This Is Going to Hurt: Following Jesus in a Divided America

Introduction

FUN AT PARTIES

Every party needs a pooper, that’s why I’m inviting you.

—Party Pooper, a 1950s parody song that would later be made famous by Martin Short in Father of the Bride Part II

If you need to find me at a party, check the corners. Listen for the voice that’s a little bit too intense for cocktail hour, using words with too many suffixes. That’s me. And once you find me, you probably need to rescue the person trapped there with me, because I assure you, I’m bumming them out.

That’s because at most parties people want to know So, what do you do?

I’m a journalist.

Oh really?!?, they say, usually thinking I’m going to spill all the tea on local politicos. What are you writing about?

If I were a more naturally accommodating person, I could mine my portfolio and come up with a handful of party tricks. I could pull something from the files entitled petty gossip or heartwarming kid stories.

Instead, I sigh a little and gather up my internal petticoats to step right into the social shit.

My sparkling banter in recent years has included why we should pay more for fruit, fetal abnormalities, the mechanics of the GOP stranglehold on Texas, the failure of the humanitarian parole process for Afghans, and three reasons a school bus first aid kit should include a chest seal.

So again, if you see me at a party and I’m speaking, you need to come rescue the person I’m talking to, because they are not having a good time.

Or better yet, I would like to invite you, the reader, into the corner with me to talk about the issue at the root of all my party fouls, the story I write over and over again: People are suffering.

People reach out to me with their suffering stories, and I put them into writing, using the best skills available to me. Like all journalists, I put these stories out into the world hoping that thousands of people will read them and be moved. Ideally, I write what I write hoping that politicians, churches, and businesspeople will read the stories of suffering and take action to relieve the suffering. Journalists don’t tell you how to act, and we aren’t activists ourselves. But every journalist wants their work to inspire action. We don’t report on corruption, injustice, and suffering just for kicks. We’re trying to give you, the public, the facts and stories you need to change the world for the better.

So imagine my frustration when—after sitting with a young mom and her crying child at the US-Mexico border, interviewing lawyers who clearly outline what needs to happen for this mother and child to have a chance at a stable living situation, and then spending days crafting a story that contains all this information in gut-punching detail—someone responds to my story with an email about how immigrants just need to respect the laws. Or someone in the comment section of a social media post calls the story liberal propaganda and regurgitates some sound bite about the threat immigrants pose to the United States.

Well, if you’re the unlucky soul stuck in the corner with me at a party, you don’t have to imagine my frustration. You can hear it in my voice. You can hear the weariness and cynicism of someone who spends half of her day listening to stories of profound suffering and the other half of her day listening to people respond to those stories with other stories, stories that justify their lack of compassion.

That’s what this book is about: stories of suffering and the competing stories we tell in response that lead us to tolerate that suffering. It’s also about the healing stories we could be telling instead, and what those stories would cost us. I’m a journalist who wants people to act on the stories they read and hear. But I’m also a person of faith who believes we have no other righteous choice.

I’ll pause here so you can grab a strong drink or a pint of ice cream.

Welcome back.

To introduce the book, I’m going to use some of the basic questions that guide every narrative: who, what, how, and why. Where and when are very important questions too, but if this book is in your hands the answer is, obviously, here and now.

WHO (IS THIS BOOK FOR)?

I assume you’re here, reading a book about suffering, because you’re either a pretty intense person yourself, or because you’re perplexed by the state of the world. Maybe you’re a person of faith, trying to figure out where the hope is hidden. Maybe you blame it all on religion. I’m assuming that if you picked up a book by a Christian author about how the stories we tell ourselves about suffering influence our national discourse, then you’re probably trying to reconcile something. You’ve either read Parable of the Sower and are sure we’re living in the apocalypse, or you watched Squid Game and are now alarmed by the cavalier use of phrases like late-stage capitalism all over social media. Or maybe you’re tired of every family text thread devolving into aggression over Greta Thunberg or March for Our Lives or Joe Biden’s electability. (All those examples will be antiquities by the time this book comes out, but I will bet my career on Americans’ ability to produce adequate replacements.)

I expect there are some of you, readers, who thought you were pro-life until Roe v. Wade fell and women started suffering from sepsis before they could get medical attention in Texas. A few more have probably observed the sweeping teen mental health crisis in the wake of the pandemic and are now rethinking those 2020 social media posts castigating schools for reopening too early. Maybe not. Maybe the last sentence offended you, because you totally stand by that post from 2020.

At least one of you just wants to mind your own business, but now your activist cousin is telling you that silence is complicity and that you are, therefore, a white supremacist. And somewhere there’s an activist reading this who doesn’t understand why their cousin won’t engage in the most pressing issues of our time.

If any of those people is you, then welcome. You are either me or someone I love, and we need to talk about the suffering at the heart of all that divides us. I promise to be earnest, but also humanely humorous. I promise to consider issues from a more productive angle than Right vs. Left.

I’ve had a lot of practice looking at suffering from various angles—after all, it’s been my job for over a decade. Actually, it’s been my job to ask good questions, so more than anything I promise to ask and answer the question, What stories could alleviate both the suffering in the world and our alienation from each other?

WHAT (IS THE PROBLEM)?

Most of the news we read, watch, and discuss has to do with suffering and alleviating suffering. Politicians promise to alleviate our suffering by stimulating the economy and securing our borders. Scientists warn of coming climate catastrophes, but they also have ideas about how to mitigate the effects. We read about crime and punishment, economic busts and relief efforts. Our eyes are glued to images of both devastating poverty and wealth so extreme all waiting or wanting seems to have disappeared.

Even movie reviews, restaurant openings, and fashion are, to a degree, about adding pleasure to our lives to avoid boredom, creating a want and filling it, or helping us avoid the pain of missing out. I’m not going to get too deep into that philosophical quagmire, though. We’ve got enough going on with just the front page.

We read about a child who was kidnapped, and we want to read about how she was safely returned.

We read about a pandemic, and we want to read about a vaccine.

We read about a heat wave, and we want to know when it will be over.

Problems and solutions. Conflict and resolution. Suffering and relief. That’s what engages us in both news and novels.

Often, when I wax on for hundreds of words about school funding formulas or refugee caps or other details I find self-evidently fascinating, my editors write, Why should I care? in the margins of my stories. What they are really saying is, Make me feel the suffering, or Make me feel the relief.

(News editors are also fun at parties.)

As I’ve reported on education, immigration, tragedy, and policy over the past twelve years, people have laid their stories of loss bare on the table. Brave people have opened their wounds in public. Early in my career I believed that translating palpable, demonstrable suffering to the page was a mighty act, bringing evidence to the masses. I believed that showing the suffering would inspire someone else, maybe even a lot of people, to alleviate it.

I’ve also pursued an approach called solutions journalism precisely because it seeks answers to our biggest problems and holds people accountable for applying those answers. I was drawn to solutions journalism from day one, because it allowed me to cultivate a more hopeful, redemptive practice. I’m still not fun at parties, but without a solutions lens, I’d probably just avoid society altogether.

The reason I’m still no fun at parties, though, is that every true solutions journalism story acknowledges the limitations of the proposed solution. No panaceas, no silver bullets. So while I am an avid seeker of practical solutions, I recognize that a lot of times solutions are limited by the popularity of a counternarrative, by their political viability, and by the cost they would carry for people who are not willing to sacrifice an ounce of comfort for a pound of healing.

While sharing them is still necessary for an open society, the stories of suffering and solutions alone rarely change minds, let alone hearts, along our most intractable divides. Often, suffering has been already accounted for, and some readers have deemed it tolerable. They’ve decided it was merited, necessary, or they have simply given it a shrug and a meh. They have a counternarrative, a story of their own that allows them to remain unmoved. When readers have decided that certain kinds of suffering—poverty, unwanted pregnancy, family separation—are tolerable, then even stories about solutions draw ire. Not only have we, as a society, made peace with some people’s suffering, we expect it. Some of us demand it.

But not always. A lot of the responses to my stories seemed to fall into a chasm of politics and apathy, but a couple responses made the leap to compassion or moral outrage, and when they did, when the suffering was deemed intolerable, people demanded it be alleviated at any cost. Readers would demand action in the comment section on social media, followed by prayer hands and lots of exclamation marks. This has happened twice in my entire reporting career: a missing preschooler, and cyberbullying middle schoolers. Do something! everyone demanded on social media. Then the moment of agreement was over, and the fights began over who was to blame.

More often, the suffering we describe is deemed intolerable to some and tolerable to others. Half the response is some version of Omg fix this! Or the more condescending Do better. The other half of responses will be along the lines of The law’s the law. Or They got what they deserved.

We are not inherently and incurably apathetic as a people. But we do have a high tolerance for certain kinds of suffering.

So, when is suffering tolerable and when is it intolerable? The answer to that question has come up repeatedly in my reporting career, particularly on the six subjects we’re going to get into in this book: immigration, school curriculum, abortion, climate change, COVID-19, and mass shootings. There are plenty of other topics we could and should discuss; most notably absent from the list here are capital punishment, transgender rights, and universal healthcare. These topics merited more thorough discussion than my reporting could support so far. Each of these topics could be its own book, and the discussion here will not be exhaustive, but with the six selected topics, I have spent enough time in the narratives to capture the heart of things (she said, with more confidence than she felt).

When I pitched this book, I had a complex set of philosophies and frameworks to make sense of when suffering was deemed tolerable or intolerable. I considered nature, human agency, blame, religious hierarchies, power structures, economic liability.

My editor listened patiently before telling me I was overthinking it. Isn’t the answer obvious? he asked. It wasn’t about some complex formula; it was just about who was doing the suffering. Your suffering is tolerable. Mine is not.

The end.

Just kidding. He’s right, of course, but there’s a lot of complexity in that obvious statement, hence he agreed to work on this book with me.

HOW (IS THE BOOK ORGANIZED)?

In the first two chapters of this book I explore the elements of stories about suffering. These elements are present in stories that depict the actual suffering and the stories we tell in response to suffering, the counternarratives. Stories are how we make sense of the world, so if a person is telling us a story that makes the world seem unjust or broken, we either accept their story or refute it with a counternarrative that accounts for that perception of injustice or brokenness. Here is a quick example: An immigration attorney claims that asylum seekers suffer as a result of border policy. If you don’t want to fix border policy, then you have to counter with a narrative in which the policy is not the problem. You can blame the asylum seekers for their own suffering, or you can claim that the situation would be even worse without the policy.

The first chapter will identify key elements of those stories: judgments, context, and trade-offs. The second chapter will chart the various dividing lines that create the us and them—a cast of characters—in suffering stories, and the distance we put between them.

Once we’ve established these elements of suffering stories, the next twelve chapters will examine the hot topics mentioned above—immigration, school curriculum, abortion, climate change, COVID-19, and mass shootings—and explore how the suffering stories we tell determine where we stand on those topics, all of which have divided our country in significant ways. Not every story is the same. Some are character driven, others are driven by the conditions of the world. In some cases, the suffering of some is met with a justification for their suffering, as in immigration. In others, the suffering of one group is countered with the suffering of another group, as in abortion. Sometimes both sides have legitimate concerns, as in COVID-19 school closures; sometimes one side is arguing in bad faith, as in the critical race theory (CRT) curriculum debate. As I looked at the suffering stories for this book, I found, as in all storytelling, the various elements mixing and matching, merging and diverging, becoming more or less significant in different circumstances.

To keep us from thoroughly depressing ourselves, each of these chapters will be followed by another chapter on the same topic, in search of a better story. Think of each chapter pair like an evil twin and a good twin. The evil twin is telling us what’s wrong, identifying the business-as-usual entrenchment we find around stories of suffering. Telling these stories isn’t evil. I’m just going to call these evil-twin stories because they don’t make you feel very good. They’re more like the killjoy twin. The good twin chapters will be based on stories from the gospels and the work of people proposing alternative points of view to what is most frequent in our current discourse. As we revisit each hot topic, we will challenge ourselves to look at immigration, school curriculum, abortion, climate change, COVID-19, and mass shootings in light of Jesus’s ultimatum in Luke 9:23, Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. While I’m not going to suggest that a giant revival or evangelistic effort is the only hope for a compassionate society, I am going to suggest that the gospels contain stories that would revolutionize our public discourse if we let them.

I’d also like to consider how the ethic of cross-bearing might open a new response to the suffering of others and new possibilities for conversation and, dare I say it, democracy. By cross-bearing, I mean taking up the challenge laid out by Jesus in the three Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke: if you want to walk in the Way of Jesus, you have to take up your cross daily. He’s not talking about grand martyrdom, here. He’s talking about lives that put our self-interest aside and choose self-sacrificial love in a way that is not rewarded, in fact may be punished, by the power structures of the day. Taking up your cross and following Jesus means not capitulating to exploitation and power hoarding just because that’s the way it’s done. And when you realize, Oh shit, that’s going to cost me something—a promotion, an election, some profit, some power—the gospels are there to agree with you. "Right. Because it’s a cross."

The goal is not to reduce the Christian life to a series of good works or social positions. To take up one’s cross does require us to embrace abundance when the world screams scarcity at us. Spiritual transformation is, on some level, necessary. But a full doctrinal embrace of Christianity is not. No honest person could say that only Christians can be compassionate and just. (In fact, given the current evidence, you might be able to find some who would say the opposite.) There’s a need to debate what it means to follow Jesus’s Way, or even what it really means to have faith in Jesus, or to be responsive to the Spirit. I’m not going to do that here. Instead, I’m going to suggest that at whatever level you encounter the stories of Jesus and the Way the gospels describe, there’s an invitation to dignified sacrifice and nonviolence. I’m not concerned right now with the Way being the Way to heaven. This book is about the Way of life, or shalom, a major theme of not only the gospels but also the Hebrew Scriptures they drew from and the letters to the early church groups that expand on Jesus’s ministry.

Shalom—wholeness and harmony throughout our interconnected world—is key to understanding what is referred to throughout the good-twin chapters as healing. By healing I do not mean making everything perfect, finding panaceas, and conforming life to our preferred standards of comfort and control. Healing, in this context, means reconnecting what has been torn apart or exiled, making whole what has been depleted. To heal is to remove barriers between us and respond to suffering with compassion.

Which reminds me. I need to tell you what I mean by compassion. Here’s what I mean: solidarity. As Walter Brueggemann told me during an interview, when you have compassion for someone, you are suffering too.¹ He told me that the Greek word for Jesus’s compassion in the New Testament implied a physical upset at what he was encountering. Compassion moves us to act, because it hurts us. It’s a solidarity so deep that when it happens to our neighbor it is as though it is happening to us.

Compassion erases the false line between loving thy neighbor and loving thyself.

Maybe the compassion is emotional; we really feel the suffering. Maybe it is ethical; we are disquieted and unable to ignore the suffering. Sometimes it leads us to take direct action to end the suffering. Sometimes it leads us to share the suffering so that it is not compounded by isolation. Compassion works differently in different relationships, but it is always uncomfortable, and it is never inert.

WHY (IS THIS IMPORTANT)?

Narrative reorientation is necessary, I believe, because the instinctual position that my suffering is less tolerable than your suffering has led to, predictably, a lot more suffering and entrenchment. It leads to and is fed by tribalism, racism, xenophobia, and homophobia—beliefs and systems that protect me and mine from incursions by you and yours. We also see a gravitational pull around power, because powerful people can protect themselves really well, and so if we hunker down around them, we think we, too, can avoid suffering. Powerful people, who like having us hunkered around them, feed our sense that we are suffering and that loyalty to them and their ideas and products will alleviate that suffering. This in turn makes us even less willing to consider sacrificial love for those not in our tribe.

What a cycle, right?!?

In a series of essays that became his book The Cruelty Is the Point, journalist Adam Serwer pointed out over and over again that this sort of safety-seeking mob loyalty was at the heart of Donald Trump’s appeal to white, Christian conservatives. It wasn’t that they were actually marginalized or oppressed—the so-called Calamity Thesis that Trump had found some actual suffering hitherto ignored by elites—it was that these voters live on a steady diet of fear that they will lose their dominance, which feels like suffering. Serwer writes. The Republican Party … has grown more racially and religiously homogeneous and its politics more dependent on manufacturing threats to the status of white Christians.²

Serwer goes on to point out that not only does this kind of mob become cruel in an effort to avoid suffering for themselves, but in the process they actually begin to delight in the suffering of others as a group ritual. Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to one another, and to Trump. Taking joy in suffering is more human than most would like to admit. Somewhere on the wide spectrum between adolescent teasing and the smiling white men in the lynching photographs are the Trump supporters whose community is built by rejoicing in the anguish of those they see as unlike them, who have found in their shared cruelty an answer to the loneliness and atomization of modern life.³

Safety at the center and vulnerability on the margins is exactly how our world doles out suffering. It is a comfortable story. But I think we need something different, and I think Jesus pitched the better story. As a riddle.

The Jesus we meet in the gospels is all about the ironic and mysterious. Whoever wants to save his life will lose it (Matt. 16:25). The last will be first and the first will be last (Matt. 20:16). Whoever wants to be great among you will be your servant (Matt. 20:26).

As someone who really likes to understand the rules of the game, I sympathize with any disciples who were frustrated by this