Open-Minded vs Principle-Minded... Is There a Clear Winner?

Ever since I learned of Venn Diagrams in high school math class, I’ve been attracted to them. The term “mutually exclusive” was a fascinating discovery around the same time, and, since, I’ve been known to frequently highlight that most things being compared are not so mutually exclusive.

Even before Venn Diagrams entered my life, I was obsessed with both/and thinking, the notion that two seemingly opposing things can both be true, and the Walt Whitman quote made famous by the hit show Ted Lasso, “Be curious, not judgmental.”

I blame my dad for this curse, as he was always teaching me to “walk a mile in someone else’s shoes” and “look at both sides of the coin.” These cliches were meaningful to me, and they fueled my desire to uncover what’s common amongst people. The overlap. The exciting sliver formed when two (or three, or one hundred) circles overlay. The intersection.

I call this outlook a curse, because it sometimes is. 

Namely, I experience quite a bit of discomfort by looking for and living in the gray. I believe it’s a lot harder than digging one’s heels in the black or white.

Remaining open, curious, and empathetic to multiple views has gotten me into trouble a time or two as well. I’ve been accused of “talking out of both sides of my mouth,” fence-sitting, and not standing for anything: unprincipled and maybe even spineless. And, I admit, it sometimes comes off that way. 

Perhaps I do have it all wrong.

See? I can even come at that point of view.

Even though I like the way I’m built, it has been causing me to experience quite a bit of internal conflict as of late. One of my favorite games is to play devil’s advocate with myself:

What happens when the very point of view with which I’m trying to find commonality harms people I love? 

What happens when the circle with which I’m trying to overlay goes a bridge too far?

What happens when it is revealed to me that the other side is not playing fair or with integrity? 

What happens when the ideology towards which I am trying to remain open stops being just a benign differing one and starts becoming more like a bullying enemy? 

When is it time to stop being a teammate on both teams? 

When is enough enough? 

When is it time to say no?

When do I cast a line in the sand that separates wrong from right?

When do I stop defending and start denouncing?

I don’t know the answers to any of these questions, but I do know that just the way I’ve phrased them introduces a problem of its own. 

Yes, I shed the spineless and unprincipled descriptors, but look at the new ones I get to try on for size: cocky, narrow-minded, rigid, fixed. And my personal least favorite: divisive. 

At the time of the writing of this post, I was in quite a swirl about which side of the fence I wanted to habitate. If I were to draw a Venn Diagram of my predicament, one circle would be labeled “Open-minded but potentially cowardly” and the other would be “Principled but potentially divisive.”

Unshockingly, I posit that the two circles are not mutually exclusive. 

At least I hope not. 

And I’ve been hunting for the perfect language to describe the intersection. 

Also unshockingly, I found it at church. 

Just when I was about to give up, I attended worship and my senior pastor, who was preaching the second installment in the sermon series “The Politics of Jesus,” dropped the perfect title for the sliver of overlap in my little homespun Venn Diagram:

Bridge-builder.

I want to be open-minded. I want to be principled. Are both possible through a bridge-building lens? 

I know a guy who tried.

And it’s why I follow him.