Thus we read from the pundit who has the best take on the meaning of the midterm elections, the prophet Isaiah.
Isaiah’s imagery comes from the desert wanderers who were compelled to set up tents with long cords and strong pegs. Short cords make a safe tent but also a tent that is too small to include family and friends and guests who come in hungry from the savage desert. Tents with weak pegs will blow away in the first stiff wind. Long cords and strong pegs are needed to erect large and safe tents in the wilderness, and we are in the wilderness now.
Isaiah’s wisdom about tents must be our wisdom about the journey ahead. There are those rejoicers in victory—and whiners in defeat—who have taken this election as a mandate to shorten our ropes, to make our tents more ideologically pure and, thus, smaller. They believe, on the right and on the left, that people yearn for simple, narrow solutions to the problems of global terror, pollution and immigration. Simple-minded clarity almost always sounds good—and is almost always unworkable and divisive and narrow-minded. The worst problem with short cords is that they makes our tents too small to ever learn from dissent. Dissent is the only way we can be sure that we are traveling in the right direction.
Americans need to invite dissent on a variety of issues:
Antiwar activists need to pull into their tents guests who have seen the perdurability of radical evil—and the need to fight it even if it bloodies us and saps our will. Pro-war activists need to invite into their tents those who want to fight but do not want to fight without a plan for victory that seems real and effective.
Pro-gay-marriage Americans need to lengthen their cords so they can hear visitors who believe that marriage between a man and woman is neither culturally arbitrary nor malleable to any form of consensual love. Anti-gay-marriage Americans need to lengthen their cords so that visitors can show them that true love has more than one form.
Atheists must welcome visitors who can try to explain that Mother Teresa, Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. were not accidentally or peripherally religious but the natural products of a life of faith. Religious folks must invite atheists who challenge these folks to seek rational reasons—and not just Bible quotes—for their ethical postures.
Pro-life people must attend to women who are scared and young and overwhelmed by their pregnancies and not treat them as criminals without a soul. Pro-choice people must invite guests into their tent who have pictures of a growing fetus sucking its thumb—and then respectfully wait for an answer from pro-lifers as to why killing this fetus isn’t simply a matter of privacy.
Those seeking virtually open borders must welcome people who remind them that an America that cannot control its borders is an America that cannot control anything. Anti-amnesty people must invite in those who do not have papers but have what many old immigrants had: a love of this land, a sincere desire to strike roots here and build a future.
In all these and other tents we must lengthen our ropes. We need to hear the counsel of humility and learn that disagreement does not mean phobia or fundamentalism, fanaticism or cowardice. We must learn to find each other after this election—and we cannot find each other if we have short ropes and small tents.
The goal of our encampments must not be to find a corrosive consensus that forces us to betray our core values. It must not be to surrender defining moral struggles for the sake of political comity. Searching poll numbers instead of our own moral compasses will surely produce a morally incoherent amalgam of ideas that regards truth as an illusion and evil as a foolish religious superstition. We must be anchored in truths that we hold to be self-evident.
Is there an essential tension between lengthening our ropes and strengthening our tent pegs? Yes, there is. Dialogue, compromise and realism do not always fit well with passionate, moral integrity. But the reason we must embrace this tension is that none of us can build the American tent alone. This great tent requires many ropes and many pegs and many people who are watching the wind and welcoming the stranger. There are easier things to do in our world but none more noble and none more necessary. If we build the tent well, then perhaps someday soon the soul of Isaiah will return to us and say with quiet joy, “How goodly are your tents.”
