This Is How The Bubble Pops

Carrying each other’s voices into our echo chambers: A guest post by Alex MikoLevine

My good friend Tag Tuck and I had the opportunity to share about our friendship as part of a ‘story slam’ at One America Movement’s annual Summit in Tulsa last month.

At One America Movement's national Summit in Tulsa, OK, Alex MikoLevine (left) and Rev. Tag Tuck (center) discuss their "unlikely friendship" with One America's Rabbi Fred Reeves (right).

Tag is a pastor from Nebraska, whom I met through a virtual men’s group that One America Movement helped my synagogue, Ikar, set up with an evangelical Christian church. When two Ikarites and I started the group two and a half years ago, we were well aware that we lived in a liberal Los Angeles bubble, and we wanted to build real relationships with some “bona fide red-state evangelicals” (to use Tag’s words).

The goal of the group was never to solve a debate but to meet people we otherwise wouldn't and try to understand where they were coming from. We were perplexed and curious. We knew they could not be monsters, but things we had heard sounded monstrous to us.

We now have about sixteen members, most of us in our 50s and 60s, and we meet every other week to have conversations across lines of faith, geography, and ideology. The group has become a place where we share personal stories, too, not just our ideas—what’s happening in our lives, what keeps us up at night, what helps us grow. It didn’t take long before we were flying across the country to visit each other’s homes and attend each other’s religious services.

During the story slam I mentioned how I now carry the voices of my evangelical friends with me back to my liberal bubble. So if I’m at a cocktail party and I hear someone talk about conservatives or evangelicals, it often sounds wrong to me, and I want to speak up on their behalf. I want to help my liberal friends hear my evangelical friends' voices as I hear them.

When we listen to other people with care and respect, we naturally start to carry their voices inside us, and this naturally changes the way we hear and see things around us. I see this happen a lot in families–say, with a parent who holds different views from their child. But if we never get a chance to really listen to those ‘others’, or if we come into conversations without that care and respect, we will go on living without the light of their perspective. Even in close families, it takes really active work to achieve this kind of understanding.

The idea of carrying each other’s voices into our own echo chambers is a beautiful sentiment, but it’s also very uncomfortable in practice. There are a lot of conversations for which I have to find new language, since so many of the words and phrases we use are loaded with misunderstanding or deliberately defined differently by each side. Take a conversation about abortion: none of my liberal friends would call themselves ‘anti-life’ any more than my conservative friend would call himself ‘anti-choice’, but the pro-life/pro-choice conversation is loaded with those assumptions. This is one of a few reasons I’m finding it’s hard to really speak on behalf of my evangelical friends the way I want to.

At the beginning of this year, I told my family that my New Years’ resolution was this: Learn to speak so you are heard. As a liberal person living in a coastal city, it’s easy to think that speaking in the modality we were taught in college is sufficient, and that anyone who does not 'get' our language is stupid or crazy. I still hear this sentiment expressed, and I feel grieved and angered by it.

I’ve grown in my ability to speak so that I am heard in the context of our group with One America, where we disagree on big topics but all come with a shared intention to listen and try to understand each other. Ironically, I actually find it easier to speak openly about difficult topics with these friends I’m different from than friends inside my own bubble.

Any advice?

Alex MikoLevine grew up attending an Episcopal church, where he developed a lasting appreciation for faith and tradition. When he married, he and his wife–who had affirmed her Jewish identity–decided to raise their children Jewish. They combined their last names, Miko and Levine, forming the family name that all four now share. Alex is a member of the Ikar synagogue in Los Angeles, California.