Many of us are stunned by harsh and mean-spirited comments from both sides of the political aisle — whether from presidential candidates or our own Facebook friends. In Today’s Conversation, Leith Anderson talks with Richard Mouw on incivility in the public square and how to address it.

In this podcast, you’ll hear from a distinguished evangelical statesman, who has spent much of his life and career addressing civility, on:

How to bring "conviction" and "civility" together;

The differences between the tenor of today's public discourse and that of past decades;

Which Bible passages challenge our own rhetoric; and

How the cultural marginalization of evangelicals impacts the way we interact with others.

Read a Portion of the Transcript

Leith: So let’s begin by making sure we agree on terms. So how do you define “civility”? What does it look like? What does it sound like?

Richard: Civility is — to put in kind of more basic terms — it’s just being a respectful person in public life. The word comes from the word “civitas” for “city” and in the ancient Greek state — city state — civility was learning how to get along after you’ve learned how to get along with kinfolk — later on with friends — learning how to treat people in the public square from different nations, lifestyles, different races, religions, with a genuine respect that took their fundamental shared humanness with you seriously.

Leith: Well today, in the USA, it is a topic of frequent conversation, because it sort of feels like American public life is unusually divided — political attack ads; people forward emails with inaccurate messages; there are all these social media posts, many of which are just intended to provoke incivility. So it’s certainly not difficult to find it, and there are real policy changes and differences along the way, but there’s a question that many of us are asking, “Is that the way we have to be? Does it really need to be so mean-spirited in today’s political world?”

Richard: As a Christian I certainly wouldn’t say it’s the way we have to be. It’s certainly not the way Christians have to be. But I think given our created humanness, it’s not the way we’re made to be. We’re made to respect people, to acknowledge that people with whom we disagree are created in God’s image and that they deserve a civility from us. So I think it’s a very important time to be saying, “This is not the way it’s supposed to be.”

Leith: It begs the question of whether or not things are different now than they’ve been in the past. CNN has recently run a series about previous presidential elections, and I’ve seen only a few of them but I’m kind of stunned to find out about some of the uncivil things that have been done in the past. But what’s different today in public discourse? Or is it just the same way it’s always been, and we’ve just sort of idealized the past and demonized the present?

Richard: I think there are really two different answers to that. And the one is, even if it’s not brand new, we’re surrounded by it much more. I mean in the old days, when I was being raised on television, you watched the Camel News Caravan for 15 minutes at night and a little bit of Walter Cronkite or something, but today, it’s 24/7 — you can tune in any time. And the coverage that’s given — I mean the tremendous media coverage — and then furthermore, just the ways in which people interact with each other on the web. I was a columnist for something called Beliefnet for awhile. I would write something, and somebody in the comments section would say something to disagree with me and somebody else would disagree with them, and there may be 143 comments, but only the first couple have anything to do with me. People are shouting at each other — as it were — on the internet, and I think we’re just seeing it a lot more.