• A professor at Citrusville College near Los Angeles twisted students’ arms to write protest letters to the White House. Students got extra credit for opposing the war, but no credit for supporting it.

• A mall in Albany had a man arrested for trespassing because he wouldn’t remove a “Peace on Earth” T-shirt, and a Dearborn, Mich., high school student was sent home for wearing an anti-Bush shirt.

If you said they involved controversy over war against Iraq, you’d be right, but that’s not what I have in mind. If you said they involve violations of the American principle of free speech, you’d be right again, and you’d be closer to what I have in mind — but still a ways away.

The free-speech issue is a serious one, of course. Happily, these transgressions against it didn’t stand up to pressure for long. The Citrusville professor was suspended after her policies were brought to administration attention by the free-speech group FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which just released a series of books — all downloadable online — that show students how to defend their rights). The Albany mall quickly dropped charges.

But I think the fact that they happened at all reflects something more widespread, and more disturbing. Though the issue of war always inflames passions, it's only magnifying tendencies that are already widespread in our culture, and especially on campus.

Though everyone hails tolerance and civility in theory, you can't help noticing how quickly many folk also demonize their opponents. Many leftists, as I’ve written before, routinely resort to name-calling: racist, sexist, homophobe. Many right-wingers have their own epithets which they throw around pretty loosely: pinko at one time, anti-American these days. Left, right or otherwise, this is a perennial temptation for all of us. In our better moments we know it’s simplistic, but it’s just much easier to dismiss the people we disagree with than to engage them and their arguments. We’re good, they’re evil, and that’s that.

Christians should be the first to see what's wrong with this attitude.

The problem isn’t that there’s no such thing as good or evil (there is) or that one side in a conflict might not be morally better than another side (it might). The problem is that people, individually or collectively, make poor embodiments of either good or evil. Especially good.

As columnist Joseph Sobran points out in a perceptive essay called “Where to Look for Evil,” "Moral standards are absolute; but human fidelity to them is always relative."

Christians don’t just believe that evil is “out there;” they believe it’s in every human heart, the result of Original Sin. They believe that the first need of every human being is divine mercy and forgiveness; our first duty is to repent, not to condemn: “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” That is not moral relativism, but the very opposite: humility.

That word humility is the key. The first and foremost reason we need it is for our own sake: The whole Christian life rests on recognizing the need for daily repentance and forgiveness. The more righteous I feel — or the more I like to concentrate on the other guy's unrighteousness (so much worse, invariably, than my own) — the further I get from my Savior. Satan, of course, would love me to feel as righteous as possible. When I do, he's got me right where he wants me.

Beyond that, though, humility is the attitude that does justice to a truly righteous cause. And pride, in whatever form it emerges (cockiness, arrogance, affected superiority), does a disservice to that cause.

When I was in college I wrote for a conservative campus paper which delighted in mocking our opposition. I was as into that as anyone; like a lot of young men, I liked a good fight. Mind you, I think we did some good; we equipped readers with valuable information and arguments they wouldn't otherwise have had. But I wonder how many people we needlessly alienated on those occasions when we crossed the line between legitimate satire (the kind mainly concerned with making a point) and just plain sneering. We might've made more converts if we'd restrained the impulse to take a few gratuitous shots.

By contrast, some of the most effective people for good causes are the ones who confess their sins. Pro-life activists include women who've had abortions, and even men — like former abortionist Bernard Nathanson — who've been complicit in them as well. Opponents of homosexuality include people who've formerly practiced it, like the members of Exodus International and speakers in Focus on the Family's Love Won Out ministry.

A big part of what makes such people persuasive is in large part their experience. But another big part is their lack of pretentiousness. No one can mistake them for Pharisees denouncing others for sins with the self-righteous zeal of men who don't feel personally guilty of the same sins. And while not all of us have committed those particular sins, we're all no less sinners. That's Jesus' point in the Sermon on the Mount: At heart, we're all guilty of murder, adultery and all the other offenses covered by the Ten Commandments. If people who've had abortions and practiced homosexuality can confess and repent, the rest of us have no less cause to do the same.

Knowing that shouldn't make us softer on the sins; far from it. It shouldn’t prevent us from taking some pretty strong shots at bad ideas — even, from time to time, sarcastic shots (as Jesus, the prophets and the apostles all did).

But it should influence the way we treat our fellow sinners. We don't shout them down. We don’t revel in our supposed superiority. We treat them with respect. We remind ourselves that even if they’re wrong on some (or many) points, they may still have something valuable to say — maybe even something that hasn’t occurred to us.

It’s amazing how far that kind of approach can go. I once knew an agnostic student named Todd, who was thoroughly convinced that Christianity was mere mythology. Todd agreed with Christians on just one major point: He opposed abortion, strongly. By virtue of doing pro-life work with Christian students who treated him with respect and friendliness, he eventually started to wonder if perhaps there might not be something to their faith as well. Sure enough, before he was done with college, Todd was a Christian.

Know anyone like Todd? By all means, feel free to challenge him, to engage him in discussion or debate. But above all, treat him right. Scoring debating points sometimes does matter; saving souls always matters more.