Billy Graham’s Conversions

Posted on April 8, 2022 by steve.ignell

Billy Graham announced in 1992 he had experienced three “conversions” in his life: to Christ as Lord and Savior, to the principle of racial justice, and to “work for world peace for the remainder of his life.”

Four blog posts ago, I began writing about a journey of discovery I’ve been on for an America-I-never-knew.  The journey included several eye-opening conversations with African American friends who described a world very much different than mine.  Their lived experience raised many questions and I was struck with how little I knew. 

I learned about America’s horrifying past where the massacres of Tulsa and Wilmington form the tip of an iceberg filled with centuries of racial ignominy, inequity, and violence.  I learned how America’s racially disparate judicial system didn’t happen by chance.  The creation of dense, poverty-stricken, black neighborhoods throughout the 20th century happened through the force of governmental and private discriminatory actions. Then I learned how the legacy of those past discriminatory policies and actions continues today in a systematic fashion, putting the thumb on the scale in areas of wealth, income, justice, job opportunities, and health.

Throughout my journey I found truth in the maxim “where you stand depends upon where you sit.” The longer my travels, the more my “standing” changed.  As long as I made space for people’s stories, honored the data, critically examined the analytics of racial disparities, and refused to let past narratives cancel new discoveries.

Partway through this journey, I joined Billy Graham and became a convert to racial justice too.

The Priority of “Seeing” “Compassion” and “Doing”

An “expert in the law” once tested Jesus by asking “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus answers by telling a familiar story known to most of us, whether Christian or not.  A man traveling from Jerusalem was attacked, stripped of clothes, beaten and left for dead.  As he laid along the side of the road, several religious men came and went, offering no assistance to the injured man. 

 “Then a despised Samaritan came along, and when he saw the man, he felt compassion for him. Going over to him, the Samaritan soothed his wounds with olive oil and wine and bandaged them. Then he put the man on his own donkey and took him to an inn, where he took care of him. The next day he handed the innkeeper two silver coins, telling him, ‘Take care of this man. If his bill runs higher than this, I’ll pay you the next time I’m here.’”

The context to this parable is a most critical part of the story.  Jesus was answering the question “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” His answer – to love God and love our neighbor with the second commandment as unto the first – forms the very core of the Christian faith.  On those two commandments alone, Christ said, “hung all the law and the prophets.”

The Jesus Creed

Our love for God and others forms the two goalposts of our life.  Our devotion to Christ connects them together forming a “Christ-centered or biblical worldview” ruled by love. This two-faceted and interconnected rule of love – called the Jesus Creed – launches a new way of life with a calling to “be like Him.” As we abide in Him, we are transformed, becoming a daily witness of “his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works.”

Christianity is a story of grace.  We receive grace through Christ and regift grace to others.  This is the essence of the gospel – how it’s received and lived out with Christ as the Center.  And the more His graciousness envelops us, the more we become conduits of His grace and mercy to others.

Living graciously shapes our behavior as well as our passion and attitudes. It creates a “biblical worldview” marked by compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and generosity (Colossians 3). For it’s impossible to demonstrate kindness to “others” if there’s distain.  It’s impossible to be reconcilers of racial division without a generosity to those historically marginalized.  And our generosity remains incomplete unless we have actions which follow our “seeing,” like the Good Samaritan who “saw” the man, felt compassion, and administered to his needs.

A Biblical Worldview “Sees Clearly” The Other

Jesus saw people too.  Matthew writes: “Seeing the people, Jesus felt compassion for them, because they were distressed and dispirited like sheep without a shepherd.” When Nathanael asked Jesus “How do You know me?” Jesus answered and said to him, “Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you.” 

Our ability to “see,” unlike Jesus, depends upon the person being seen. In a fascinating study, researchers subjected white participants to digitally altered pictures of white and black people by various degrees: 30% (minor changes to facial features), 50%, 70% and 100%.  The white subjects reacted strongly to even the most subtle differences in white faces, but not to black faces, even when the differences were large. 

“Own-race bias” is a widespread phenomenon and enhanced through power dynamics. We pay attention to hierarchy and are quick to categorize.  We are more prone to “see” the boss than the janitorial assistant, more prone to see the wealthy than the poor.   

This “seeing” bias is hard-wired within us, yet we each have the ability to change through intentional actions.  Seeing people as individuals rather than a face-less “other” changes our attitudes and our actions towards them.  It means we must be thoughtful in our encounters with people, paying attention to their details.  We must approach people with the expectation of finding nuances and sophisticated behavior.  We must pair honor towards others with humility about ourselves.  We must, like Christ, see others – every single one of them – through the lens of imago dei, as those created in the image of God.   

Impediments to “Seeing Clearly:” Cultural Blinders

Walter Lippman once famously said: “for the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define and then see.” We subconsciously pick and choose our facts so that “what is alien will be rejected, what is different will fall upon unseeing eyes…more often without knowing it, we are impressed by those facts which fit our philosophy.”

Throughout America’s history, blacks were often “seen” through three pre-defined narratives, all disparaging to their character and abilities: simple-minded, incapable of learning; the “black beast” (a stereotype intended to create fear and outrage among white populations); and a lazy worker.

The first two, especially the one about simple mindedness, are seldom heard today.  Yet the poor work ethic narrative continues to show up in the data.  This accusation seems strange at first since black slaves were responsible for much of American’s economic growth of the 1800s.  Growing and harvesting cotton was incredibly hard work and the South grew 60% of the world’s cotton and 70% of the cotton used for British textiles.  And just this one crop, cotton, once accounted for over half of all US export earnings.

The persistence of this “lazy” narrative by a sizable portion of Americans is helped through two presuppositions: all Americans are created equal and all Americans enjoy equal opportunity in life. Hence, America is structurally colorblind and successful people of any race, creed, or background can pull themselves up by their bootstraps through an ethic of hard work. Given these beliefs, then the equation

Equally Created + Equal Opportunity + X = Unequal Outcome,

when summed across individuals in a population, only allows for a very limited explanation of “X.”  If there are unequal outcomes across different races, “X” can’t be an extrinsic (e.g., systemic) factor because of equal opportunity.  “X” must then be intrinsic, applicable within a particular race and found across a spectrum of individuals.

The enduring cultural narrative of black character deficiencies solves this equation for them. In their culturally defined worldview, bad outcomes stem from poor choices and poor choices stem from character issues such as relationship dysfunction, a lack of initiative, and a lack of responsibility. Much of the fault, their narrative says, lies with the government’s welfare program.  This is the “X” factor as welfare removes the motivation to work which then sets up a cycle of poor choices and the breakdown of the family.

To prove this narrative, they just need just one person of color who has achieved success against all odds.  See, they say, anybody can do it. You just have to work hard enough and want success bad enough.  It’s an argument that ignores the data and is rooted in probability neglect, a classic cognitive bias, in support a pernicious tribal narrative that puts blinders upon what one sees. 

Implements to “Seeing Clearly:” Isolation

“Seeing clearly” becomes impossible when, as Alexis De Tocqueville once observed, societies like the United States order themselves into two disparate or even foreign communities, one white and the other black. In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. lamented the persistence of this racial divide by observing “that the most segregated hour of Christian America is 11 o’clock on Sunday morning.” Today, nearly 60 years later, surveys show that most America’s churches remain racially segregated.  Yes, things are slowly changing but any further integration faces stiff headwinds from the increasingly polarized nature of America where our religious, political, social beliefs all mix together. 

We not only worship separately, we also live separately.  White Americans still live in mostly white neighborhoods even as metropolitan areas diversify. Part of this is unintentional. People tend to sort themselves into like-minded communities, clustering around people who think and look like them.  The wealth differential contributes too, as the entry cost into many of these communities is expensive and beyond the financial capabilities of many people of color. 

All of this separation, whether intentional or not, hinders us from “seeing clearly” people different than us.  We need close relationships, cross-racial relationships, either through close living proximity or friendship before our “seeing” and thinking begins to change. It takes meaningful time together before meaningful change begins. Low to moderate level friendships (“but I have friends”) or contact (“I work with someone”) change people little.  In fact, they only increase racial division through enabling those who deny structural effects to feel justified in their assessments.  Its only when a relationship develops to the point where one can “walk in their” shoes and “see how they see” before the light of discovery comes on. 

Implements to “Seeing Clearly:” Willful Ignorance

The problem is compounded when the lack of understanding is willful, an intentional decision to not care about knowing. Sociologists call this phenomenon an epistemology of ignorance and it arises when people don’t see the benefit of making an effort to understand. They don’t see it worth their time because the outcome doesn’t add value to their worldview. 

We see this lack of understanding most profoundly in surveys of race in America. Most (87%) black Christians believe America has a race problem.  Most (70%) of white Christians disagree even though the data on inequalities is clear.  Most Americans believe there is “a lot of discrimination” against historically marginalized groups in the U.S. Most white evangelical Protestants think there isn’t.  When asked about fairness in hiring, housing, justice, and other societal issues, white Christians are the only ethnoreligious group to disagree that people of color were treated less fairly. 

Other survey organizations report similar findings. The Barna Group, an evangelical survey organization, shows 94% of evangelicals believe “Christian churches play an important role in racial reconciliation,” yet only 13% approve of the message “Black Lives Matter.” They summarized their data by saying “If you’re a white, evangelical, Republican, you are less likely to think race is a problem, but more likely to think you are a victim of reverse racism. You are also less convinced that people of color are socially disadvantaged. Yet these same groups believe the church plays an important role in reconciliation. This dilemma demonstrates that those supposedly most equipped for reconciliation do not see the need for it.”

The Barna Group continues: “More than any other segment of the population, white evangelical Christians demonstrate a blindness to the struggle of their African American brothers and sisters…By failing to recognize the disadvantages that people of color face—and the inherent privileges that come from growing up in a ‘majority culture’—we perpetuate the racial divisions, inequalities and injustices that prevent African American communities from thriving,”

Impediments to “Seeing Clearly:” A Colorblind Gospel

The apostle Paul’s declaration “there is neither Jew nor Greek…for you are all one in Christ Jesus” became the rallying cry for those who sought to end racial segregation in America.  Using language such as “unity in Christ,” “the body of Christ,” and Jesus died for all,” they saw such colorblindness as the solution for America’s racial divide. After all, the breaking down of walls of enmity forms the very core of the gospel itself.  And if only Christians could walk in love, uniting together under their commonness as believers, the walls of prejudice could be broken.

It wasn’t long before these same statements became the rallying cry for those opposed to addressing racial inequalities through societal measures.  The racial divide must be settled in the hearts of man, they said, not on the streets of our nation. A message of sin, repentance, and regeneration of the heart changed society, not a focus on social justice.  Civil disobedience was not only an affront to law and order, it was a denial of the sufficiency of the gospel.

A colorblind society, they said, kept an eye on the root problem: sin, not skin. It announced “all lives matter,” seeking a day when race was not an issue and skin color was overlooked. Slogans such as “black lives matter,” they said were racializing, moving society away from the aspirational vision of Martin Luther King who said “one day every Negro in this country, every colored person in the world, will be judged on the basis of the content of his character rather than the color of his skin, and every man will respect the dignity and worth of human responsibility.” 

Yet King later lamented the disconnect between his aspirational vision and the reality of America as he “moved through the ghettos of the nation and saw [his] black brothers and sisters perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity, and saw the nation doing nothing to grapple with the Negroes’ problem of poverty.”

Assertions of colorblindness without accompanying action are like the Levite who looked but walked away. The mandate to act in response to a need will be addressed in a subsequent post.  But I think the Levite’s problem was even more elemental.  What did he see when he passed by the injured man?  What narrative did he imagine that caused him to keep walking?  What distortion in his understandings kept him from following the Hebrew scriptures which are clear about the mandate of doing?

The problem with most present assertions of colorblindness is not just a “walk by” of the data, but that it’s not a neutral and fairly constructed character trait.  When people isolate within their tribes and are blind to their biases, uninterested in other people’s stories, preferring instead to sustain a historical and pernicious cultural narrative, any insistence of colorblindness becomes meaningless. 

It’s like missing a gate in a ski race. When we diminish the past, ignore the data on inequalities, and miss-see the present through a “seeing” formed more by culture than other people’s stories, we veer off the course and fail. For if we can’t see people clearly, we misunderstand their world – their joys and challenges, their strengths and weaknesses, their aspirations and needs.  Such distorted “seeing” then corrupts our first-order gospel callings: to walk in unity, be ministers of reconciliation, and to be His hand extended, like the Good Samaritan who saw and then acted to bring healing to the needy man.

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Wilmington’s Lie

Posted on March 13, 2022 by steve.ignell

My journey of exploration for a United-States-I-never-knew took another turn once I read Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy. It received the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and is a fascinating read.

Now 1898 may seem awfully long ago so one could ask: why the significance?  But when looked through the context of lifespans, it’s really not that long ago.  For example, I figure have roughly 62 years of memories accumulated in one form or another.  Although I was born in the 50s, I remember little before 1960, the year my brother was born and I went to first grade. I’ll be reliving some of those memories during my 50-year high school reunion this year. 

From one perspective, much has changed since 1960.  People have come and gone and I’ve experienced a rich lifetime of work, events, a new family, and experiences. Yet much has remained roughly the same.  Planes, trains, and automobiles still look and function similarly.  Houses are still houses and boats still boats. The world’s gotten smaller, but it wasn’t that large before. 

As an aside, Alaskan king salmon are smaller too, but still have their legendary incredible taste. As long as you get the very best product, don’t overcook it, and use minimal seasoning (I use a baste of salted butter and brown sugar).  That’s the secret to amazing salmon. Take it off the grill or out of the oven just before it’s done. Let it cook to perfection on the plate as people sit down to eat. And make sure you primarily taste the fish and not the seasonings.

The 62 years prior to 1960 tell a remarkably different story. Think about life before cars, telephones, cordless drills, flush toilets and expresso machines.  The mere thought of fastening thousands of long deck screws by hand brings pain to my right arm. But maybe that’s why God made hammers before he made drills. 

Looking back in history, 1898 was quite the year! The year began with the USS Maine sunk in Havana harbor.  Soon the Spanish American war was on and then it was off by the year’s end.  Not quite as short as the 100-hour Gulf War of 1991, but still pretty short as wars go.

Annexation was in the water that year.  New York City annexed the land around it to create five boroughs.  The United States annexed the Hawaiian Islands. John D. Rockefeller’s merged a bunch of oil companies to form Standard Oil Company which then controlled 84% of the United States’ oil.  And the Democratic party led by white supremacists led a coup d’état against a democratically elected government in America.

I wonder how many Americans have ever heard about this armed uprising leading to a successful overthrow of a legitimate government in the “land of the free”?  It took me 67 years before I did.  But then again, it took me 66 years before I learned about the Tulsa massacre. Maybe I’m just a slow learner.

Wilmington in 1898 was one of those rare anomalies of the Jim Crow south. A few years earlier, the Populist Party had joined forces with the Republican Party to form a winning coalition which included blacks. Other communities may have been racially mixed, but Wilmington’s elected leadership was also biracial.  Blacks held important government positions with authority over both the white and black parts of the community.

This was a bridge too far for many whites.  Having suffered through the loss of a war and new constitutional amendments, “Negro Rule” was a nonstarter. Plus, given the populist influence, many of the new legislative priorities – lowered interest rates, new tax laws, and new railroad regulations– harmed Democratic interests.

So the Democrats hatched a plan to overthrow a legally elected government.  They drafted a Wilmington Declaration of Independence calling for enlightened men who refused subjugation to an “inferior race.”  They formed white supremacy clubs such as White Government Unions to help plan the insurrection and whip up anti-black sentiment.  They launched an inflammatory propaganda campaign.  They set up armed “vigilance committees” and “citizens patrols” for each block. Lists of white women were kept to sustain the fiction that blacks were plotting to rape white women and burn homes. 

Then the Democrats did it, with gusto and brutality.  The massacre began two days after an election on November 8th. They wanted a chance to win outright through a campaign of intimidation, a combo of ballot box stuffing and ballot destruction, and teams of armed men prohibiting blacks from voting. Since they could not outnumber the blacks, they must “either outcheat, outcount, or outshoot them.” With the first two of that triad accomplished, phase two began and the massacre was on.

Armed mobs backed up with state militia hunted down blacks.  Blacks were usually shot in the back according to records from the local hospital.  Many in the mob saw this as great sport with one white man declared “we are just shooting to see the niggers run.” Hundreds of “Red Shirts,” a white supremacist paramilitary group, coursed through the black areas of town, breaking into homes, spilling blood while looking to lynch. Blacks fled the city into the surrounding swamps and forest, leaving folks like the Red Shirts frustrated.  Yes, they had shot their share of black men, but there hadn’t been a single lynching!  The armed crowd forcibly removed all the black and white Republican officials and ran those they didn’t kill out of town. “White niggers” were fair game too, including the Republican governor who was in town for the election. 

None of this happened spontaneously.  It was the climax of a full court campaign by the press and Democratic Party to demonize blacks and amplify the myth of an impending “black uprising.” 

These lies are perhaps the worst part of the story.  Sure, the killing fields are hideous, an unthinkable part of our history that infuriates any patriotic person to ask “how could something like this happen in America?” Yet it was through those enabling lies that the stage was set for the extremists to enlist the ordinary white citizen of Wilmington.  They needed to create an atmosphere of overwhelming fear and outrage.  And they did.

No story was out of bounds.  Blacks were deemed incompetent with poor character. Newspapers portrayed black men as beasts, sexually insatiable. White men’s “manhood” were challenged for not protecting white women enough: poor white girls on secluded farms needed men with courage, ready to enact justice at a moment’s notice. Trivial incidents became amplified into front page stories.  Innocent events twisted to increase white folk’s fear.  Rape epidemics declared although the statistics showed otherwise. False reports of blacks stockpiling weapons were printed.

No one was ever charged, something the insurrectionists relied upon before the massacre and found true following it.  Might made right, hence murder, ballot box stuffing, voter intimidation, and home invasions to whip and terrorize families were all fair game as long as the victims were black. 

Emboldened by their November 10th insurrection success, the white supremacists of the Democratic Party then set out to eliminate any future black vote.  The poll tax and literacy test were obvious tools, upheld by the Supreme Court in 1898, but such actions could disenfranchise poor white voters too. 

Louisiana offered the perfect solution.  Called the grandfather clause, men whose fathers or grandfathers had voted before 1967 – two decades before the 15th amendment of the constitution – were exempted from the poll tax and literacy test.  This provided, in one white senator’s words, an “election perfectly fair.” Prior to its 1898 passage, 3000 blacks and 380 whites in St. Joseph, Louisiana had registered to vote.  Following its passage, white voters outnumbered blacks 369 to 14.  Its application in North Carolina found similar success. Registered black voters dropped from 126,000 in 1896 to 6,100 in 1902.

The spin following the massacre was unrelenting.  For years, this massacre, plotted and executed by white supremacists, was portrayed as a “race riot” instigated by the black community. The coup was framed as a righteous return to law and order.  The new mayor Waddell declared “I believe the negroes as much rejoiced as the white people that order has been evolved out of chaos.” Newspapers downplayed the destruction. The Morning Star first asserted “not the hair of any man’s head was hurt” and then backtracked to say that no unarmed black man had been shot.

Both were lies.  The Washington Post saw the uprising not as a mob but against conditions that had grown intolerable.  Northern newspapers deplored the violence but welcomed the change back to the “natural order,” where the “weaker race must bend to the stronger.” Victory celebrations commenced in several southern cities.

There were some who got it right, basing their stories on eyewitness accounts.  But their voices were marginalized until recent years.  The intimidation by the white supremacists with their skill in whipping up fear and outrage were just too much to overcome.  Even McKinley, who had a long and storied history fighting slavery and racial division, kept silent.  Bombarded on both sides but in the midst of the Spanish American war, he and his administration stayed neutral, reluctant to antagonize folks in the south. 

School textbooks began to tell the same mythical stories. Blacks had only themselves to blame.  After all, the Ku Klux Klan were assets to the community, bringing law and order through the intimidation of lawless men (read blacks).  As the truth slowly emerged over time, the spin continued to evolve.  It became just another incident of “racial violence” done in the distant past by people no longer with us. 

Quite the story isn’t it?  You should look it up someday because it’s a most relevant story for six important reasons.

It Reminds Us That Wholeness In America Needs Wholeness In Storytelling

The older I get and the more I read, the further I realize how little I know of our nation’s history.  Now some of this shortfall is surely memory related, as I’ve forgotten much of my past learning. Other parts may due to whitewashed curricula.  To wit: a Connecticut social studies textbook said slaves were treated just like “family;” a Texas geography textbook referred to slaves as “workers;” and an Alabama textbook called slave life on a plantation “one of the happiest ways of life.” Maybe that happened in the Alaska of my youth.  I just don’t know.

I do know that other parts of my shortfall have been self-inflicted, a selective use of facts, interpretations and memories to fit the dominative narrative of my youth. We are storytelling people acutely committed to defending our narratives. Our need for coherence trumps our desire for truth. And the stories we tell ourselves provide insight into our values, aspirations, and what we see as meaningful. 

I grew upon a conservative culture that fused a fundamentalist view of Christianity with nostalgic stories about America’s past.  America was a shining city on a hill, a nation of divine beginnings with a divine calling central to God’s purpose for his world. Stories like George Washington’s Farewell Address reinforced those narratives.  Stories of 400 years of abuse to African Americans, like the story Wilmington’s Lie’s tell, did not. 

John F. Kennedy said “Perhaps our brightest hope for the future lies in the lessons of the past.” There are still too many silent chapters in America’s history and too much of that silence is about the black experience. An America restored to wholeness needs to correct a nostalgic understanding of our past through a revival of remembrance. We need diverse perspectives from both inside and outside of our groups.  We need an inclusive society, where people arising from vastly different backgrounds are equally welcomed and accepted into our nation’s discourse and civic life. Zucchino’s book Wilmington’s Lie is one small but important step there.

Fun fact: the power of independent judgments was famously demonstrated by Sir Francis Galton in 1906 where he took guesses of the weight of an ox at a local fair from 787 different people and calculated the average, which came to 1,197 pounds. The actual weight of the ox was 1,198 pounds.   

It Teaches Us About the Dark Side of Human Nature

Stories like Wilmington’s Lie instructs us about the power of affective polarization which thrives on an antagonism towards the other.  Affective polarization creates a binary worldview of us versus them.  It welcomes anything which confirms that antagonism, opening the door to false narratives, distortions, and embellishments. Fear and outrage are its bread and butter.  It takes us down tribal rabbit holes as our identity becomes owned by our political or social group.  Then as we live in those echo chambers, the law of group polarization moves us towards more extreme positions driven by reputational needs and of the limited argument pools within our group.

It Exposes the Unbounded Destructiveness of a Media Amplified Lie

Joseph Goebbels once said “repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.” When that lie is shaped to invoke fear, we begin to hate without thinking.  And the rest is observed in history with Wilmington in 1898 being a prime example. 

Daniels, the editor and publisher of North Carolina’s most influential paper, and other newspaper men of that time understood the power of the press to move people. Especially white people and there was no greater motivator than the twin menaces of black suffrage and black beast rapists.  Daniels needed white men to “take the law in their own hands and by organized force make the negroes behave themselves.” So he launched a constant barrage of inflammatory lies and succeeded. 

It Shows Us Our Theology Can Be Wrong

Many in that era thought they were doing the Lord’s business.  Leading theologians like Thornwell taught slavery was normative from a scriptural perspective: any other opinion was extrabiblical and vain philosophy. Some pastors stayed neutral or did what they could to reduce the violence.  But many pastors joined the mob or supported the insurrection. Three days after the massacre, James Kramer of Wilmington’s Brooklyn Baptist Church said: “God from the beginning of time intended that intelligent white men should lead the people…In the riot, the negro was the aggressor. I believe the whites were doing God’s services, as the results have been good”

The idolatry of the god, guns and country face of Christian Nationalism shone brightly in the story. One letter to President McKinley said “men with white skins, sons of revolutionary ancestors…lovers of the Union and the constitution…are leading the victorious column this morning and will rule North Carolina ever hereafter.  No need of troops now.  Praise God!”

It Reveals the Vulnerability of Liberal Democratic Principles

Waddell, the insurrectionist made Mayor after the massacre, dared federal authorities to intervene in their affairs. His words: there aren’t enough soldiers in the US Army to make whites give up the vote.” The Wilmington story is a story of intentional disregard for the constitution, the rule of law, and democratic principles.  This disregard was created through a steady diet of lies with malicious intent to whip up fear and outrage. The fear and outrage tapped into a moral depravity deep in the hearts of the white citizens of the area, removing any barriers to the outbreak of evil. 

This just wasn’t a story about a few bad apples taking control of the city.  Yes, I’m sure there was nuance with many citizens uncomfortable about the events which took place that day.  Yet the underlying support was broad enough and the force of intimidation strong enough to overcome any moral or constitutional principles in its way.

Final Thoughts Without Commentary

Wilmington’s Lie is a relevant today because of a critical need in America today to understand how: (1) wholeness in America requires wholeness in storytelling, (2) hope for the future requires a full uncovering of the past, (3) there is a dark and innate side of human nature itching for division, (4) bad theology can enable racial division, (5) liberal democratic principles are vulnerable to the lie and the mob enabled through polarization, (6) the unbounded destructiveness of a media amplified lie.

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Matters of the Heart

Posted on March 7, 2022 by steve.ignell

Our first-born child didn’t know an unhappy day in their first two years of life.  Our second born didn’t have a happy day, suffering with severe colic until nearly 2-years old.  Each night Tammy took the first shift and I took the last until our child finally fell asleep around four in the morning.  Trips to our pediatrician proved fruitless.  He only shook his head and then prescribed “colic” drops.  The phenobarbital was all he could do.   

For a brief moment we actually considered taking the “drops” ourselves.  But we never did.  Scripture says “my grace is sufficient” and we can testify to the truth of that during those years.  At least for us.  Mom lived just down the road but just couldn’t take the loud and unrelenting fussing.  Her total time spent alone with our colicky child in the first two years of her life?  Less than 45 total minutes.

One of the great memories of that period was listening to Moody Radio.  Programs like Tony Evans and the Urban Alternative and Mike Kellogg and Music Through the Night helped immeasurably.  Mike Kellogg has since retired after 42 years of hosting that show. Tony Evans though is still going strong and apparently a very busy guy.  He continues to broadcast a radio ministry while pastoring a megachurch in Dallas. He’s also authored over 125 books including the first commentary of the Bible by an African American.

Dr Tony Evans On the Need For Racial Justice

Four of Evan’s books and a significant focus of his current ministry deals with racial issues in American.  And he doesn’t pull any punches:

“The biggest problem in the culture today is the failure of the church. We wouldn’t even have a racial crisis in America if the church had not consistently failed to deal with racism as the severe sin it is. But because the church has historically ignored and downplayed it, the issue still exists. Where the church is called to set an example, we have cowered.”

Tough words from one of America’s leading evangelical preachers.  But also balanced too as Evans recognizes that change must occur at both the personal and systematic levels. On the personal side, his message fits into the traditional evangelical approach to racial issues:

“This change first begins with the individual. We cannot change the nation if we don’t first allow God to change our hearts. We have to develop a heart that cares for our fellow man because they are created in the image of God. Not because they look like us or have what we have, but because they have the stamp of divine creation on them. And that means that you have the responsibility to reach out to somebody different than you, hear from that person, and build a relationship.”

But Evans doesn’t stop there, willing to push the boundaries of his faith tradition towards a posture of justice:

“The harsh reality, yet one we must face, is that unfortunately, all lives aren’t valued the same way. All lives ought to be, because every person is created in the image of God…It is now time…we reverse the course of history that has brought us to this point and that we reverse it on every level…The church must address racial, economic, health care and opportunity inequity, as well as recognize the systems that work against the fair treatment of people…And yes, we should protest evil in a righteous way. We should let our voices be heard, but then we must act because if we don’t act, all we did was have a speech.”

Evans still isn’t through.  In fact, he is just warming up, willing to take on the three most feared letters in the evangelical world today.  No that isn’t “sin.”  It’s something much, much, worse: CRT or critical race theory, which he sees as “a post-Civil Rights social construct that seeks to demonstrate how unjust laws have served as the embedded foundation and filter through which racist attitudes, behavior, policies and structures have been rooted throughout the fabric of American life and systems even after those laws have changed.”

Evans considers CRT useful for addressing institutional racism caused by legacy impacts of past and present racist laws and cultural norms that continue to exist. He also welcomes the Black Lives Matter slogan.  Not the organization which he is critical of, but the message of “lives of Black people matter in the same way all of us evangelicals say the lives of the unborn matter.”

Two Gospels

Now there are churches who have sued pastors who espouse just a fraction of what Evans believes.  Pastor John MacArthur calls wokeness “the greatest danger to the Church that he has seen in six decades of Gospel ministry.” Theologian Owen Strachen sees wokeness as cause for disfellowshipping pastors like Evans: “In churches and institutions, those who teach and promote wokeness — binding the conscience of people with new unbiblical laws — must face Matthew 18 discipline. The church has tolerated the spread of wokeness too long. It is time for a line in the sand.”

Other evangelical theologians see pastors like MacArthur and Strachen to be directly attacking the gospel. Here’s evangelical pastor and scholar Michael Bird “Churches and Christian leaders who are concerned with racism, police brutality, affordable healthcare, protecting refugees, acting on poverty…as well as defending the unborn, promoting end-of-life care as an alternative to euthanasia, safeguarding religious freedom, opposing the gambling and pornographic industries, they are not whoring or compromised. They are simply doing what Christians have been doing for 2000 years which is loving their neighbor, remembering the poor, being the Good Samaritan, imitating Jesus, hating evil, loving good, and establishing justice in the gate of the city.”

“Having A Heart That Cares”

Multiple studies show a Grand Canyon sized chasm in racial perceptions, especially within the church. Michael Emerson and Glenn Bracey in their upcoming book “The Grand Betrayal: The Agonizing Story of Religion, Race, and Rejection in American Life” show that 87% of black Christians but only 30% of white Christians believe America has a race problem.  When surveyed about fairness in hiring, housing, justice, and other societal issues, white Christians were the only ethnoreligious group to disagree that people of color were treated less fairly. 

This contrarian viewpoint, rejecting the stories of America’s continuing racial divide, “isn’t a lack of understanding so much as it’s what we call the epistemology of ignorance— willful lack of understanding,” Emerson said. “It’s an investment to not understand, that I will not hear what others are saying, because it doesn’t benefit the way I interpret the world.”

This difference in understandings or beliefs is consistent across survey methodologies. Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) surveys show most Americans believe there is “a lot of discrimination” against historically marginalized groups in the U.S. Most white evangelical Protestants believe otherwise.  And they are only ethnoreligious group with a majority of members disagreeing with that statement. 

It’s not a slight disagreement either. In the language of that old Merrill Lynch commercial, they are a “breed apart” when it comes to the perception of discrimination against historically marginalized groups such as Muslims, Hispanics, blacks, and the LGBTQ.

That “breed apart” outcome persists in PEW surveys of whether or not blacks are treated fairly across a range of societal situations and institutions.

The Gospel Priority of Compassion

Honest question: WWJT (what would Jesus think) of the attitudes as measured in the graphs above?  What would be his response to the massive disparity between two groups of people created in His image? 

To wit, where would the Jesus in Matthew’s gospel who, when “Seeing the people, He felt compassion for them, because they were distressed and dispirited like sheep without a shepherd,” land on these issues?  Where would the Jesus, as described in Hebrews 4:15 “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin,” come down? Do you think Jesus would, as portrayed by the prophetic declaration in Mary’s Magnificant “He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things,” discount the testimony of the historically marginalized? 

Following Christ’s death, the apostles doubled-down on the priority of compassion.  It was an emphasis of Peter “all of you, be like-minded, be sympathetic, love one another, be compassionate and humble.” And Paul too: “Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.”  Not to be outdone, John raised the standard even higher: “If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person?”

Compassion, which means “to suffer together,” begins by recognizing someone’s pain.  It’s realized when someone else’s heartbreak becomes your heartbreak, when another’s suffering becomes your suffering.

Sounds pretty similar or at least connected to the Cambridge dictionary definition of wokeness as “a state of being aware, especially of social problems such as racism and inequality.” Wokeness, a controversial word today, began as a part of African American Venacular English where it meant ‘well-informed’ or ‘aware’, especially in a political or cultural sense.  It became increasingly used by the late 2000s and then popularized through the Black Lives Matter movement. Since then, definitions have proliferated and for many, it acts like a Rorschach test showing the projection of someone’s worldview onto current cultural issues. 

So why don’t Christ-followers own this word, and through our ownership stamp a Christ-like definition on it?  To wit: why can’t we embrace a Cambridge-defined concept of wokeness in a fashion following the example of Jesus, Peter, John and Paul?  Where we wear the label “woke” courageously and without reservation? Showing a heart of compassion to those who are suffering, historically marginalized, and yearning for acceptance?  First observing and listening through eyes and ears of a Christ-like nature, thereby enabling us to “suffer together” as we see the world through their perspective instead of ours. Then following up with action cast in concrete steps, unwilling to be ignorant nor silent. 

Thumb on the Scale: Maternal and Infant Mortality

One of the first and easiest acts of Christ-like “wokeness” is to stop the epistemology of ignorance and begin listening to the stories of the marginalized and paying attention to the data. 

Take the maternal and infant mortality of black women in America.  Infant mortality rates of black babies are more than double that of white babies: 10.8 vs 4.6 deaths per 1000 live births. Because of such racial disparities, the United States ranks 33 out of the 36 OECD countries with only Turkey, Mexico and Chile below it.  If Mississippi were a country, it would be somewhere between Botswana and Bahrain.  Pregnancy related deaths for black women exceed 3 times that of white women: 41.7 vs 13.4 per 100,000 live births.  Here, the United States ranks 60th in the world, just after Moldova and before Latvia.

Its A Complex and Troubling Story

Multiple academic studies show a strong association between race and pregnancy-related death, even after adjusting for potential predictors and confounders.  Part of this may be due to differing health care coverage with 13.6 percent of Black adults uninsured, compared with 9.8 percent of white adults, according to the CDC.

But the data suggest a darker and more complex story. According to data from Florida hospitals, Black newborns when attended to by white doctors experienced 430 more deaths per 100,000 births than white newborns. But if the attending doctor was Black, excess deaths dropped to 173 per 100,000.  Whatever the reason, the data is clear: a Black newborn’s “mortality penalty” is more than halved when cared for by a Black physician. 

The differential in cumulative stress between Black and white women is another likely factor.  Data show that the cumulative burden of chronic stress and life events, called the allostatic load, of Blacks exceed that of whites. Poor Black women have the highest scores followed by nonpoor Black women. These differences are small in the late teens and early 20s, but then quickly diverge. Poverty matters but is not the principal cause. 

More generally, racial differences in health occur at all socioeconomic levels. Blacks experience earlier deterioration of health than do Whites. In each age group, the mean health scores for Blacks are roughly comparable to that for Whites who are 10 years older.

Final Thoughts

Tony Evans challenges the Christian church to stop ignoring racial disparities or downplaying them.  Michael Bird challenges the church to avoid framing these issues through a culture war lens.  Concern about racial injustice and prioritizing its redress is a gospel priority, not a Marxist or socialist-driven ideology.

The preponderance of wealth, income, health, and housing disparities I’ve written about in this and the previous blog should be alarming. We can differ in views on root causes and policy fixes, but a love-of-neighbor gospel priority supersedes those differences.  Such a priority takes those disparities seriously from a heart rooted in understanding, compassion, and then action. Any other response is, in Bird’s words, a “derogation of a Christian’s duty to be concerned about the welfare and just-treatment of their neighbor [and] an attack on the biblical love command itself.”

The Good Samaritan didn’t know the history of the half dead man lying by the side of the road. He hadn’t seen the robbers and for all he knew, perhaps the man had it coming.  He only had eyes for the need and a heart that cared.  His compassion caused him to stop, reset his priorities, and then extend a healing and restorative response to the man.

Such a response is what the prophets commanded, what Jesus expects of his followers, and what the early church saw as normative. The 21st century church can do the same. But we must first see our current shortcomings as sin – including our posture of “colorblindness” which too often is a manifestation of Emerson’s epistemology of ignorance – and then develop a Christ-like heart that cares. 

Then the work begins. We have a responsibility to listen and build cross-racial relationships. The church must tackle head-on the difficult issues of racial, economic, health care and opportunity inequity.  We need to recognize where the problems are systemic and then work to change systems, like the civil rights struggles of the past.  We must call out racial injustice in a righteous way. And we must act.

And for those who continue to insist that such social action isn’t a first order issue of faith, I would merely note that Jesus set up the Good Samaritan parable as a response to an expert in the law who, in an effort to test Jesus, asked “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”  

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Houston, We Have a Problem

Posted on February 28, 2022 by steve.ignell

My journey of exploration for a United-States-I-never-knew took a new turn following a movie in North Seattle just before the pandemic hit. Tammy and I along with four other couples from one of our church’s small group fellowships were there to see Just Mercy. After the movie we gathered at a nearby coffee shop to download and process our reactions. 

Many of us were still in shock.  The story we had just experienced was infuriating, devastating, and damning.  Things we sort of knew, but only in an abstract, clinical way, became visible in living color and imprinted upon both our mind and spirit.  I teared up at several points, something I never do in movies, moved by not only the enormity of the story, but with a disquieting sense about the scale of this issue throughout an aspect of American history still largely unknown to me.

Just Mercy is a true story about one young man’s extraordinary efforts to free an innocent man on death’s row.  Bryan Stevenson, fresh out of Harvard Law, travels to Alabama and finds a deeply racialized society with the justice system and political power all stacked against African American community.  The blindfolded Lady Justice as represented on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court doesn’t exist here.  Instead, her scales are rigged and the blindfold ripped off even though it’s been decades since the landmark civil rights legislation of the 1960s.

Stevenson eventually succeeds in overturning his client’s conviction, but only with great difficulty, skill, and personal cost.  He then goes on to create the non-profit Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) which provides legal representation to those who have been denied a fair trial, wrongly convicted, or without sufficient funds to hire effective representation. 

Stevenson declares “My faith influences and shapes everything I do.” He quotes Micah 6:8 as his calling: ‘What does the Lord require of you? To act justly, and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.’  He sees this calling as non-negotiable given the estimated 1 – 5% of those incarcerated to be innocent.

Thumb on the scale: Racial Disparity in a One-of-a-Kind Criminal Justice System

The U.S. has 5% of the world’s population but 25% of its prisoners.  U.S. incarceration rates in 2008 exceeded that of the Soviet Union during its infamous Gulag system. Today about 7 million adults representing 3% of the U.S. population are under some sort of prison control.

War on Drugs

Thirty years ago, the story was much different.  Then Nixon’s War on Drugs was launched and in less than 30 years, the U.S. prison population rose from around 300,000 to 2,000,00 with most of the increase arising from drug convictions. 

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The soaring arrest and incarceration rates came from disproportionately targeted African Americans. Despite roughly similar rates of drug usage between the races, drug-related imprison rates for blacks became 6 times greater than whites. Even though 5% of illicit drug users are Blacks, Blacks who represent 14% of the U.S. population have made up 29% of those arrested and 33% of those incarcerated for drug offenses.  

Compounded Selectivity

Such disparities don’t happen by chance.  They are the outcome of sequential inequalities against blacks at every stage along the criminal justice system.  Like interest in the bank, these inequalities compound stage after stage until the disparities reach improbable levels.  Here’s how this works.

It starts with selective targeting by police, focusing efforts according to racial composition rather than actual crime likelihood.  Even when crime is not at issue, such as in highway stops, racial targeting remains extensive.  Not only do multiple studies bear this out, so do the personal experiences of many African American such as Senator Tim Scott from North Carolina who has been personally stopped 18 times for “driving while Black.”

These targeted searches mixed with police discretion too often yield a fishing expedition composed of pretend traffic stops and bullied consent.  Plus, there’s financial incentives too, from federal arrest incentives to liberal forfeiture laws which then feed back into the targeting strategies.

Selective sentencing then piles onto selective targeting.  Race matters whether a person is sentenced to incarceration or community “supervision.” Young, male, or unemployed Black and Hispanic offenders are more likely than whites to be sentenced to prison for the same crime.  This disparity deepens when considering sentence length with Blacks receiving a 20% longer sentencing period than whites for the same crime.

A vicious feedback loop develops when prior criminal records carry substantial weight in sentencing. Inequalities (e.g., the initial 6:1 disparity in arrest likelihood per crime event) get amplified again and again increasing racially disparate justice.   A study of Minnesota’s imprisonment rates show that two thirds of the racial disparities were due to criminal history factors imposed at sentencing. 

The severity of the sentencing can also be racially disparate.  The historic (but now modified) 100-to-1 rule for crack versus powdered cocaine possession is one of the best known examples. Under the old “War on Drugs” inspired law passed in 1970, it took 500 grams of cocaine to receive the same 5-year mandated sentence for 5 grams of crack. So why the difference in severity as both drugs are chemically similar?  The most telling difference was in user profiles with crack used primarily by impoverished minority users and powdered by more upscale users.  

But the disparity has only begun.  You can serve your time and pay your debt to society, but life after incarceration brings its own form of prison.  Convicted felons lose rights and face a world much different than before their “time spent.”  It varies state by state but for many, their ability to vote, own firearms, and be a juror is taken away.  Employment becomes restricted along with access to federal or state grants, public housing, and many federal benefits. Their unalienable Rights, such as Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness have now become alienable, unprotected from the whims of the majority. 

A new class of Americans

  • 1 of 3 Black, 1 of 6 Latino, and 1 of 17 white boys born today will likely be sentenced to prison;
  • 1 of 8 Black men in their twenties are locked up on any given day;
  • 3 or 4 black men in Washington DC can expect to serve time in prison
  • 4 of 5 young black men in many cities have criminal records and face a lifetime of legal discrimination
  • 50% of wrongly accused exonerations as documented by the National Registry of Exonerations were Black.
  • Black defendants are 22% more likely to have convictions exonerated due to police misconduct

Thumb on the scale: Modern Day Wealth and Income Disparities as an Outcome of Legacy Discrimination

America’s racially disparate judicial system couldn’t have happened without the legacy impacts of past discriminatory policies and actions.  The creation of dense, poverty-stricken, black neighborhoods throughout the 20th century happened through the force of law and the force of majority actions.  Limited housing options absent the power of choice imposed a heavy toll upon much of black America.  It led to urban crowding and rise of the urban ghetto.  It amplified socioeconomic vulnerabilities as it shoehorned crime into small, easy to target, areas.  It set the stage for wealth and income disparities that continue today though decades removed from the landmark civil rights legislation of the 1960s. 

Wealth Disparities

In 2019, the median white household held $188,200 in wealth vs $24,500 for black households with 25.8% of blacks and 10.6% of whites having negative wealth. After controlling for education, median black household wealth remained substantially less (70%) of the median white household.  Age-adjusted wealth of blacks nearing retirement is 10% of the wealth of whites. There is a 6-fold difference in per capita inheritance (30% of white households received an average inheritance of $195,500 compared to 10% of Black households with an average inheritance of $100,000).  There is a 2.7 -fold difference in home value (73% of white versus 42% of Black families own homes with an average value of $230,000 for white versus $150,000 for Black families). 

Underlying Causes?

There are many hypotheses explaining these inequalities and it is beyond the scope of this blogpost to fully adjudicate between them. I will say, however, that I spent most of my life in a world where folks like Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell and George Guilder associated racial inequalities to the breakdown in black family structure, the unintended consequences of welfare programs, and the harm of moral decay. Discrimination wasn’t a factor, racism wasn’t systemic, and the welfare program was government’s only enduring sin. The onus was on blacks and they held the key through the power of self-determination.  Just as long as the government got out of the way and they were up to the task.

But are blacks truly up to the task?  Now there’s an inflammatory question.   But it’s a sad fact that a dominant answer throughout most of American history has been “no.” Prior to 1700, most whites viewed black slaves as not human and incapable of learning. Then came the notion of a simple-minded, docile black man as stereotyped by the Sambo image.  The blackface stereotype became popular in the 19th century when white actors or singers darkened their faces with burnt cork, painted grotesquely exaggerated white mouths over their own, and wore woolly black wigs to create the “city dandy,” a northern counterpart to the southern “plantation darky” Sambo.  A third stereotype saw African Americans as “shuffling and drawling, cracking and dancing, wisecracking and high stepping” buffoons.  The 1915 released movie “Birth of a Nation” portrayed blacks (many of which were white actors in blackface) as stupid and sexually aggressive toward white women.

The belief that black Americans lacked motivation to work was also a dominant narrative.  The Washington Post correspondent Henry West called “the typical black man of North Carolina to be a “thriftless, improvident, does not accumulate money, and is not accounted as desirable citizen.” Southern legislatures adopted black codes centered around vagrancy laws where it became a criminal offense to not have proof of a job, opening the door to convict laws which returned black labor to the plantations in a slave-like fashion.  Those codes, rationalized through a disparaging narrative of the black character, were eventually overturned through federal legislation and constitutional amendments.  But many of those sensibilities have remained.

The graph above measures racial resentment using Kinder and Sander’s metric of how much white Americans “attribute socioeconomic disparities of black and white Americans to racial discrimination or to a lack of hard work and perseverance by black Americans. The more one agrees with the general sentiment that black people’s lack of effort is the primary reason for racial disparities, the higher that individual’s racial resentment score.”

So, are the large and enduring wealth inequalities an outcome of poor work ethics? 

The Cleveland Federal Reserve Bank disagrees.  They see the current racial wealth gap as systemic, a legacy of our past with persistent staying power: “The current racial wealth gap is the consequence of many decades of racial inequality that imposed barriers to wealth accumulation either through explicit prohibition during slavery or unequal treatment after emancipation. Examples of post emancipation barriers include legally mandated segregation in schools and housing, discrimination in the labor market, and redlining, which reduced access to capital in black neighborhoods. And…it may be surprising how little the racial wealth gap has changed over the past half century, even after the passage of civil rights legislation. In fact, the 2016 wealth gap is roughly the same as it was in 1962.”

Income Disparities

In 1962, black households earned 52% that of white households.  Little has changed since then with the percentage increasing to 58% in 2007 and then falling steeply after the recession of 2007 – 2009.  The black unemployment rate roughly doubles that of white unemployment. Whites seeking employment receive about 36% more callbacks than blacks given similar qualifications.

Does the blame for the large and enduring income inequalities reside with deficiencies in black communities? 

The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco says no: “a significant portion of the wage gap between blacks and whites is not traceable to differences in easily measured characteristics [demographic, education, job type, socioeconomic, etc}, but rather is unexplained…the consistency of the black-white wage gap across the full spectrum of subgroups in our data indicates that the forces contributing to the wage gap apply to the entire population of black workers.”

The Cleveland Federal Reserve Bank agrees, calling us to look elsewhere: “closing the racial income gap…leads to another broad set of questions…such as racial discrimination in the labor market, incarceration policies, and skills…the role of factors such as deindustrialization, neighborhoods, and schools…the intergenerational transmission of income is lower for blacks than for their white counterparts at all levels of income.”

Synthesis

In my old job, “they” made me take a course in the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1970.  This law saturated our agency’s business and although my work never directly required this expertise, employees I supervised did and someone upstairs determined that folks like me needed to know.  Mostly likely to feel their pain, but in any event, to at least understand how this legislative act was important within our agency and hence connected to our mission. 

I intentionally left the textbook upon retirement. I’ll never used it nor will I ever need to use it.  And if that black swan event ever arises and NEPA enters my life, I’ll invoke the famous “I don’t recall” line of criminals/politicians and then run and duck for cover. 

I did, however, learn one useful concept in my training. Though many development activities may be individually minor in effect, over time the cumulative effect can often be highly significant.  Even exceeding the severity in impact of a major direct effect.  Because it’s the cumulative effects that make the biggest difference.

One way to “see” the impact of the many legacy creating cumulative effects is to borrow the following language from our Declaration of Independence: “The history of the present King of Great Britain [insert United States] is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations…To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.”  The United States government:

  • chose to build racially separate public housing in cities without a segregation history.
  • gave developers FHA guarantees for building segregated housing.
  • urged suburbs to adopt exclusionary zoning laws enabling white flight.
  • allowed State courts to evict black homeowners in neighborhoods with racially restrictive covenants
  • allowed churches, universities, and hospitals restrictive covenants while keeping their tax-exempt status.
  • allowed police to support leaders of mob violence when blacks tried to move into white neighborhoods.
  • allowed state real estate commissions to ignore brokers who imposed segregation in neighborhoods.
  • allowed school boards to place schools and attendance boundaries to separate black from white students.
  • allowed highway planners to run new highways through black neighborhoods helping create urban ghettos.
  • denied equal labor rights to black workers, helping to trap them in low-income neighborhoods.
  • provided tax breaks to the suburbs while neglecting giving support to the inner city.

All of these actions by state, federal and local officials fueled the division of our country by race.  It gave cover to the majority white population to do the same through their own discriminatory actions such as redlining. It led to the creation of ghettos and the restriction of wealth building by black families.  It created an acute sensitivity to inner-city employment dynamics. 

Then as they were forced to live packed together in confined urban areas while being shut out of the suburbs, globalization and de-industrialization brought the perfect storm to black America.  More than 70% of inner-city blacks held blue-collar jobs in 1970.  By 1987, however, industrial employment of black men dropped to 28%.  Many of the jobs had moved to the suburbs or overseas, but the legacy housing policies kept blacks hemmed in the city. A whole generation of inner-city black men became isolated, jobless and only 18% of them had access to a car.

Crime rates rose but rather than addressing root causes, the War of Drugs became a war on symptoms. Enforcement agencies placed a target on urban communities where they could get the most “bang for the buck.” And then through feedback mechanisms of selectivity begetting selectivity, the war on symptoms created a new caste of Americans: young black men with criminal records permanently sidelined in society. 

Final Thoughts

Throughout my journey I found truth in the old maxim “where you stand depends upon where you sit.” And the longer my travels, the more my “standing” changed – as long as I made space for people’s stories and the analytics of racial disparities. I refused to let past narratives, formed in cultural echo chambers, cancel new discoveries. I needed, in Galef’s language, to adopt a scout rather than a soldier mindset.  Soldiers prioritize defending themselves and their tribal narratives.  Scouts prioritize discovering the truth independent of those narratives. In doing this, scouts prioritize listening to others, heeding Baldwin’s words. “If one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected — those, precisely, who need the law’s protection most! — and listens to their testimony.”

Isn’t it time we hold in abeyance our hypotheses and preconceived notions and just begin to listen?  Intentional about becoming a scout, able to change where we stand as a posture of listening changes where we sit.   

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A Journey of Discovery

Posted on February 22, 2022 by steve.ignell

It took me nearly 60 years before I finally understood. Yes, the ground had been laid in the preceding decade as I increasingly challenged some of my past tribal narratives. But it took two separate events within the space of a week to nail this lesson home once and for all. That there was structural unequalness between the races in society and that my understandings on America’s racial issues were woefully incomplete. 

We are storytelling people acutely committed to defending our narratives.  Changing those narratives is hard work, especially when they arise from a cultural tradition embedded deep within our subconscious. It usually takes life events of great love or pain to push through those boundaries.  In my case, it was love.

I can still picture myself sitting in a friend’s living room.  There was an event that day and the house was packed.  Most people had moved into the kitchen and family room. That’s where the food was and it was time to eat.  Just a few of us remained in the living room and while waiting for the lines to shorten, I struck up a conversation with an African-American woman whom I had seen for years but never spoken to one on one. 

We talked about work, family, church, and life in general. She was a professional woman, well-educated and respected.  Somehow, we got on the subject of cars. They had an expensive European car and an older American car which had seen better days.  The older car was a burden to drive and on one of her travels in that car to a professional meeting in Kirkland, she recounted a story of how she got lost and kept circling and circling trying to break free of Kirkland’s confusing back streets.

She spoke about feeling trapped.  The more she tried to find a way out, the greater the fear.  She just knew someone would call the police, believing she had no business in such an upscale neighborhood.  It was a scenario she had experienced before, a perverted form of Newton’s 3rd law of motion.  To wit: a black woman driving a run-down car in an affluent neighborhood yielding a likely reaction from the police and all of the uncertainty that follows.

I’ll never forget the sense of terror she conveyed that day.  The residual fear was palpable just like it was a week later when we had another professional African-American woman in our home.  Her son was embarking on a journey from college to another part of the country where a new job awaited him.  His journey required traversing vast remote areas noted for aggressive policing, especially towards people of color. As long as he started early enough, all would be fine. He’d be able to pass through these areas in daylight with the rest of the journey in more friendly territory. 

But his day had started off with a broken-down car and by the time it was fixed, the morning was gone.  It meant driving at night through a region with a reputation and all of the uncertainty that follows. Once again, I witnessed the emotions from a terror-filled woman. We prayed and she paced, and she paced and we prayed until she heard from her son that he was in a safe place. 

A Journey of Discovery

Walter Lippman’s observation “for the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define and then see,” rang true that week. I found a world of discovery awaiting me.  I listened to a friend about the “talk” he gave to his racially different adopted son, a “talk” he never had to make with his naturally born white children. I began reading books, embarking on my own journey of exploration for a United States I had never known. 

I read Martin Luther King’s (MLK) book Stride Towards Freedom and his Letter from a Birmingham jail.  I discovered an insightful, godly, and learned man different than the communist and womanizer man I had been taught. I then read MLK’s “Where Do We Go From Here” where he lays out a vision for achieving equality in jobs, wages, housing, and education. He saw the racial problem in America as systemic, where “the persistence of racism in depth and the dawning awareness that Negro demands will necessitate structural changes in society.”

I read The Warmth of Other Sons, a beautifully written book, and learned about the “Great Migration” – a phrase I had never previously heard.  It’s a story about six million African-Americans fleeing the harshness of the Jim Crow South to the supposedly “better” cities of the North and West.  Once there, however, they find a different kind of thumb on the scale, encountering a new form of discrimination through housing and jobs.  As MLK once said: “Let us not fool ourselves, we are far from the Promised Land, both north and south.”

I read The Color of Law and discovered that urban ghettos didn’t happen by chance.  They were created over decades through a private-public partnership with a goal of protecting white interests.  At the core were a range of de jure discriminatory actions (government based) in areas such as zoning, taxation, federal financing and subsidies, and highway construction routes. Private discriminatory actions (de facto) such as redlining and urban flight then filled in the spaces, leveraging the federal, state, and local government policies for maximum impact. 

I read The New Jim Crow and learned how the war on drugs put a thumb on the scale for black men in America. It was a war unequally waged, marked by decades of racially selective targeting, sentencing, imprisonment, and parole enforcement.  It left a racial legacy of unequal impacts through a gauntlet of private and legal restrictions imposed on those who have served time.  Although the causes are highly debated, the statistics are shocking and cannot be swept under the rug.  And whatever the cause, justice has not been blind and the scales rigged for a whole class of Americans.

I read The Color of Compromise and learned how much of the church promoted or at least accommodated racism since the first arrival of slaves in 1619.  Yes, many white Christians opposed racism throughout history. But too often they were the exceptions rather than the rule. During the antebellum era many Christians, even some of the great “heroes of the faith,” owned slaves.  Others supported racial prejudice and/or abuse, a perversion of God’s order which continued into the next period of bondage, Jim Crow.   Still others chose to stay stayed silent, preferring in the words of MLK a “negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”  

I read The Bible Told Them So and learned how many southern white Christians, following the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, asserted the principle of colorblindness while preaching and practicing a segregationist Christianity. They saw scripture as supporting their racialized stance and practices.  Then by asserting “colorblindness,” it allowed them to be “faithful to scripture” while navigating the perceptions of society.

I read Divided by Faith, a sociological study on faith and race in America.  There I learned despite the many actions by evangelical leaders to address the problem of racial discrimination (e.g., Promise Keepers), the data are clear. White evangelicals are more likely to be part of the problem than part of the solution to closing the racial divide in America. They are unable to “see” the persistence of systemic discrimination in America because of a set of theological and cultural presuppositions. All they can “see” is individual sin, hence there is only one solution: individual repentance from sinful individuals.

But Christ’s defeat of sin and death through the cross is much more than that. It’s joining God in the renewal of all things through the launch of His Kingdom.  In Andy Crouch’s words, we are called to work “for the peace, security, justice, and prosperity of their city and their neighbors, loving them in word and in deed.” But by restricting the gospel to the plan of salvation rather than, in the words of Emerson and Smith, “integrat[ing] their faith with knowledge of race relations, inequality, and American society…[evangelicals] allow their cultural constructions to shape one-dimensional assessments and solutions to multidimensional problems.”

I read the stories of African Americans through books like Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates and I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness by Austin Channing Brown. I read even more books, all illuminating a different part of an America, past and present, I never knew existed.  I then pored over academic articles and found a troubling set of data supporting the findings in those books.

I learned how Alexis de Tocqueville, the legendary and astute observer of American society once said “I do not imagine that the white and black race will ever live in any country upon an equal footing.  But I believe the difficulty to be still greater in the United States than elsewhere. An isolated individual may surmount the prejudices…but a whole people cannot rise.”

De Tocqueville saw the United States as composed of two foreign communities, one white and the other black.  And if slaves were freed, he predicted this divide would just grow deeper, a conflict that “perpetually haunts the imagination of Americans, like painful dream.”

A century later following the end of slavery but still in the midst of Jim Crow, Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish scholar studying race in America, found honest, hardworking white Americans to be relatively satisfied with race relations.  Yes, there were a few “bad apples” they said, but relations between races were good and improving across the majority population.  When pressed by the gross inequalities and oppression highly visible during Jim Crow, they were surprised and taken back by the question.  They weren’t aware there was a problem. Myrdal concluded what de Tocqueville a century earlier had observed.  Even though slavery had been abolished in the intervening years, American was a divided, unequal, society and one side seemed comfortable with that.

Racialization is a Variable

The data shows race has and continues to be the largest social cleavage in America.  In fact, that cleavage continues to deepen even after all the legislative progress America has experienced in the past 150 years.  Now if you asked people today if “are Africans not fully human” or “do whites have a right to keep blacks out of their neighborhoods” and compare against historical responses, you would conclude racism is declining. 

But the racialization of America functions as a variable in history.  And we fail to understand it when we treat it as a constant, viewed through the lens from an era preceding ours. Hence, it’s important to ask the right question, a question that addresses the current state of society.  For example, the normative belief in early American history of “Africans are not fully human” diminished during the Jim Crow era. But that era brought new racial goalposts defined through segregation, discrimination, and disenfranchisement.

Similarly, the normative belief during Jim Crow of “whites have a right to keep blacks out of their neighborhoods” diminished following the passage of the Civil Rights Act. But our current era, following the civil rights legislation of the 1960s has brought new goalposts of legacy impacts due to the persistence of inequalities in wealth, employment, education, housing, health, and judicial areas established during Jim Crow. Despite the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, little has changed in terms of societal division born of sustained racial inequalities according to the Kerner Report in 1968, the Eisenhower Foundation Commission in 1993, and the 2018 report entitled “Healing Our Divided Society.”

When such persistent disparities march together in lockstep, something other than chance is going on.  There must be underlying variables common in impact across life experiences and time. But what are those variables? As you would expect, many answers abound and here they create an even wider division among the races.

Three General Hypotheses

On the one side are those who see racialized differences arising through differential benefits based upon race and sustained through policies, institutions, and societal norms.  Its these structural differences which change the goalposts and they operate covertly, seemingly invisible to most whites.

Others see society as yielding equal opportunity without any lingering racial goalposts.  Any differences are due to conditions cultural in origin, an outcome of work habits, character, and moral control.  Under this individual-based worldview, society delivers an equal opportunity to every person and it’s up to each one of us to shape that into a successful future. 

Still others assert that these differences are old news, outdated narratives which distort the current prejudicial state of American society.  The tide has turned and now its white Americans which face the headwinds from racialized policies.  

Final Thoughts

My next several posts will explore these hypotheses from a data and theological perspective.  But until then, I’ll let the great statesman Frederick Douglass (1853) have the last word:

 “A heavy and cruel hand has been laid upon us.  As a people, we feel ourselves to be not only deeply injured, but grossly misunderstood.  Our white countrymen do not know us.  They are strangers to our character, ignorant of our capacity, oblivious to our history and progress, and are misinformed as to the principles and ideas that control and guide us as a people.  The great mass of American citizens estimates us as being a characterless and purposeless people; and hence we hold up our heads, if at all, against the withering influence of a nation’s scorn and contempt.”

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MLK in His Own Words

Posted on January 17, 2022 by steve.ignell

To honor Martin Luther King today, I thought I would post some of his own words, particularly those that are new to me and probably to many others as well.  They may be surprising as many of us really didn’t know him well, with our experience limited to a few quotes and a general understanding of his life’s work.  His books though are easy to read as he was a good writer. And given the current debate about “wokeness,” structural racism, and critical race theory, its important for us to hear his voice once again as MLK had much to say about systemic racism and justice.

On America’s “Congenital Deformity”

“Ever since the birth of our nation, white America has had a schizophrenic personality of the question of race.  She has been torn between selves – a self in which she proudly professed the great principles of democracy and a self in which she sadly practiced the antithesis of democracy.  This tragic duality has produced a strange indecisiveness and ambivalence toward the Negro, causing America to take a step backward simultaneously with every step forward on the question of racial justice, to be at once attracted to the Negro and repelled by him, to love and to hate him.”

“What is the source of this perennial indecision and vacillations?  It lies in the “congenital deformity” of racism that has crippled the nation from its inception.” -MLK Where Do We Go From Here

Over 100 years earlier, De Tocqueville saw the United States as composed of two foreign communities, one white and the other black.  And if slaves were freed, he predicted that this divide would just grow deeper, a conflict that “perpetually haunts the imagination of Americans, like painful dream.”

On “A Few Bad Apples”

“It is an aspect of their sense of superiority that the white people of American believe they have so little to learn. In human relations the truth is hard to come by, because most groups are deceived about themselves. Rationalization and the incessant search for scapegoats are the psychological cataracts that blind us to our individual and collective sins.”

“For the good of America, it is necessary to refute the idea that the dominant ideology in our country even today is freedom and equality while racism is just an occasional departure from the norm on the part of a few bigoted extremists.”

“To live with the pretense that racism is a doctrine of a very few is to disarm us in fighting it frontally as scientific unsound, morally repugnant and socially destructive.  The prescription for the cure rests with the accurate diagnosis of the disease.  A people who began a national life inspired by a vision of a society of brotherhood can redeem itself.  But redemption can come only through a humble acknowledgment of guilt and an honest knowledge of self.” -MLK Where Do We Go From Here

Decades earlier Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish scholar studying race in America, found honest, hardworking Americans to be relatively satisfied with race relations.  Yes, there were a few bad apples they said, but relations between races were good and improving across the majority population.  When pressed by the gross inequalities and oppression highly visible during Jim Crow, they were surprised and taken back by the question.  They weren’t aware there was a problem.

On “A Nation’s Scorn and Contempt”

“when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”–then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.” – MLK Letter from a Birmingham jail

 “All too many Americans are horrified not with conditions of Negro life but with the product of these conditions – the Negro himself.” – The Role of the Behavioral Scientist in the Civil Rights Movement (1967)

Over 100 years earlier Frederick Douglass said: “A heavy and cruel hand has been laid upon us.  As a people, we feel ourselves to be not only deeply injured, but grossly misunderstood.  Our white countrymen do not know us.  They are strangers to our character, ignorant of our capacity, oblivious to our history and progress, and are misinformed as to the principles and ideas that control and guide us as a people.  The great mass of American citizens estimates us as being a characterless and purposeless people; and hence we hold up our heads, if at all, against the withering influence of a nation’s scorn and contempt.”

On “Systemic” Prejudice

“The majority of white Americans consider themselves sincerely committed to justice for the Negro.  They believe that American Society is essentially hospitable to fair play and to steady growth towards a middle-class Utopia embodying racial harmony. But unfortunately, this is a fantasy of self-deception and comfortable vanity.”

“Depressed living standards for Negroes are not simply the consequence of neglect.  Nor can they be explained by the myth of the Negro’s innate incapacities, or by the more sophisticated rationalization of his acquired infirmities (family disorganization, poor education, etc).  They are a structural part of the economic system in the United States.”

“years of struggle have sensitized the Negro’s eyes…[they] have become aware of the deeper causes for the crudity and cruelty that governed white society’s responses to their needs They discovered that their plight was not a consequence of superficial prejudice but was systemic.” -MLK Where Do We Go From Here

One Final Thought

Most of us are unaware of MLK’s story at least in its fullest telling. We have not been taught the extent of the sin, the depravity, against African Americans over the past 400 years. What we were taught, at least in my experience, was about a womanizing communist and an embarrassment to this nation. 

Fortunately much of this has changed in the last 50 years.  But that doesn’t mean that we are out of the woods as a nation.  The racialization of America functions as a variable in history.  And we fail to understand it when we treat it as a constant, viewed through the lens of an era preceding ours. Our ignorance, misunderstandings, and/or distorted education makes it easy for us to hide behind a self-described “colorblindness,” unwilling to accept that there is sustained systemic and structural prejudice in our society. But the data shows it’s still here.

This is a huge and fascinating study showing racial/ethnic discrimination be a continuing and significant problem in America.  It shows how such discrimination continues to impact many core parts of the lives of Black Americans while reinforcing and exacerbating existing inequalities.

The church has the tools to correct this.  Orthodox theology demands it.  But when Christianity is fused with a mythical understanding of history the call of the gospel becomes corrupted. I’ll be writing more about this in coming weeks and months. Until then, here’s some data showing how present-day Christian Nationalism is associated with the perpetuation of the “congenital deformity” of racism that continues to harm our nation.

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Hope or Hopelessness

Posted on December 20, 2021 by steve.ignell

“But I just don’t know what to believe anymore.”  A pastor said this on Facebook after being called out for a disgusting and shameful video posted during the midst of New York City’s worst moments with hospitals over flowing and fleets of refrigerator trucks storing the dead. The post was from citizen reporters who had uncovered the “truth” about the pandemic.  Contrary to the mainstream media, New York City hospitals were idle and they had the video to prove it.  The virus was a hoax, fake news, and the suppression of this truth a grand conspiracy against our nation.

Yet the truth was just 15 seconds away.  An easy one-click google search could have quickly revealed the creator of the post’s true colors. She was a well-known conspiracy theorist and this was just one in a long series of outrageous and false claims.  On a scale from 0-10 where 10 denotes a difficult decision, this judgment was a 0, as easy as it gets. 

During this covid season, I’ve responded to a number of people’s questions ranging from the science behind covid treatments to the veracity of outlandish truth claims.  People are stressed and looking for answers, trying to make sense of the challenging times.  There’s no shortage of answers and without the help of truth’s traditional guardrails, they get lost and truly don’t know what to believe. 

Brief Recap of Previous Posts About Truth

In the past four blogs I’ve provided four different perspectives that influence what we know to be true. I started with Galef’s metaphor how some of us (actually most of us) pursue truth through a “soldier” mindset where our goal is to defend our side.  It drives us to rationalize our beliefs and filter our vision so that “we see what we want to see.”  A second option – and the road much less traveled – is to pursue a “scout” mindset when our priority is to survey the territory without preconceived ideas so that we can draw as accurate as a map as possible. 

In my second blog, I posited what a scout mindset looks like using Wolfe’s book “Epistemology: The Justification of Belief.” He contends that all of our assertions and opinions arise from un underlying belief system or interpretive scheme.  He calls us to examine how we believe something is true because only those truth claims that survive robust and open critique can be considered “warranted,” or validated. Sheltering a scheme from such critique or constructing our “facts” from a prejudged set of sources may neutralize opposition but it also trivializes its truth claims.  Surviving open criticism means that our belief system must actually correspond to reality and can’t be selectively applied.  In Wolfe’s terms, it must be: (1) consistently applied without contradiction, (2) coherent (i.e., logically consistent) (3) comprehensive throughout experience, and (4) congruent (i.e., best fit) to the data.

In the third blog I started with the century old debate between Lippman and Dewey on the correspondence vs coherence vs theory of truth. Do we believe reality is knowable through an unprejudiced analysis of facts or are we constrained by a limited set of prior beliefs or upon people we know or trust? I then introduced several lines of research that show how Lippman got it right.  We know by how we feel and those feelings are an outcome of our prior values and sensibilities.  We’re more soldiers than scouts, prone to project values onto our perception of facts, exchanging “what is” for “what it ought to be.” In the words of Lippman, “for the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define and then see.”

I then show how values are a two-edged sword. They are essential to the flourishing of society, serving as a beacon or lighthouse to help us determine right from wrong. But watch out when people violate our moral code.  Especially when amplified through a culture war fueled by media-driven outrage where malice and distain become the norm.  It creates a binary world that turns us into soldiers with the goal of defending our team’s beliefs.  And the more people moralize about politics, the more partisan bias, distance, and animosity they exhibit.  Truth becomes one-sided, coloring one’s perspective of the world.

I expand upon the truth and values theme in the fourth blog by cautioning against having incomplete values. Although we may be virtuous at heart, our goodness gets transformed through a culture war incompatible with the cross.  Through the heat of the battle, with apocalyptic outcomes at stake, our virtuous nature gives way to vice.  We become affectively polarized through a diet of outrage and fear which means that our partisan dislike surpasses most other affections.  The fruits of the Spirit yield to the works of the flesh as our inner self becomes disformed. And with the loss of those fruits comes a loss in our truth claims because we are merely soldiers for someone else’s cause.

Hope or Hopelessness

Marietta and Barker in their book One Nation Two Realities paint a hopeless picture for America.  So do an increasing number of pundits across both sides of the aisle.  Day after day, malice, distain, and outrage are amplified through the infinite feedback loops of our echo chambers. And of the many causalities from this war, there are none more profound than truth. 

Yet I think of Keith or Eva, both whom I’ve mentioned in earlier blogs: or our friends Dave and Karen, or Steve my former pastor.  And other friends along with thousands and perhaps millions of others like them that refuse to subject their heart to a divisive message.  This remnant of people, like Shadrach, Meshack and Abednego of old, have chosen not to bend, bow or burn the pure gospel for a counterfeit message that the culture war demands.

It’s because of this remnant that I chose hope rather than hopelessness for our nation.  They serve as examples, as signposts in a hostile culture (a part of which is evangelical-based) of a different way to be human.  Three aspects of their lives stand out as a possible roadmap for others to escape from tribalist rabbit holes to be part of a movement that brings hope to our nation.

Step 1 to Hope – Establish Road Markers, Make Yourself Guideposts

The Hebrew prophet Jeremiah said: “Set up road markers for yourself; make yourself guideposts; consider well the highway, the road by which you went” (Jer. 31:21 ESV).

It’s a theme found elsewhere in scripture such as Proverbs 4:25-27 “your eyes look straight ahead; fix your gaze directly before you. Give careful thought to the paths for your feet and be steadfast in all your ways. Do not turn to the right or the left; keep your foot from evil.” And it serves as our first step towards hope.

  1. Don’t blindly trust your intuitions.  Be on guard against the unconscious power of our cognitive biases that drive us to look for causality at all costs, picking and choosing data (or even making up data) to confirm existing beliefs.  And then recognize that no matter how much we guard against those biases, we need external accountability as those biases are built into our neurology and we can’t escape them.
  2. Don’t blindly trust your tribes and especially their media outlets.  Be on guard against the power of tribalism to hijack our identity, imputing certainty on our truth judgments that they now control. To wit: unless we break free our media echo chambers and purposively and seriously question the narratives in those chambers, our understandings of truth will remain fettered.
  3. Don’t blindly embrace “new” ideas.  Be on guard for our human susceptibility to the “medium lie” which opens the door to another lie and then another until we will accept anything. In a like manner, be vigilant against the lure of a soft Gnosticism, with its itchy ears for “secret knowledge” that too often leads people down YouTube rabbit holes. In my past Pentecostal tradition, we were always on the lookout for fresh revelation, new insight that no one else had ever seen.  It too often led us down wrong paths.
  4. Don’t blindly hold tight to your opinions.  Be on guard for our human need for certainty.  The antidote is humility that welcomes uncertainty as it exchanges a “soldier” mindset of defending tribal beliefs to a “scout” mindset where accuracy is the goal.

Step 2 to Hope – Seek Wisdom Like a “Scout”

The quest for wisdom is characterized as a passionate call for insight and understanding.  Scripture likens it to looking for silver and searching for hidden treasure.  It’s a journey of discovery that depends upon virtue through a humility and openness to counsel. 

  1. Honor the Bible as the story of God rather than a collection of proof texts that we can pick and choose to fit existing narratives.  As NT Wright has said, each word in scripture must be understood within its own verse, each verse within its on chapter, each chapter within its own book, and each book within its own historical, cultural, and indeed canonical setting.
  2. Honor the Book of God’s Works – his created universe – by honoring peer review science as the hands and feet that uncovers those Works, consistently applying such science through an objective weighing of valid evidence and expert judgement across the spectrum of issues, whether they are partisan or not.
  3. Honor the wisdom of a diverse crowd as there is “safety in the multitude of counselors.”  Being embedded in diverse communities with a practice of listening, goes a long way to keep us on the straight and narrow.
  4. Honor the wisdom of diverse counsel from those with proven expertise both inside and outside of your guild.

Step 3 to Hope – Choose Virtue

Philippians 4:8 says “Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things;”

Mom would often quote those words as this was the second of many Bible verses I memorized as a young boy.  I never forgot it because the older I got, the more she reminded me of this verse.  We still need this wisdom and here’s how that would look like using a passage in Galatians that I’m sure mom would approve of.  Especially as a contrast between the nine Fruits of the Spirit with those Works of the Flesh which arise through the heat of America’s culture-war battle.

Towards a joy arising through an undivided heart with affections affixed upon Christ: an outcome of a 2 Cor 3:18 life passion for Christ shining through us, independent of situation and culture.

Away from factions and the division that breeds an affective polarization which distorts and divides our heart.  Where our enmity towards the opposing side exceeds even our affection for those around us.    

Towards a peace born of His Spirit, marked by forgiveness, and sustained through Philippians 2:13 type of trust that God is working in us and giving us the means to do His will. 

Away from dissentions and conflict borne of a culture war that is destroying our church and country.  Where a passion for political power exceeds a passion for the cross as it changes the gospel witness in this world.   

Towards patience, putting others before us as we forbear with the inconveniences of the world.  Although not blind to injustice, patience refuses to punish others for the difficult, unfair, and painful nature of life. 

Away from discord from fighting in a world that blames the other as it unleashes the dogs of war.  Fed by fear, it relies upon a highly divisive populism marked by “we the good” and “they the enemy.”  

Towards kindness irrespective of the individual: whether poor or rich, liberal or conservative, gay or straight, city dweller or rural, immigrant or citizen, or whether in or out of my group.  I am Christ’s reflection in this world and that is what He would do.

Away from group rivalry and its binary world that’s a zero sum game where somebody has to loose. Such tribalism changes our identity and alters our perspective us as it binds and blinds us against the other side.

Towards goodness through a life marked by virtue, humility, empathy, and putting others first rather than seeking our own advantage.  Where we are kind, full of mercy and passionate about justice.

Away from a selfishness that sees people different than us and foreign to us as violators of “our way of life.” Whipping us up into a fear-based state of alarm despite the Biblical call to welcome the stranger.

Towards a faithfulness in character that arises from a pure and undivided heart. Marked by a consistency between beliefs and actions, and where faith is confirmed through deeds and not just words.

Away from great zeal of a partisanship that competes with a gospel-centric faith and leaves us doubleminded.  From an upside-down world where mulligans are given out because the end justifies the means.

Towards a gentleness in spirit witnessed through a meekness of character, being kind to one another as we forgive one another. Strength under control with a softness in speech and a tenderness in action. 

Away from fits of rage arising from a steady diet of malice and outrage. Where fears are stoked and outrage enhanced and then again and again through an echo chamber-led feedback cycle. 

Towards self-control marked by a self-awareness and empathy towards others. Quick to listen and slow to speak, giving ourselves time to think before we act. 

Away from the impurities formed by innate cognitive biases which causes us to instantly respond without considerate thought. It leads to predictable errors in judgement which are very difficult to overcome. It taints our truthfulness, relationships, and our consistency with gospel verities.

Two Hypotheses:

My primary audience in the last four blogs have been both the Christian and evangelical communities, an estimated 70% and 25% of the American population, respectively. In the last two blogs I focused on the fruits of the spirit, the gospel-centric metrics for our external actions and internal attitudes.  They tell the true story about the faith we affirm and help shape the story of our truth proclamations.

H1: The division in America could swiftly change if the Christian church heeded the calling of 1 Peter 2:21 “To this you were called, because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps.” NT Wright put it this way: “Jesus came to earth to bring something new, through the launch of a kingdom that was not of this world. As citizens of that kingdom, we are to be instruments of God’s new creation, planting signposts in hostile soil that show a different way to be human.”  The early church changed their world through being faithfully present to follow in the footsteps of Jesus.  We could too.

H2: The truth crises in America would swiftly change if the Christian church, the ekklesia, would:

  1. Heed the scriptural admonition to “establish road markers…make yourself guideposts” by refusing to: blindly trust our fallible intuitions, blindly trust our tribes and media outlets, blindly embrace “new” unwarranted ideas, and blindly holding tight to our opinions.
  2. Seek knowledge and wisdom like a “scout,” like a hunt for hidden treasure encapsulated by virtue, humility and an openness to diverse counsel.
  3. Taking to heart the calling of Philippians 4:8 “Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.”

There’s never been a time where the scriptural injunction to “Be on your guard and stay awake” is more needed for the discernment of truth and the avoidance of deception.  In fact, none of this truly works without first establishing boundaries as it’s nearly impossible to follow the rest when entwined in a partisan or populist worldview born of our culture wars.  So, let’s be on guard, honor wisdom’s diverse foundations, and then commit to the core of the gospel: dying to self, putting others before us, being attune to the Spirit, and with a singular focus on Jesus.

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The Indispensable Imperative of Virtue

Posted on December 11, 2021 by steve.ignell

“Most people say that it is the intellect which makes a great scientist. They are wrong: it is character” – Albert Einstein

So begins the opening line of a leadership paper a former colleague Doug DeMaster and I wrote a few years back. I was privileged to work under Doug, first as a scientist and then as his Deputy managing a regional science enterprise. Doug was one of the brightest lights within the organization.  Smart, highly respected, accomplished, wise, and virtuous.  My resume was much more modest, but I was also the “core values” guy and when Doug needed that sort of person to help him lead the Center, I got the job.

Our leadership responsibilities were, at times, national in scope through membership on national leadership and policy councils.  There we saw first-hand the good, bad, and the ugly of leadership execution across diverse agencies and regions.  In our judgement, many of the Agency problems appeared to be foundational, stemming from deficiencies in leadership values. Solutions too often attacked the symptoms rather than root causes.  Hence the symptoms would invariably persist, likely to surface again like a game of whack-a-mole. 

We found that organizational excellence depended on the character of its leadership and that Einstein’s character insight applied to science organizations too.  We saw character as foundational to healthy organizations through virtuous leaders who practice what they preach. We further believed that leadership excellence was best expressed through “servant leadership”, as demonstrated through a leader’s ability to listen, empower, and develop staff in a manner marked by integrity, humility and authenticity. That the task of a leader was a moral endeavor as much as a scientific endeavor where character and virtue became indispensable to the mission.

Moral Man, Immoral Society

Moral reasoning and belief however, as I wrote in my previous blog post, can be tricky business.  Jonathan Haidt, the author of moral foundation theory, sees it as a two-edged sword, able to bring both good and harm: “Morality binds people into groups. It gives us tribalism, it gives us genocide, war, and politics. But it also gives us heroism, altruism, and sainthood.”

Garrett and Bankert in their paper “the Moral Roots of Partisan Division: How Moral Conviction Heightens Affective Polarization,” show how partisanship and moralization feed off of on another.  We know that strong partisans will seek out information that cast their party in a most favorable light. This motivated reasoning stems from a “soldier mindset” where accuracy is no longer the main goal. 

Yet the more people moralize about politics, the more partisan bias, distance, and animosity they exhibit.  And the stronger the moralization the more one-sided people become in their partisan and ideological division. Such moralizing even trumps partisan strength as a driving force behind anger, incivility, and antagonism towards the opposing side.  It intensifies affective polarization and an increased perception of social anomie with its attending call for authoritarian and strong leaders.  

Are Morals Then the Problem?

From coast to coast throughout America, virtue is alive and well, witnessed through the goodness of neighbors and family. This practice of virtue has been seen as essential for human flourishing across the landscape of human history. Virtue in the ancient Japanese Bushidō code was marked by righteousness, courage, benevolence, respect, honesty, honor, loyalty, filial piety, wisdom and care of the aged.  Aristotle’s four classic cardinal virtues were temperance, prudence, courage, and justice. Early Christian church fathers then added faith, hope and love to make up the Seven Christian Virtues.  The Christian faith lists the Fruit of the Spirit – the outward behavioral evidence of an inner transformation – which is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.

Good character depends upon a range of virtues, not just one or two.  Sins of omission can lead to profound sins of commission when our moral codes are incomplete.  Even the Sicilian Mafia lives by a moral code which emphasizes respect, loyalty, honor, and fidelity: “anyone who behaves badly and doesn’t hold to moral values” are no longer welcome in their organization. But their moral code is woefully incomplete, lacking essential virtues needed for human flourishing.

The problem in America, like in the case of the Cosa Nostra, isn’t because morals aren’t valued.  The problem in America arises from incomplete virtues, especially within the public square. The goodness we experience in everyday life gets transformed through our partisan battles.  It creates a new worldview of us against them that reshapes our inner self.  We become affectively polarized from a partisan dislike that surpasses all other affections. The culture war amplifies those sensibilities through the outrage and fear it inspires.  Then cancel culture sets in, but only after we cancel the goodness within us. 

Andrew Sullivan the conservative iconoclast, who alternatively triggers and affirms both partisan sides, recently said: “The American Constitution was set up for people who can reason and argue and aren’t afraid of it, and then reach compromises, the whole thing is designed that way.” “If you’re in a tribe, and all that matters is the victory of your tribe…You can’t make it work.” “We’re flying from reality. We’re inventing abstractions and ideologies. We’re fighting each other. We’re demonizing each other. The system can still work. It’s we who are broken.” 

The Full Gospel Priority of Othropraxis and Orthopathy

Our identity must be in Christ and our calling is to love the other.  This calling, the injunction to act justly, love mercy and walk humbly with our God, has no higher priority as we “are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works.” As we conform to His Image through abiding in Him, the Fruit of the Spirit shows up. And it’s our Christian practice (orthopraxis) informed by our attitudes (orthopathy) that tells who we truly are.   

But there is a disconnect within the church today that diminishes the power of the gospel. In our relentless pursuit of so-called “Christian Values,” a pernicious and confrontational mindset can set in. The fruit of that witness is often an incomplete set of values, neglecting Christ’s “weightier aspects of the law.” And even those some of those values may be truly biblical in doctrine, but they lose gospel virtue when they are brandished around like a righteous sword.  It leads to loss of orthopraxy turned harmful, yielding a moral code that’s woefully incomplete. 

My former pastor Steve Pecota once said: “Our opinions, especially our theological opinions, are important. But orthodoxy at the cost of lost orthopraxy will always imply a diminishment of the gospel – the gospel is about more than right believing, as the Apostle James labored to make clear.” 

The church will continue to fall short of its calling until it embraces a full gospel witness.  Where Micah 6:8 and the Fruits of the Spirit God become as important as creedal orthodoxy.  Where the priority of orthopathy/orthopraxis and its faithful pursuit becomes a normative feature of the church.  And where our community of practice becomes patterned after Jesus who taught that how we live is an important as why we live. 

The Linkage between Undiminished Virtue and Truth

James 3:13-18: “Who is wise and understanding among you? Let them show it by their good life, by deeds done in the humility that comes from wisdom…the wisdom that comes from heaven is first of all pure; then peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere. Peacemakers who sow in peace reap a harvest of righteousness.”

The Fruits of the Spirit are a “tell all” story through its unmasking of our inner life.  They are the outward evidence of an inward transformation of “those who belong to Christ Jesus [and who] have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.” This process of transformation touches every part of our lives including the trustworthiness of our assertions. 

Yet we can’t self-assess the depth of that transformation because someone else has to make this call. Hence the credibility of our insight, our wisdom, and our truth telling, as the apostle James has written, lies in a “fruit test” not graded by us. 

The “works of the flesh” are the other side of the coin, those “obvious” acts contrary to the Spirit.  The flesh and the Spirit are at odds in our life as St. Augustine many years ago observed: “Two wills were mine, old and new, of the flesh, of the spirit, each warring on the other, and between their dissonances was my soul disintegrating.”

We see this dissonance, this “warring on the other,” coursing through the church today. It’s always been a feature, a consequence of our fallen nature, until the culture war brought it to new levels. The widespread polarization and division within the church are two unholy outcomes of this war. Its apocalyptic message creates an upside world with many works of the flesh now functionally normative: e.g., hate [xenophobia], fighting [populism], obsession [affective polarization], competitive opposition [partisanship], conflict [outrage], selfishness [nativism], and group rivalry [tribalism].

The message of the cross and a culture war engagement are two incompatible faith choices.  In the heat of the battle as the culture war rages, the fruits of the spirit quietly fade away. And with the loss of those fruits comes a loss in our truth claims, and the rest, as the saying goes, is our present history. 

Postscript

The next and final post in this series will focus on how we get out the abyss that both America and the church finds itself in today. I don’t have all the answers, but there is a remnant who continue to be a 1 Tim 4:19 “example in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith, in purity” type of person. We can learn from their lives which brings hope for a church willing to take seriously a Matthew 5:16 calling of: “You are like that illuminating light. Let your light shine everywhere you go, that you may illumine creation, so men and women everywhere may see your good actions…”

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Wide is the Gate and Broad is the Way

Posted on December 4, 2021 by steve.ignell

“We don’t collect news to inform us. We collect news to affirm us.”

– Frank Lutz, Republican pollster

Frank’s observation isn’t new, of course.  Centuries ago, Goethe said “each see in the world what is present in their heart.”  But it’s been a minority point of view until recently. The traditional model of truth held that true beliefs and true statements must actually correspond to how they relate to the world and whether they accurately describe that world. Accurate maps were the goal and a scout type mentality the norm.  Beliefs had to be justified (see previous blog post) and narrow was the path to that justification.

But then the world shifted and a new truth sheriff rode into town.  The world, they said, was too complicated.  Ordinary people didn’t have the time to sort through flawed journalism and find the truth.  People needed a shortcut, a more pragmatic approach to truth.  They said: find a trusted authority or just shoehorn into existing beliefs. Coherence is the goal, with trust leading the way. 

Lippman Dewey Debate

These two worldviews held a famous showdown at truth’s corral nearly a century ago.  On the one side was Walter Lippman who saw the complexity of knowledge, flaws in the media, and the penchant for stereotypes to be insurmountable. Instead, he asserted that “What each man does is based not on direct and certain knowledge but on pictures made by himself or given to him.”

Hence, one’s beliefs and actions arose from one’s values, said Lippman: “for the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define and then see.” We then naturally pick and choose our facts so that “what is alien will be rejected, what is different will fall upon unseeing eyes…sometimes consciously, more often without knowing it, we are impressed by those facts which fit our philosophy.”

On the other side was John Dewey who sided with centuries of tradition by asserting the power of reason and human observation to sort out complexities in facts and arguments.  He placed his faith in the power of process, that through civil and rational discourse, our posteriors could be aligned, bringing consensus through shared collective values.   

Note that both approaches depend upon trust.  Either in the applicability of a prior set of propositions often expressed through the views of a trusted ally, or in the achievability of objective judgment, where reality is knowable through an unprejudiced analysis of facts.  Both approaches involve judgement: one about our intuitions and preexisting beliefs and the other about the trustworthiness of evidence.  And both approaches involve choice: likeminded people or facts. 

Its hard work making decisions by weighing valid evidence, expert judgement, and accepted observations.  It’s much easier to rely upon trusted friends or authorities, especially given the explosion of information which makes discernment all the more difficult when traditional authorities are lacking.  With the media, institutions, and other long-standing guardrails of truth now presumed to be in error, truth becomes subjective and facts lose their mooring.  Instant judgements then take over arising from woven fabric of partisan attachments, social identities and familial ties. 

The Making of a Soldier

Phillip Tetlock calls this process of instant judgements intuitive epistemology where our intuitions determine what’s true.  We know by how we feel and those feelings are an outcome of our prior values and sensibilities.  As John Zaller once said, “every opinion is a marriage of information and predisposition” with our predispositions driving any conclusion about that information causing “the fragmentation of society into particularisms that command more loyalty than the center.”  Translation: we live in a post truth world, something the Oxford English Dictionary declared in 2016 given the triumph of emotion and personal belief over objective facts.

The world around us exerts a powerful influence.  Friends, trusted information sources, and political associations all rub off on us. They exert influence on our identity, values, and beliefs creating a particular worldview that serves as a foundation for what we know.  And the more we’re connected to them, the more our viewpoints become aligned and our predispositions formed. 

Marietta and Barker in a remarkable book called “One Nation, Two Realities” show through an integrated set of studies how our beliefs arise from these cultural associations.  Our differences of beliefs reflect differences in values rather than a difference in understandings or knowledge. We do this by projecting values onto our perception of facts and then encapsulate them through “critical thinking.” Education provides no corrective nor does fact checking make a difference. The outcome is a realignment in authority from a trust in traditional knowledge-generating institutions to a trust in any personal knowledge consistent with prior beliefs.  

We exchange “what is” for “what it ought to be” in our establishment of facts, from what we observe to what we want to see.  Our cognitive biases reinforce this exchange by giving selective attention and then selective acceptance to any evidence or arguments supporting our priors while reserving our skepticism to any evidence which challenges our priors.  At the back end of this process, a one-sided remembrance sharpens this selectively while the repeated telling of these selectively-driven stories sharpens it again.

Combining Galef and Tetlock’s language, we are intuitive politicians, scout-like within our groups, with a goal of building accurate maps. But our maps are less about truth than about the dynamics of our group so we can best advance our reputation and approval like soldiers.  Our desire to fit in creates a powerful incentive to conform as we find it more important to be accepted than correct. 

We become principled theologians where we instinctively protect sacred values from compromise or competing beliefs.  William James again, “the greatest empiricists among us are only empiricists on reflection; when left to their instincts, they dogmatize like popes.” It turns us into intuitive prosecutors, on the lookout for norm violators as we set boundaries of acceptable thinking.  We easily assign blame and assess penalties, seeing such prosecution as a virtuous upholding of the “social order.”

The world shrinks down into just two dimensions: us and them.  Populism sets in, pitting us as “we the people” against our judgement of a corrupt and self-serving “elite.”  A dichotomous worldview is formed defined by “we the good,” and “they the enemy.” Through such a highly divisive lens the world is seen, judged, and convicted.  It opens the door to conspiracy theories and extreme motivated reasoning through a play on people’s fears. And with historic institutions of societal truth, like experts, the media, or judiciary now the enemy of “the good,” it’s no wonder our societal foundations are failing.

Final Thoughts

Values are a two-edged sword. They act as an internal compass, providing direction in our lives.  They serve as beacons or lighthouses, to help us determine right from wrong. They can guide us toward civic virtue, mindful of what Martin Luther King once said: “This is a moral universe. It hinges on moral foundations. If we are to make of this a better world, we’ve got to go back and rediscover that precious values that we’ve left behind.” 

But watch out for when our intuitive prosecutor kicks in, on the prowl for those violating our moral code.  Especially when amplified through a culture war fueled by media-driven outrage where malice and distain become the norm.  It creates a binary world that turns us into soldiers with the goal of defending our team’s beliefs. And when you see yourself in a dualistic fight with the unholy Forces of Darkness, the first causality of that war is truth and the second causality our heart.  As James KA Smith once said: “It’s because our loves are informed by what we are devoted to and our devotions are drawn to the battle.”

I usually resist a “both sides” viewpoint as nuance matters and the world is seldom binary.  But our intuitive epistemology is truly a “both sides” phenomena and a growth area in recent years with the rise of cancel culture on both the left and right as well as within the Christian faith community. Time has vindicated Lippmann’s side in the debate and I’ll give him the last word.  For he clearly saw this post-factual world coming and feared it because of its logical outcome of intense polarization.  His statement 100 years ago when compared to our present time is eerily prescient: “He who denies either my moral judgments or my version of the facts is to me perverse, alien, dangerous.”

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Are Our Beliefs Warranted?

Posted on November 24, 2021 by steve.ignell

Ten years ago, we pulled up stakes and moved to the “lower 48.” It was hard leaving Alaska but easy to live in Seattle as we were closer to our children, to much of our family, and in a job I loved. Plus, there were roads to drive and places to go and we quickly became enthralled with exploring the Pacific Northwest with all its own outdoor options and beauty.

Flyfishing became a new outdoor activity, although truth be told, minimal harvesting has yet to take place.  Most areas are catch and release and since my primary objective is an outdoor experience, every outing is a win. There’s a ton to learn: the selection of gear, mechanics of casting, reading of the river, knowledge of the fish, the assessment of their food, and selecting the right fly.  It’s an all-encompassing journey of discovery as you develop a fisher’s mind through a continuous appetite for information.  Understanding is the goal – to develop an accurate picture of the behavior of fish on the particular river and day we are fishing.  Previous experience is helpful and general understanding useful.  But the mystery of nature never disappoints as there is always more to learn.

We can accelerate our learning through the help of skilled friends or an outing with a guide or even a diet of educational videos.  But the proof of the pudding comes through the test of experience with each river and day separate trials. I’m still a novice if I only meet success in high alpine lakes where starved fish will strike anything they see. But when there’s a repeatability of success over a wide variety of environments, I can then say my fly-fishing skills have been validated.

In my previous blog, drawing from Julia Galef’s book “The Scout Mindset,” I discussed how we are prone – its actually part of nature – to defend our beliefs and dismiss those we don’t.  She calls this tendency a “soldier” mindset where we rationalize what we believe and see what we want to see. What if instead, she asked, our goal was know what’s actually true through having a “scout” mindset?  Where we survey the territory to draw as accurate as a map as possible rather than defend one side over the other? 

Most people, like me, adopt a scout mindset when learning a new hobby. There’s rarely a set of prior narratives to shape our learning. That isn’t usually the case, however with our more cherished beliefs which touch society and politics.  Now our identity is on the line with much at stake to defend. 

There are exceptions to this rule and my friend Keith is one of those exceptions. Keith’s resume is long with a storied history as a business owner, mechanical engineer, and university professor. Plus, he has a graduate degree in theology with a specialty in philosophy and ethics (which he teaches).  The best part of Keith, though, is his gentle spirit that encompasses a sharp mind where you can always count on him to ask the right “scout-like” question. 

Following a series of off-line exchanges about one of my blogs, Keith sent me a brief but fascinating book that he thought would interest me.  We had been discussing Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast and Slow” and he thought Wolfe’s book “Epistemology: The Justification of Belief” would provide a new perspective for this discussion.

Wolfe says that we miss the mark when we seek to prove beliefs are true as it’s just impossible to prove we are right: “The crucial criticism of the belief system is not whether it involves faith, but if it can survive testing.”  And “only to the extent that a scheme remains open to continual testing is it able to display its credentials.  Protecting a scheme from criticism may neutralize any opposition but it also trivializes its truth claims.  Hence, only those belief systems which survive robust open criticism can be considered “warranted,” or validated. 

Wolfe further suggests that whether or not a belief is valid or “warranted” rests on the answers to four questions. Are our assertions based on a belief system that is: (1) consistently applied and hence free from contradiction, (2) internally coherent; and (3) comprehensive with respect to experience?  And finally, (4) is it congruent throughout that range of experience such that it better fits the data in terms of adequacy, precision than other belief systems?  Now that’s 100% in scout territory!

Here’s how this works.  An assertion or statement about the external world occurs within a larger interpretive picture of reality.  Truth claims always involve assumptions, some explicit but others implicit and left unsaid or even unknown.  We cannot prove our assertions are correct.  But we can test them and when we do, we’re really testing our interpretive schemes (from whence our assertions arise).  And if they are able to withstand robust and unfiltered criticism, we can then judge them to be warranted.

How to Make Sure Our Beliefs are Valid

Take my supportive view of the covid vaccine as an example.  I received the initial two doses back in January and February of 2021 and then received a booster in September. I eagerly accepted the vaccine because I saw it as a game changer through lowering my probability of: a) contracting the virus, b) serious illness resulting from any contraction should it still occur, and c) infecting others I encounter.  And all of this came with nearly a negligible risk to my own health as a male senior citizen.   

Many of my friends would disagree with me, holding contrarian views about the vaccine.  To them I would say the following.  My vaccine positive assertion occurs within a larger interpretative scheme marked by three conditions: (1) a profound and anchoring respect of science and its peer review process for warranting research findings; (2) a belief that the best available scientific judgement for an issue occurs through the integration of opinion from a wide range of subject matter experts grounded in peer-reviewed academic research; and (3) the identification of a limited number of trusted sources that have proved faithful to the previous two conditions and hence can be used as a reliable proxy for them.  (My doctor at UW Medicine is such a trusted source).

My interpretive scheme also includes three cautionary guardrails: a profound skepticism about our human tendency (including me!) to shoehorn data and information into preexisting stories while picking and choosing information to confirm those stories; a profound wariness about my groups to unwittingly shape my values and identity, and a moral obligation to put a thumb on the scale for actions that benefit others, faithfully affirming a “love-my-neighbor” ethic above which there is no law. 

So: (1) how does my interpretive scheme (whence my vaccine assertion arises) handle Wolfe’s four criteria for warrant and (2) how does my particular vaccine assertion deal with criticism from others with differing views?

My Interpretive Scheme – How I Judge Whether or Not Something is True

Over 2.6 million peer reviewed papers are published every year covering the gamut of issues from science to philosophy. Most papers expand our understandings about some aspect of our world.  Others challenge existing understandings or a commonly held paradigm.  Errors which escape the skepticism of peer review encounter the critique of other scientists in subsequent publications, establishing a consistent, coherent, and comprehensive process of “warranting” those understandings of our world.  And although erroneous paradigms or findings may persist for periods of time, new findings or a new generation of scientists arise to bring course corrections, restoring congruence between the data and scientific theory. 

To the extent that this peer-reviewed scientific process drives scientific expertise and institutional policy, these four dimensions of warrant persist. But once the human element sets in, things get complicated. We are made to belong and our reputation within our groups subject us to the influence of family, peers, employment, and other associative groups.  Science as seen through the opinions of scientists or agencies now becomes complex, less moored to the original science through relational influence, competing goals, and public pressure. But we can safeguard our understandings by an integrated perspective that weights the opinions of credentialed scientists by their adherence to “warranted” research findings. 

To ensure consistency, coherence, and comprehensiveness in how I treat vaccine questions, I must treat the vaccine issue as I would any other issue involving technological or scientific expertise.  To wit: I must employ my interpretive scheme just as I would for other medical procedures, engineering-dependent activities (e.g., flying), research inquiries, or food science.  I must use the same intellectual and decision approach for each and every issue, from the mundane to the controversial. 

That’s why skepticism is so important to my interpretive scheme, especially when is issue is controversial.  In those cases, I must avoid confirming predetermined outcomes through any sorting of peer review articles, or experts to follow, or agency directives.  Faithfulness to my interpretive scheme means that the whole body of scientific literature needs to honestly considered and the crowd of experts fairly evaluated.  I just can’t pick and choose either data or experts to fit a preexisting narrative.  I can’t form an opinion from the first thing I read.  And I can’t cancel scientifically-based criticism just because it comes from sources I don’t like.

It doesn’t mean that all articles or all experts are equal though.  Credentials matter and the ability to withstand scientific skepticism matters even more. Contrarian viewpoints might be correct as long as they, like any other hypothesis, survive the challenge of robust scientific skepticism.  As Wolfe says: “the genuine believer [in truth] wants to show the truth of his beliefs, and this can only be done in the process of testing.”

Evaluating Contrarian Views of the Covid Vaccine

The arguments against taking the vaccine are many and varied and I’m sure I don’t know the half of them. Here is a sample of a few I’ve heard.  How about the 14,500 covid vaccine death reports? Doesn’t the VAERS database provide evidence for the harmfulness of the vaccine? Aren’t these vaccines unproven technology? And doesn’t the Israeli data show that the jab is ineffective?  Did you know there’s a Cabal orchestrating the whole pandemic situation, using it to establish a new world order? Everyone that I know who’s taken the jab has fallen hard to the covid bug or other harmful outcomes. 

I don’t have space to evaluate each one of these, but if I did, the process would be the same, based on the interpretive scheme given above.  I would first look at the scholarly literature relevant to each assertion.  Multiple papers would be examined and if necessary, read, focusing on experimental design and results.  An integrative assessment of relevant expert judgement would be next.  Sources would be weighed according to credentialed relevancy, not outcomes.  Hence at each step, I would guard against cognitive biases, ensuring that I wasn’t unduly influenced by an article or expert that either supported or opposed a pre-existing belief. My final decision would then be weighted by a moral ethic where the coin flip leans into my neighbor.

Yes, it takes real work to warrant our beliefs but the outcome is worth the effort.

For those making anti-vaccine assertions, departing from the predominant scientific consensus, I’m genuinely interested in hearing about your interpretive scheme and the criteria you employ which leads to you believe those assertions.  

  • Are your assertions from a belief system applied consistently, coherently, comprehensively and congruently across every corner of your life, from the mundane to the controversial?  To wit: would you use the same informational process used to evaluate the covid vaccine as you would for the use of capsule endoscopy –another remarkably innovative 21st medical technology like the covid vaccine?
  • How does your belief system respond to critical engagement from all sides or are some sides excluded from that testing through a filter or sorting process that eliminates information or a perspective you don’t like? And if you use such a filter, what objective data supports that use?

Once again, it’s worth remembering Wolfe’s warning: “Protecting a scheme from criticism may neutralize any opposition but it also trivializes its truth claims.” 

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