Future of Conflict #4: Speaking of Faith

This week I read Krista Tippet’s Speaking of Faith. The central questions of her book — to my eyes — were “Why is spirituality suddenly everywhere?” and “What can we learn from our yearning for religion?”

The premise is that even though religious attendance and belief in God have been declining, 80% of people in the US still believe in God.

The idea that God was just going to “go away” (or should) turned out to be wrong. Guilty! I thought that for years.

“It would be so much easier to reason with people if they could just drop the whole ‘God thing’ and move on!”

That particular cognitive error is called desirability bias.

Because we are here as conflict transformers, and our mandate is to use conflict productively, at every scale, my question is reading the book was:

“How we can use religious conflict productively?”

Krista puts it like this:

What most of us surely want, whether we are religious or not, is for the religious voice in our public life to be more constructive [and] reflect the capacity religion has to nourish lives and communities.

I got some answers, and grouped my learnings into two major themes:

1. What we lose by dismissing religion (the perils of conflict avoidance and desirability bias)
2. How to talk to people about religion (or vaccine skepticism or anything else you can’t comprehend)

Lets’ dive in. 🤿

What We Lose By Dismissing Religion

I got three things from Krista on this topic:

• There are things science isn’t good at and religion is
• Values that encourage social good
• The moderating influence of moderates

The book begins with an emphasis on what science and religion have in common: They are both about asking difficult questions, and they are both motivated by an impenetrable mystery.

After interviewing numerous professional scientists who also have a rich “inner life”, Krista concludes:

Science, like religion, is about questions more than answers—questions and more questions that meet every new answer as soon as it is hatched. It’s not so much true that science and religion reach different answers on the same questions of human life, which is how our cultural debate has defined the rift between them. Far more often, they simply ask different kinds of questions altogether, and the responses they generate together illuminate human life more completely than either could do alone.

I got this point from reading Ken Wilber’s book Quantum Questions years ago: Science and Religion (or Poetry) have different modes of inquiry and are applicable to different domains. This is good.

We don’t have to entertain Biblical laws about public health because we can do better with science. But when it comes to metaphysical, moral, aesthetic, existential, and subjective questions, we might need another way to approach them.

I mean, it might be better if we could stop asking those questions, and if so much didn’t depend on them. But we can’t. And it does.

The physicist and theologian John Polkinghorne tells Krista:

Science treats the world as an object, something you could put to the test, pull apart, and find out what it’s made of. And, of course, that’s a very interesting thing to do, and you learn some important things that way.

But we know that there are whole realms of human experience where, first of all, testing has to give way to trusting. That’s true in human relationships. If I’m always setting little traps to see if you’re my friend, I’ll destroy the possibility of friendship between us.

And also where we have to treat things in their wholeness, in their totality. I mean, a beautiful painting—a chemist could take that beautiful painting, analyze every scrap of paint on the canvas, tell you what its chemical composition was, and would incidentally destroy the painting by doing that—but would have missed the point of the painting, because that’s something you can only encounter in its totality. So we need complementary ways of looking at the world.

This is not a dis on science, Krista says. The longing for religion is another need entirely:

The spiritual energy of our time as I’ve come to understand it, is not a rejection of the rational disciplines by which we’ve ordered our common life for many decades — law, politics, economics, science. It is, rather, a realization that these disciplines have a limited scope.

They can’t ask ultimate questions of morality and meaning. We can construct factual accounts and systems from DNA, gross national product, legal code, but they don’t begin to tell us how to order our astonishments, what matters in a life, what matters in death, how to love, how we can be of service to each other.

These are the kinds of questions religion arose to address and religious traditions are keepers of conversation across generations about them.

Her claim is that we need the questions that religion answers, even if we don’t need the religion itself.

The second point is that most religious values are common-sense morality, and common-sense morality is very helpful in a democracy. Since I read Moral Tribes a couple of weeks ago, this argument landed really well on me.

As a reminder, one of the main points in Moral Tribes is that we evolved our moral sensibilities and codes (many of which hang out in religious containers) to counteract selfish behavior in our early group life.

(Obviously, we still need some encouragement in that regard.)

Some of you are thinking, “Dude! What about the extreme religious shit that continues to cause so much harm?” Hold on, we’ll get there in theme two.

I found two interesting historical tidbits here.

The first was how:

…until the early twentieth century, biblically conservative Christians were as likely to be engaged in causes of social justice as of personal morality.

This includes farmer-labor union organizing, Christian socialism, and decrying the evils of selfish individualism. The modern split between the “social justice religious left” and “conservative Christians” apparently happened when:

…as the century progressed, a more theologically liberal Christianity picked up the mantle of social justice and defended it with critical biblical scholarship, altogether questioning the transcendent power of God. This specter, compounded by economic depression and war in the world, led conservative Protestants to begin to concentrate less on saving society and more on saving souls.

Damn, major fail on the part of the Left! Could had all those religious homies on your side! Too bad.

The second is from De Toqueville’s Democracy in America (1835):

Religion in America takes no part in the government of society, but it must be regarded as the first of their political institutions. I do not know whether all Americans have a sincere, faith and religion, for who can search the human heart? But I am certain they hold it to be indispensable to the maintenance of Republican institutions. This opinion is not peculiar to a class of citizens or to a party, but it belongs to the whole nation into every rank of society.

The promised land for Krista — rather than waiting for that hallowed day when everybody gives up on God and religion — is when religion once again takes no part in the government of society, and instead underlies our sense of community and responsibility with another, as well as providing a vehicle for the inner yearnings of the soul.

The third point — the moderating influence of moderates — has both positive and negative reinforcement. Here’s the positive version:

The reasoned and moderate Muslim center will not be secular, nor will the Christian, Hindu, Mormon, or Jewish center. [Moderation] does not mean denying the importance of religion in human life. It means inviting and enabling the devout to bring the best of their tradition to bear in the world.

If you can accept that religion is here to stay, then the right thing to do is to get the religious people to bring the best parts of their culture to the table.

I recently came to a similar conclusion with British food. For a long time I just thought it would be entirely be replaced with Indian food, but recently I had this buttery shortbread thing, and I was like, “Damn, that’s edible, we should get more British people to make shit like that”.

The negative version is much more, well, negative. Because moderates are moderate and extremists are extremists, moderates will obey when you deny them access to the conversation, but extremists won’t.

Here’s an example Krista gives with respects to the Oslo peace process:

My Palestinian and Israeli conversation partners have told me with one voice that the Oslo peace process failed in part because it attempted to bracket out religious instincts on all sides of the conflict. This only succeeded in marginalizing moderate religious voices.

Religious extremists insert themselves into the process in the Holy Land and elsewhere whether they are invited or not. To regret and ignore the volatile role of religion in the contemporary world will get us nowhere.

Key takeaway from this section:

Many of us on the secular side of things (whether we identify as “spiritual” or not) dismiss the role religion plays so much that we ignore how impactful it is for a majority of people. We therefore underplay our “promoting moderate religious voices” cards, which leads to more extremist voices and action. (fail)

Arrogance is a really important part of this impulse. I thought my way of doing things was better and would dominate. Even if I was right about it being better, it certainly did NOT dominate.

For me this is a novel pattern, and I love patterns.

Normally it’s Fear that leads to conflict avoidance. In this case it’s Arrogance (and desirability bias).

Either way, conflict avoidance is something you want to avoid (groan), unless you’re interested in more conflict (double groan). haha.

How to talk to people about religion

This is the part that includes (but isn’t limited to) talking to religious fundamentalists. It’s a very mediation-compatible approach, and I use similar strategies in my Civic Engineering work and in conflict coaching in general.

You can use it with anyone you:

1. Have a relationship with
2. Don’t agree with
3. Don’t understand

And — surprise, surprise — the key is curiosity.

Krista’s technique, which she learned at the Collegeville Institute, is called “narrative theology” or “1st person theology”.

I inherited the notion that everyone has relevant observations to make about the nature of God and ultimate things – that the raw material of our lives is stuff of which we construct our sensibility of meaning and purpose in this life, of how the divine intersects or interacts with our lives, of what it means to be human.

There is a profound difference between hearing someone say this is the truth, and hearing someone say this is my truth.

I could never again dismiss one of those predictions of my conversation partners wholesale, because it now carried the integrity of a particular life, a particular voice.

Translation: If we get people to say what something Grand means to them:

1. We get to know and understand them better
2. We are less threatened by the idea we have to agree with them. It’s explicitly subjective. They are the expert in their own experience.

No argument necessary. Just a deepening of the relationship, an understanding of what forms someone else. And probably still a bunch of wacky shit I can disagree with if I want.

Of course, any public policy decision — like who has to wear what or who has to inject what into their bodies — should be based on something other than subjective values. But understanding the deeper feelings and needs behind the ideas are the first step towards grasping the deeper Why, and what might eventually work (for most people).

And there are many conversations which don’t need to be public policy, and yet still have the power to divide or unite us.

Take the question that my friend Holland and I spent dozens of hours arguing with missionaries about in college (instead of my math homework):

Is there a God?

Today, I am so much more interested in asking:

What is your relationship with God?

or

What does God mean to you?

Where did the argument go? It is mystery.

Religious scholar Karen Armstrong tells Krista her “aha” moment along these lines:

And in this little footnote, the author said that you must not lead the discussion of a religious idea or the theology or personality, such as Mohammed, without being able to find out what lay at the root of this… enter the minds of these mystics and sages and poets, and keep on asking, “But why? But why?”

And filling up with scholarly knowledge the background, until you come to the point where you can imagine yourself feeling the same, or believing the same as them, until basically the intellectual idea learns to reverberate with you personally.

I call that “grokking” the idea. I don’t have to agree! It just benefits me enormously to go as deep as possible with that “But why? But why?” line of questioning.

Krista grasps something beautiful and essential about these questions: The questions are what the whole religious encounter is about.

(Of course, this is the part the fundamentalists totally blow.)

There cannot and should not be a definitive answer. The juice is in the mystery of contemplating the question. Chew the gum, don’t swallow it! Embrace the mystery!

Okay, a short recap and then two lovely quotes to finish.

Our themes were:

1. What we lose by dismissing religion (the perils of conflict avoidance and desirability bias)
2. How to talk to people about religion (or anything else you can’t comprehend)

Eboo’s Warning:
Eboo Patel on why he has devoted his life to helping young people feel powerful.

Young people want to impact the world. They want their footprint on Earth, and they’re going to do it somehow. And if the only way that they get a chance to do that is by destroying things, then we shouldn’t be surprised if that’s the path they take.

So when people say to me, “Oh, Eboo, you know, you run this sweet little organization called the Interfaith Youth Core, and you do such nice things, you bring kids together,”

I say, “Yeah, you know, there’s another youth organization out there. It’s called Al Qaeda, and Al Qaeda’s been built over the past twenty-five years with lots of money and with lots of strategy and with lots of ideas of how you recruit young people and get them to think that this is the best way they can impact the world.

Ouch.

Reinhold’s Blessing:
And, to end on a positive note, a reminder from Reinhold Niebuhr (who was an inspiration to MLK and many others):

Nothing that is worth doing, can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope.

Nothing which is true, or beautiful, or good, makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we must be saved by faith.

Nothing we do, however, virtuous, could be accomplished alone; therefore, we must be saved by love.

No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe, as it is from our own standpoint; therefore, we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.

Together,
~ Ankur

PS As usual, I made a blog post with the all the quotes I pulled out, including many that didn’t make it into this post. And I made a shorter public post relevant to the question of religious extremism.