The Liberal/Conservative Dichotomy

Brian McLaren is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors. He has a way about him, a way of making complicated issues understandable without oversimplifying them. The complexity remains in tact, but you walk away feeling as if you actually understand it. He's passionate without being arrogant. He's thoughtful and unafraid to question the "staples" of Christendom. He recently made some remarks in an interview that I appreciated. I particularly loved his response to the reporter who tried to pin him into the "liberal" or "conservative" box (because don't you know those are our only two options?) The reporter asked if he was "a liberal" and McLaren answered:

"What do you mean by the term? If liberal means you believe ... you should help the poor, and your bias should be toward peacemaking rather than war-making, then I'm a liberal. But if liberal means that government can solve all of our problems and that secularism is better than faith, and that it doesn't matter what you do in your personal life and that morality is up for grabs, then I'm not a liberal. And I could say the same thing about conservatives...When we present Jesus as a pro-war, anti-poor, anti-homosexual, anti-environment, pro-nuclear weapons authority figure draped in an American flag, I think we are making a travesty of the portrait of Jesus we find in the gospels."

And yet it makes people's head spin when they cannot classify someone into a clean-cut, clearly defined category. This is because if they cannot classify someone into some offensive, suspicious, or baggage -laden label, then it becomes much more difficult to automatically dismiss everything they have to say. People will actually have to process new or different arguments and logically and adequately refute them, or heaven forbid, concede to the fact that "others" might just have a valid perspectives.