Greg Garrett: Our country is so polarized -- here's how to still have a meaningful conversation

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America seems more polarized than at any time in my memory, and it seems harder and harder these days to have meaningful conversations.

More often, we ignore each other or shout past each other, and if we’re not careful, we may even make the mistake of thinking the world is divided into “Us” and “Them” -- the people with all the answers and the people who, at best, are misguided.

People like Us can be talked to. People like Them will never understand Us, so why bother?

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Even people we know and love can prove hard to talk to, and I know this from hard experience.

A few weeks ago my Grandma Irene passed away at age 99, and I’ve been forced to the painful realization that it had been 20 years since we had a conversation that was more than just small talk.

Irene was a deeply religious member of a Pentecostal church, and while she loved me dearly and prayed for me daily, she honestly couldn’t understand why anyone would express their faith differently. She was constantly reminding me to read my Bible, to pray, to go to church, constantly quoting Bible verses to me -- or at me. Because her tradition had been so foundational for her, she distrusted any other way of loving God.

If I am honest, I was as guilty of minimizing her beliefs. I’m Episcopalian and find the highly emotional worship that she loved deeply unsettling. Even if she’d been willing to grant me my faith, I too might have let my own prejudice stand in the way of real conversation.

So we never had -- and now will never have -- Big Talk as opposed to small talk. I will never get to tell her how a historically African-American church in East Austin saved my life during my battle with life-threatening depression, and she will never share how she coped with soul-killing loneliness these past 20 years as she lived on without my grandfather, as her friends died and left her with nothing but photographs and memories.

This failure of conversation happened between family members, between people who loved each other. How can people not related by blood or history possibly reach across these boundaries, see each other, and talk to each other?

Well, fortunately, I also have a number of positive experiences with conversation to draw on.

For over 30 years in my classroom at Baylor University and beyond, I have led conversations, often between people who are radically different in the way they look, or love, or believe.

In the process, I’ve developed a few essential insights that lead to good conversations and what we have to agree to in order to make them happen:

1) Everyone has their reasons.

2) We are more alike than we are different.

3) Conversation is not about conversion.

First, when we allow ourselves to be divided by politics or religion or anything else, we fail to see that everyone has reasons for the things they profess.

My years as a novelist have taught me that every character has history and motivations that shape what they do. My Grandma Irene preached to her grandson the preacher not because she wanted to drive me crazy, but because she wanted to make sure I was held securely by the God she loved. Even those people we might think of as Them have very real reasons for who they are and what they do.

Secondly, to have good conversation we need to push past that very idea. One of my favorite songs by the Irish rock band U-2 concludes with this essential wisdom: “There is no Them. There is only Us.”

In my travels around the world, I’ve met many people who didn’t look, talk, or act like me, but when we sat down and looked past those differences we found real kinship.

Some years ago, I sat with Douglas, a young father in his mud hut in rural Kenya, and we talked late into the night about our fears, our dreams, our hopes. We discovered that despite an impressive array of differences -- the many things we could have allowed to be barriers between us -- we had the exact same desire: we wanted our children to inherit a world where they found more opportunities than we had and wanted them to grow and thrive and find joy. It was a night of real conversation, and unlike the small talk I endured at my most recent cocktail party, I have never forgotten it, or Douglas.

Finally, if you spend a lot of time watching talk shows, listening to the radio, or just listening to contention in public spaces, you could get the idea that these days, people speak only to convert -- or bludgeon -- people to their way of thinking.

This is not conversation.

Conversation requires the respect we’ve spoken of, yes, and the recognition of our common humanity. But it also requires us to listen as well as talk.

Last summer in Cambridge, England, I spent three days talking with Rowan Williams, the past Archbishop of Canterbury.

Baron Williams is one of the most recognizable faces and voices in the U.K., and more to the point, one of the most brilliant people in the world. He could easily have filled every moment of our visit with his own opinions, but in that conversation, you’ll find a real willingness to listen, to learn from each other, and as he puts in the afterword to our book of conversations, a willingness to recognize that there were things he didn’t know until we talked about them.

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Real conversation is about our own recognition that as strongly as we may hold our beliefs, there is always something to learn. Maybe conversation won’t change what we believe, but it can change our perception of each other.

And anything that reminds us how much more alike we are than different would be a good thing just now, wouldn’t it?