Biola University
What are our expectations for rules of engagement in building a healthy democracy? What shared commitments can we make in our civic aspirations? At the heart of answers to these questions is the issue of pluralism, which was one of the founding creeds of the United States for helping to live peaceably and with civility despite deeply engrained differences. John Inazu, professor of law and religion at Washington University, and author of the book, Confident Pluralism: Surviving and Thriving through Deep Difference, is back on the podcast to discuss pluralism and ways to foster persuasion rather than coercion for a pluralistic society.
Transcript
Rick Langer: Welcome to the Winsome Conviction podcast. My name's Rick Langer. I'm a professor at Biola University, and I'm also the director of the Office of Faith and Learning and the co-director of the Winsome Conviction podcast. And one of my favorite activities is hosting this Winsome Conviction podcast. And today we have a special treat of being together again with a guest we've had before John Inazu. He is the Sally Danforth, distinguished professor of law and religion at the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis. And he not only teaches rights and works in technical legal discourse, but has also written other books, popular opinion ed pieces and things like that. And just a wonderful partner in thinking about issues, about civility, how we get along, how we can cross both within our public square, but also even within the church. How can we cross the divides that separate us about matters of deeply held conviction in ways that preserve unity and actually perhaps even enhance the individual convictions that people hold. So it's a privilege to have you back with us. Thanks so much, John.
John Inazu: Rick, it's great to be back with you. Thanks.
Rick Langer: So you've recently published a book called Learning to Disagree, published by Zondervan, and in a different podcast that we did, we had a conversation just about that book and some of the issues that come up with that. But I want to pick up on another book that you wrote called Confident Pluralism, and I was intrigued by that title. I read some things about it, I think when it first was that 2016 or sometime like that? It was a while ago now that that came out. But I was intrigued by that book, and I find it to talk about an important issue that I worry sometimes we're getting foggy on in our public discourse, namely what sort of a country, what are our expectations for the rules of engagement of building a healthy democracy?
So I was intrigued by that. And when we were talking about the other book, I thought it'd be great to have you back on to talk a little bit about this whole issue of pluralism. Maybe it would be helpful at the outset for you to define pluralism. Whenever I use that word, I have this anxiety because I think some people hear it in effect, hear the word relativism. Some people hear a boring brute fact word that yes, of course there's different people in the country, and I don't know that many people have a real imagination for pluralism actually being something that might be able to organize and hold together political community. So talk to us a little bit about that.
John Inazu: Sure. Yeah, no, so I think of it first of all in two different definitions. The first definition, and you just alluded to this, is the fact of pluralism. It's a descriptive point that our country is very diverse and full of lots of different views and opinions over things that really matter. So yes, we're divided about ice flavors, but we're also divided about who is God and is there a God and what happens when you die, and what should be the right abortion policy. And so these things matter deeply and divide us. So as a descriptive matter, we are a pluralistic society. We are not homogenous. We don't all believe the same things, and that's not going to change in any of our lifetimes. So the second definition of pluralism is what do you do in response to all of that difference? And you could choose to try and crush the opposition and win at all costs and then control.
Or you could pursue a withdrawal that's not really affected politics, but just tries to say, "I'm going to live in my part of the country and do my thing, and you live in yours." Or the normative political theory response to all of this difference is a form of pluralism itself, which says, "We can actually learn how to live alongside people who see the world very differently than us." And that's going to be hard and messy, but it's possible. And I would say of all the different alternatives in terms of what you do in response to the difference that is there, pluralism seems like one of the best, maybe the best these days.
Rick Langer: Yeah. So let me just, as you were describing that, I had this thought come to mind. I appreciate your contrast between the two obvious options are, one, just control and dominate, make sure your side wins. The other is withdrawal from the conflict. And I actually think that second option, I think we sometimes are struck by that first option because it shouts at us from social media, so to speak, in media in general perhaps. But the second option, I do feel like one of the things, it isn't so much that people think they have withdrawn, but I read these sociological observations, what do they call it? The great sort.
John Inazu: The big sort.
Rick Langer: The big sort, yeah. Where you have these, not just enclaves, it's almost states and regions becoming increasingly polarized by intention. And I think the real intention people have is actually to withdraw from a place of conflict and hang out with the people who are like me. Is that actually part of a refusal to engage pluralism?
John Inazu: Oh yeah, I think so. On a social or structural level, the more that happens, the harder it gets. When you really do have red states and blue states and people moving to different parts of the country to be around more like-minded people, it's hard to hold together a larger democracy on those terms. Now, having said that, and I do think the big sort and some of these explorations are making an important point in describing real phenomena, but it's also the case that most institutions I know are not as homogenous echo chamber-ish as we sometimes read about. I teach at a university where there's lots of difference, and there are certainly some group think norms that go on, but it's not completely homogenous. And when you think about your local little league sports team or going out with friends or whatever it is, it's really the case that you have pure homogenous settings that most of us in the workplace and in our neighborhoods actually do live around a bunch of difference. We might not always talk about it, but it's often there.
Rick Langer: And perhaps one of the other things that has hurt us on this is because things become contentious. I think we're less inclined to raise some of these conversation topics, and then you're not even aware that there's people out there right beside you who see things really differently.
John Inazu: Right. No, that's a good point. Yeah. You assume that everyone around you thinks the same because you actually haven't brought it up in a long time, or you're worried about offending someone. And it turns out that people actually have complex views because people are complex people.
Rick Langer: Just as we were talking about this, I remember intentional conversation that we were doing with some other people here at Biola, other faculty members, about issues that divided people. And so we intentionally got some people together. We identified the seven most contentious issues, drawing things from political platforms to talk about. Well, one of the things on that was issues about healthcare. So we were going around and people who are thumbs up or thumbs down on the Affordable Care Act and things like that. One of the people who was sort of thumbs down on it was a person who was opposed to vaccinations. Now, this is before the COVID vaccine opposition to vaccination thing. This is what, I don't know what to call it, traditional vaccines or something.
John Inazu: The OG anti-vax people. Right?
Rick Langer: Yeah, right. And I was surprised when he said that because he was a person I respected and appreciated a lot, and I thought, "Oh," because I always grew up with vaccine. What's the big deal about a vaccine? That was my little world. Well, he began to talk about this and described an issue where their family didn't want to get vaccines. The main reason was that his, I think it might've been his wife's sister anyhow, a direct sibling relationship. Their kids had had vaccines, had a terrible reaction to them. One of their children, I think, had almost died in response to this. And the medical professionals really did think it was the vaccine. It wasn't just the panic kind of a thing, but they had never done that for their, they never got their kids vaccinated exactly because that happened to someone who was that closely related to them. Well, they got to school and their kids couldn't enroll in school without these vaccine cards, because this is how California's done those laws. And they said, "Well, how do you know your kids are going to react the same way that your sister's kids did?"
It appeared that in the minds of the administration, the only way to answer that was by going ahead and having your kids be vaccinated. But they're like, "Well, weren't you listening? I was just telling you that my sister's child just about died from this." And I admit it doesn't necessarily answer for me what we do we do with vaccine regulations? But boy, did it open up my mind to why a person might be thinking that way. It suddenly seemed perfectly reasonable, number one. And number two, I was suddenly going, "Oh, so this person isn't so much opposed to the idea of the Affordable Care Act, but rather seeing this as one more restriction that requires and limits your options in terms of medical freedom on decisions that are really important to them." And it was one of these aha moments, and again, I had no idea that that diverse viewpoint was sitting right beside me on a regular basis, because we never talk about those kinds of things.
John Inazu: I know it's an illustration too, how some people might be formed by a set of experiences or exposure to a worldview where it becomes very difficult to assume that you can just persuade them of a different position in a conversation. It's very hard to do when your entire life has been framed differently.
Rick Langer: Yeah, yeah, that's right. I had another friend whose father had been killed in the mid-air collision that happened over San Diego back in the, I don't know, the '70s or '80s, a PSA flight, I think is what the airline was called. But anyhow, and if you happen to have a fear of flying, and that's how your dad got killed when you were seven, it's like, "Well, that sounds more reasonable than I think." And at some point you realize, "Well, all the statistics in the world might not make a fear like that go away." So back to the issue of pluralism in general, though the title of your book was Confident Pluralism, I was intrigued by that just in the sense of, "Well, what is it a correct for? Is there a timid pluralism out there?" What is it that you were looking to help us see about pluralism with that title?
John Inazu: Yeah, a couple of things. I pulled the title from a brief in a 2010 Supreme Court decision, Christian Legal Society against Martinez. And then that term also shows up in Justice Alito's dissent in that case. And so the term wasn't original to me, but it stood out to me and I realized it had a salience to the issues that I wanted to talk about. In some contrast to these earlier ideas of principled pluralism and those kinds of notions that had been thrown around in Christian circles from the 1990s and even before. And I think I wanted to do a couple of things by focusing on confidence. One is I wanted to expand the frame of the pluralism discussion beyond an interfaith context, because today we're also talking about a lot of people who might have no religious faith, but who are also members of this country. And so what does pluralism mean to them? And then related to that, the idea of confidence. And in the background, I was thinking of Leslie Newbigin's work among others, but that when you-
Rick Langer: Proper confidence or?
John Inazu: Right, yeah, yeah, Newbigin's Proper Confidence and some of his other work as well. But the idea that when you live in the world and you act as a human being, all of us are acting in faith, and all of us are acting on things unseen. And it becomes very, I think, counterproductive to talk about those actions in terms of certainty. You and I are not certain about what happens tomorrow, or an hour from now, or what happens when we die, but we have a confidence in some of these matters. And for Christians, those are informed by a faith and the object of our faith. But it's a different posture than a combative certainty or even a reliance on some kind of foundationalist principle. It doesn't mean relativism by any stretch, but it means a recognition of the limits of what we can know and how we can engage with other people.
Rick Langer: And that is a helpful notion because it isn't denying a person. I guess confidence sounds like a thing you might bring to cultivating a conviction. It isn't a posture of weakness, even though you're looking at that conviction saying, "I'm probably less than certain, but you know what? I'm going to have to," sometimes I talk about landing your plane. It's great to say there's a lot of different viewpoints, but at some point you have to say, "What will mine be?"
John Inazu: Right. Well, and in practice, that's what all of us do in the world. All of us land the plane every day because you can't act otherwise as a human being in the world. And so we have degrees of confidence. We don't have certainty, but we commit our lives and make major, major decisions around that confidence in that faith. And then other people do that too sometimes in ways that we don't recognize. And that's part of the human experience. Now there's still a lot of people think, and I'm certainly one of them, there is a big T truth out there is a God out there. There is a way in which this is not all just choose your own adventure, but in the ways that people work to figure this out in the world, there is going to be a lot of diversity and a lot of difference. And part of what I'm trying to argue in a lot of my work is can we start with the thumb on the scale toward persuasion rather than coercion.
Rick Langer: In have to go through sometimes the long and tedious process that is persuasion rather than just asserting things through power of the force of law. I think sometimes we try to make the law do the job of the prophets, and there's certain things that the prophet demands of us, they do a follow me and the law does, a thou shalt not, and the two both have their function, I think, in a healthy society.
John Inazu: Yeah. Well, there is also, I think there's a lot of conditioning of American Christianity and particularly evangelicalism today that traces back to the 1980s, 1990s version of apologetics that was all about, "If you just give me five minutes of your time, I'll be able to talk you into the faith by my..." Right.
Rick Langer: "My great arguments will less."
John Inazu: I can give you the propositions and my unassailable wisdom and logic will convince you, and it's not very effective. But I'm also not sure it's very theological. That's just not how this works. And the more that we try to insist that we are in control of all of this, or that we have a formula or a means of convincing others on our own, I think the less room we have for God to work in ways that we don't fully understand.
Rick Langer: So let me just pick up on that thought. Here's a question that I basically have been asked, and I'd love to have your answer because I'm not sure mine was good enough. But what's the point of pluralism if you know you're right. The person asking that wasn't trying to be mean, but they're saying, "Shouldn't I want to convert other people to my way of thinking if I know I'm right?"
John Inazu: Well, yeah. I think the questioner to you is misunderstanding the motive or the motivation with the means of engaging. So if you have a confidence or a conviction that you have the truth of the world in Christianity, not only that, but you have a command to go and make disciples, then you do need to do that. But the means of doing that is through a lived witness and through persuasion, and especially in the context in which we find ourselves, where there is a ton of difference around us, that the way to do that faithfully, but also in a way that loves neighbor and honors the people around us, is to do that through persuasion that unfolds in a pluralistic setting.
And actually, it's very hard to conceive of an alternative in the United States in 2024. Maybe it's different if you're in a country where 98% of the people believe the same thing and you've got a... But that's not us. And so, one of the, I think points about living faithfully where you find yourself is you got to start with the context you're in. And the context we're in is not one in which you can just pronounce from on high or convince people through the use of force that your way is the best one.
Rick Langer: Yeah, and that is a great point in that sense, where you have the point of pluralism in some sense is actually that is your starting point for the key task present presented to you, which is one of persuasion. Knowing that you see things one way the other person sees another way, that doesn't dismantle your confidence, that is actually the occasion for your confidence to be put into action, to go ahead and engage in persuasion and not just to back off and vanish.
John Inazu: Right.
Rick Langer: Here's one of the other worries that, and I think this is certainly a thing that has been brought up many times by countless other people when they look at things like pluralism, is the question of does pluralism really have a strong enough grip to hold together a society when there's fundamental divisions? One way you might think about it is you can say that the US has had 250 years of democratic pluralism being enacted in our country, but it seems like you could argue, in fact, I feel like I've heard a lot of people argue that we really had an oppressive consensus regarding a western view of enlightenment reason kind of things, a version of either Protestant Christianity or just Christianity in general, that we're really exercising domineering control over the American mind.
And now that that consensus no longer seems to hold, what we're finding is actually we're discovering something about the strength of pluralism itself. And therefore what we think traditional political liberalism, not the left leaning versus right leaning, but liberalism in a sense of free exchange of ideas and differences, that might not be strong enough to hold the country together and allow it to move forward. What do you think about that viewpoint and how would you respond to it?
John Inazu: Well, it's certainly true that as a historical matter, there was a more unified set of beliefs at an earlier point in our country's history. And as you mentioned, there were a lot of bad things that came along with that, including oppressing minority voices, and there was power and control. You could also get a lot more things done when you had a unified culture. It's very hard to envision the pluralistic society of 2024 deciding to go and build a hospital or a university, because there's no institutional thickness to getting things done. And it mattered that for a big chunk of our country's history, first Protestants and then later Catholics and Jews and others did institution building and made things in the private sector that would be very hard to envision today from the charitable arm of society, because you can muster people and resources when you have a common vision.
And that does leave open, I think, the very important question of what replaces that or is there anything that comes next? And you certainly, so a couple of things here. One is, I'm very wary of the use of the language of the common good in diverse political spaces, because it turns out we don't actually agree about what the common good is. It's very hard to give substance to that in any meaningful way at the national level. A common good as an aside, is an extremely important theological term, and Christians who espouse a belief in the story of human history that culminates in the return of Jesus that you can name a common good when you can name your end point. So you can't give up on that as Christians, but when you're in more diverse pluralistic settings, it's hard to talk about the common good. So I tend to default to language like common ground, and where do we find common ground in this diverse society?
We still need cultural narratives, and there are challenges right now about what those ought to be. I think in one of the arguments I make in Confident Pluralism is our shared commitment to civil liberties themselves and a shared understanding of an appreciation for democracy should be one of those common ground areas, but that requires ongoing education and storytelling and a recognition of why these kinds of rights matter to everyone. And we could try to think through what else fills that vacuum that's been lost. It might be very modest, and maybe modest is all you need, but it's got to be something.
Rick Langer: Yeah. Well, and I feel like some of these issues, even our commitment to civil discourse, civil liberties, I think of things on college campuses of shutting down free speech in, again, as we do with so many things in all directions. If I was giving this talk or we're having this conversation six or eight years ago, I might've been thinking more about what had been happening at progressive campuses, but we've had a lot of pushback with similar things on conservative and of just shutting down discourse. I worry that those exact things are on the table. I've had conversations, people about civility just as an ideal of how we talk to each other and say, "No, civility is just, it is the voice of the stronger trying to silence the weaker by forcing them to talk in a certain way in order that the stronger people can preserve their position of strength. That's all that's going on in civility. It's a power exercise." And it makes me worried about things that I used to think would work for holding together that center. Then I'm like, "Wow, where did that go?"
John Inazu: Yeah. Well, you can start with, I think, recognizing the complexity, but even that example, sometimes civility really is that. Sometimes calls to civility are the people in power trying to stay in power. So there's a discernment and judgment that you can't really generalize for all settings. Who are the people making these claims? What's the content of their character? What's the institutional structure and which they're operating? And then maybe we can make some judgments. But in these settings, I think that institutional health and leadership really matters so that the people in the institutions that are encouraging these ongoing traditions and these common commitments, we need to rally around them and make sure that they're strong.
And frankly, another piece of this are the expressive institutions that convey certain narratives. So I understand, believe me, I understand some of the challenges that come on campus settings, and I write about some of the examples in my own life in my newest book, but that's not my day-to-day, right? My day-to-day is people being students and teachers. And my day-to-day is the campus is kind of normal. And I think it's important for the storytelling we do about these institutions to say, yes, to point out their flaws and point out bad leadership and push for better leadership, but also not to overstate what's going on all of the time.
Rick Langer: Well, one final question on this. It's interesting for me to think about the church in this sense as not as a political institution, but as an institution that is part of our society. And if I am concerned, let's say that I am in agreement with you about the importance and the value of a functioning pluralism would like to advocate for confident pluralism and have that be a thing that holds us together. What could churches do to contribute to that, to breathe life into that kind of institution? Because I, just being honest for myself, I have enormous anxiety about the idea that we would abandon that because I'm not sure. It's one thing to let go of something in the face of something better, but I look at what we're doing now and I'm going, "I don't know that this is an improvement over our best attempts to do pluralism in the past." So what could the church do to contribute to that?
John Inazu: Yeah, I've got a lot of thoughts there, but maybe I'll limit myself to two. One, be honest about the diagnosis and then, two, count the costs about the remedy. So for the diagnosis, and this is not original to me, lots of people are saying this, but it's just worth stating explicitly, whatever formation churches are doing in a Sunday morning service, or maybe a Wednesday evening church gathering, for many people in the pews, that formation is overcome by counter formation and other liturgies that happen all throughout the week. And especially for people embedded in social media and certain news sources, it's very hard to overcome that formation.
So the challenge to reform is incredibly hard and incredibly high. And that takes me to the remedy point. Maybe the remedy is that a lot of churches aren't asking too much, but they're asking too little. And maybe the point is to say, and this is going to be contextual depending on the congregation, the nature of the people, what the church leadership looks like, but maybe it's, we need to do something really radical. We need to pledge together to be off social media. We need to meet more frequently and talk about reality and the claims of the gospel and where our priorities should be, and call people to a thicker sense of commitment. Because the status quo is going to be you show up for church, maybe you show up on Wednesday night and left to your own devices, the algorithms are going to win in the rest of the week.
Rick Langer: Yeah. Yeah. That's great. That's a wonderful thought. And I, as long as you just shared that, let me turn that into a shameless plug for a book project that Tim and I are working on is part of what we do called The Heart of Civility, where we're trying to develop actually a curriculum for an extended spiritual formation experience that cultivates, as we put it, a heart of civility. And perhaps in some ways, I don't know what the title end up being anyhow, but a heart that really does bear the fruit of the spirit. Because that's, in biblical language, you don't talk about civility, but you do talk about things like gentleness, and kindness, and goodness, and faithfulness and self-control.
John Inazu: Yes. Yeah.
Rick Langer: And to realize that's actually a cultivation project. It isn't just a magic thing you get to become, but at some point you have to do these kinds of practices that you were enumerating, that our formative for us, and if we neglect them, we do it to our peril.
John Inazu: Yes. Yeah, that sounds great.
Rick Langer: Yeah. Well, great. Well, thanks so much for joining us, and again, let me remind our listeners that John's new book that has just come out recently is Learning to Disagree: The Surprising Path to Navigating Differences with Empathy and Respect. And again, we highly recommend that. We're so grateful to you taking the time to join us, John. And let me encourage our regular listeners to go ahead and sign up, be a subscriber on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or other places where you might be getting your podcasts. And also we encourage you to go to the winsomeconviction.com website, share with us questions, things you might want us to address in future podcasts or ideas that have been plaguing you, I'd like to knock around, we'd love to participate with you that way. And also sign up for a quarterly newsletter that we'll be beginning because we'd love to keep in touch with you that way as well. So thanks for joining us for this episode of the Winsome Conviction Podcast.
