TL;DR
We are all, always, being edited. So why do we treat the people we disagree with as though they've arrived at their final form?
The Full Stop
I've been thinking about ghosts lately.
Not the kind that haunt houses — the kind that haunt arguments. The translucent figures we construct out of people we disagree with. Outlines of real human beings, reduced to a position, a label, a single sentence they once said that we can't quite forgive them for.
I watched it happen again recently. A public figure said something objectionable — and let me be clear, it _was_ objectionable — and the response wasn't to engage with what she said. It was to go after who she is. Not the idea. The person. As though the person _were_ the idea, and nothing more. As though she had arrived at her final form and the rest of us were simply there to confirm it.
What unsettled me wasn't the disagreement. I like disagreement. I think disagreement, done well, is one of the most generous things people can offer each other. What unsettled me was the finality. The way the critique carried an unspoken verdict: _This is who she is. She will not change. She is not worth the effort of real engagement — only the effort of dismissal._
And what unsettled me most was that the people doing the dismissing were Christians.
I don't say that to be pious. I say it because it's the bit I can't quite shake.
I should tell you something about myself, because it's relevant — and because I think the best arguments are the ones that come with a face attached.
By 1995, I had become the kind of person most people walk past quickly. Homeless. Using drugs and alcohol most days. Estranged from family. I'd attempted suicide twice in the previous twelve months. I wasn't searching for God — I didn't believe there was one to search for. The universe was a big bang followed by noise, and if there was a point to any of it, I'd stopped being able to see it.
When you're sleeping rough, you become a kind of public text that people read without engaging. They glance, categorise, and move on. You can feel the full stop at the end of their assessment. Addict. Dropout. Lost cause. No comma, no ellipsis — just a period. _He is what he is._
By any external measure, they weren't wrong. I _was_ all of those things. What I'm interested in now, thirty years later, is whether being those things in that moment meant I could never be anything else. Whether the full stop was earned or assumed.
One afternoon I looked up at a tree. Sunlight through the leaves, nothing remarkable about it — and then a thought broke in that had never been there before: _There must be a God._ I didn't manufacture it. It arrived. Not like knowledge; more like presence. And with it came the strange conviction that this God was good, and worth finding.
A few days later I walked past a church on my way somewhere I shouldn't have been going. I still don't quite know why I went in.
The preacher stood up and described my life with a precision that baffled me. The pain, the trouble, the hopelessness — all of it, in detail. My mind went immediately to the only explanation that seemed to fit: the church had organised a surveillance operation. They'd followed me around, collected intelligence, and handed it to the pastor, who was now reading it back from the pulpit.
(Please bear in mind: I was experiencing a significant amount of drug-induced paranoia.)
What he was actually doing was preaching the gospel — describing the universal human condition apart from Christ. It just happened to land on a paranoid young man in the third row like a personalised dossier.
When he invited people forward for prayer, I went. I don't remember what he prayed. I remember what he did next: he gave me a Bible. I took it home, opened it, and couldn't stop reading.
Within months I was in a residential rehabilitation program. A few years later I was married. A few years after that I was studying theology. None of that was visible in 1995. None of it was predictable from the outside. If someone had written their summary of me that year and walked away confident in their verdict, they'd have been right about the present — and completely wrong about everything that came next.
I don't say this to be inspirational. Inspiration wasn't the point. The point is that I was a ghost, and someone treated me as though I could become solid.
Thick Enough to Stay
That image — of ghosts becoming solid — comes from C.S. Lewis. In _The Great Divorce_, he imagines a bus trip from hell to the outskirts of heaven. The passengers who arrive from the grey town are spectral, translucent, barely substantial enough to exist. The grass under their feet is so real it hurts to walk on. The light is almost unbearable. Heaven, it turns out, is not the ethereal place we tend to imagine. It is more solid, more vivid, more _real_ than anything the ghosts have ever known.
The problem isn't that heaven rejects them. The problem is that they're not yet thick enough to bear it.
Lewis isn't writing about a select group of hopeless people. He's writing about all of us. The thinness isn't a permanent diagnosis — it's a present condition. And the whole point of the story is that the ghosts are _invited_ to stay. To become more real. To let the solidity of grace reshape them from the inside out. Some accept the invitation. Most, heartbreakingly, don't. But the invitation itself is never withdrawn.
I think about this image more than I probably should. I think about it whenever I see someone treated as though they've arrived at their final, translucent form — especially online, where the speed of judgement leaves no room for the slowness of transformation.
When we attack a person rather than engaging with their ideas, we're essentially saying: _You are a ghost, and you will remain one._ We've looked at the translucence and decided there's nothing underneath worth waiting for.
But Lewis — and, I think, the gospel — suggests otherwise.
The Mechanics of Dismissal
There's a concept in psychology called the fundamental attribution error. It describes our tendency to explain other people's behaviour in terms of their character rather than their circumstances. When someone cuts you off in traffic, you don't think "they might be rushing to the hospital." You think "they're a terrible driver." We attribute motive to identity rather than situation. We flatten.
It works the other way, of course. When _we_ make a mistake, we're full of context. We know we were tired, or stressed, or having a bad day. We extend to ourselves the grace of narrative — the acknowledgement that this moment doesn't define us. But we are far less generous with others. Other people are their moments. We are our stories.
Carol Dweck's work on growth and fixed mindsets runs along similar lines. In a fixed mindset, people are what they are: smart or dumb, good or bad, redeemable or hopeless. In a growth mindset, people are always becoming. The mind isn't set. The person isn't finished.
Most of us would say, if asked over coffee, that we believe people can change. We believe in second chances. We believe in growth. But watch what happens when someone says something offensive on the news. Watch how quickly our generous theory about human potential collapses into a firm verdict about human character. The growth mindset, it turns out, is easy to hold in the abstract and very hard to maintain when you're angry.
René Girard, the French-American literary critic and anthropologist, observed something even more unsettling. He noticed that communities under tension have a recurring habit of resolving that tension by directing it onto a single figure — someone who can absorb the group's anxiety and make everyone else feel righteous. He called this the scapegoat mechanism, borrowing a term from the Hebrew Scriptures with full awareness of its weight.
The scapegoat isn't chosen because they're uniquely guilty. They're chosen because they're _useful_. They become the container for everything the group is uncomfortable about. And once someone has been cast in that role, the community doesn't need to examine itself anymore. The problem has been located. It lives in _that person_. The rest of us are clean.
What struck me about the social media exchange I witnessed was how neatly it followed Girard's pattern. A public figure with problematic views was identified — and I want to say again, the views genuinely warrant criticism — but the response became something other than criticism. It became a ritual of denunciation. The person became the scapegoat. And once that happens, the conversation isn't really a conversation anymore. It's a ceremony. A ceremony of belonging, where the price of admission is agreeing that _that person_ is beyond redemption.
The Tribe That Knows Better
Henri Tajfel and John Turner, working in social psychology in the late 1970s, gave us the language of social identity theory. They showed that humans naturally sort themselves into in-groups and out-groups, and once the sorting has happened, a cascade of predictable behaviours follows. We favour our own. We view the other with suspicion. We attribute positive traits to "us" and negative traits to "them." We stop seeing individuals and start seeing categories.
This is deeply human. It may even be adaptive — there's a reasonable evolutionary argument that tribal instincts helped our ancestors survive. But adaptive isn't the same as good. And understanding the mechanism doesn't make you immune to it.
That's the uncomfortable part. You can study social identity theory, understand exactly how in-group bias works, publish papers on the subject — and still find yourself instinctively sorting people into categories and treating the out-group as less than fully human. Knowledge of the pattern does not automatically interrupt the pattern.
In fact, there's something particularly seductive about the version of in-group thinking that dresses itself in the language of justice. Or compassion. Or theology. It feels earned. It feels righteous. It feels like the _good_ kind of tribalism — the kind where we're on the right side and they're on the wrong one, and our position is so obviously correct that we don't need to examine ourselves, only them.
But tribalism doesn't stop being tribalism just because the tribe has better values. The structure is the same: us and them, in and out, redeemable and irredeemable. And when Christians adopt that structure — when the people who claim to follow a man who ate with tax collectors and spoke tenderly to the woman at the well begin to treat certain people as beyond the reach of grace — something important has gone missing.
Critique Without Verdict
Here's where I want to be careful.
The public figure at the centre of the exchange I saw has said things that are, by any reasonable standard, deeply hurtful. Nationalist rhetoric. Comments about immigration that are difficult to read as anything other than hostile toward the people who now call Australia home. I'm not here to defend those views. I think they deserve strong, clear, sustained critique. If your neighbour has moved to this country and built a life here, and someone with a public platform suggests they don't truly belong, that deserves to be challenged. Firmly. Publicly. Repeatedly, if necessary.
But there's a difference between challenging a view and dismissing a person. And the difference matters — perhaps especially when we claim to follow a gospel that is, at its core, a story about people being transformed into something they could never have become on their own.
When we attack the person rather than the argument, we do something subtle but consequential. We declare them beyond the reach of persuasion. We treat them as though they _are_ their worst opinion — fully formed, finally fixed, no longer worth the effort of genuine engagement. And in doing so, we excuse ourselves from the much harder, much slower, much less emotionally satisfying work of actual dialogue.
Denunciation is quick. It gets likes. It signals where you stand.
Dialogue is slow. It's messy. It risks being misunderstood. And it proceeds from a fundamentally different assumption — that the person across from you is not yet finished.
I keep coming back to the apostles.
Paul was a religious terrorist. That's not rhetorical exaggeration — he held the coats of the men who stoned Stephen and then went on to systematically hunt Christians across cities. By any measure of fixed judgement, he was the enemy. If someone had summarised Paul before Damascus and posted it online, the comments would have been merciless. And fair. And completely wrong about what came next.
Peter denied Jesus three times, at the moment it mattered most, within earshot of the man he claimed to love. And yet he became the rock on which the church was built.
Matthew was a tax collector — a collaborator with the occupying empire, a man who profited from his neighbours' suffering. The disciples included a zealot, fishermen with tempers, doubters, and deserters. Not one of them looked, at the point of calling, like the person they would become.
The history of Christianity is a long, strange procession of people who should have been written off and weren't. Not because they deserved another chance, but because the entire logic of grace runs against the idea that people are final drafts.
We are all, always, being edited.
What I'm Actually Asking For
I think the instinct to attack the person rather than the idea comes, in part, from exhaustion. We are tired. Tired of hearing the same harmful rhetoric recycled. Tired of feeling like engagement doesn't work. Tired of extending patience to people who seem determined to waste it. I understand that tiredness. I share it, some days.
But tiredness is not a theology. And the Christian tradition has resources for exactly this kind of weariness — the kind that tempts us to give up on people. Patience, in the biblical imagination, is not passive. It is not naive. It is the stubborn, sometimes excruciating refusal to let another person's present behaviour become the final word about who they are. It is the discipline of holding space for a future that doesn't yet exist.
That's hard. Enormously hard. And I'm not pretending I'm good at it. I fail at this regularly — in traffic, in arguments, in the small daily judgements I make about people I've never spoken to. I am, on most days, no better than the person I'm gently pushing back against. I just happen to be thinking about it right now, which gives me the unfair advantage of sounding more reflective than I usually am.
But I think it matters. I think it matters because the alternative — the world where people are sorted into fixed categories and left there — is not actually a world that any of us want to live in. It's not a world that leaves room for the homeless kid under the tree who looks up and has a thought he's never had before. It's not a world that leaves room for the preacher who hands that kid a Bible without asking whether he deserves one.
It's not a world that leaves room for grace.
So what am I asking for? Something small, I think. Or something enormous, depending on how you look at it.
I'm asking whether we might resist the urge to reduce people to their worst public moment. Whether we might engage with views we find repugnant without treating the person who holds them as though they are permanently defined by those views. Whether we might hold open the possibility — against all evidence, against all instinct, against the satisfying certainty of our own righteousness — that the person we're furious with today could, by some strange grace, become someone quite different tomorrow.
Not because their views are acceptable. They may not be.
Not because critique isn't needed. It almost certainly is.
But because the moment we stop believing a person can change is the moment we've decided something about them that only God has the authority to decide.
And we might — just might — be wrong.
I think about that tree sometimes. The one in 1995, with the sunlight through the leaves. The moment a thought arrived that had never been there before.
I didn't earn it. I didn't seek it. It just came.
If it could come for me — paranoid, addicted, sleeping on floors, with nothing to recommend me to anyone's optimism — then I find it very hard to believe it can't come for anyone.
Even the people we've given up on. Even the ones we think are too far gone. Even the ones whose views make us want to stop listening altogether.
Even the ghosts.