The other day I had a couple of Facebook posts get shared a whole bunch and thereby end up on the wrong side of the algorithms. I checked in to find hundreds of comments. There were the usual ones filled with slurs and references to the clobber passages of the Bible. There are always a few who make thinly veiled Biblical death threats (millstones, stoning, etc.). And then lots and lots of people telling me I’m a wolf in sheep’s clothing who doesn’t know how to read the Bible. The vitriol pours through the screen. Folks who claim to be loving but who tell me, with glee, that God is going to smite me. 

What I wish I could say to them if they actually had ears to hear, is that I am not afraid of God. I don’t mean that in a flippant way, nor in a “God can’t touch me” kind of way. I mean it in the deepest place of knowing that God is loving. And what makes me so sad for all of these commenters is that no matter how much they protest otherwise, they don’t really believe that God is loving. God’s love, in their mind, is definitely outweighed by God’s wrath. (I know this because this is what I used to believe.) There is a deep down fear that at any moment God might smite them. So they try to push off that smiting on to other people: gay folks, trans folks, people who don’t think like them. Hoping to stay out of the way of the smiting. It’s not a good way to live. 

I wish for them freedom. From the need to be the arbiters and protectors of morality and theology, from the need to attack strangers on the internet, but more than anything from their fear of God and Hell. I wish them to be delivered from the deep terror that God is out to get them, that they are never, ever enough. I wish them peace. The peace that comes from resting in the knowledge of your own goodness, the goodness of the universe, and the deep, deep love of the Divine. 

I wish they had ears to hear, but since they don’t I can at least rob them of their chance to amplify their fear. I will delete and block and hide and not engage with anything that might make their message be seen by more people. Sometimes we can’t change people’s minds, but we can limit the damage they can do. We can muffle the noise of their hatred. We can take away their ability to amplify their message. Sometimes the work isn’t about countering the argument, it’s about doing whatever we can to suffocate it. It’s about making the argument so unpopular that it has a social cost to holding it.

I might not be able to change people’s minds, but I can live in such a way as to make their beliefs irrelevant and to do whatever I can to silence the hatred.