One of the criticisms leveled at social media platforms such as Facebook is that they inherently encourage us to portray a picture of ourselves only at our best.  Perhaps we could call it the new “Sunday Smile”.  We post pictures of our best moments at the beach, or at the barbecue, at the rally or at the resort.  The medium is encouraging dishonesty about who—and how—we really are.

But I’ve found something else to be true on the other side of it.  Social media seems to encourage the worst in people.  I cannot tell you how horrified I have been by what people I know post on Facebook.  Instead of promoting their best side, social media seems to bring out their worst.

Some of this comes from anonymity.  People will do atrocious things in their cars—yell, curse, cut-off, squeeze—that they would never do in other settings.  (I mean, can you imagine if people pasted bumper stickers on their jeans pockets, and then pushed their way to the front of the grocery line while explaining to you what your sexual orientation might be?)

And now throw politics into this mess.

Our differing views and political leanings are nothing new, of course.  I remember in high school going to a friend’s house during a campaign speech by George H.W. Bush.  In the circles I ran in at the time, Bush, Sr. was spouting nonsense.  And so there I sat in my friend’s living room, a family of very red Republicans, laughing out loud when Bush would say something that seemed ridiculous to me.

I was soon asked to leave.

Shocking.

It was a brief experience that I was careful not to revisit.  I quickly learned two things: not all people see the world like I do, and I need to have some tact when conversing with said people.

But what occasionally happened in living rooms now happens on an hourly basis.  There is little concern on social media over disagreement, and so people say all sorts of things, not caring whose living room they may be in.

Which is creating a sort of cultural climate change.

And to push that metaphor, things are dangerously heating up.

I think about this a lot.  I want to have meaningful relationships and dialogue with those I disagree with.  Many of the disturbing posts I see on social media come from people I care a lot about.

So how do we chart a different path, work at a different kind of dialogue?

I’d like to begin by calling our toxic way of conversing what it is: heresy.

In the really old Christian Scriptures, a leader by the name of Saul of Tarsus was trying to help a divided church take communion together.  If you know anything about communion, you know how ridiculous this already is.  Communion is that practice that Jesus taught to His disciples to remind them that they are bound together—not by class or socio-economic position or ethnicity or political party—but rather by the sacrificial grace of God.  No one person better or more deserving than the other.  This is what communion is all about.

Now check this out: Christians took the most unitive practice they had received from Jesus and turned it into the most divisive.  (Can you even believe it?)

Saul lets them have it, “Your meetings do more harm than good.  In the first place, I hear that when you come together as a church (for communion), there are divisions among you.”

What Saul wasn’t concerned about was their disagreements.  What he was concerned about was their willingness to divide over them.

The word for “divisions” here is the ancient Greek word haireseis.

It is where we get the word heresy.

Heresy, for the first followers of Jesus, was not wrong belief, nor misguided faith, nor being pro-choice or pro-gun.

Heresy—very literally—meant dividing themselves over their differences.

Which means—as a Christian now—I can’t think of a group more heretical than Christians.

Which also means that to do the work of navigating and bridging our divides—whether Christian or not—is nothing less than the work of healing our heresies.

I believe it is a work—now more than ever—that we each need to prioritize in our posts, our conversations, our relationships, our lives.