������Ƶ

This is an inspirational story for the holidays, but it is not about peace, good will or miracles.��And you won’t find this cast of characters in your average Christmas pageant or Hanukkah celebration.��

The story involves Megan Phelps-Roper, a star member of the , a virulently anti-Semitic and antigay church in Kansas, and likely the most hated group of Christians in America.��

The other character is David Abitbol, an Israeli orthodox Jew who runs the satirical web site and often signs off on Twitter with the initials “c.k.” for “Christ killer.”

Sentimental the story is not, but inspiring it is, because the way they came to productively relate to each other — with the help of social media — offers such an uplifting contrast to the depressing doldrums of American politics.

American politics has increasingly become about good versus evil, or “Manichean” as the political psychologist Jonathon Haidt describes it in his wonderful book, ��

You view your position as good and your opposition not just as different but also as evil and not even worth trying to understand. In this way people depersonalize their opponents by defining them only in terms of their political ideology.

Surveys show Republicans rate Democrats lower than atheists.��Liberals don’t simply disagree with religious conservatives, they find them not worth understanding.��

Typically social media reinforces these silos of difference because people choose to read only material supporting their views.

Haidt says that morality and politics have become more intertwined and that morality binds us “into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle.”��

But morality also “blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say.”

The Westboro Church’s worldview is as Manichean as it can get. It is full of binding and blinding.��That church’s followers believe that virtually everyone is evil and that this evil is the prime driver of everything people do.

The church’s opponents, which includes almost everyone outside of the small band of Westboro church activists, had no trouble identifying as evil a religious group that virulently hates homosexuals and picketed military funerals to get across its message that these soldiers’ deaths showed that God was punishing America for its acceptance of homosexual ways.

So you would expect that any interchanges between Phelps-Roper and Abitbol would be at least as nasty as today’s common political dialogue — presumably exaggerated versions of the binding and blinding that Haidt describes.

In fact, the dialogues were quite different.��They��dealt with one another in productive, humanized ways that are almost totally missing from today’s politics.

Adrian Chen tells the full story in a recent . Overall, it is a story about how and why Phelps-Roper gives up her beliefs and leaves the church, but I want to tell less of the conversion story and��more about how it offers a political ray of hope, and certainly not simply because Phelps-Roper saw the evil of her ways.

Three significant things happened that were better than the typical and unproductive ways that people talk about their political beliefs.

First, in this Westboro case, social media was not used simply to preach to the converted.��Instead it fostered diversity.��Instead of isolating people further, social media brought them together.

Second, this diversity led people to constructively engage different viewpoints and to think of their opponents as something more than simply a product of what they believed, even if these opponents saw these beliefs as awful and even crazy.

Third, communities with diversity developed.

Here is how this happened.

Circumventing Isolation

It is much easier to maintain a Manichean view of the world if you isolate yourself. On the surface, the church members lived in enclaves that were far more rigid and isolated than the lifestyle enclaves other Americans increasingly live in.��

Almost all of the Westboro members and all of the most influential ones lived in the same Topeka, Kansas, neighborhood in houses surrounded by walls. They worshiped at the single Westboro church.

Phelps-Roper believed in Westboro and actively participated in its��activities from the time she was a child.�� In fact she was something of a protégé.��Anyone who dismisses her experiences as brainwashing is deceiving herself.��

But there were some cracks in this armor of isolation. Phelps-Roper, like all the church children, went to public schools.

More significantly, at least for her, Westboro parents were okay with pop culture, possibly because they did not see it as any more evil than the rest of American life.

So she developed a strong taste for pop music.��This became an important part of the way she engaged with others.��

It was not in a self-conscious I-am-going-to-learn-to-be-hip-so-I-can-show-empathy-with-sinners way.�� Rather, it became a part of who she was.

Pop culture became a commonality that personalized the relationships with others who hated her beliefs. Both she and her opponents became something more than their beliefs.

Pop culture was a currency of meaningful engagement.

Social Media And��Constructive Engagement

Megan Phelps-Roper’s initial interest in Jews had nothing to do with understanding her fellow man.��It had to do with Westboro followers’ prophesy that the election of Barack Obama, in their eyes the Anti-Christ, meant that the world was soon to end and that the Apocalypse would soon follow.

As a result, Fred Phelps, the head of the church, planned to move his flock to Israel and, following the Book of Revelations, try to identify the 144,000 Jews that would be saved.

Phelps-Roper took it upon herself to identify who those saved Jews would be, and being social media-savvy, turned to Twitter to help identify them.

On a list of influential Jews around the world she found David Abitbol’s name and his Jewlicious web site.�� ��

Considering, say, his willingness to joke about Jews as “Christ-killers,” Abitbol was not your ordinary Jew.��He was different in other ways that very much determined the link between Phelps-Roper and him.��

When he lived in Montreal, Abitbol developed a web site called Net Hate, where he corresponded with hate groups.�� He learned there that the best way to communicate with hate group members was to humanize them.��

So Phelps-Roper found him to be diametrically opposed but curious, “evil but friendly.”��In turn Abitbol found her to be evil but funny, and at least after awhile willing to engage in real conversations.

“You know, for an evil something something, you sure do crack me up,” she tweeted him one day after a discussion of a new TV show.

Abitbol also was thoroughly versed in the Old Testament and exceptionally familiar with the New Testament.��He could discuss theology on Phelps-Roper’s own terms.

Neither ever really gave up trying to get each to see the evil of their ways, but over time the two of them contextualized their differences into something broader.

Communities Based On Diversity Develop

From an early age, Phelps-Roper was an active messenger for the church. Even as a young child, she loved to picket and confront the hostile crowds.��

So for her it was a small step to social media. She became the church’s best and most prominent social media spokesperson.

She saw Twitter as a great way to get this message across. At first she used Twitter to get out the usual Westboro message. One of her early tweets celebrated Ted Kennedy’s death.

The more Twitter followers she got, though, the more diverse these followers became.��Some of them supported the church’s views.��Many others dismissed the church’s ideas as hateful and crazy.

But others resembled Abitbol.��They were unsympathetic but genuinely curious and wanted to engage Phelps-Roper in more extended discussions.

In fact Phelps-Roper uses the word “community” to describe this particular odd and diverse group of Twitter followers.��She was particularly influenced by those who, like Abitbol, were confrontational but who engaged with her in a friendly way.

For their part, this group of Twitter followers was, as Chen puts it, ”fascinated by the dissonance between Westboro’s loathsome reputation and the goofy, pop-culture-obsessed millennial Phelps Roper seemed to be on Twitter.”

Why Is This Inspiring?

Ultimately Megan Phelps-Roper left the church and moved away, not without a great deal of agony and fear that God would punish her for her evil ways.��

She and Abitbol met in person and exchanged gifts.��She no longer believes that people are inherently evil.

But, as I said earlier, politically her conversion is less important than the process by which she got there.��

This is politically an inspirational story because, compared to the usual partisan discourse in our politics, people involved in this Westboro incident behaved in exemplary ways.��

They did not compromise their fundamental views about the church’s beliefs, but at the same time they framed these discussions in ways that made it possible to examine these views.��

“What the hell were you thinking?” became not a rhetorical throwaway question to stop conversation.�� Instead it became a question that actually��invited an answer.