It's actually very easy to believe your own small town or local religious community is an isolated pocket of "sanity" in a hedonistic liberal world. Outside of your immediate surroundings, how do you know how "people do things" in other parts of the world, or country, or state? Even traveling only exposes you to brief, touristy glimpses of restaurant workers and World's Biggest quirky statues. If you haven't actually lived in those places, you're probably mostly depending on TV to tell you about their daily life.

I realize Hollywood's ham-fisted attempts to be PC and woke have always been comically backwards to actual progressive people, but to someone who's never lived outside a small conservative community, it would seem like a gritty, realistic glimpse into the liberal-ruled godless world out there.

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While TV's treatment of gay people has often caricatured them and ignored any discrimination or difficulty in their lives, to someone who's never seen "a gay," it reveals that outside of their town, the gays are "everywhere" and rich and celebrated and any complaints of discrimination must be laughable lies. Hollywood has somehow found that happy medium where they can screw with both actual gay people and homophobes simultaneously.

Hollywood may also give some inaccurate ideas about sex frequency in the wider world. Every non-religious liberal person out there is not actually having sex with a different person every day, at least because of availability issues if not moral or pragmatic ones.

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And finally, pretty much every overtly Christian person in TV/movies is a self-righteous moron. (This is fair as it applies to me but I have friends who deserve better.) This is pretty good at reinforcing the idea that your own local religious community is a tiny safe oasis in a dark world that hates you. It's hard to grasp there are massive community-dominating megachurches all over the country if they never appear in the worlds you immerse yourself in for hours every day (often more hours than the real one outside your door).

Even a miniscule amount of negativity goes a long way -- for all of us. I've seen people on Twitter (from all parts of the political spectrum) complain about being swarmed with angry replies, and looked to see one or two negative replies dwarfed by tons of support. I won't judge them. We all filter out the well-wishers and stress out over the one guy that hates us. We're all self-destructive idiots in that way.

It's ego suicide. Nobody's going to respond, "That's great, you're making progress!" They're going to be, "YESTERDAY you thought black people were born dumber?" Which is fair, but intimidating.

What you do is you very quietly delete any public posts you've made referencing The Bell Curve and never ever make that argument again in any race discussions. You just play it real cool, like you've been enlightened all along.

The problem with this is that everybody who's an LGBT ally (for example) has this pressure to pretend they've always been an LGBT ally. It's hard to say things like, "Now I correct people on Twitter for adding an -ed to 'transgender' but just six years ago I used 'tranny' as a punchline!" That means people who are in the process of rethinking their bigotry feel like it's a huge, maybe insurmountable leap to cross to the other side, when probably tons of people right around them have slowly floated over without ever making a peep. It would probably be a more appealing journey if it was known to be a super common and chill one, and not a daredevil Evel Knievel jump across a chasm that only one man is known to have survived, and that man eats his meals through a straw now.

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When people argue on social media or on forums, it's so easy to think the only people involved are the people posting. In fact, there's (usually) a larger number of people just watching. And only they, and Twitter or Facebook or Google analytics' invasive tracking, know they're there.

When someone I disagree with blows apart the argument of some random stranger on my side, it's not me they're responding to, and it's not my reputation on the line. I don't have to worry about hurt feelings or embarrassment or the demolishing of an argument I worked hard on. Someone else takes that hit and I get to devote more of my brain to the actual point being made. If I'm slightly less racist or abrasive than the guy arguing my side, I can even console myself that I wouldn't have been yelled at like he was because "I'm not like him, I'm one of the reasonable ones."

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The other factor I'm watching for is what I call "who is the real asshole?" If the guy on my side is being so rude even I'm put off, and the godless liberal refuting him is being super polite and patient, it makes me rethink the good and evil narrative. Sure, I may just move to, "These are very nice people, but just mistaken," but I'll be more receptive to listening to nice, mistaken people in the future, which will give them a bigger opening to further change my mind.

Again, this would not work if you gave me an article or told me about a friend who experienced these things, in rebuttal to me. "You said it's easy for poor people to move -- well just look at this lady's story!" Delete. My defense would be up, because it's framed as an example to show why I'm wrong. If it had just come up as "Here's some crazy thing that happened to me today" while we are just chilling and not discussing any big issue, it would get right past my defenses. You are my friend who had a crazy misadventure, not "Welfare Queen Stereotype Shattering Story Number Five!"

One thing I remember is another Christian telling me that the Bible mentions the poor 300 times and homosexuality seven times or something, which is a bit backwards from standard "religious right" priorities. It really made me rethink where I should be investing my social activism as a genuine Christian and switched my mindset away from "legislate morality" to "protect the vulnerable."

Non- or less-religious people may say, "But I use Bible quotes all the time to tell religious people they are wrong and it doesn't work." Of course it doesn't. I never listened to that kind of argument from someone who didn't actually believe in the Bible, because what is this, some kind of game to you? You think you found some loophole in my Dungeons And Dragons rule book? You don't believe the quote you are throwing at me, but you think I am dumb enough to fall for it because I am dumb enough to do whatever my magic book says. This is not a good setup for a cooperative response.

SaeKawaii/Pixabay

But when other Christians tell me there's something in the Bible that contradicts what I think, I'll take a look, because they really think there's something real there, not like an overlooked loophole in my spellbook that will give them power over me or whatever.

So here's a sneaky suggestion: For those who know some people who are "bad" on lots of issues but "good" on one or two, you don't have to give those people a medal or approve of them but if you don't completely burn that bridge, you can help bring THAT person into contact with a worse person ("bad" on everything) and get the worse person to evolve a step (when they wouldn't have listened to you).