Two Kinds Of People
What if there are only two kinds of people in the world?
I am fifty-seven years old, and I have been speaking to people - trying to persuade people of one thing or another - for more than twenty-five years. I am now trying to strategically repeat myself.
A couple of years ago I hit upon a theme in my preaching that I haven’t been able to shake. And the further we go down whatever paths this nation travels, the more compelled I feel to repeat myself.
The theme I hit upon was the observation that the scriptures - including Jesus’ own words - not infrequently seem to suggest to us that there are really only two kinds of people in the world. “Sometimes,” I wrote, “the scriptures seem to want to suggest that the world is divvied up this way: God’s chosen people and everybody else; Jews and Gentiles; saints and sinners; the redeemed and the lost. The biblical tradition often seems all too comfortable with binary thinking. And the church often seems this way too.”
I went on: “Maybe there really are only two kinds of people in the world: believers and non-believers; Republicans and Democrats; pro-life and pro-choice; straight and Queer; rich and poor; gun owners and gun control advocates; vaxers and anti-vaxers; tree huggers and oil drillers; Fox News watchers and MSNBC watchers. Two kinds of people.”
The temptations to think this way are only growing more acute in the present moment, when there seems to be an open invitation to place ourselves on one side or the other of the MAGA-divide. I do not think for one moment that Bishop Marianne Budde intended her words at Washington Cathedral earlier this week to play into that thinking. I strongly suspect that she would sign on to my project to discourage the two-kinds-of-people thinking that we so often fall into. I find that the point of her words was congruent with my pushback to the temptation to divide the world up into two kinds of people. But, of course, without intending to, she became another point on the graph plotting out the dividing line.
It was the murder of nineteen children by an eighteen-year-old boy in a school in Uvalde, Texas that set me on the path to evaluate the two-kinds-of-people thesis. I’ll quote myself here:
“I happened to be in my car the other day, listening to a radio station that represents the binary choice of my point of view. And I heard a woman named Scarlett Lewis being interviewed by Cory Turner, and she was talking about forgiveness.* Now, I’m big on forgiveness! I’ve been trying to talk about forgiveness too! So I sat up and took notice. And it turns out that Scarlett Lewis is the mother of a 6-year old boy named Jesse ‘who was murdered alongside many of his classmates at Sandy Hook Elementary’ School, ten years ago.
“And the story on the radio was going on about school safety, and a report by the Secret Service, and bullying in schools, and something ‘they call a threat assessment model, where a team of trained staff, including an administrator, a counselor or school psychologist and a law enforcement representative work together to identify and support students in crisis before they hurt others…’ which, the reporter told us, reminded him of something Scarlett Lewis had told him a few years ago, when he had interviewed her.
“This mother of a child who’d been shot and killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School at the age of six… this is what she said: ‘There are only two kinds of people in the world…’. And I braced myself, because it seemed like whatever came next was going hurt in its poignant, insightful, truth-telling accuracy.
“‘There are only two kinds of people in the world,’ she said, ‘good people and good people in pain.’”
Go ahead and pushback at this perspective. Of course it is not a perfect way to view the world. And I am sure that you and I could find individuals whom we would like to nominate for the distinction of standing well outside this hopeful framework.
But I think we need a corrective to the easy temptation to suspect that there really are only two kinds of people in the world. And the possibility that the only two kinds of people in the world are good people and good people in pain is a useful corrective. If we adopted this perspective, we’d be more likely to do good than to do harm.
And since, again and again, I find myself tempted to define which side of the MAGA-divide I want to occupy, I find myself repeating myself to myself. I’ll do it again:
“Jesus prayed explicitly that we might be one, that in our unity we might share again in the divine nature, as he and the Father are one.”
“The good news expressed in Jesus’ prayer that we all may be one, might not be so easy to hear at first, especially when it seems so obvious to us that there really are only two kinds of people in the world… until you consider the possibility, suggested by a woman whose six-year-old child was murdered at his elementary school, that maybe there really are only two kinds of people in the world: good people and good people in pain.”
Preaching is supposed to be persuasive. By that measure, I suspect most of my preaching has failed, since I’m not sure that I often moved people to think or act differently tomorrow from the way they thought or acted yesterday.
But I am repeating myself because I think this theme has some possibility to persuade. I hope it makes no difference which side of any divide you are on to get you to consider the possibility that there are only two kinds of people in the world: good people, and good people in pain. I admit that I worry about what happens to us if we are willing to divide ourselves up along different lines. But if the only two kinds of people in the world are good people and good people in pain, the world looks like a much more hopeful place to me.
*on “All Things Considered”, National Public Radio, May 26, 2022, The interview with Scarlett Lewis had actually taken place in 2019