Later today, Elizabeth Edwards will be buried in a cemetery near her son, Wade. She will be laid to rest after a very arduous journey, having traversed the death of a child, two presidential races, her husband’s affair and a recurrent cancer.

But before that, Elizabeth Edwards must attend church one last time: for her final ritual, her funeral.

CNN reported earlier today that besides family, friends, and members of the public who want to pay their last respects, protesters from Westboro Baptist Church plan to picket outside the event. The church protests at celebrity and military funerals in order to forward its anti-gay, anti-mainline Christian, anti-Semitic, and anti-a-whole-bunch-of-other-things agenda.

I am not interested in talking about the stance of the church or its members this morning. Rather, I want to use this space to raise the larger issue of civility. Put differently, I might ask: “Is a woman’s funeral—attended by her children—really the moment for a protest like this one?”

Sixty or seventy years ago, the answer would have been obvious: It’s not appropriate. But a host of events in the latter half of the 20th century have made our society very comfortable with expressing its opinions.
Perhaps a little too comfortable.

As professors Guy and Heidi Burgess, Co-Directors of the University of Colorado’s Conflict Research Consortium write:

“The increasingly vocal campaign for civility in public discourse reflects an understandable and widespread frustration with the current tenor of political debate.”

Burgess and Burgess go on to suggest certain ways in which public discourse could be made more civil, including a willingness to be persuaded and an emphasis on logical persuasion over sheer force. Their suggestions seem reasonable: if we were to listen more, perhaps be a little less defensive, there might be greater civility in the public arena.

So why don’t we do that?

One reason might be that our society is so fast-moving that we need quick sound bytes to summarize the meat of discussions we don’t have time to digest (apologies for the metaphor, vegetarians!). A majority of us just don’t have the time to read a whole news article, so we’re far more likely to read just the headline or opening sentence than—ergo, kudos if you’ve read this far. So we need things to be easy, accessible, and quick. In other words, it’s much simpler it to comprehend the meaning of a headline that says, “Sarah Palin Hates Color Pink” as opposed to, “Sarah Palin Thinks Pink Does Not Flatter Her Coloring But Appreciates It On Others Especially Reese Witherspoon But Only If Hew Is Rose, Not Salmon.”

Reason number two: Sensationalism. Along with our fast pace comes such a glut of information that stories cease to catch our interest unless they’re different or more extreme than what came before. Just as movies that once seemed glamorous or technologically advanced now seem trite and technologically primitive—enter Titanic—so we expect today’s news to be more unbelievable, exploitative, and scandalous than yesterday’s.

What is the solution? In the theological world, we talk a lot about discernment, the process of careful, deep listening that allows a person to hear the still, small voice of God that gets muffled by the world’s cacophony. Regardless of a person’s religious beliefs, perhaps a stance of constant and continual discernment could help us as a society to slow down a bit and consider the deeper meaning of a pop culture event or political stance. Maybe by so doing it would make us all slower to anger, filled with just a bit more kindness.

In response to the protests scheduled for Elizabeth Edwards’s funeral, Susan Burcham and Ben Requena scheduled a counter-protest. Their picture of success: headlines that read, “Elizabeth Edwards quietly laid to rest.”