How To Talk About Politics
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This is, I think, a great conversation to have today. With the holidays coming, you're going to be with a lot of different people that you may or may not see eye to eye with on politics. Maybe you don't want to talk politics, but maybe you feel like you should talk politics. If any of that is coming up for you this holiday season, you're going to love

this week's guest on live in the bream denise grace gitsum is with us she's got a public affairs consulting firm but she's been involved at every level from the white house on down in campaign she's at her own campaign she's got a brand new book called politics for people who hate politics

How to engage without losing your friends or selling your soul. Denise, welcome. Thank you so much for having me, Shannon. It's such an honor. Listen, I got to say, we have friends in common who just speak so highly of you. Our dear Molly Henneberg that we all know and love. You apparently introduced her to the man who is now her husband. Yes, that was one of my...

many matchmaking successes. God uses me in various ways and that's one of them. We may get some tweets and posts from the, you know, just people who want to know if you offer those services as well because that was a fantastic match. But I loved this when I saw that the title was Politics for People Who Hate Politics because I think there are people

people over the years who may have actually liked politics, but they don't like where it is now. They're very frustrated, whatever side of this that they're on. They feel like there's no way to have a civilized conversation. But is your argument that good people, wherever they are, need to stay engaged? Absolutely. And I would just say to those who have a love-hate relationship, it's okay to have both because we understand what politics can be and the force for good that it is when it's done correctly. But we also see what it's become, which is so disappointing.

And so, yeah, I believe that all of us share one thing in common. Most of us do, at least I think all of us, honestly, is that we really want what's best for our nation. But our perspectives are so different because we all have such different backgrounds. And really, the truth comes out through all of our narratives. None of us have a lock on truth. And I think that when we approach politics from a perspective of humility, even if we have strong convictions and I encourage those so much.

Unity is not conformity. And so understanding that, you know, we're going to be different, but God has given us each perspectives that are unique to our experiences and that we can honor that same reality in other people is really the key to enjoying an engagement because your intention is different. It's not to have a zero-sum game mentality. It's not to win at anyone else's expense. And that's what politics has often become in this day and age, unfortunately. And that's why it's so difficult.

Yeah, I think you're so right. Because even if people concede, they do have some common ground on certain things. If the talking points from their particular party are like, nope, these are our five talking points and you can't divert from that. People feel like giving anything is a concession or a loss. As you said, if you think everything's a zero sum game,

Whereas if you can actually have productive conversations on really difficult topics, maybe you could find ways to move the ball forward that would benefit if you're working for the American people or your state or locality, whatever it is, you're actually served. You're elected to serve those people. So if you are willing to have these conversations, you might actually get something done because we see things on the Hill that are just they feel completely intractable.

Like nobody's going to move. And so there are real human lives that are the cost of that left in the balance. Absolutely. I think one of the things that I really challenged myself to do throughout my political career and actually let me put this out as a disclaimer because I think it's so important. I am preaching to myself in this book. This book is mostly about the mistakes that I have made throughout my course in politics. And really, I got put to the test myself.

when i became a congressional candidate myself and i declared myself to be a christian and i was running on the foundation of civility respect and honor and uh... when i established that as sort of my guiding light in terms of how i would conduct myself

forced myself to live up to that standard. And those were my spiritual guardrails. I thought when I go outside of those realms of just what God has called me to do and loving my neighbor, even those I might consider my political enemy at the moment, I felt like I would get a check in my spirit. And so what I decided was instead of

ascribing to partisan agendas, which all of us fall into just because you hear the same talking points over and over, and that's how I was raised to do it, frankly, professionally. I was more interested in kingdom principles, what I call principles of truth that I believe for me come from God, and that I think all of us ascribe to certain principles that we hold dear. And I think most Americans have those, and most of them are the same.

Yeah. The core, I think that you want good for other people. You want good for yourself, for your family, all of those things. You just may have very different ways of getting there or your definition of that. Again, we're talking with Denise Grace Gitsum, Politics for People Who Hate Politics. This is the name of her book. How to Engage Without Losing Your Friends or Selling Your Soul. And those are two very different competing interests. I mean, really, do you find that you fight sometimes with compromising maybe your words or your truth or how you feel about something because you don't want to alienate family or friends?

So it's that balance of staying true to what your core principles are but loving the people in your life and not in some way alienating them. I almost never feel compromised and that's really interesting because I really of my the three women that were bridesmaids in my wedding Three of them are Democrats. That means three of my closest friends are people that have different opinions than I do That's always been the case in my life. I've always had friends from various backgrounds I'm from the Bay Area in California, which is a very diverse and I

I just feel like it's not hard to speak the truth when we decide to do so in love, because there's no apologies that you have to offer. Because what you're doing is you're saying, "This is what I believe."

There's no such thing as love apart from truth in my belief system. And so what I believe is that the heart of the truths that we speak, if we bring more love to it, it's actually it enables us to say things that are difficult, but being true to ourselves, because if we don't love our own truth, we can't stand in that. We're really not showing up as our full selves and we're not being honest. And that's really not that loving because we're lying. And so I just believe in speaking truth.

but I just believe in doing it in a way other than what you're seeing modeled in Washington, D.C. right now. Right. Well, and you model for us something different in the fact that the closest people in your life, that you do have people of different viewpoints from what you believe, and we really should all be that way. Yes. I mean, there's danger in being too tribal or being tribal at all, I mean, or retreating into our corners and saying like, oh, I can't be friends with that person. I can't engage with them. I can't have a relationship with them. I mean,

we have people who are really broken over that the last few years because of covet or any other you know thing that turned into a political debate um these

These are our loved ones, our family, our friends. I mean, we should not be willing to sacrifice those relationships over difficult conversations. Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. I think most people feel that way as well. They just don't have the practical tools for even beginning to get their mind out of that space. It almost feels like people have taken on politics as their identity. And I think that's a really dangerous place to be. Anytime you look for your identity or proof that you're okay, validation from anything other than the truth,

And for me, that comes from God and who he says I am. But each of us has sort of where we derive our identity from. And I think that's external. It really puts you in a position of jeopardy because you're going to ultimately compromise what you know to be true at some point when that identity that you've tied yourself to deviates. And if you watch just what's happening in our partisan political world and what's happening with the parties,

what a party stands for will constantly change. It's involved so much in the 20-something years that I've been in politics being a Republican. And so we really have to figure out what your core identity is. I think so many of the things that we're seeing that are challenging for people are because they feel like if they don't hold on to this identity and defend it with

all of their being, that they're somehow going to be not okay. And that's just not true. Yeah, I have to, and I will try to remind myself that a lot when I'm praying, saying like, Lord, for me as a Christian, I don't believe that my answers are through politics. I mean, I think they come through him and through his word, through the church. We're supposed to be solving and solve, you know, serving and solving problems and reaching into needs that we see in the community. We shouldn't outsource that.

to other people. And we shouldn't outsource our identity either. I mean, you really have to stay rooted in whatever your beliefs and system, your principle is. Absolutely. And from that place, you can serve other people and be willing. I love so much about what you said in the beginning because I constantly am quoting Professor Robbie George out of Princeton, who I just love because he models this with such interesting friendships. We had him and his buddy, Cornel West, who's now running for president. Yes. Who spoke at my graduation from Bowdoin. He did. There you go. And both of,

them, meet each other with the heart of, you know, Dr. George always says, approach these conversations as if you could possibly be wrong about something and that other person could be right. You're going to hear each other and there's going to be some opening for conversation moving forward. You have a lot of practical advice in the book. Again, politics for people who hate politics. But what I found interesting, too, is that you end the chapters with prayer. Yes, because it's a constant.

It's an instant challenge for me. To get it right.

there are times when I get really heated and I have to ask the Lord to really help me because I'm just not capable of it in my own strength. I ask God to help me to be the person that he wants me to be and to speak only the things that he wants me to say that bring hope and the truth, the reality of who he is and the

and really like life-giving truth into the situation, even if it's an argument. And I got to tell you, I don't always succeed. There are days when I ask, you know, I think we all, we have the same makeup artists that come between the two floors, but they, some of them are believers. And I asked them, I'm like, Hey, I feel like really off today. Can you just pray for me? Cause I feel like,

I'm trying to get external validation from how smart I'm a lawyer. So like, I like to win and I want to be smart and I want to say the boom, like the mic drop thing, right? I just want to go for the guttural sometimes and just land my point. And, and I have to be reminded that that's not my purpose here. I mean, you can do it.

funny and you can do it light and it's fine sometimes but it's really like what are you trying to do about the conversation that leaves the other people feeling like you understand them you appreciate them they're validated but also that you might have a different perspective and that that's really bringing God's truth into the conversation for me instead of just focusing on the two camps and where we're entrenched well and so much of the political debate world or anything that you're debating is about winning is about landing that blow and that's okay

Yeah, I like to win. And I think there are places that I'm a lawyer too. So I think there are places in a courtroom or hearing or whatever, like you like just kind of leaving that answer out there and you're like, yes, you know, like that was our job. That's what we're supposed to do. But we're not supposed to fight with everybody. My parents used to say, yes, you should be a lawyer because you like to argue about everything. You should be glad you didn't go into the law. There are ways that, right, there are ways that you can argue winsomely.

But there are those who will say, and you say in the book, that humility is seen as a sign of weakness in the political world. So I think about recent folks like Mike Pence and Tim Scott, and I know you know Tim Scott very well, but them leaving the presidential race, a lot of people thought they were sort of the quote-unquote good guys, the nice guys. Does that mean...

Listen, what the American voter rights now, what they want now is a fighter, somebody who will play dirty because they feel like the quote other side is going to play dirty. Is there room for nice people in politics?

I think it really depends on there's there's two there's a there's the spiritual element of just being loving and kind and loving your neighbor and your enemy and all the above all the things we've been talking about which changes the way that you engage but again there's also the wisdom of the political world and understanding where people are and I think

Again, Tim is truly one of my dearest friends and also somebody that I respect enormously. One area where I think that in his campaign he didn't ever hone in on, and this is probably because the Lord told him to be who he was and I honor him for that,

But I think that there was this latent anger and frustration in the party that didn't convey as though he or Mike Pence were able to tap into that and to understand it, to empathize with it, to sit with it and say, but here's a better way. It's almost like...

like in the law, I went to Georgetown Law School and one thing I learned in law school that I didn't learn in undergrad, which was really helpful, is how to make an argument by connecting A to B to C to D, every point along the way, so you don't arrive at a conclusion without meeting people where they are and taking them along the process to where you get to. And I

I feel like politics isn't really made for those kinds of conversations because when you're in a soundbite, like if I was having a conversation with Tim, he could walk me through and it would make total sense. And I get that he shares that sentiment, the concern that I have, but on a 30 second soundbite,

Nobody's interested in that and I think that's more of a reflection of where we are as a society and just wanting quick answers instead of sitting down and really understanding where people are and why they believe what they believe. So I just think that people like Pence and Senator Scott are just, they're such admirable people. I hold them in the highest regard. I do think also that

our electorate hasn't really thought about what the current path that we're on is doing to our nation, because I really believe that the division that we're really entrenched, this entrenched division, is actually more of an existential threat to our country and the unity that we're called to, both by our founding fathers and for me in Christ, than any external threat right now. And I think people aren't looking that far down the line. Yeah, I think some people...

are just trying to get through their daily life. They're trying to pay their rent, the food on the table, get their kids to school, that kind of thing. And so maybe, I think a lot of them have just tuned out. Like you talk about in the book, they've just said, this is so ugly and nothing is getting solved. And so like, I'm just, I'm out. And we see this with elections where there's such a small percentage of people who actually show up to vote on things of monumental value and importance.

And I'm always stunned by that because I see these countries around the world that don't have that freedom where they have elections, but they're clearly not clean, unrigged elections. And you think, what a gift and a privilege that we have to be able to voice our opinions, campaign if we want to, or just show up at that ballot box and vote.

cast our vote and make these decisions and the fact that we have such a huge part of our population that is so turned off by it or apathetic to it that they're just checked out and they're not even going to show up and vote. It's sad. It's actually something I just want to briefly mention. As a daughter of immigrants, I actually, I think one of the reasons I love America so much is because my mom, my mom's father, my grandfather was a general, a two-star general with Chiang Kai-shek.

And so he fought against the communists and he fought for these democratic ideals and freedoms that the communists would not allow when they took over China. So they had to flee to Taiwan when I was my mom was a child. And so my mother understands what it's like to live in a country where you don't have a say and where the government is God. And.

For her, she's the most patriotic person that I know because she appreciates so much the freedoms that we take for granted as Americans. And so does my father. He joined the U.S. Air Force. He enlisted at the age of 17 as a Canadian citizen to earn the privilege of becoming an American citizen. So God bless him. Yeah, he's so wonderful. He just passed away. God bless him indeed. But I learned everything that I know about life.

what I feel about America from the example they set in loving their country so well and serving. We'll have more Live in the Bream in a moment. Hi, everybody. It's Brian Kilmeade. I want you to join me weekdays at 9 a.m. East as we break down the biggest stories of the day with some of the biggest newsmakers and, of course, what you think. Listen live or get the podcast now at BrianKilmeadeShow.com.

I wanted to ask you about something else in the book, too, because this is something that, you know, we both probably run in some of the same circles with, you know, Christians who are out there trying to make a difference. And they're very divided over a number of candidates and issues these days, too. But this idea in your book that you talked about, that there were some people who clearly just saw Christians and evangelicals as kind of a voting block, like, eh, we'll tell them what they need to hear. They're not really going to have a lot of other options, so they'll vote for us.

And this worry that Christians are used as, especially evangelicals, are kind of used as political pawns. And I think that's why some of them have checked out because they get it now. They do feel used by different candidates and people. But others say they're more engaged than ever because they feel like, all right, I don't really care what this candidate's motivations are. If they're going to line up with what my worldview is, I can deal with the rest of it.

Yeah, I think maybe because I served a president, George W. Bush, who was internally and externally consistent in who he was, his faith shaped his policies. And so I knew that even if he made a mistake, it was really maybe

There was a deeper spiritual meaning to what he did. And you can be sincere and sincerely wrong sometimes. But I appreciate the sincerity of having the character to back up and form what your opinions are, because then I can trust you if I trust your character to make the right decisions, even when it's unpopular.

And so I have a chapter in my book called Wise as Serpents, which is derived from scripture. And it says, be innocent as doves and wise as serpents. And the reason I wrote that chapter, and it was actually kind of hard for me to write that chapter because I don't like thinking of

Christians as being people that are easily duped because we're smart and we have the mind of Christ and so we do have discernment but sometimes I think that when you don't know how to operate in a certain cultural realm because you're so immersed in the spiritual realm you become of no earthly use and sometimes you become a force for evil and I'm not saying that any Christians were so please don't get me wrong but sometimes you can be manipulated into being used for other people's intentions

And I've just seen so much of that in my time in politics where I've seen it's happened to me, where people have tried to manipulate me. I've had pastors drag me up on stages and tell their congregation that I'm like, you know, the golden child. And then all of a sudden they're putting words in my mouth about how I feel about different issues that are dear to them. And I just have to say that's not where I am. I mean, I agree with you in principle.

But how you got there is not why I got there. And it takes a lot of courage that I wish at times that I'd been stronger in when I was running for Congress. It's so uncomfortable to have to tell somebody, hey, I don't this is not the tone that I think Jesus would have wanted me to present. Jesus cares as much about our character as he does where we stand on the issues. And that's really why I wrote this book.

We have to show up internally consistent, and that externalizes in how we engage in politics. And at the end of the day, people are not going to remember what position you took on X, Y, or Z, but they will remember how you made them feel. And if you're bringing the love of God into that conversation, eventually that's going to be even more effective in politics if you're trying to convince someone to change their mind. So,

it's a big answer to a very directed question, but I do think that we do need to be wise in vetting our candidates. It's not always the fact that Christians are the best candidate for whatever it is. Being a Christian doesn't qualify you to be a great leader, but it is for me an important part of my consideration and then seeing how they live up to that standard in their lives before they get on a stage. Yeah. And it's like we always say, whether it's talking to somebody about spiritual things or political things, I,

I think few people would ever say, yes, the screaming really turned me around. The getting in my face and insulting me really convinced me. Turned on a light. Right, because then I thought, oh, I love your position. Yes, scream at me some more. That's great. Okay, again, the book is Politics for People Who Hate Politics, How to Engage Without Losing Your Friends or Selling Your Soul by Denise Grace Gitsum. It is a fascinating book, and you just may need it to get you through not only the holidays,

season right but going into 24 because it's gonna be a presidential year it's already ramped up and heated and don't let it discourage you don't let it divide your relationships people that you really love and care for in your life or if you're a person of faith as Denise and I are don't let it

muddy your servant heart or your attitude to serving other people or being what you're called to be, which is totally separate from politics. So with all of that in mind, thank you for joining us on Live in the Dream. It's been great to have you. Thank you so much, Shannon. God bless you. You too. Listen ad-free with a Fox News podcast plus subscription on Apple Podcasts and Amazon Prime members can listen to this show ad-free on the Amazon Music app.

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