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Years ago, my father taught me something about neighborliness that took a long time to take root in my own life.
When I was a teenager, the father of one of my classmates (who lived nearby) was running for local office on the ticket of the party my family never voted for. So I was surprised one day to come home and see a campaign sign for my friend’s father in our yard. But it turned out that my friend’s father simply had asked my father if he could place one of his signs in our yard, and my father had said yes. Being a hospitable neighbor was more important to my father than partisan politics or a campaign sign.
Now, all these years later, this particular lesson in neighborliness is something I’ve come to apply in my own life in a slightly different way.
Often, when we talk about loving our neighbors, we are thinking in the abstract. Perhaps we are thinking about loving neighbors on a global scale—those who live far from us, whom we encounter on short-term mission trips and exotic vacations, or fill shoe boxes for at Christmas time, or learn about on missions Sunday when we put money into a special offering. And loving our neighbors can be all these things. But just as “all politics is local,” so, in a sense, is all neighborliness local, too.
I inherited my father’s keen interest in politics. Over the course of my life, I have attended campaign rallies, canvassed door-to-door for a candidate, slapped bumper stickers on my car, worn buttons, and even run for office myself. And as soon as I became a homeowner, I also put up campaign signs on my property.
When my husband and I moved to our current home 25 years ago, each fall still found me putting up those signs on our front lawn. It took me a long time to notice that our immediate neighbors did not.
Almost all of our half dozen or more immediate neighbors were already living here when we moved in. They are all still here. That’s a lot of history, a lot of tradition, a lot of heritage.
And our neighborhood is anything but homogenous. Our house is the oldest in the neighborhood. Other houses of various sizes and styles have popped up here and there over the past century, some built decades ago, others still being built. Our neighborhood has large new homes, small doublewides, and lots of modest brick ranches. Like their homes, the people who live in them represent just about every demographic box one might be asked to check. Indeed, the diversity of our little rural corner of the country could rival the hippest of urban neighborhoods.
Back then, politics seemed black and white to me—I really believed one party was all about law and order and morality, and the other one was not. Then, I didn’t think twice about putting my campaign sign in the yard with its face peering over at my neighbors, whose very lives—as I would slowly learn over the years—had been harmed and hurt in measurable and lasting ways by some of that party’s policies.
But I would eventually learn these things as our neighbors let us into their lives more and more and we let them into ours. We didn’t have much in common with any of our neighbors at first, other than living in the same neighborhood. We all had our own schedules and were in different stages of life.
But over the years, chats at the mailbox led to invitations to family celebrations and shared holiday meals. After I admired one neighbor’s climbing vine on her mailbox, she planted a similar one next to ours. Another neighbor loved my lilies, so I invited her to come over and dig some up for her yard. When one neighbor grew sick, the rest of us checked in with his spouse. When another neighbor died, my husband took over mowing the lawn of his widow. When another neighbor died, someone else in the neighborhood took over their mowing. When we lose an old tree, we call another neighbor, who cuts up the wood to burn in his family’s woodstove.
Over the years, through all these exchanges of neighborliness, I gradually learned more about my neighbors’ histories and their ancestors’ histories. I learned the history of our neighborhood—how some people faced injustice and evil, and how others overcame evil with good.
I wondered if any of those campaign signs felt like a slap in the face to my neighbors. If so, they never let on.
Let me be clear: I am not making any argument here about putting up or not putting up campaign signs. Travel to either end of our long country road, and you will find some. (Here in my neck of the woods, only one party tends to be represented. And that’s okay, too.) There is nothing wrong or inherently unneighborly in advertising one’s favored candidates for office.
Rather, my reflections are about how I learned over a long time to be a better neighbor in my own particular neighborhood, among a handful of particular families with whom I have (or had) little in common besides sharing this space, seeing each other day by day as we collect mail, wash cars, weed the flower beds, feel alarm at the occasional sight of an ambulance in the drive, or share reports of the latest bear sighting or stray dog.
Every neighborhood has a different character. Every neighbor has a different story and set of experiences. When I finally learned more of those things about my community, and observed more about how they live and have lived, I wanted to be a better neighbor to them in this small way of not creating a barrier with a sign.
And hopefully I am a better neighbor in much bigger ways, too—as they are to me.
A campaign sign can signify so much and yet so little in comparison to the ordinary exchanges and camaraderie between neighbors. It took me a long time, but I came to realize that I don’t want a printed piece of polypropylene to come between me and these people I’ve grown to know better and love more just in being neighbors. I’m grateful my father taught me that lesson so long ago.
Karen Swallow Prior, author of The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis, is a columnist at Religion News Service and writes regularly on Substack at The Priory.
