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Twenty-five years ago this week, for a brief and terrible moment, the signs came down.
Not because we agreed on everything. We did not. But because something happened that reminded us, suddenly and painfully, that we were neighbors before we were opponents. That the person across the street, whatever their politics, was someone whose loss we could feel.
The signs went back up eventually. They always do.
And any day now, driving through Morgantown, I know what I am going to start seeing. Yard signs. Bumper stickers. The quiet declarations that appear every September before a November election and stay until the votes are counted. We are less than two months out. They are coming. And when they do, the temperature will rise.
I want to talk about what this season does to a community. And about what I think faith has to say in the middle of it.
Full disclosure: I put up yard signs. I think civic participation matters. I think it is healthy for neighbors to know where their neighbors stand. Signs are not the problem.
The question is not whether we put up signs. It is whether we still see the person who put up the one we disagree with.
I have been a pastor for more than two decades. I have served congregations in small towns and in university cities. I have sat in rooms where people who loved each other deeply could not agree on a single political question. I have watched friendships fracture and families go quiet at the dinner table. I have heard people say, with genuine pain in their voice, that they do not know how to stay in relationship with someone when the election season has sorted them to opposite sides.
That pain is real. I do not want to minimize it.
But I think we are in danger of something that goes deeper than political disagreement. We are in danger of letting a sign in a yard become the whole story we tell about a person.
Here is what I mean.
A yard sign is a position. It is not a person. The neighbor who put it there is someone whose child goes to school with your child. Someone who shovels the walk in February. Someone who has a name and a history and a set of reasons for what they believe that you probably do not fully know. The sign tells you one thing about them. It does not tell you everything.
I grew up in McDowell County, West Virginia. I know what it is to come from a place where the economic ground has shifted under people’s feet for generations and the political arguments that follow are rarely simple. People vote the way they vote for reasons that are woven into their history, their losses, their understanding of what keeps a family alive. Dismissing those reasons because you disagree with the conclusion is not sophistication. It is a failure of imagination.
That cuts in every direction. I am not making an argument for any party or any candidate. I am making an argument for the neighbor.
A yard sign is a position. It is not a person.
This spring, something happened at Suncrest United Methodist that I have been thinking about ever since. Our congregation shared a Passover Seder with Rabbi Joe Hample and the Jewish community here in Morgantown. We sat at the same table. We shared the same ancient meal. We told the same story about a people who were slaves and became free.
And somewhere in the middle of that evening, it occurred to me that this is exactly the kind of thing that becomes impossible when we have decided that the people on the other side of a difference are not really worth knowing.
The Jewish and Christian communities in Morgantown could have kept a polite distance from each other. It would have been easy. It would have been the default. Instead, a friendship built over years, starting when I was on the Fairmont Human Rights Commission, of all places. Rabbi Joe leading a Christian congregation in a Seder became an evening that people in both communities are still talking about.
That did not require agreement on theology. It required the willingness to sit down.
I think that is the invitation the next two months are making to all of us, whether we accept it or not.
The signs are coming. The arguments are coming with them. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, your actual neighbor — the one whose sign you cannot stand — is going to need something from you. Maybe it will be small. Maybe it will matter more than you expect.
The question faith asks is not whether you agree with them.
It is whether you still see them.
Twenty-five years ago, for one terrible week, we saw each other. We would do well to remember what that felt like — and to practice it before the next catastrophe forces it on us again.
The signs are not up yet. That means there is still a window — a few days, maybe a week — before the yard becomes a declaration and the neighbor becomes a position.
Go introduce yourself now.
Rev. Larry Buckland serves Suncrest United Methodist Church of Morgantown. He is ordained in The United Methodist Church and is writing as part of the Morgantown Faith Leaders Network.