I’d like to read about people’s experiences with friendships across belief divides. I’m especially interested in friendships across liberal/conservative divides, and across religious/anti-religious divides.
I have a good friend who is stupidly "conservative" and has been all his life. Over the years we have learned to avoid the topic so as to remain friends, as each is pretty intractable, and we'd rather stay friends than 'be right'. But also, I know why he is 'stupidly conservative', and so I can empathize, at least somewhat, with his condition.
He was raised by a violent, abusive father, a co-dependent mother, he was sexually molested on several occasion by the family priest, and he was sexually assaulted by an older cousin. And these events of his childhood formed and solidified an understanding of life that he's held ever since. Such that he is a classic philosophical 'Darwinist', as nearly all modern "conservatives" are. He believes that those among us with money and power will inevitably use and abuse those who have less of it, and that anyone preaching any other scenario (like his family priest) is preaching pipe-dreams and outright lies, and so are either fools, or abusers, themselves. My friend's mom taught him from a very early age that the only course of action in the face of the ongoing threat of abuse from dad was "not to do anything to attract his ire". And so my friend understood from childhood on that the best way to survive in the Darwinist world of abusers and victims, is to serve the desires of the abusers, so as to try and avoid becoming their victim.
When he left the service and entered the job market, he immediately went to work at a brokerage firm, as a technician; helping the rich and powerful get richer and more powerful. And he voted for the party of the rich and powerfull's candidates in every election (republicans, of course). Because in my friend's mind, the best way for him to survive in such a toxic, abusive world, was to serve the abusers, and hope that by doing so, they wouldn't choose to abuse him. So that's what he's been doing all his life. And it's mostly paid off for him. He worked hard, and rode the abusers coattails through the stock market, and saved up enough money to retire in relative comfort. But, of course, he's done nothing at all, his entire life, to stop or mitigate the abuse of others by the wealthy and powerful of the world. And in fact, he has worked as an 'enabler' of them for 45 years.
I, of course, am a 'liberal' (actually, I'm a progressive), so, to my friend, I am one of those hopelessly stupid and idealistic people who believe the 'priestly' preaching that the world and it's people could be better than they are. That things could change, could be improved, and the abuse could be minimized. And in many ways he's right. I am hopelessly idealistic, and the world and it's people are not getting any 'better' toward each other, or toward me. But I still can't see any legitimate reason why not, except that people like my friend just can't and won't trust and hope enough, to try. But I can understand why he can't hope, or trust, because he has no evidence of it's benefit. I hope and trust in him, but he only sees that as further evidence of my own foolish idealism. And that's sad.
So there we are, and have been for many years. My friend, the relatively protected servant of the great satan, and me, the vulnerable, broke, powerless, idiot idealist, friend.
