Purity Is Not Available to Us
And seeking purity will only continue to destroy us
We have done more than enough home improvement projects for me to know how hard it is to achieve perfection. Most people are able to look past the flaws when they see our finished projects, but I always know. I want to stand in front of a chipped tile or crooked line or roughly patched wall. I want everything to be perfect, which might be one reason so many of our projects go unfinished, such as our completely refinished bathroom with one hole in the wall because we can’t find the right medicine cabinet to put back into the hole.
So often I have allowed perfection to be the enemy of good. Instead of being satisfied with a good final project, I have allowed the imperfections to stall my progress or prevent me from being happy with the end results as they are. I allow myself to forget the lessons learned along the way and the improvement in both my skills and our overall living situation.
Just as my Enneagram 1 need for perfection has stalled me personally, I have seen the desire for perfection and purity in all things hurt everything in public life, from politics to religion. Our inability to see other people as human beings with differences and flaws has prevented us from making progress where it is possible and has made room for bad actors to come in and destroy what progress has been made. And I fear that this need for perfect solutions and purity of intent and process has brought us to the dangerous place we are as both a country and world right now.
As a perfectionist, I get it. We human beings tend to love neat and clean. We don’t like messy situations and that’s not unreasonable. When things get complicated, we have to make hard decisions. When people don’t make the decisions we want them to, it hurts. When those decisions hurt us or people we care about, it mutates our relationships, sometimes destroying them completely.
No, we shouldn’t excuse harmful words and behavior. No, we shouldn’t turn a blind eye when we see actions that are hurting people or could potentially hurt people. No, we shouldn’t get go along to get along and keep the facade of peace.
But we live in a country with multiple cultures, ethnicities, religions, and political beliefs. Our Electoral College obsession with “blue states” and “red states” has forced us to see our fellow human beings as fitting into binary groups without considering that all people, regardless of their backgrounds, are a compilation of many different factors. We are living examples of what it means to be both/and in pretty much everything we say and do.
A liberal democracy depends on people who do not fit into false binaries. It depends on people with different life experiences and ideas who are able to work together to come to better, more complete solutions that will benefit the majority without causing irreparable harm to the minority.
It is a reality political elites have conveniently ignored, all while encouraging the rest of us to follow suit.
The far-right has ostracized anyone who dares to speak out against Donald Trump. People who once spoke out against the 45th and 47th president but still want to keep their current jobs or potentially seek better positions have fallen in line. (With great grief I have watched my own lifelong church body do this in recent months, particularly with this letter from the synod president.) Despite the yearly decline in church membership and attendance, mainline church bodies with majority white attendees have also fallen in line. In nearly all of these spaces, those who maintain conservative moral and political positions but who see everything related to Trumpism as diametrically opposed to those values, have found themselves exiled with no political or faith community left to turn to.
But the far right isn’t the only one guilty of canceling people for not perfectly falling into line. The far left has done this for years as well. When Bernie Sanders was on Joe Rogan (who was originally a Bernie Bro), he was criticized for platforming someone with questionable views. When the Democratic candidates were all vying for the 2020 nomination, they competed for who could take the most “woke” position, which was used against Kamala Harris in 2024. It has become harder and harder for Democratic candidates from centrist districts to win their nominations because they took positions that weren’t always popular with Democratic activists. And while I disagreed with a lot of the positions he took, I sure wish we had a Joe Manchin in the Senate right now to stand up against the most extreme Republican members of Congress.
Yes, ideals matter. Yes, values matter. Yes, integrity matters. And yes, there should be common ground and defined platforms in party politics.
But purity never has been, and never will be, available to us.
They say to never meet your heroes. There is a good reason for that. Once we start digging into our heroes, we discover they are usually far from perfect. And the more time that passes from the time they lived and the time in which we are living, the more likely we are to see their flaws.
One significant example comes to us from World War II.
By many metrics, Oskar Schindler was not a good man. He was a greedy businessman who cooperated with Nazis to enrich himself during the early years of the war. He was a womanizer. He drank and smoked and was by all accounts godless. According to my religious upbringing, he was not a safe man to associate oneself with if one wanted to avoid temptations and being led away from a firm Christian faith.
And yet he put his business interests and his life on the line to save over 1200 Jews from certain death by employing him in his factory. When he had to make the ultimate decision between what was right and what was easy, he chose to do what was right.
He was an imperfect vessel who should be praised for doing the right thing when it was essential to do so. He didn’t need to be a perfect human being. He just needed to remember his humanity and see the light when it mattered most.
Humans don’t like being told they are wrong. Humans don’t like admitting when they’ve made mistakes. It is human nature to fight against change or acknowledging when we’ve taken the wrong path.
But people need to be able to learn. We need to give people space to make mistakes and do better after the fact. We need to give each other space to disagree. We need to recognize that our life experience informs our perspective and reactions just as another individual may have very different life experiences that have shaped them.
We don’t like to be uncomfortable. Americans are especially averse to situations where we might be the minority or potentially learn we might have been the ones in the wrong.
But I’m ready for a messy coalition of messy people who are willing to do hard work. I’m ready for people who will stand for democracy and against authoritarianism. I’m ready for people who want to discuss human flourishing and do the hard work of figuring out how to make that happen in a liberal democracy with many diverse voices.
Maybe that’s why I liked this particular Substack Notes post by
:
Ten years ago I could not have imagined a situation where all of those people would be in a room working together to come to a consensus. Now, I can’t imagine a better way for us to get shit done.
It’s time for us to stop letting perfection be the enemy of good. Instead, we need to seek to do our best, to remember our collective humanity, and work together to fight against the darkness threatening to destroy us from within.
Is that idealistic? Yes, but I don’t know any other way for us to move forward.
More on getting past purity tests
I appreciated this particular video from
:
I also loved this piece by
challenging us to encourage our loved ones to see that it is not too late to do the right thing.
Finally, I found this piece about life in Holland to be particularly enlightening:
Support my writing
While most of my work here is free for all subscribers, it is still a labor of love that I fit into the few hours I have when I am not teaching or being an attentive wife and mom. If you want to support my writing but you do not want to commit to being a paid subscriber, please consider a one-time donation.
You can also support me by ordering my book or books from my favorite book lists at my Bookshop.org affiliate page.
Check out my RedBubble store for related merchandise.
If you want to be a regular supporter, you can upgrade your subscription from free to paid and get occasional content only for paid subscribers.
And thank you for supporting my journey 💗