Christian Almanac: Where Faith Meets Real Life
Episode 36 Transcript
Transcript: You Don’t Have to Agree—and People Can Change
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In Episode 36 of Christian Almanac, Jacquelyn Lynn explores how to disagree respectfully without abandoning your convictions or automatically sacrificing relationships. Segment 1, “You Don’t Have to Agree to Work Together,” considers common ground, civility, and boundaries. Segment 2, “Leave Room for People to Be Different From Who They Were,” looks at humility, genuine growth, and why recognizing change doesn’t mean ignoring the past. The episode concludes with a Real Life Tip.
Years ago, someone I thought was a good, close friend noticed that I had “liked” a political candidate on Facebook that she opposed.
And she told me, “We can’t be friends anymore.”
That was it.
We hadn’t had an argument. I hadn’t attacked her beliefs or criticized her. She simply learned that I supported a candidate she didn’t, and apparently that difference was enough to end the friendship.
Our relationship dissolved after that.
I’ve thought about that experience many times over the years, because it raises a bigger question:
Do we really have to agree with someone in order to have a relationship with them?
And beyond friendship, do we have to agree with people in order to work with them, do business with them, serve alongside them, or simply treat them with respect?
I don’t think we do.
In fact, I think one of the things we’ve lost in our increasingly divided culture is the ability to disagree without making an enemy.
Common ground doesn’t mean common beliefs.
Sometimes the common ground is simply a shared responsibility, a shared goal, a relationship worth preserving, or a problem that needs to be solved.
You and I may disagree about politics. Or theology. Or how a business should be run. Or how to solve a particular problem.
Those differences may be real. They may even be important.
But they don’t automatically mean there’s nothing else between us.
Jerry and I have a close friend who is almost our polar opposite on a number of political issues.
And yet we enjoy each other’s company. We socialize. We call each other when we need help or a favor. There’s genuine friendship there.
Every now and then, one of those political issues will come up, and we’ll talk about it.
Nobody starts yelling. Nobody decides the friendship is in jeopardy.
We listen. We ask questions. We try to understand why the other person sees the issue differently.
Sometimes we may learn something.
Sometimes we may understand the other position better without changing our own.
And sometimes we simply reach the point where we say, in effect, “We’re going to have to agree to disagree on this one.”
And then we move on.
That doesn’t mean the issue doesn’t matter.
It means the relationship is bigger than that particular disagreement.
I think we need more of that.
Because if everybody in your life agrees with you about everything, you may be very comfortable, but you’re also missing something.
People who think differently can make us examine our assumptions. They can expose weaknesses in our reasoning. They can bring experiences and information to the table that we don’t have.
And sometimes they can make us explain why we believe what we believe.
That can be healthy.
Listening to someone doesn’t mean agreeing with them.
Trying to understand their point of view doesn’t mean endorsing it.
And treating someone with civility certainly doesn’t mean giving up your convictions.
You can believe someone is wrong and still treat that person with respect.
You can challenge an idea without attacking the character of the person who holds it.
You can even work very effectively with someone whose worldview is completely different from yours if you have a common purpose and both of you are willing to behave like adults.
That matters in business, too.
If you own a business and decide that you only want customers who think, vote, worship, or see the world exactly the way you do, you’re not just making a statement about your beliefs.
You’re limiting your business.
Your customers don’t have to agree with you about everything in order for you to serve them well.
And unless a customer is asking you to do something unethical, illegal, or contrary to the values that govern your business, their politics or personal beliefs generally don’t need to become a test for whether they deserve good service.
The same applies to employees, vendors, coworkers, and professional colleagues.
You don’t have to settle every philosophical difference before you can accomplish something worthwhile together.
Now, none of this means there are never legitimate reasons to create distance from someone.
Some behavior requires boundaries.
Abuse requires boundaries. Dishonesty may require boundaries. Unethical behavior may require you to say, “I can’t participate in this.”
And sometimes a relationship simply isn’t healthy or workable.
Civility doesn’t require you to tolerate mistreatment or compromise your principles.
But disagreement by itself is not mistreatment.
And I think sometimes we confuse the two.
Romans 12:18 gives us a very practical standard:
“If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.”
I especially appreciate the way that verse is worded.
“If it is possible.”
Sometimes it isn’t.
And, “so far as it depends on you.”
You can’t control whether someone else is civil. You can’t force someone to listen. You can’t make another person preserve a relationship they’ve decided to end.
I couldn’t make my former friend stay my friend because we disagreed politically.
But I can decide what I’m going to do.
I can decide that disagreement alone won’t automatically disqualify someone from my life.
I can listen before I react.
I can ask questions because I genuinely want to understand, rather than because I’m looking for an opening to prove someone wrong.
I can look for the things we still have in common.
And I can recognize that there are some disagreements we simply aren’t going to resolve.
That’s okay.
Not every disagreement needs a winner.
Not every difference needs to be settled before we can work together.
And not everybody who disagrees with us needs to become an enemy.
We can hold firmly to what we believe and still leave room in our lives for people who believe something different.
Of course, there’s another side to this.
Sometimes when we disagree with someone, the other person isn’t the one who needs to reconsider something.
Sometimes we are.
And that’s what I want to talk about next. I’ll be back in a moment.
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Welcome back.
There are things I believed 20 or 30 years ago that I don’t believe now.
There are things I did in my 20s and 30s that I wouldn’t do today.
That doesn’t mean everything I believed or did back then was wrong. I admit, some of it was. But over the years, I’ve learned things. I’ve gained experience. I’ve seen consequences I couldn’t see before. I’ve changed my mind about some things, and I’ve changed the way I do some things.
I hope that’s true for most of us.
We’re supposed to grow.
And part of growth is being willing to say things like:
I was wrong.
I shouldn’t have done that.
I’ve changed my mind.
I need to do this differently.
And sometimes, simply, I’m sorry.
Those can be surprisingly difficult things to say.
They can be especially difficult for competent people and for leaders, because other people look to them for judgment and direction.
If people rely on you to make decisions, it can feel risky to admit that one of those decisions was wrong.
If you’ve taken a strong public position on something, changing your mind may feel like inconsistency.
But there’s a difference between being dependable and pretending you’ve never been wrong.
Sometimes integrity doesn’t mean defending the decision you made.
Sometimes integrity means correcting it.
And changing your mind isn’t necessarily a sign of weakness.
Sometimes it’s evidence that you’ve learned something.
Of course, not every change represents growth. People can change their minds for bad reasons as well as good ones.
But we should be willing to reconsider what we believe when new information, experience, evidence, wisdom, or conviction gives us a reason to.
That’s the first part of this.
Start with ourselves.
But then we have to turn the idea around.
If you can change, can’t other people change too?
That sounds obvious, but I don’t think we always live as though we believe it.
We have a tendency sometimes to freeze people at a particular moment in their lives.
Someone said something 15 years ago, and that becomes who they are to us.
Someone made a bad decision years ago, and that becomes the permanent lens through which we see them.
Someone once believed something we strongly disagreed with, and even if they no longer believe it, we keep treating them as though they do.
Now sometimes the past really does tell us something important about the present.
If somebody has a long pattern of dishonesty, abuse, irresponsibility, or unethical behavior and there’s no evidence that anything has changed, it would be foolish to ignore that history.
But that’s different from refusing to acknowledge genuine growth when there is evidence of it.
We shouldn’t freeze someone permanently at the worst thing they ever said, believed, or did.
But that doesn’t mean pretending it never happened.
It means asking whether it still accurately describes who that person is today.
And for Christians, this really shouldn’t be a strange idea.
Our faith is built around the possibility of transformation.
Second Corinthians 5:17 says that if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation.
That doesn’t mean that the moment someone becomes a Christian, every bad habit disappears, every consequence goes away, and everybody should immediately trust them.
It means we believe change is possible.
We believe people can repent.
We believe they can mature.
We believe they can learn.
We believe they can become different from who they were.
And if we want grace extended to us for our own growth, then grace has to affect the way we look at other people too.
Most of us want people to understand that we’re not exactly the same person we were years ago.
We want them to recognize that we know more now.
That we’ve learned.
That we’ve changed.
That maybe we regret something we did or said.
That maybe we would handle it differently today.
If we want that room for ourselves, we need to be willing to give some of that room to others.
Now, there’s an important qualification here.
Accepting that someone has changed is not the same as ignoring history.
And it’s not the same as automatically restoring trust.
Trust usually has to be earned.
If someone has betrayed you, mistreated you, lied to you, or caused serious damage, you can believe that person may have changed and still decide that certain boundaries need to remain.
You can forgive someone without putting yourself back into the same situation.
You can acknowledge growth without pretending there were no consequences.
Grace does not require gullibility.
But neither should wisdom become an excuse for refusing to recognize change when it’s real.
You can remember what happened without insisting that the person must always remain who they were when it happened.
And that applies to us too.
If we know we were wrong about something, we need to own it.
If we owe somebody an apology, we need to give it.
If we know more now than we knew when we made a decision, it’s okay to say so.
Sometimes one of the most credible things a leader can say is:
“I made the best decision I could with what I knew then. I know more now, and I’m changing course.”
That doesn’t make someone weak.
It shows that ego is not more important than doing what’s right.
One thing Jerry and I appreciate about the way our son and daughter-in-law are raising our grandchildren is that they’re teaching them to stand firm in what they believe while also understanding that other people may believe and live differently.
I think that’s an important lesson to learn early.
Have convictions.
Know what you believe and why you believe it.
But leave room for the fact that other people are on their own journey.
And leave room for the fact that you are too.
You may know something five years from now that you don’t know today. I certainly hope you do.
You may understand something differently.
You may regret something.
You may grow.
And the people around you may grow too.
In the first part of this episode, we talked about the fact that people don’t have to agree with us in order to have value in our lives.
This adds another dimension to that.
People also don’t have to remain forever who they once were.
We want others to give us room to learn.
We want them to recognize when we’ve grown, changed our minds, or become better than we were.
We need to be willing to offer that same room to them.
So hold on to your convictions.
Own your mistakes.
Apologize when you need to.
Change when you have good reason to change.
And when there’s real evidence that someone else has changed, don’t insist on keeping them trapped in their past.
I’ll be back in a moment with this week’s real life tip.
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I know better than to gossip, but I’ll admit there are still times when I get drawn into it.
But when I find myself in a situation where other people are being discussed, I try to remember something my mother taught me:
Never say anything about someone that you wouldn’t say to them.
That’s this week’s real life tip, and it’s a rule that has kept me out of trouble more times than I can count.
And I think there’s a modern version of it that applies especially well to social media, email, texts, and online comments:
Don’t say or write anything to someone online that you wouldn’t say to them in person.
It’s amazing how easy it is to become harsher when there’s a screen between us.
People will type things they would probably never say if they were sitting across the table from the person they’re attacking.
Disagreement is fine. Discussion is fine. You can challenge someone’s ideas, explain why you think they’re wrong, ask questions, and even reach the point where you simply agree to disagree.
But there’s a difference between discussing and attacking.
And you don’t have to participate when someone crosses that line.
That’s the second part of this week’s Real Life Tip:
When someone says something offensive to or about you online, don’t feel obligated to engage.
You can ignore it. Delete a rude comment from your own page. End the exchange. Block someone if necessary.
Not every insult deserves an answer, and not every argument deserves your time.
Before you hit Post, Send, or Reply, ask yourself one simple question:
Would I say this to this person if we were face-to-face?
If the answer is no, don’t say it online either.
It’s good manners, good judgment, and a simple way to make the spaces we occupy—online and off—a little more civil.
Thanks for being here. See you next time.
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