The last three words he just slightly spaced out, giving them even more emphasis. “You’ve got to talk to them so they can see you love them,” Stream publisher James Robison said in a phone meeting a few days ago.

He was talking about people with whom he disagrees on pretty much every single possible issue. Think two trains speeding toward each other on a single track. That included people who work in public to advance truly wicked causes, like the legal killing of the unborn and experimenting upon (and thereby killing) embryonic human beings.

Outrageous Things

Serious Christians feel outrage because these people say and do things that genuinely outrage. Many of us want people like James speaking like the Old Testament prophets at their angriest. We want Elijah jeering at the prophets of Baal.

James can do that, but he doesn’t. He talks to these people whenever he can. He has the status and weight in the world to get a hearing from many of them. They’ll have him in to talk because they’re hoping for some political benefit, and find they’ve miscalculated, because he has things to say to them they really don’t want to hear.

I enjoy the picture of the politician inviting in the preacher, thinking they’re going to have a nice talk about politics, maybe followed by an endorsement, and then the preacher talks to him about the things of God. These things of God have political implications the politician probably won’t like. Godliness does not perfectly correlate with electability.

Here’s the trick: James speaks to them as persons loved by God and not as political figures, as things to be manipulated. “When we finish,” James said, again spacing out his last words, “those people know I love them.” Because they see that he loves them they may see that God loves them. Even if they don’t, they’ll see that this man wants the best for them and not just their help in advancing his causes.

That’s the only way a preacher’s going to get a hearing from those driven to gain power in the world, the kind of hearing that can change minds and hearts. Otherwise the politician’s only going to be thinking about votes and how he can use this preacher and spin this meeting.

Don’t Be a Jerk

“Don’t be a jerk,” is the way his Jesuit peer James Martin puts it. In the ways of Providence, I saw his article about ten minutes after hanging up the phone. The Jesuit James was giving the same instruction as the Evangelical James. The New York priest said the same thing as the Texas pastor.

Writing in the Jesuit weekly magazine America, Martin quoted another Jesuit’s rules for getting along with their brother Jesuits, which is probably a lot harder than it sounds. The three rules are: “(1) You’re not God; (2) This isn’t heaven; (3) Don’t be a jerk.”

Martin notes how jerky people can be, including public leaders. At this point in the presidential campaign you can think of hundreds of examples. Okay, thousands. He explains the results: “Jerkiness is contagious, I think. Seeing public figures shouting on television probably encourages people to do it in their private lives. At the very least, it does not encourage charitable behavior.”

That’s for sure. We can avoid the contagion, he continues, by giving people the benefit of the doubt and not attacking them personally. And by what he calls “an overtly spiritual approach.”

Ask God to help you see others the way God sees them. In the Spiritual Exercises, St. Ignatius invites us to imagine the Trinity looking down on all of humanity with love. The next time you’re angry with someone, think of the Trinity gazing down on the person you’re about to flame.

God Loves Them

The Jesuit James and the Evangelical James tell people caught up in the culture wars, on both right and left, the same thing. God loves the people on the other side as much as he loves us. Jesus died for them too. They may say and do outrageous things, but then from God’s point of view so do we. As Evangelical James tweeted yesterday: “As I prayed this morning I heard our heavenly Father say, ‘I use the imperfect to accomplish my perfect will. Always have — always will!’”

If we want to move them to act differently, we must speak to them in a way that they’ll hear what we have to say. We have to find a way to get past their filters, one of which is that the other guys just want to win and don’t care about the people on my side. Don’t be a jerk. Show them that God loves them by loving them yourself.

Follow David Mills at @DavidMillsWriting.