By Aaron Van Voorhis, Pastor at Central Avenue Church, Pasadena, CA
As we head into the holidays, many of us will soon gather around tables with family and friends we don’t see very often. And let’s be honest, some of those family members may hold much more conservative views about faith, politics, or the world in general. Those moments can feel strained, stressful, and at times downright exhausting.
So how do we navigate these holiday interactions without wanting to strangle someone over the Thanksgiving table?
I want to offer a perspective that has helped me approach these moments with more compassion, grace, and sanity.
Conservatives and Liberals Don’t All Think the Same. Literally.
One of the hardest truths I’ve had to accept is this:
Not everyone has the same psychological, emotional, or even neurological capacity for questioning their closest-held beliefs.
Some people simply aren’t built to peel back the layers of their worldview, reconsider long-held assumptions, or adopt new ways of seeing the world. It requires a specific kind of temperament: curious, self-reflective, and willing to live with ambiguity. Not everyone has that.
Recent research even shows that liberals and conservatives exhibit different patterns of brain activity. A 2022 Ohio State University study looked at brain scans of people taken while they performed various tasks and could accurately predict whether they were politically conservative or liberal. In fact, even when participants were asked to sit quietly and think of nothing in particular, the resulting scans showed a relationship to political ideology.
Although brain activity from all eight tasks offered clues about participants’ political leanings, three stood out as especially telling. One involved assessing empathy by showing people images of individuals expressing different emotions—neutral, joyful, sad, or afraid. Another focused on episodic memory. The third was a reward-based activity in which participants could gain or lose money depending on how fast they responded with a button press. The study found:
Liberals/progressives show greater activation in the prefrontal cortex, the region associated with empathy, complex thinking, and flexible problem-solving.
Conservatives show greater activation in the amygdala, our “lizard brain,” which is wired for processing threats, fear, and anxiety.
When someone is primarily processing the world through the amygdala, they tend to:
crave certainty
think in black-and-white categories
prioritize authority and social hierarchy
fear difference and ambiguity
prefer rigid structures that feel “safe”
When you try to debate someone who sees the world this way, it can feel like trying to explain calculus to a five-year-old (not because they’re unintelligent, but because their brain is literally working differently and looking at the world differently).
Once I understood this, it opened up a new door for compassion.
The Trouble With Over-Identifying With Our Beliefs
Before we get too smug about our own capacities for empathy and complexity, we need to recognize that all of us can over-identify with our beliefs. When someone challenges what we hold to be true, it’s easy to feel personally attacked.
It’s human.
When this happens, our ego steps into the driver’s seat. We stop listening. We stop learning. We become the mirror image of the very rigidity we’re reacting against.
That’s why it’s so important not to ground our identity in labels like “Christian,” “post-Christian,” “progressive,” “Democrat,” “independent” or whatever, but instead in higher virtues:
Love
Compassion
Curiosity about others and the world
Truth-seeking
Identities can be helpful. They give us language for where we belong. But when our ego fuses to those identities, we lose the ability to remain open and playful with new ideas.
Why Some of Us Deconstructed and Others Can’t
I often reflect on why many of us found ourselves drawn into deconstruction while people in our own families didn’t. Yes, environment matters. Yes, our experiences shape us. But I’ve come to believe that something deeper was at work from the very beginning.
When I look back on my childhood, I can see I was always wired for seeking truth, philosophy, and ideas that challenged me. Even though I grew up conservative and evangelical, something in me couldn’t help but question, explore, and open myself to other perspectives.
This didn’t happen because I moved to Los Angeles (despite what my family might think).
My deconstruction actually began in Nashville, in the buckle of the Bible Belt, at an evangelical university, studying the Bible.
The real catalyst wasn’t geography.
It was how my brain works, my temperament, my psychology.
And the same is true for many of you.
You’re here, exploring a community like Central Avenue Church, because something in you resonates with empathy, curiosity, justice, and compassion. You’re what I like to call empathetic intellectuals: people who think deeply and feel deeply. Not everyone is wired that way.
So when your family members “don’t get you,” it’s not necessarily because they won’t.
It’s because, in some profound sense, they can’t.
“Father, Forgive Them, for They Know Not What They Do”
These words from Jesus reveal something radical about human nature: We are not the fully conscious, freely choosing individuals we imagine ourselves to be.
We are shaped by:
our upbringing
our environment
our culture
our brain chemistry
the stories we inherited
People often don’t know why they do what they do.
Honestly, we rarely know why we do what we do.
So how much less can we expect total self-awareness from the person across the table who grew up in a completely different world?
When Jesus says, “They know not what they do,” he’s naming the unconscious self, the mystery within each of us. Recognizing this can free us from the tyranny of anger. It helps us see others not as monsters, but as limited human beings, just as limited as we are, but in different ways.
And that simple shift makes compassion possible.
A Holiday Practice for Staying Sane
I want to end by revisiting a meditation that someone named Jason from our congregation recently shared with our community. It’s one I’ve been praying myself.
It’s a simple loving kindness prayer:
May I be free from suffering.
May I be free from ill will.
May I be filled with loving kindness.
May I be truly happy.
And then we extend that same blessing outward—even (especially) toward the people who drive us the most crazy (for me, it’s my brother Nathan). So that might sound like:
May Nathan be free from suffering.
May Nathan be free from ill will.
May Nathan be filled with loving-kindness.
May Nathan be truly happy.
Who in your family needs that prayer from you this holiday season?
May We Lead With Empathy
We may not be able to change our family members.
We may not be able to reason them out of their worldview. And we definitely can’t rewire their brains.
But we can adjust the posture of our own hearts.
We can choose compassion over contempt.
Curiosity over combativeness.
Understanding over anger.
Love over fear.
Because at the end of the day, we’re all just human beings who are mysterious, complicated, limited, and beloved, trying to make sense of the world as best we can.
May you go into this holiday season grounded in love, steadied by compassion, and anchored in peace.