I choose neither
Resist the urge to always pick a side and recognize that God's side rarely lines up with our sides.
Inevitably, dealing with middle schoolers as my day job means I also play referee to some of the pettiest, most ridiculous squabbles known to humankind.
And while I don’t think we should be insulting anyone, the zingers these kids sling aren’t even clever. Like, it would at least be more entertaining if they had some real roasting skills. But their comments wouldn’t even change the shade of my marshmallow.
About 90% of these debates are hardly more sophisticated than “She made a weird noise” vs. “No, I didn’t” or perhaps on a better day “Messi” vs. “Ronaldo,” and they so quickly devolve from anything resembling a coherent argument. Trust me, I taught a whole year of 6th to 8th-grade debate, and I’m not sure I imparted much in the way of reasoning skills—their little developing brains can’t seem to handle anything too complex.
Despite the superbly dumb reasons students fight, more often than not, when the argument-of-the-hour crops up, I’m asked to pick a side. Students want to know what I stand for. Who’s team am I on? They desire my clarity as an authority on which person or clique is right and which is wrong.
Like I’d give them the satisfaction of my celebrity endorsement!
With this age, you’ll commonly see a scenario like the following: Person A does a Thing. Person B doesn’t like the Thing and reacts with Another Thing. Then, Person A retaliates with Yet Another Thing. The cycle of violence and retribution continues ad infinitum until an authority figure steps in to broker peace.
Almost always, the parties will claim the other side “started it,” justifying whatever insane thing they did in response, like throwing things, stomping around, yelling, making fun of their mom, or ignoring the direct instructions of the teacher. When I step in, each party wants the other one punished, but they want to get off scot-free themselves!
But when arguments like this arise in the middle of class, it’s triage time. I’m not interested in who started it; I’m interested in getting on the case of the one who can’t seem to drop it and move on, is starting to act violently, or is doing something wildly inappropriate or distracting!
Inevitably, one of the parties gets mad that I’m “taking the side” of the other party because I choose to immediately deal with the worst behavior. I get lectured about unfairness, injustices, travesties, and how I have never once given a consequence to the other party (except that I have, like, 17 times)… all that fun stuff.
Because apparently a student is never more an expert on the art and science of teaching than when they get consequences for their poor actions.
As I leave work, throwing my water bottle and lunch box into the passenger seat, tires screeching out of that parking lot, leaving the children and their petty squabbles behind for the day, I’m unfortunately pushed into a world where, once again, I’m being forced to pick a side. This time, it’s from news media, my social media feed, podcasts, random spam emails, the people around me, and even sermons—in our incredibly polarized world, practically the only way we know how to exist is to segregate into one side or the other.
You are either on our side or an enemy.
It’s not like we invented “choosing a side” in the early 2000s. But the internet certainly makes this more pressing. There is a measurable change in how polarization functions today. As writers like Alan Noble, David French, Greg Lukianoff, and Jonathan Haidt have variously pointed out, we Westerners have had to adopt a new moral system as Christianity has lost its prominent place on the pedestal. One of the ways we conceive of the world is now as either oppressor or oppressed. If someone is deemed a victim—which can include, as Lukianoff and Haidt write about in The Coddling of the American Mind, even being offended that another person simply HAS a contrary opinion—then we tend to side with them.
Yet this moral system fails us in a multitude of ways. We see this especially, I think, in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Israelis, as Jews, have a long history of being oppressed. They have been victims for thousands of years of all kinds of ugliness from all sorts of powers. Yet, in this current conflict, they are clearly the ones with more power. There is no doubt about it: they are the big boys on the playground and Palestine is the scrawny kid. Palestine is not even a fully functional country and they have suffered under Israeli rule for decades now. Their land is carved up into a series of ghettos, and their citizens are given different-colored IDs to be able to enter different parts of their land. If you lose the ID lottery, you can be prevented from getting to the best hospitals or schools, and you might have to commute an hour out of your way to get somewhere right next door.
Those who adopt this oppressor-oppressed model are in an awkward situation of trying to decide whether Israel or Palestine is more oppressed so they can side with whoever comes out the bigger victim! You can’t be anti-semitic…but you can’t be Islamophobic. You can’t be pro-terrorist…but you can’t be pro-genocide. This is only a conundrum because too many people apparently think it’s either one or the other.
For whatever reason, so few in both progressive and conservative environments have stopped to think that maybe our whole model of needing “sides” just needs to be thrown out the window.
Scripture certainly challenges notions of clearly labeled sides, at least as we conceive of “sides.” God works things out differently.
There’s this marvelous moment tucked into the beginning of Joshua that illustrates how God views our human notions of sides. In a book that is essentially a war narrative, where God appears to be condoning some pretty harsh military action against the pagan locals, you may be surprised that God doesn’t view things in terms of Israel vs. the Bad Guys.
In Joshua 5:13-15, not long before Joshua is given wild instructions on how to take down Jericho, Joshua encounters a mysterious figure.
“Now when Joshua was near Jericho, he looked up and saw a man standing in front of him with a drawn sword in his hand. Joshua went up to him and asked, ‘Are you for us or for our enemies?’
‘Neither,’ he replied, ‘but as commander of the army of the Lord, I have now come.’ Then Joshua fell facedown to the ground in reverence and asked him, ‘What message does my Lord have for his servant?’
The commander of the Lord’s army replied, ‘Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy.’ And Joshua did so.”
In this theophany—a miraculous appearance of God—the commander goes against Joshua’s black-and-white conception of reality. The Lord isn’t on “Israel’s side” nor “the Canaanites’ side.” That’s too simplistic. God is just God. God’s kingdom can’t be reduced to tribal affiliations—nor political borders, genders, policies, races, creeds, or star-bellied sneetches.
Jesus conceives of things wildly differently as well. When he tells the story of the Good Samaritan, he communicates to his Jewish audience that even their enemy can be good. The two Jews in the story fail to help the man, but the foreigner does the will of God. It’s parables like that that make his audience sweat, as Jesus redefines the lines, not in terms of this group or that, but based on who is actually doing the will of God.
Jesus tells us that even those who purport to be on Team Jesus, who have great credentials, who go through the Christian rigmarole like a pro, aren’t guaranteed a spot in the afterlife, awkward as they may be.
“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’”
-Matthew 7:21-23
The ones doing the will of God are the ones who get in. Like in the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, Jesus redraws the lines not in terms of us vs. them but in terms of what kinds of virtues we have grown in our lives.
When one kid insults another, which causes a war of insults like a cartoon character rolling down a snowy mountainside, growing bigger and bigger, it’s not about choosing which student is right and which one is wrong. It’s not about picking a side in that human way of understanding. It’s not about carefully deducing who is more oppressed and then protesting only on their behalf.
No, the way of Jesus calls us to rethink sides.
It’s instead about Godly behavior vs. everything else. I don’t have to pick a side when my students do verbal battle because they both are in the wrong. And that’s a real thing that can happen—both sides can be doing bad, unjustifiable atrocities! It’s true! We don’t have to pick a nation we like best in every war or sign up with one political party and hate the other or hitch ourselves to one leader over another, no matter how morally bankrupt they are. No, both sides can be dumpster fires.
As I wrote in my book Who We Are: Seven Christian Identities to Shape Your Life (which is getting a second, updated edition this summer, so don’t buy it yet) in a chapter about not being defined by earthly groups:
“The Kingdom of God transcends ethnic, national, political, social, geographical, and cultural barriers. Certain groups might display Christian values better than other groups, but we cannot say that those groups are synonymous with being a Christian. Our Christian identity is found in the Kingdom; those groups that seem acceptable to us have merely stumbled upon Christian virtues, but they themselves are not to be equated with the Kingdom. The Kingdom of God stands above and often against the groups we form in this world. It changes everything.”
As long as we are on the side of Jesus, we aren’t going to fit so neatly into different camps. I imagine that more often than not, when the world asks us whose side we are on—ours or the enemy’s—we are going to answer like the commander of the Lord’s army in Joshua 5: “Neither.” Neither side is for us because neither side is truly on God’s.
We must continue to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God. Doing these tasks is going to mean that sometimes we recognize the Samaritan is good and the priest is bad. We must be ready to call out the good—on whatever side—and call out the bad—on whatever side. It’s not easy, and boy it isn’t popular with middle schoolers or supposed grown-ups alike, but we must stop pretending that the sides we have drawn up can be easily called “good” or “bad.”
We have to do better.
We have to follow the way of Jesus that calls us to live only on God’s side, even when that doesn’t line up with the ways of the world.
Question of the Week
Leave your answer in the comment section below or reply to this email.
We are obviously commanded to help the oppressed as Christians. But how do we continue in that task while also showing love to the oppressors?
My “Goings On”
Working on Super Jake book 3! Which was supposed to be done awhile ago…
Gearing up for a new podcast this summer *wink* *wink*
Not taking sides,
Jake Doberenz
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Excellent column and analysis, Jake. Thank you.