“How to win friends and influence people” has a flip side: “How to lose friends.” One of the easiest ways is by sticking to one’s convictions—or, at least, by sticking to them while making them known. There can’t be many readers who have never lost a friend or, at least, annoyed someone dear by maintaining a principle and conforming their actions to it.
Uncle Filbert abandoned his wife, got a civil divorce, and now is intending to marry to someone else. Do you attend the wedding to please him, even though, by doing so, you may give others the impression that you see nothing wrong in what he is proposing to do (enter a state of adultery)? Or do you decline to attend on principle, knowing that your relationship with him may be damaged? If people were as open-minded as they profess to be, Uncle Filbert would take no offense at your staying away. He would receive gratefully your explanation of why you will be unable to attend his wedding. While disagreeing with your calculus, he would respect you for abiding by your convictions, and your relationship with him would suffer long-term damage. Of course, it almost never works out this way. He will conclude that someone who doesn’t approve of each of his actions doesn’t approve of him at all.
Some people, in flipping open the New Testament, have a way of finding no verse other than John 17:11: “that they may be one, even as we are one.” For them, the chief message of Scripture is oneness, commonality, agreement, unity. The impulse is understandable; most of us wish to avoid contention and the uneasiness that even shallow disagreement can bring. We want to get along with everyone, and we want everyone to get along with us. We recognize that there will be a multiplicity of opinions. We may have little hesitancy in highlighting our own opinions when it is a matter of disagreeing with strangers, but it seems another thing altogether when the disagreements may be with friends or family. When that prospect looms, we want to focus on unity, even if that means never alluding to some things.
But other verses round out the picture. “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword” (Matt. 10:34). “Henceforth in one house there will be five divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided . . .” (Luke 12:51). Why a sword, why divided? Because of principle. Living by principles would result in no division if everyone agreed to the same principles, but the fact is that they don’t. The only way to effect unity is for one side or the other to convert. Normally this does not happen, which leaves two alternatives, if one wants to try to save a relationship: Learn to live with the disagreement or pretend there is no disagreement, which means to live a fiction, at least with respect to this subject and these persons.
The sword, in cutting, unavoidably cuts both parties.