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Sen. Ben Sasse Explains 'Why We Hate Each Other' and How to Heal America

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WASHINGTON – This election year has been marked by incivility, with the heated political environment driving many people to say things they shouldn't.

However, Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE), a professing Christian, says it doesn't have to be this way. In his new book, Them: Why We Hate Each Other – and How to Heal, Sasse offers solutions on how Americans can bridge the ever-widening political divide.

Sen. Sasse shared more of his thoughts on the matter in a recent interview with CBN News Anchor John Jessup. Read the full transcript below.


Date:  October 31, 2018
Location:  CBN News Washington, DC Bureau

JOHN JESSUP: Well, joining me now is Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska. Senator, thank you so much for being with us.

SEN. BEN SASSE: Good to be here, John.

JESSUP: We're here to talk about your book, Them: Why We Hate Each Other and How to Heal. So, I think we should probably start off with the title: Why do we hate each other?

SASSE:  I think we're meant to be relational beings. God created us to love our neighbor and to be involved in projects with other people. And then, fortunately, most of the good tribes, the local tribes, the places that make people happy: Do you have a good family? Do you have a few deep friendships? Do you have meaningful work? Do you have a church? Do you have a local worshipping community? All of those places are kind of being undermined by the digital revolution. So, place is tied to where you're raising your kids. Your deep friendships are about a place. Your church is in a community. Your work is usually tied to a specific geography. As all those things get undermined, people are lonely. I think there's a loneliness epidemic among us and right now we're filling in, but a lot of Americans are filling in political tribalism as the sort of backup plan for failed tribes. They're going to these bad tribes, which are political addictions. And they tend to be anti-tribes. What are you against, rather than what you are for?

JESSUP: How does social media factor in? I think it's interesting social media was meant to connect people, but in many different ways it seems like it's maybe having a reverse effect?

SASSE: I think so, too. I think when social media is used to augment relationships you already have it can be really great. I'm relatively active on Twitter, but I think of it as an audience of a bunch of buddies I had from college – that we live in different geographies now, but we pray for each other's families. We're raising our kids, separate from our other friends, but we sometimes travel with them. And we use social media as a way to stay connected. When you're adding to relationships that are already embodied, people that you know, social media can be great. If you're using social media as a substitute for knowing the person two doors down from you in your neighborhood, it's a really bad thing because social media doesn't ultimately give you lasting relationships.

JESSUP: You had just mentioned tribalism, which factors into the fact that many people like to associate with people who think like they do or look like them, but that exposes and sets us up for other problems with building animosity and anger and not just that but misunderstanding of those who don't share similar values or who don't look like us.

SASSE: I think that's true. When you live in a community with people, you know them to be a whole person. Right? I have a lot of identities. I'm a Christian. I'm a dad. I'm a husband. I'm a Nebraska football addict. I'm a conservative. (We'll forgive you for that last one – the football identification.) Missouri is good at a lot of things, but we can talk some football. So, you got a whole bunch of different identities. I've served in the Senate for a time. I'm a Republican. But you don't want to get those identities out of order. You don't want to warp it. I love Husker football, but if I use my Cornhusker football addiction as an excuse to neglect my kids, there's something wrong with me. I'm a dad before I'm a Husker football fan. I'm a Christian before I'm a Republican. And one of the things that happens on social media is you tend to reduce people to the one conversation you're having at that moment. And a lot of people – a lot of Christians are spending way too much time doing sort of rage on social media because you disagree with somebody's politics. Well, that person you're yelling at because you disagree on legislative strategy or legislative or policy priorities, they're somebody created in the image of God, and you're meant to love them as a whole person.

JESSUP: How does that bode for you? You continually talk about how you identify as a Christian but when you see how people treat each other in person or at rallies or over social media and they identify Christians, how does that comport with your faith and how you view living out your faith?

SASSE: Yeah, so I differ with Democrats on really important policy matters, but my disagreement with a Democrat about whether or not the minimum wage will actually help poor people – I don' think it will. I think it will cause a bunch of jobs to lost to automation if you raise the minimum wage too high –  That's a debate that people can reasonably have, but that's not a core identity issue for me and it shouldn't be for any Christian. And so I want to work really hard to treat my neighbor in a debate as somebody who has an eternal soul and that God created and that if I debate this person on a policy issue, I want to make sure it doesn't compromise my witness to still love them as a person well outside and well beyond this particular policy debate.

JESSUP: I don't think you could have said that any better. What about cable news networks? We live in a 24-hour news cycle and you see people on the right and left just watching the networks that identify with how they believe but how does that factor into the atmosphere and the environment we have today?

SASSE: Right now there are benefits to modern technology, to be clear. There are a whole bunch of things that are great about having access to 500 channels. Ninety-three percent of American households now have access to 500 or more channels. In the 1950s you had three channels. And you better hope you liked "I Love Lucy," because 68 percent of households were going to watch it every week. So there are wonderful things about it. Networks like yours get to exist. There are a whole bunch of college football games I can watch this Saturday with my kids. I'm glad about that, but there is a danger that we end up with these little tiny siloed fragmented audiences where we only talk to people who already agree with us. And we cease to treat people like whole people. We cease to try to persuade people. And we start to just think, 'Let's use our time in this one half or a one percent audience to yell at the other people that we're angry at and not try to do justice to their argument. I think the ninth commandment: thou shalt not bear false witness against their neighbor is a pretty important commandment for the way we consume our news.

JESSUP: The argument is it's so easy to stay in those segmented, cloistered societies, so what's the incentive for people to reach out and go beyond to do exactly what you're saying?

SASSE:  I think we live in an interesting moment because those incentives don't yet exist, and we're going to need to build new kinds of habits. Habit and addiction are really the same word. It's just when we like it, we call it a habit. When we don't like it we call it an addiction. Right now we have a whole bunch of people and it's bad for America – but it's particularly bad for Christians – to be addicted to a kind of anger-centric news consumption, which doesn't do any good for your neighbor. There's probably a little old lady three or four doors down from you on your street that has some unmet need today. My wife and I are blessed. We have a 17-year old daughter, 14-year-old daughter, 7-year-old son. Obviously, our 7-year-old doesn't have any kind of smartphone technology, but our teenage daughters – in Nebraska you can drive at fourteen – so our girls drive. So they have a smartphone to help do their GPS navigation. But we realize the smartphone can tempt them away from human relationships to a digital online life? Well, they need to love their grandparents. They need to love that widow that lives four doors down from us. There's an old guy on our block whose wife has Alzheimer's, and he's trying to care for her and he's lonely. And he has needs. We should serve those real people. Not be down in our phones all the time.

JESSUP: How do you do that when we seem to exist in an age and an era where we aren't just divided by beliefs but we're divided by a different set of facts. If we can't come together on an agreed or shared sense of what's fact, how do you bridge that gap?

SASSE: It's very difficult. If Americans don't start with an assumption about basic facts, how we going to be able to fight back against what China wants to do to us in the future? We're headed to an era of cyberwarfare where the Chinese government is going to be able to create fake audio and fake video. They're going to drop on the internet stuff of a politician taking a bribe or of somebody on a conference call where they're planning something evil – Republican against Democrat or Democrat against Republican. And if we're addicted to all of that sort of anger-centric view of politics, we're setting ourselves up to be weak and vulnerable in the face of future battles that we're going to have with China about this kind of cyberwar. So, it's really important for Christians, in particular, to start with an assumption about loving their neighbor next door to them and then building out and projecting good things on other people you're debating before you get to the place where you actually identify what the lines are between good and evil. It's not helpful to start with all of politics as good and evil fighting.

JESSUP: Sen. Sasse, how do we restore credibility and a sense of trust in some of our public institutions that have been revered – how we restore some credibility that has been lost?

SASSE:  So one of the things we need to do, I think, is send different kinds of people to Washington. The public trust issue, you flagged, is one of the most important crises of our time. Americans have less and less trust in our institutions but definitely, that includes governmental institutions. And one of the reasons is because we send a whole bunch of people to Washington who plan to be politicians for their whole lives. That's not how our founders intended it. We're supposed to be public servants who serve the people for a time by going away from the places where we live. Freemont, Nebraska –the town I live in Nebraska, where I want to be raising my kids – it's where I want to, Lord willing, die. We bought cemetery plots there. I don't want to move to Washington, DC and become a lobbyist. Right now, too many people go to DC and they think that Washington is the center of the world. Washington should be a servant community for the place where all of your viewers live. Because every community where they live should be the center of the world, because that's where they're raising their kids, where they're helping carpool around their grandkids, and where they're loving their neighbor. That's the center of the world that Washington should be a servant community for those places.
 
JESSUP: Sen. Sasse, I want to get to the last part of the title of your book: how to heal?

A lot of people point to our leadership and say that our leaders should lead the way when it comes to civility and healing, but I'm curious for you, as someone who works in a very divided body and a very divided, partisan city, what do you think is the best solution toward healing the brokenness and healing the incivility in the society in which we live?

SASSE:  So there's a lot that has to be healed in Washington, that's for sure. And political leaders should lead. But in America, we've never thought that politicians are the center of our life. George Washington refused to be king when there was a chance for him to do that after the Revolutionary War. He refused the chance to become essentially lifetime president. He wanted to go back to Mt. Vernon. We need our politicians to want to go back where they're from, because where your viewers live are the kind of places where moms and dads and Kiwanis and Rotary Club members and Little League coaches and volunteer firemen and teachers and nurses and especially pastors and people who are deacons and elders at their local congregations, those places are the places where you first live to love a neighbor who's next door to you. And when you model that kind of love next door, you can expand it to other communities beyond your county and beyond your state. Washington is not going to lead on this. We're going to need people to lead the places where they actually live. And one big piece of this is going to be about coming up with new habits for rootedness and mindfulness and presence even in a digital age that constantly tempts us by our phones to believe the really interesting place – the important place – is somewhere far from where you live today. Actually, God's probably calling you to live the mostly, right now, the ordinary – sometimes boring – life we live on our street because those are the places where people have skinned knees and where they're lonely and where there's some shut-in who needs you to take them a casserole. That's probably your ordinary calling today. We need to do more of that love of neighbor.

JESSUP: Senator Sasse, thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it.

SASSE:  Thank you, John. A pleasure.


Post-Interview Remarks

JESSUP: What's the passion burning in your heart that motivated you to write this book?

SASSE:  I really do think that the happiness literature is telling us some pretty interesting things. That the wisdom literature has told us for a long time that if you've got grandparents or if you've Ecclesiastes and you've wrestled with what the big challenges of life are, it turns out the happiness literature right now is saying really similar things: if you have a nuclear family, you're happy. If you have a few good friendships you're happy. If you have a meaningful vocation, if you have a sense of calling, if you have coworkers you're happy. If you're a member of a local worshipping community on Sunday morning, you're happy. And, right now, I think we have so many people thinking they're going to find happiness in politics, and I just don't think it's true. I think it's snake oil. Politics has important work to do. Right? We need a cost-effective infrastructure bill. We need a cyber-policy for the age of digital warfare. We need entitlement reform. But you're not going to find somebody to comfort you in your old age because you're on the same political tribe as those people. And I think we have more and more people running to politics. That makes me sad for my neighbors. But it particularly makes me sad when Christians seem to be squandering the chance to live a life of gratitude to God by serving in the communities where they are actually called and pretending that if we win the next election, somehow that will bring about the eschaton. That's not true.

JESSUP: How do you in your daily life build bridges and demonstrate civility and Christian love?

SASSE:  So, I really do keep most of my life – as much as I can – anchored in Nebraska. So, we've got these three kids, ranging from seven to seventeen, and we raise them there. And I come here for my work week and then I go back home. So, when I'm here, I'm trying to work and get as much done as I can. And then my church community is back home. My wife and kids are usually there. I bring a kid with me a lot. But the main thing I want to be sure I'm doing when I prioritize at work is I want to do big and important things. I want to not pretend that small things are big. There's a kind of dishonesty that happens in politics a lot, where people pretend whatever piece of little legislation you're working on today is the one thing that's going to bring about heaven. And it's not true. So, I don't want to be dishonest about that. But I also want to get good about summarizing my opponents' argument in a debate in a way that's fair enough that they would regard it as a fair summary of their position. I think you build credibility over time with people that you want to love and show the love of Christ to by thinking that truth matters. And I think we live in a world where people are devaluing words more and more because we think the ends justify the means. Well, the political ends you're going to seek and accomplish, they're an important way to serve your neighbor, but they never justify lying about what you're up to or lying about your opponents' position or sort of projecting the worst motive on them. So I want to love my neighbor in a way that I hope they'd treat me.

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About The Author

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John
Jessup

John Jessup serves as the main news anchor for CBN, based at the network's news bureau in Washington, D.C. He joined CBN News in September 2003, starting as a national correspondent and then covering the Pentagon and Capitol Hill. His work in broadcast news has earned him several awards in reporting, producing, and coordinating election coverage. While at CBN, John has reported from several places, including Moore, Oklahoma, after the historic EF5 tornado and parts of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas devastated by Hurricane Katrina. He also traveled to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, during the height