In my recent Newsweek column, I described the sadness that hit me on Election Day morning when I saw angry groups gesturing angrily to each other as they waved signs for and against the California referendum on same-sex marriage. Since that column appeared, I have seen hundreds of responses to my plea for a civil discussion of the issue, some of them modeling the civility I asked for, and others from folks who continue to wave the signs in anger.

Jake from Chicago is one of the sign-wavers. On his blog he expresses his rage over the fact that Newsweek failed to print his letter criticizing me. Actually, “criticizing” is a weak description in this case. Jake uses two nouns to describe me. I won’t repeat the second one in this space, but here’s a hint: it is a compound noun beginning with “a.” The first is more printable: Jake says I am a “solipsist.”

At first I wondered how Jake knew enough about me to describe me in such specific terms. Then it occurred to me that there was a Jake that I knew in high school in New Jersey who also liked to refer to me with the “a” word. The Jake who is presently quite angry with me is from Chicago, but we all move around a lot these days. Anyway, if it is the same Jake, I take some delight in discovering that he has expanded his vocabulary. The kid I knew in New Jersey would not have been voted “Most Likely to Discover What ‘Solipsist’ Means.”

For those who may not be as versed in philosophical terminology as the present Jake, a solipsist is someone who believes that he or she is the only person that exists—everyone else is a figment of the solipsist’s imagination. One of my favorite philosophical jokes was told by Bertrand Russell, who had mentioned in a BBC interview that sometimes he was tempted to endorse solipsism. A woman wrote to Russell and told him that she was pleased to hear about his attraction to that perspective. She was a convinced solipsist, she said, and was comforted to know that there might be another one around!

In his anger toward me, Jake has actually stumbled on an important social problem. As a metaphysical theory, solipsism is not very plausible. But many of us do fall into a pattern on occasion of a kind of functional solipsism. We act like we are the only ones who have genuine experiences, and we treat others as less than real persons. That was the problem I was trying to address in my column. On both sides of the current angry exchanges over same-sex marriage, there are real people with genuine hopes and fears. It would be a good beginning in working for the common good if we could at least hear each other in talking together about our concerns. The responses to my Newsweek column have convinced me even more that such a conversation is extremely difficult. I for one, however, will struggle against the temptation to retreat into a functional solipsism on the subject. And if Jake is willing to talk calmly, I will even ignore his previous use of the “a” word!

On February 4, I told a friend in Washington DC that I would be attending the National Prayer Breakfast the next morning. He suggested that I write something about being “a Calvinist at the National Prayer Breakfast.” (One of my books is entitled Calvinism in the Las Vegas Airport.)

It was an intriguing suggestion, and I did keep it in mind as I sat the next morning in the large banquet room at the Washington Hilton. The prayers and readings, and especially the moving speeches by both featured speakers, Tony Blair and President Obama, were well-crafted, highly nuanced treatments of faith in public life. Neither of them could be accused of following a simple-minded “civil religion” line. Each of them was speaking as a committed Christian to a more general audience, and indeed to a more general culture, in which they were appealing beyond the community shaped by their—and my—Christian convictions. They were calling people of good will to work together for the common good.

There I sat, then—seated next to a Muslim mufti from Libya—as a Calvinist who was asking what John Calvin would have thought about what I was seeing and hearing. And the fact is that some of the Reformer’s pronouncements would have supported the pleas of Blair and Obama. Calvin could use quite positive terms to describe the moral and civic capacities of humanity in general. Sin does not destroy our shared social nature, he tells us: “there exist in all men’s minds universal impressions of a certain civic fair dealing and order. Hence no man is to be found who does not understand that every sort of human organization must be regulated by laws, and who does not comprehend the principles of those laws.” We do well, then, to celebrate the “many gifts the Lord left to human nature even after it was despoiled of its true good.”

But Calvin could quickly turn to more negative assessments. While people in general do understand the principles of civic fairness, he quickly adds that the human mind “limps and staggers” in its pursuit of the good life. In people whose hearts have not been transformed by Christ, he says, the civic “virtues are so sullied that before God they lose all favor,” so that anything in them “that appears praiseworthy must be considered worthless.”

In his biography of John Calvin, the Berkeley historian William Bouwsma saw this kind of tension in the Reformer as evidence for “two Calvins,” one with broad “humanist” sensitivities and the other obsessed with the need for drawing strict boundaries. As I sat at the National Prayer Breakfast, the more generous Calvinist loomed large for me. The other Calvin was not completely absent, though. I allowed him to issue his warnings. But this time around, I celebrated the display of civic virtue as I rose with the rest of the crowd in a standing ovation to each of the featured speakers.