When I was a teenager, maybe fourteen or fifteen years old, I had a friend who had a bit of a religious epiphany. He hadn’t been a particularly religious person before that, at least not as far as I had ever seen. One day we were sitting at a lunch table at school, and he began to ask me questions.

Did I go to church?

Had I read the Bible?

Did I believe in God?

I think I realized later that he was going down a list he had been instructed to use, because it certainly had a rehearsed feeling about it. My answers didn’t really matter, because the only thing I think he cared about was getting to the part where he asked me to go to his church. Before I answered, I quizzed him a little, and discovered that he’d been invited to a youth fellowship about six weeks earlier, and it had really struck a nerve with him. He had seen the light and wanted everyone else to bask in it as well.

I told him I wasn’t interested in going to his church, and besides, at that point, I didn’t get to make decisions like that, my parents did, which is why I went to church with them instead of staying home to watch cartoons and read comic books.

So my friend told me I was going to hell and was going to burn in a lake of fire forever.

This seemed mean-spirited, to say the least.

I pointed out that I went to church with my parents, and he said it didn’t matter because HIS CHURCH WAS THE ONLY ONE THAT HAD GOTTEN THE INTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLE RIGHT.

Well. I’d like to say that he toned down the rhetoric after that, but any time the issue came up, he continued to tell me I was going to burn in hell forever, despite that fact that this sales pitch had failed to work the previous thirty times he’d used it.

Which brings me to the election—well, to the people who voted differently than you, I guess.

You’re probably well aware that some people voted for Trump or for Clinton, just as others voted against Trump or against Clinton. There are probably hundreds of different reasons why people voted the way they did, and we’ll probably never really understand them all, but one thing’s for certain: if you didn’t like the way somebody voted this time, you’re not going to change his or her mind by attacking them.

Don’t be confused. I’m not saying you shouldn’t speak out against horrible people or horrible things, but if you use the political equivalent of telling them they’re going to hell because you’re the only one who has it all figured out, nothing will change. I’ve never had someone call me a piece of shit, or the equivalent, and then thought to myself, “Wow, what a good point. You’ve certainly changed my mind on that issue.” What has changed my mind is when someone shows me how my actions have a negative impact on someone else. I know there are people out there who won’t change their mind for anything, but there are a lot of people who act the way they do because they are ignorant of the fact that they are hurting other people.

An example from my own life is that when I was much younger, I suppose I had a negative view of people with mental illness, even if it wasn’t a particularly far-out viewpoint at the time. It’s so easy to dismiss someone as crazy or to expect them to just “get it together.” In my job, however, I’ve worked with students who have mental health issues, and when I was first starting out as a teacher, I had a wise staff member make an observation that changed how I saw people with mental illness and how I saw myself. Of a struggling student, he said, “If that person had cancer, would you dismiss them as not trying hard enough to get better?”

It was a revelation. My friend managed to make me understand that I was wrong without making me feel like I was being attacked. His willingness to take a moment to try and help me change my point of view made a big difference in how I see other people. He made me see that I was looking at those people in a way that was wrong-headed and thoughtless. A rewiring took place in my brain.

If we want things to change, maybe we need to find ways to make our point without defaulting to name-calling or trying to shame those with opposing views. Maybe we need to help others see things from a totally different perspective, and when we do so, we can learn to see things from their perspective, too.