flaw. Deeply held beliefs are often held for other reasons entirely,” explains psychologist Julie Gurner. “Things like strong emotional attachments, social or personal reasons, and group membership make people particularly resilient to changing beliefs.”
A lot of this boils down to cognitive biases, the subconscious tendencies in human thinking and reasoning that influence our judgment, decision-making and even our behavior. Confirmation bias, for instance, is one of the heaviest hitters: our brains tend to seek information that supports our existing beliefs and ignore information that challenges them.
The internet made this phenomenon worse, something I watched first-hand as my friends and family members began using Facebook as a source of news. I tried serving as a friendly factchecker at first, happy to put my history degrees to work. Most people ignored me; the burden of proof seemed to disappear. If something got enough likes and sounded correct, it was all-too-easy to hit share.
Kristina Lerman, principal scientist at the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute, says her research has identified what she calls a “majority illusion” – which is what happens when social media distorts our observations of what people believe until we start to overestimate the popularity of information. In some conditions, this can even lead people to believe things are far more believed and accepted than they actually are.
This is what happened with my friends and family. I didn’t own a television before last year, so I never watched mainstream or cable news networks, while my parents tuned into Fox News. As a millennial, I lived by the warning drilled into us from a young age – don’t believe everything you read online – and grew frustrated when others seemed to ignore that same advice. I tried my best to receive most of my news from following local and international journalists on Twitter, but even that was tinted with bias. The more my social network grew – and the more active it became – the easier it was to get trapped in an echo chamber.
It’s something I’m still wary of, especially given the ever-increasing political divide. Misinformation rages on, and I don’t want to fall into the same trap that I’ve seen claim so many others.
I don’t go to church any more, but I still lead every conversation with a conservative Christian with, “I grew up in the church.” It’s a trick I’ve learned over the years that reminds people that we’re not so very different while making it easier for the dialogue to progress from there. I’ve slowly rebuilt my relationship with my parents – although I’m admittedly terrified of them reading this article – and I’m working up the courage to reach out to my brother after a particularly brutal argument about politics on Facebook disintegrated our relationship years ago.
I haven’t given up on nudging all of them back toward the centrist beliefs they used to hold. We still talk about politics from time to time, and I try to start every conversation with empathy. Instead of railing against the things that I think they’re doing or saying or believing, I take a deep breath and think about why.
Why do they hold this position? Why do they feel this way? Why are my beliefs different?
I remind myself that beliefs are heavily influenced by emotions, not just facts, and I try to connect the dots.
My relationship with my family is still rocky, but – thanks to time and therapy – it’s one I’ve come to terms with. I’ve learned to surround myself with my chosen family, people who share my beliefs while challenging me to stretch beyond my limits and grow, and this has made it easier for me to connect with my friends and relatives back home on my terms.
We might not have the same relationship we had before, and that relationship might not look the way either of us wish it did, but that’s OK. Either way, I feel better knowing that I’m still trying.
