I have often felt like I may live on the wrong street, in the wrong community, and perhaps that is never more obvious than during election time. Up and down my street and the streets that surround me are Trump signs, usually coupled with “We Support Police” signs, big and small, stuck out in front yards, stuck to the back of bumpers, and sometimes waving on flags in the back of pick-up trucks. There are a few Biden and “Black Lives Matter” signs speckled here and there, anomalies that remind me I’m not totally alone here. But where I live, about ten miles out of the blue city of Reading, Pennsylvania, most of my neighbors are white, churchgoing conservatives. The vast majority of parents of kids who play with my kids are pro-life, anti-maskers who believe wholeheartedly in the current institutions that enforce our laws but don’t think much about climate change at all, if they’ve ever considered it at all. It is, as the cliche goes, “Trump Country.”
And sometimes it gets overwhelming. “How can this be?” I asked my husband once. These were people I had sat with at our kids’ basketball and softball games, parents I’d done Zumba with, people who I had enjoyed talking to. They seemed like perfectly decent people, who cared about the community, their kids, and the world. But suddenly they were openly dismissing science and the existence of institutional racism. They were hateful in their commentary too. I wanted so much to leave politics out of my assessment of these people, but the truth was I felt less and less comfortable with where I lived. “I just don’t understand how reasonable, ethical people could dismiss science, equity, and the lives of others so flagrantly,” I told my husband.
“People wear their political beliefs like sports gear,” he said. “They think if they’re Republicans, they have to believe everything their party believes. They may not even bother to think much about what they’ve decided to believe. It’s just a part of who they think they have to be.”
My husband fits more easily into this community than I do. He drives a big Ford F-150, is an avid hunter, owns guns, and complains about the Welfare system. In a lot of ways, he’d be comfortable as a Republican. But there are a few things that he can’t accept. He believes in science, in its roots in logic and critical thought. He also feels for other people. He cares if people catch a virus that might kill them, if our children inherit a planet on which life will be difficult, and he cares that people of color suffer disproportionately from violence, poverty, and poor healthcare. He and I are not the same in our beliefs. But I feel mostly at ease with him because of these important agreements.
On the other side of the street, a few houses down, lives Lisa, a white, fervently Christian wife and mother who has homeschooled her kids for as long as I’ve known her. Not surprisingly, she is also a registered Republican. We met through our kids; our daughters played together for years. Though Lisa’s daughter is slightly older, the girls have enjoyed playing dolls, participating in imaginary summer-camp dramas, and playing tag and Uncle Sam out front with other neighborhood kids. Once, Lisa’s daughter invited Sophia to church, where Sophia heard about sin and being saved.
“What did you think?” I asked her when she got home.
“A little scary,” she said. “But okay, I guess.” She had learned something in the discussions because she’d never heard anything like it before. It was new, a bit jarring, but perhaps important to hear and consider.
I was nervous when Lisa and I went out to dinner a few times. I wasn’t sure we’d have anything to talk about, or if we did talk, if it would feel comfortable. But despite our differences, I liked Lisa. And I wanted to believe that people were more important than political or ideological differences--that we could and should connect with others no matter how different we might be.
At the restaurant, she sipped water, and I sipped wine. We talked for hours. She listened in earnest when I talked about all that felt important to me--including local climate action and policy. When she talked about being saved by Jesus, I listened back. It wasn’t that I wanted to be saved. It was that her faith was so real, so honest. She shared it with me out of what felt like a genuine desire for me to know the power of this feeling inside of her, the source of which was her faith in God. At the end of our long conversations, I was not much closer to being saved, and she was not sure climate change was caused by human activity, but our friendship was solidified. She lived on the other side of the street and on the other side of the political spectrum, but we had figured out a way to really connect.
As the Trump signs went up over the past few months, I tried to pretend them away, smile at my Trump-loving neighbors when I saw them. After I read reports of George Floyd’s death, Breona Taylor’s death, Ahmaud Arbery’s death, and Jacob Blake’s shooting, I had to continue to drive past all the “We support police” signs and “Trump Pence” signs while I tried to fight the ache in my gut. When more of my friends and acquaintances reported that their relatives were hospitalized with Covid or had died of Covid, I bit my lip when I opened Facebook and saw people from my community posting about the ridiculousness of masks. When wildfires began blazing through the west, with unprecedented speed and intensity, I kept the dread to myself. I told myself that the community in which I lived was filled with people who had their own sets of experiences that drove their decisions, that there must be a lot I didn’t understand about their perspectives---that it couldn’t be that they were just cold-hearted and ignorant. We all are driven by something that feels true, feels real, feels right. But still I was troubled by feeling like I was in the center of a place that proudly proclaimed their allegiance to a candidate I associated with hate and ignorance.
And then I had an idea. I’d talk to Lisa. Though there was no Trump sign in front of her house, I thought I remembered that she was a Republican. Maybe she’d help me understand the mindset of those who planned to vote Trump. Maybe if I talked to her, I’d feel less disgust and fear about where I lived and what was happening around me. So we met outside on the front lawn, in lawn chairs six feet apart. It was the second time we’d met like this during the era of Covid. The last time was just a couple months earlier when I’d asked her for some insight on homeschooling. I was considering taking the kids out of school, but I was nervous that I wouldn’t be able to teach them and successfully maintain a career too. But she had encouraged me, emphasized how much freedom and fun there was in homeschooling and had then given me a long list of resources. Largely because of that conversation, I decided to homeschool.
Now I was looking for more insight from her. I looked over at her, trying to find a way to ask her what I wanted to ask her. She looked back at me with a smile. She was a slim, smaller woman, with thick wavy white hair. She wore jeans, a t-shirt, and sneakers, and, like most of the time, a friendly smile. She doesn’t wear makeup. She doesn’t wear much jewelry or carry fancy purses. She’s comfortable with herself, and that much is obvious.
“You’re a Republican, Lisa. Help me understand, will you? Before I lose my faith in humanity. How can so many people be supporting Trump now?”
She sighed. “I am a registered Republican,” she said, “but I’ve never felt beholden to that party. I voted for Biden. Already. With a mail-in ballot. Without any question.”
“You did?”
“I couldn’t vote for Trump in good conscience,” she said. “I just couldn’t.” As people walked their dogs past us, cars drove by, and the moist bare branches of the trees overhead shifted in the fall breeze, I listened as she told me about the reasons she had voted for a Democratic candidate. Though Lisa is modest and quiet about this fact, she reads a lot, probably more than I do. And I am a college writing professor. She summarized several of the books she had spent the last year reading--on science, guns, police reform, and racism. She doesn’t read books from just one perspective. She reads and considers perspectives from all sides. She gets most of her news from the BBC as she feels that it is less biased than American media. “I had to start reading,” she said, “because I got the sense I was in my own echo chamber in the group of white Christians we spent most of our time with.” She shrugged sadly. “The thing is that most of the people we go to church with are angry with us for our beliefs about guns and racism, not to mention science. They think we’re aligning ourselves with liberal extremists.”
“But that doesn’t stop you?”
“No,” she said. “It wouldn’t feel like I was being a good Christian if I wasn’t being true to God, a God of justice, racial reconciliation, truth, love, and equality. I have to think critically about what I observe, about what I read.”
I thought of the issue that weighs heavily on the minds of most of the Republican women I had spoken to. “What about abortion?” I asked.
“I am against abortion,” she said. “I am.” She sighed again. She spoke slowly and reflectively. Her eyes focused on the ground before her. “But I don’t believe it’s something I have to fight with my vote. Even if we overturned Roe vs. Wade, abortion would still be legal. Instead of fighting it by voting, I want to volunteer at women’s pregnancy crisis centers to help women who might be considering abortion.” She pushed her wavy white hair out of her face.
“And you believe in defunding the police?”
She nodded. “I wouldn’t dismiss either defunding or dismantling police departments if one or the other would put them on the path to change. So many people make quick judgments about those phrases without really finding out what they mean. But I’ve read about police reform and considered it for a long time. I also strongly believe that police officers need better training, especially in de-escalation. Next door to me there is a young man with autism who sometimes becomes violent. His parents have to call the police for help with him sometimes, and when the police come, they don’t have any idea how to handle him. They haven’t been trained to handle such a situation. And though he’s been lucky enough up until now not to be tased or shot, I worry that one day he won’t be so lucky. If we moved some funds into social services, social workers who could handle certain situations the police cannot, and we might avoid more unnecessary deaths--deaths of young men and women of color and of the mentally ill.
“I think of Camden, New Jersey, not far from where I grew up in South Jersey,” she said. “Everyone knew how violent it was there. High murder rate, lots of poverty, lots of violence. And they dismantled the whole police department and rehired everyone, restructuring the department. As a result, Camden’s violence was drastically reduced. In fact, after George Floyd’s death, their protests were 100% peaceful. The police actually protested with the community.” This example of dismantling of the police doesn’t seem as scary as some of us think “dismantling” might be. It’s what Katherine Landergan calls “rebooting the culture of policing in Camden.”
“Sometimes I think about where I grew up,” said Lisa, “not far from Camden. And I realize that I didn’t face the violence and poverty the people in Camden did. I had support. I felt safe. And the more I think about it, the more I realize that if I had grown up in Camden as a person of color, my story would have been drastically different. It would have to be. That’s privilege,” she said. “I understand that now. But most people I surround myself with just don’t.”
I sat in awe. Here was my conservative Christian neighbor talking more articulately about systemic racism than most of the community advocates and activists with whom I worked. That’s the thing about your own echo chambers. Everyone assumes you get it, so there’s no need to talk in depth. But I was listening to someone who really got it, and talking about it felt powerful, inspiring, and important.
Even as a Democrat, I was scared of the phrase “defund the police” at first. My daughter’s boyfriend is a police officer. My husband had wanted to be a police officer. I wanted police to exist. But I feared asking questions, especially to my Democratic friends who might find my ignorance offensive. So I had protected my emotional response for a while before finding the courage to research. That’s what it took--bravery enough to let go of my preconceptions, which are so tempting to cling to.
Lisa continued. “And guns. I’ve read so much that explains how most the arguments about slippery slopes and assault weapons were actually created by the NRA and have no base in reality. Christian, critically-thinking Conservatives have realized that they’ve been duped by the NRA. But there are still so many people who blindly join the church-and-gun culture, repeating what they hear in their social circles, without thinking much about the validity of any of it.” It was true. White blue-collar men and evangelical Christians make up two of the largest groups in Trump’s following.
“So, the reason people vote for Trump, the reason they support him so much…” I started.
She shook her head sadly. “I wish I understood. Sometimes I wonder if it’s just an unwillingness to think critically, to evaluate, to do the research, to educate themselves.” She paused. “Most people don’t realize the Republican party has changed. They aren’t what they used to be. They don’t stand for the same things they used to.”
Lisa is evidence that we don’t have to wear our political beliefs like sports gear. You don’t have to choose a team and stay relentlessly, blindly faithful to it. Moreover, there are certain issues that shouldn’t, and don’t have to be, partisan. Covid, institutional racism, gun violence, and climate change are everyone’s problems. Ignoring them will do neither party any good.
It’s not difficult for people to guess that I’m a registered Democrat. But there are ways I disagree with Democrats. There is a Republican State Senator I vote for every time I see his name on the ballot because of what he’s done for clean energy, the community, and my family. He’s not the only Republican I’ve known who has made excellent choices for their constituency. In Harrisburg, there is a growing number of Republicans supporting clean energy policy. Recently, The Washington Post reported that more and more top Republicans are no longer supporting Trump. People are realizing that they don’t have to blindly accept their party’s agenda.
My conversation with Lisa probably didn’t help me understand why so many people around me are so passionately supporting Trump. Maybe it even did the opposite. After all, Lisa has plenty of reason to go along with the name on the Republican ballot and with her church community. But this time, when the issues became more universally human than they were partisan, she chose to vote not by party but with her heart and mind.
Here’s what Lisa did teach me. We aren’t married to our political identities. There is something more important underneath the colors, beliefs, and neighborhoods that separate us. When I wear a mask, it’s to protect everyone else I might encounter, Republican or Democrat. When I advocate for clean energy, it’s not just for my kids. It’s for yours too. When I cry for George Floyd, it’s because he didn’t have the privilege and justice I have but that we all deserve.
Lisa’s still not sure how she feels about climate change. She’s not convinced that it’s caused by human activity. And I’m not convinced there is a God. But she keeps telling me about her relationship with God, and I keep sending her articles on climate change. The only reason to do this is hope--hope for connection, for arriving at the same place eventually. Together. So we remain willing to listen. And doing so keeps us connected.
Maybe I don’t belong in this neighborhood. Maybe I’d be happier somewhere else. But I keep waving and smiling at all the neighbors nevertheless, because behind those Trump signs, I see their humanity even if I don’t see their reasoning. And the less we emphasize the sides or teams or parties, the more we might see each other, the more we might see the problems that threaten us most. The more we might see the truth we all share.
