Matthew Kaemingk:
Welcome to Zealots at the Gate, a podcast of Comment magazine. I’m Matthew Kaemingk.
Shadi Hamid:
I’m Shadi Hamid. Together we research politics, religion, and the future of democracy at Fuller Seminary’s Mouw Institute of Faith and Public Life. We are writing a book together. This podcast represents an informal space where we can talk about how to live with deep difference. Thanks so much for joining us.
Welcome to Zealots at the Gate, a podcast of Comment magazine. I am Shadi Hamid. I am joined by my venerable co-host Matthew Kaemingk. We are arguably the best or perhaps only Muslim evangelical podcast. Together we research politics, religion, and the future of democracy at Fuller Seminary’s Mouw Institute of Faith and Public Life. Matt and I are writing a book together. So this podcast is a kind of informal space for us to talk about how to live with deep difference.
Matthew Kaemingk:
I really like the best Muslim evangelical podcast better than the only which implies you don’t have any other choice but to listen to us. Let’s go with best, Shadi.
Shadi Hamid:
Yes indeed. I agree, I agree. For our dear listeners and viewers, make sure to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts and feel free to leave us a rating or review. Those do make a difference. God willing five stars or perhaps 4.5, it’s up to you. And thank you for joining us and supporting us at Zealots at the Gate. Matt, we have a very special guest today.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Very special, very special.
Shadi Hamid:
John Inazu. He is the Sally D. Danforth Distinguished Professor of Law and Religion at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author, previously, of a very influential book called Confident Pluralism. We’ll include a link to that in the show notes if you haven’t read it. His new book is very much on point. It is titled Learning to Disagree; the Surprising Path to Navigating Differences with Empathy and Respect. So we’re very happy to have you on, John, because we think a lot about how to disagree better and more effectively.
And maybe just to get us started, this is where I come out on the question of disagreement. I think it’s something that we all know intuitively and intellectually that it’s good and that we should learn to disagree more effectively and that disagreement is legitimate at some level unless, of course, you’re a psychopath or a zealot, if you will. But I think the challenge is it’s not easy to do in practice and people really struggle to make it real in their own lives. And I think part of the difficulty is where do we draw the line? Because presumably there are some things that are beyond the pale, there are some lines we won’t want to cross. So, for example, if someone’s an actual White supremacist or an actual Nazi, most people will say, well, we don’t have to include those people in the conversation, they shouldn’t have a seat at the table. But those are the easy cases. It gets more challenging in the kind of intermediate cases. And I’m curious how you approach that question yourself. Where do you draw your own lines when it comes to learning to disagree?
John Inazu:
Yeah, thanks. First of all, guys, great to be with you. Thanks for having me on. I should say you threw out the gauntlet by claiming to be the best podcast, and now I feel like Eboo Patel and I need to start one just to give you something to shoot for. But in the meantime, let me take your really good question there. I would say in these what you call the intermediate cases, almost all of the time almost all of us can actually work toward disagreement and relationship in those contexts. And one of the reasons we know this is that we do it as a very pragmatic point in most of our lives. So you and I, all of us, we work next to, live next to, our kids play with kids of other people with whom and for whom, if we ever dove into their deeply held beliefs, we would find all kinds of things that we not only disagree about a little but we find morally abhorrent or bad for human flourishing or wrong in some sort of absolute sense. And yet for the most part, because we prioritise ordinary relationships above those disagreements, it’s possible.
We don’t do that with White supremacists and neo-Nazis, at least the ones that are validly so, so we draw lines on the easy cases. But in most of the intermediate cases, functionally and interpersonally, we figure out a set of relationships even if we’re not naming or exploring the disagreements overtly. Now, there are some people that are going to draw those lines much more narrowly and in the intermediate cases say, no, I can’t partner with or live next to or work with those people, whoever they are. And the challenge for a pluralistic society is to minimise the influence of the absolutist, of those who are not interested in figuring out disagreement and pluralism.
Matthew Kaemingk:
So here’s a question for you. Well, first of all, I just have to say I love that you are the one answering questions now because you just had us at WashU, Shadi and I, for an event and you were peppering us with some tough questions on stage and now we get to turn it around on you, so I’m taking a great deal of delight. So I’ve come up with a number of tough questions.
John Inazu:
Bring it on, Matt. Payback is here.
Matthew Kaemingk:
So I’ve got a tougher one coming for you. But Shadi and I have a number of disagreements. We just finished up recording and discussing the question of do Muslims and Christians worship the same God? And we had some real disagreements there and disagreements on a number of other things. But I’m wondering if you can help me understand something about my relationship with Shadi. In very few other relationships in my life, I have found that Shadi and I have drawn closer to one another through disagreement. Disagreement has actually helped us build a relationship. And I’m not exactly sure how that happened. I’m trying to reflect back and figure out how that happened. And so first of all, I’m wondering, do you have any relationships in your own life that have been in some ways forged through disagreement? And if you can help me understand how does that happen and why might that happen? What are the conditions in which disagreement might actually draw people together? Because I think a lot of us avoid disagreement because we’re afraid that it would destroy a relationship.
John Inazu:
Yeah. I mean, I think in my own life I might be an outlier here because I’ve got lots of relationships that have grown closer through disagreement. I mean, in large part because I teach at a university where a lot of my colleagues disagree with me about a lot of matters but because we prioritised friendship and intellectual respect and trust building, we were able then to, I think, actually move closer through the disagreement. And one of the ways that I’ve found the experience of moving closer happens is when you can help, on a very individual level, the other person to move away from a caricature of a perspective or a demographic or an ideology and realise, oh no, this is a person from whom I can learn and who is going to show me a window into this thing that I really don’t understand. And in that sense, you move closer to the person even as you come to a better understanding of the thing. So there’s both an instrumental and an intrinsic value of the relationship in that context.
And I think about this with atheist colleagues, with colleagues of other faiths, with colleagues who just see really important political or legal issues quite differently than I do, that in the work of understanding where they’re coming from and then seeing them not as just a token or the stand-in for an entire belief system, but as a embodied person who has views about things that I come closer to them.
Shadi Hamid:
But what if they’re not showing you a window into something new or useful and they’re just offering up genuinely abhorrent views that maybe you’re caught by surprise? This is someone you’ve been friends with for many years, but then because of maybe some unusual seismic political event, it radicalises them in one direction or another, and then you guys are having dinner or something, and then your friend is just saying something that’s really surprising and you haven’t heard them say something like that before. Maybe it’s something that would be perceived as genuinely racist. And let’s say you’re a member of a minority group and your friend attacks that minority group, or let’s say your friend supports some kind of mass killing, to put it blunt.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Well, this is personal for you, Shadi, isn’t it? I mean, specifically over the last six months we’ve talked about this. The debates over Gaza and you imagining that you had friends who are with you and not. I mean, what has that been like for you?
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah, I mean, that’s precisely one of the things I have in mind. And one approach that I’ve taken on with a couple friends is that we’ve agreed to not talk about Gaza because we don’t think… Maybe we wouldn’t say this outright, but we have maybe concerns that our friendship would stay intact or strong if we talked about Gaza too much because if we did, we would actually be confronted with the fact that someone who’s close to us has terrible views. And why expose yourself to that? Why test your friendship in such a manner? What would you say to that, John? And maybe not even just the Gaza example, but just more broadly of any kind of view that you might consider to be genuinely abhorrent. And I’m not sure what that would be for you.
John Inazu:
Well, yeah, even in my own life this is not just a hypothetical. I mean, there are people with whom I was once in church who I would say in the last eight years or so have revealed political positions that I didn’t know they held, especially those tied to the intersection of race and Christian faith. And I think when you learn something new about someone that positions them quite differently, I don’t think there’s always necessarily a helpful move toward mutual respect. I mean, sometimes you realise, oh, this is a data point I had no idea that this person held.
And I think maybe there’s an asymmetry here. This is just coming to mind as you ask the question. But when you’re encountering someone new and you’re giving them the benefit of the doubt and learning who they are, and then you discover a difference, that’s a little different than assuming solidarity and connectedness with someone then discovering that it’s not there. And I mean, there are gradations of this, but I think especially in close friendships that rupture of trust might be a real challenge. This happens all the time at institutional levels when, say, a Christian college or university changes its policy on a controversial issue, and then suddenly you realise all the people who you thought were on the same mission as you are actually deeply divided about one of the core defining missional questions. And there’s a sense of breach of trust or lack of familiarity that I think is just different when you’re working on a relationship that’s more across difference.
Shadi Hamid:
Well, can you maybe say more about some of your own personal experiences and how you’ve dealt with them, just to get more practical? Because I think that this will probably resonate with a lot of listeners and viewers. They’ve had family members or friends who have surprised them in this manner. And I think then you have basically two choices. You decide that the difference in question is irreconcilable and speaks to something fundamental about the person and who they are, and you can’t sort of suspend judgement or cordon off that one bad view. I’d like to think that you can and I’ve written before how everyone should be allowed at least one to two terrible or ridiculous opinions at any given moment in their life. And then maybe you can think of it as people should be allowed four to five, six to seven terrible opinions over the course of a lifetime. Maybe that’s one way of approaching it.
So I think there’s profound choices before us when we kind of confront difference and you sort of have a fork in the road. And one thing that I really love about your book, John, and I should say it’s really a wonderful book and I’ve even said this publicly so it’s not just me being nice to you, John, on the podcast. I was really just blown away about just how insightful and also how funny and real the book is because you do talk about these practical examples in a way that’s really helpful and you take it from the theory into the classroom because you are a professor, you have students who are rambunctious and disagreeable and some of them have kind of weird or even crazy views some of the time, and you have to deal with this on a daily basis on campus. And we know that campuses get really intense and they have, especially this past year. So I’d be curious maybe if you can just say a little bit more about what you’ve experienced in the classroom on campus and some of the things that have maybe tested your own approach?
John Inazu:
Let me try to get there, but actually as you were setting up the question what was coming to mind is maybe even more pertinent is in my personal relationships. So set aside the classroom context for now, I’m thinking back to the example of race. Let’s say you are around, or as I have been, friends, maybe long-time church friends, and you have a discussion that surfaces differences in views that fall somewhere along the spectrum of racially insensitive to racist. Now the challenge here is very few people are going to say “Yeah, I’m a racist. That’s me.” So very few people think they’re actually a racist, but they could be in some descriptive sense very close to that. So then the challenge in that situation becomes is this a relationship or a friendship that I want to pursue? And if so, how do I do that in both a loving but also a pragmatically effective way?
So here’s what not to do. Don’t start the conversation by unloading a bunch of phrases like White fragility and the kinds of things that are not going to be heard, but figure out how to engage in a conversation that can maybe help move the ball, maybe help come to closer understanding. And in a friendship I think you actually want to have mutual good faith in that effort. So if someone just stops engaging or doesn’t want to engage at all then that becomes a much harder situation.
In the campus setting, in the classroom or with protests… And this goes maybe to the question of the roles that we occupy. As a classroom teacher I feel like I have a responsibility and an obligation to my students to work with them almost regardless of what they say or the positions that they hold. Maybe there are some limits but I am pretty big tent about this. So I have heard over the years some pretty remarkable comments from students that would be pretty out of bounds in any more public setting. And it does in the moment alter my sense of this person to think-
Shadi Hamid:
Can you just give us an example there?
John Inazu:
Well, I’ll give you one. I want to be very careful here about sort of student-
Shadi Hamid:
Oh yeah, sure. Okay.
John Inazu:
… confidentiality and that sort of thing and protecting the classroom. But without getting too specific I have heard when I’ve taught criminal law before comments from students that suggest that criminality is tied to heritage and families. So that is a very provocative position and it raises a lot of issues. So in the moment when someone says this in an 80-person class, how do I respond as a classroom teacher? And so usually in those settings, when I’m on top of my game, I try to come back with something empirical or something very sort of emotionally flat but intellectual to respond to that kind of statement. So basically just to interrogate the premise and say, well, here are some counter examples, what do you do with those? I find that the more measured I can be in those moments, the more effective I am as a classroom teacher.
But I will tell you on the inside, when those things surface there’s a lot going on and I’m thinking, “How does a human being come to this perspective and come to law school and share with 80 students and classmates this view?” And then how do I kind of do my best to care for the situation, not just for the speaker, but for the 80 other listeners in that room and how to move forward?
Matthew Kaemingk:
So John, lawyers are sort of famously the butt of many jokes, and you teach at a law school. And we’re going to leave the law jokes to the side for a moment.
John Inazu:
For a moment.
Matthew Kaemingk:
For the moment. Being around lawyers though, it seems from your book that you’ve learned quite a lot about disagreement. And I’m wondering if you might share with us honestly what could Americans learn from the law practice about disagreement? Are there points of wisdom that we could learn from lawyers about how to disagree well?
John Inazu:
Here’s the thing, I mean, lawyers have the not totally unearned reputation of being these stubborn people who argue, who care only about their client’s interests. I mean, the title of this podcast and legal ethics, the formal term is zealous advocacy. That’s kind of the point of the game in some ways. And yet, the case I’m trying to make in this book and what I’ve certainly found in my own experience is the very best kind of lawyering and the best lawyers are not doing that, they’re doing something quite different which is to understand and be as sophisticated and charitable as possible in understanding the other side of an argument to come up with the right objections and counter objections and to unpack it and to figure out where the other side is coming from and why they think the way that they do.
And some of that is pragmatic because at the end of the day, you want to win your case and you have to go to a decision maker or a judge and say “I’m right and this person is stupid,” what you have to say is “This is a really hard complex issue and they’ve got a pretty good argument on their side and we have a better one.” And then you’ve got to persuade the decision maker. And so that’s the best kind of lawyering and I think there are real applications for that in our everyday lives as well. You don’t have to go to law school to kind of learn some of these ideas and to recognise that the kind of empathy required to dig into someone else’s perspective and argument is a sort of work that closes relational distance. It doesn’t make you best friends, it doesn’t make you understand perfectly, but it forces you to put yourself inside the head of someone else in a sophisticated and complex way.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Now a tougher question. So you’ve been focused on disagreement and thinking about that in the context of law and politics and race. But you yourself are also a Christian and your Christian identity plays an important role in your public life and your writing and speaking in your teaching and so forth. And I’m curious as to how it informs how you approach the question of disagreement. And I want to start this off with a bit of a provocation. Is the Christian faith disagreeable? Does the Christian faith make us more passive, more antagonistic? How does the Christian faith inform how you think about these issues of disagreement as either a positive, a negative, or something else?
John Inazu:
Yeah, great question. So a couple of things. One, I think understanding your role and context matters quite a bit here. So when I’m in the classroom at Washington University, which is a non-religious institution, elite, mostly progressive, I’m not trying to think how do I convey the Christian gospel in this classroom? And sometimes I get questions from more conservative Christians that basically say, why isn’t there more Jesus in your classes? And I’m thinking, because I teach at Washington University, that’s a category mistake. And at its best, this institution will be one open and receptive to pluralism, and I want to be a participant in the conditions of pluralism. But when I’m in front of a classroom of 80 students, they come from very different perspectives and my goal and objective there is not to convey a particular theological position.
As a normative question, should Christians be disagreeable or contentious in some way? Which I think is quite different than the descriptive question of whether especially American Christians are doing that at least in the right way today. No, Christians should be absurdly weird. We should stand out as utterly different from culture, as the people who make no sense apart from the hope of the resurrection. This is what Paul says in 1 Corinthians. If this thing didn’t happen, then pity us beyond all people because we’re idiots for giving our time and our money and our priorities and training our kids in a certain way. And I totally believe that if the gospel isn’t real then what in the world am I doing here? I would live life quite differently, I think, if I had not the hope of the gospel.
And more normatively for me, but also for a lot of people around me, I worry that it doesn’t look all that different in practice. We talk a good game but often when it comes to the kinds of profound and disruptive counter liturgies that I think are actually important to display a different kind of community, a different kind of politics, really, I think, set aside the current state of American Christianity which is a dumpster fire. But just in general, I think Christian witness and largely wealthy western societies has not done a great job standing out as all that different.
Shadi Hamid:
Okay, I am curious here and maybe this takes us a little bit off track but I am intrigued. When you say that you would live your life quite differently if you didn’t have the hope of the gospel, what do you really mean by that? I mean, would it actually be that different?
John Inazu:
Yeah, for sure. So first of all, I feel like there are things I do and priorities I make that I wouldn’t make. Certainly how I spend my money and my time I think would look quite… I’d play a lot more golf, for starters.
Shadi Hamid:
But would you though? I mean, there are secular folks who don’t believe in God who don’t actually play a lot of golf and are still very engaged with presumably their students in the classroom or volunteering for secular organisations or whatever. I mean, it is conceivable that you would still be a good person who was contributing in similar ways.
John Inazu:
Well, setting aside the theological question of what a good person is, yeah, I would hope that my dispositions and my interests would be somewhat in the ballpark of what they are, but I don’t think I would… I have great difficulty envisioning, absent the purpose that I think I have in my life through the hope of the gospel and the story of which I understand myself to be a part, why I would be doing almost any of the things that I do today. Why would I spend time investing in the formation of young Christian attorneys in a program that I started on the side? Or why would I work with Christian… I mean, I wouldn’t do any of that. And I think if I were… This is a really interesting question because I think where I’m going is if I didn’t have a sense of Christian purpose or mission to be a member of an institution, and by this I mean the institution of higher ed at large, but the particular institution of a generic elite university, I’m not sure I would still be here because what would the purpose of being here be?
I think higher ed is in such a mess right now institutionally that the only way I can make sense of it is to say how do I live faithfully and pursue flourishing within a fundamentally broken set of institutions that are not going to change? And my faith gives me a way forward with that. But without that I’m not sure what I’d be doing. Now other people answer that question differently, obviously, I have lots of colleagues here who have found a way to make it work. But the intellectual challenge of the counterfactual you’re asking is that I’m trying to process it within the context of my own lived experience, and my own lived experience, absent my Christian faith and higher ed generally, is I’m just not sure I’d still be here.
Shadi Hamid:
Okay, yeah. Well, I’m glad I asked that because that’s actually a good answer and one that does suggest that your life is being lived quite differently. So with that digression out of the way, I want to return maybe to both of you on the question of Christianity and the issue of disagreement and unity and consensus. I think that for people who believe that they have the absolute truth, there can sometimes be a temptation to not consider disagreements in good faith that if they feel that, let’s say, other people are going to hell or are not going to be saved because they don’t share the same belief, which is a fairly mainstream view among Christians and also among Muslims to various degrees. And I think that’s actually a complaint that people often have of very convicted Christians in America that they don’t actually show great tolerance for disagreement, that they do deep down want some level of unity and consensus around the things that they hold dear.
So again, we come back to this question of the gap between theory and practice, that maybe as you guys see it, Christianity should allow for genuine and deep disagreement and tolerance for that. But in practice, the way we see Christians act, or let’s say evangelicals, that’s the criticism of evangelicals in America that they’re not very open to this. How do you kind of contend with that, John? And I’m sure Matt… Matt, we’ve talked about this a lot but feel free to jump in as well on that.
John Inazu:
Yeah, I’ll start off and then Matt can jump in on what I have to say here. I guess as a first cut I would say Christians should not see the fact of pluralism as a good thing. There are certainly pluralist theorists who just celebrate pluralism for itself. I think Christians have to have a much more nuanced view of what pluralism is. So there are some differences of the world that are just fine or even fun. Different sports teams allegiances or different food preferences. But there are some differences of the world that I think Christians just have to view as tragic. It’s not a good thing, normatively or eschatologically, that people out there don’t believe in the saving power of Jesus. Now, having said that, I think Christians should also put a thumb on the scale for persuasion over coercion. So I would be perfectly fine if the entire world came to a belief in Christianity, I think that’d be the right outcome for the world. But I think it’s really important for theological and other matters to move toward that with persuasion and witness and not with coercion and power and enforced consensus which-
Shadi Hamid:
But why though?
John Inazu:
… really doesn’t work anyway. What’s that?
Shadi Hamid:
But why? I mean, if that is the preference of what the world should or could possibly look like and that would be preferable and that would move us more away from tragedy, someone might say, well, why not use coercion to achieve those honourable ends?
John Inazu:
I mean, so a couple of reasons. One pragmatic and one theological. Pragmatically, we know from lots of people, Locke and many others, that it just doesn’t work. So coercing people to faith is a really bad idea just because it doesn’t really work and it often backfires. But for theological reasons I just don’t think that’s part of the Christian gospel. Lots of historical episodes to the contrary notwithstanding, that this is not a way to honour Christ or what God asks Christians to be doing in the world. And part of this today, I mean, there are some American Christians who are arguing for forced conversions but I think many of those who don’t like the persuasion route more just want control and they want a cultural narrative and laws that privilege Christianity without forcing people into it. So there’s a historical difference there today than say, in some context hundreds of years ago.
But even in that historical difference, I think that’s largely derivative from a mistake of what faith is and a kind of clinging to an enlightenment sense of certainty rather than a theological sense of confidence. This is why I’m just very influenced by the Theologian Lesslie Newbigin and the importance of recognising faith as a confidence in a set of practices and ideas and claims that are not ultimately provable. And if something’s not provable then as human beings who recognise the limits of our own intellect and capacity to reason and understand then we might immediately move towards something like an epistemic humility or a recognition that we might not have it fully correct. And certainly, as we look back through the ages, there are lots of examples where people did not have it fully correct. So for pragmatic and theological reasons, I would say no to that alternative.
Matthew Kaemingk:
John, Shadi and I are working on a chapter right now and I’m feeling a little bit stuck and I’d like you to help me.
John Inazu:
I’m starting the billable hour right now.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Okay. So this particular chapter we’re thinking about churches and mosques as spaces in which you can develop democratic habits and you can practise democracy in small religious communities. And this is sort of our way of countering a very common narrative about religious communities is that they actually undermine democracy, that in mosques and madrasas and so forth these are spaces in which anti-democratic forces are released into the world. And of course, that’s the case in some ways with churches and mosques and so forth. But we also want to explore the ways in which religious communities can actually… I think one way of talking about it is develop table manners for democratic life. So at my dinner table, my boys learn table manners, to say please and thank you, to take their turn sharing their story, they don’t dominate the conversation and so forth.
But I mean, I’m imagining a young man who decides… He converts to Christianity, he gets involved in a local church, he serves as a teacher, maybe as an elder. He gets involved in disagreements and debates over what the church should be and do, and sometimes he wins the debate and sometimes he loses the debate. He’s in a Bible study where people disagree and they push back and he learns sort of these practices. First of all, I’m wondering if you could help us think about this, but also maybe on a more personal level as someone who’s been involved in Christian community for a long time, have you learned to disagree at all in and through Christian institutions? Have Christian organisations or institutions ever been helpful in this? I imagine you can tell us a lot of stories about how they haven’t been as we’ve talked about the dumpster fire that is American Christianity at the moment. But I’m wondering if you could maybe help us think about how religious organisations could be spaces for healthy disagreement.
John Inazu:
Yeah. So I mean, first, I have lots of examples where Christian institutions have helped form me into someone who knows how to and works how to disagree better. Sometimes it’s learning about virtues like humility or practices like listening or silence even that have helped form me into the person that I am. Sometimes it’s experiences. I spent a couple of years on a church staff and going through a period of time on a church staff helps you navigate disagreements better both with staff members but also with members of the congregation. I’ve served on boards of various ministries where we have high level but respectful disagreements over things that matter quite a bit. So I can think of all kinds of ways in which those institutions help form me into a better democratic citizen but also someone who disagrees better.
Now having said that, I think I would only give you a partial concurrence to the thesis that these institutions can be schoolhouses of democracy because I think it’s complicated and I’m reminded of the feminist critique of Rawls. Rawls wants to draw this rigid distinction between the background society like our churches and private associations and the basic structure of society that contains the democratic mechanisms like voting and political parties. And folks like Susan Moller Okin and others suggested and argued I think pretty persuasively that if in the background society you have deeply illiberal structures that sometimes form and create habits in people that are not democratic when it comes to something like egalitarian gender practices then it’s very hard to see how they move into the basic structure as fully formed democratic citizens.
I think that critique is super powerful and I disagree with the remedy or the answers that many of the feminists have because I would double down on the importance of associational protections. But I would at least recognise the cost. So I would say that in many of our religious institutions if we’re going to make the argument of forming democratic citizens we probably want an asterisk there and to ask at the same time in what ways are these actually undemocratic or not helping formation? And then to be fair we should also look at lots of other institutions and ask the same questions of them right? Public schools, the library, the Elks Club, the ACLU, whatever it is, nobody’s doing democratic citizenship perfectly. So all of these come with costs and benefits and I think it’s just helpful to name what those are.
Shadi Hamid:
Okay. So John, you just said that being a part of religious institutions has helped you to disagree better. I guess I wonder though, none of us is perfect and I am always intrigued by the very real possibility that no matter how much we talk and write about something, we’re not going to model it perfectly in our own lives. And sometimes you even have an interesting dynamic where… I think an editor once said this, that “We write the books that we need to read.” And then extending that, “To we give the lectures that we need to hear.” In some ways we’re making the case to ourselves because we’re lacking or we fear that we lack the very one thing that we want. And it is a very obvious thing in the real world that people don’t always practise what they preach and then that’s why they say another cliche, try not to meet your heroes or whatever it might be.
So thankfully that’s not the case with you. I mean we know you personally and we can attest to the fact that you are not someone who is particularly hypocritical or even vaguely hypocritical as far as we know. But I do wonder, I mean you must lose your cool sometimes, you must fall short in your own way. And to what extent do you think that happens and how do you deal with that when you notice a kind of falling short of your own ideals? Because I think that’s really helpful for people to just hear because they’re going to find themselves in similar situations where they fall short.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. Why do you need to read your own book, John?
John Inazu:
Yeah, this is funny. I mean, just a couple of days ago I was in a very heated discussion with a friend for whom I have a lot of respect, a pastor, and this person just started yelling at me and it was very uncomfortable. And my book was sitting on his desk and I looked over and saw it and thought, what would I do in this moment? What would my book tell me to do? And I was really grasping for even my own thoughts and insights there in that moment. So I really appreciate and empathise with the point you’re making there.
Certainly as I was writing the book this was happening all the time. I’d be in a coffee shop in the morning writing for three or four hours and then in the afternoon I’d have to drive over to the DMV and I would lose my patience with the person I was encountering and then think, “Oh but this is another great example that I can include in the book.” So I would spend the later afternoon writing about my failure which also makes it into the book. I think that’s useful too because it kind of underscores the title of the book with that verb learning as an ongoing activity with which we’re never quite through and I am learning all the time. And I also believe that as a Christian we can work on habits and practices that can shape us into still flawed but more virtuous and that we can practise dispositions that will convey the fruit of the spirit more or less based on what we do in the world so I want to keep practising that.
But I’ll give you sort of one concrete example that I’ve used in a couple of talks around this book. This is after I’d finished writing it but I was in a discussion with my now 17-year-old daughter and we got into a pretty heated discussion about a political issue about which we disagreed. And she’s very bright and had read some things but I’d read more things. And so as she was making her arguments, I went into my law professor mode and I started telling her why she was over-claiming, why she hadn’t read source X, Y, Z, why her argument didn’t work from the premise that she held.
And I was kind of going on and on. And she was on the other side of the room, I didn’t have my glasses on. And my wife was also in the room and my wife said at one point, “Just so you know, she’s over there crying now.” And in that instant moment I realised it doesn’t matter if I was right or if I had the better argument, I had blown this moment because I had confused my principal role in that relationship not as dad but as law professor. And it was a moment of just total failure. And I think I was able to apologise and my daughter graciously accepted that and we were able to move forward. But I screw this up all the time and I’m constantly trying to work to be better at it.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah, thanks for sharing that. I think you brought up earlier the concept of category mistake, that you slipped into a law professor mode when you should have been in dad mode. And I think that very insightful I think for the whole of how we think about disagreement, in terms of disagreement in the workplace, disagreement in families, disagreement in political and public spaces and so forth. So it is a very contextual question.
John Inazu:
Well, and I think for all of us, where this might really play out for us and many of the people who listen to this podcast, with our parents. So with our parents when there’s political disagreement we still… I mean all three of us have a commandment that says honour your father and mother. And it doesn’t say honour your father and mother except in political disagreement or when you think they’re wrong. So what does it mean then to honour your parents in those roles? And I think sometimes the answer is you just shouldn’t speak or you shouldn’t press the point because your role is often as child to a parent not necessarily as interlocutor or person who is anointed to convince them of the error of their ways. And it doesn’t mean you never engage, but it means you at least engage in the context of the relationship.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah, I had an illuminating experience on this point this last year. So it’s very common for millennials and GenZers to complain about their parents and their parents’ political views or cultural views or whatever else. And obviously intergenerational strain is something that’s, I suppose it’s as old as time but definitely since the 1960s around issues of politics and culture. And so yeah, we complain about our parents and the things that they don’t get or they don’t understand or the silly things that they might say in our heads. But I was invited to teach a Sunday school class on faith and politics in my local church and it’s mostly older people who came to this class, people in their 50s, 60s and 70s. And I did the general thing on faith and politics and what does it mean to be a Christian and a Christian in politics.
But as I would go through the class I just started to ask people why are you here? Why did you come to this class? It’s election year so it was a very popular class. Lots of people came and I was kind of curious as to why they would come. And so many, by far the majority of the reasons why they came was they had strange relationships with their children over politics. So they had adult children in their 20s and 30s and it broke their heart that their relationships with their children were strained and they wanted to repair that relationship, they wanted to understand. And they asked me a lot of questions about why the younger generation was thinking this or that about politics. And I think often we talk about boomers or whatever as if they’re just hard-headed or whatever else, but the kind of vulnerability that they shared in that class about the heartbreak from the parental side about these divisions was pretty illuminating to me.
Shadi Hamid:
And that makes me think, isn’t there a deeper issue here that especially when we’re talking about younger Americans that politics is so defining for them it overwhelms their world. Everything is politicised. They take the political to always be personal and the personal to be political to use another cliche. And I just wonder if there’s a deeper issue here that has to be addressed when we talk about disagreeing better which is Americans have to care, and anyone really. We have to care less about politics. We have to find a way to de-centre the political. But I think there’s certain ideologies that make that very difficult.
So let’s say we’re living in an increasingly secularised country and we have a situation, for example… So I’m thinking here about a political position on whether gay marriage should be legal. If you’re coming at it from a religious perspective you’d say that it’s a defensible position to be against gay marriage because if you’re coming from a mainstream orthodox Christian perspective there is a Christian view on this. If you’re coming from a mainstream or orthodox Muslim perspective there is a view there and you can’t necessarily refashion an entire religious tradition overnight.
But then when you say that to someone who is secular and who isn’t coming from a religious premise they’ll say that that is actually a view that is beyond the pale because it affects them personally especially if they are LGBTQ+ that they’ll say, well hey, you’re not just expressing a political opinion that is just discussed on a higher level you’re saying to me that I’m not allowed to love the person I love in the way that I want. That’s personal, you’re crossing a line there. That isn’t a position that comes from a decent or honourable premise. Which is to say that in a secularising society where the premises are shifting very quickly just in the last couple decades or the last 10 years you do have a new set of problems and it is going to be hard to tell a younger person that “Hey, you should be okay with the idea that some Americans are against gay marriage.”
John Inazu:
Well, I want to kind of nuance your question just a little bit here though because I think there’s a theological position even from traditional orthodox religious traditions that would ask a bit more about context. So I think in the premise of your question you said something like it would make sense or be perfectly sensible to have or support a legal prohibition in this particular example of gay marriage. It’s not clear to me that that necessarily follows from the premise of even traditional orthodox belief here. I mean, those traditional beliefs at one time supported laws against premarital sex or laws against blasphemy, sometimes laws that attach to them very draconian penalties. And lots of Americans today, even those from very traditional religious faith can look at those now and say, “No, in 2024 America it doesn’t make much sense to argue for those criminal prohibitions even though we believe as a theological matter that blasphemy is kind of a bad thing.” And I would assume that there are arguments from Islam to similar ends. So it’s not clear to me that even with this more contentious question of gay marriage that it would be much different.
Now, you did also mention the very rapid timeframe in which some of these policy and legal developments are happening and that I think contributes to some of the challenge here but I wouldn’t want to surrender the premise that even traditional religious belief would find all of this somehow unworkable to a point of necessarily creating a conflict around the top level legal questions.
Shadi Hamid:
Interesting. Matt, would you say anything to that?
Matthew Kaemingk:
No, I think that’s right on. I’m with him. Yeah.
Shadi Hamid:
Okay.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Pushback though, Shadi.
Shadi Hamid:
But there are clearly religious Christians who do hold this position and they think it is the mainstream orthodox Christian position. It is the Orthodox Catholic position at least for the time being. We’ll see what-
John Inazu:
It’s not the Orthodox Catholic position that there should be a criminal prohibition for gay marriage.
Shadi Hamid:
No, no, but I didn’t say… Okay, but I didn’t say anything about criminal prohibitions. I just said not supporting gay marriage.
John Inazu:
You said a legal restriction against gay marriage which is…
Shadi Hamid:
No, I’m just talking about before gay marriage was legal, whatever that was. I mean, there’s no penalty for anything in particular. It’s just that it’s a preference for it to not be legal. I don’t see that as the same as a criminal penalty per se.
John Inazu:
I mean, in the 1980s there was a criminal prohibition against same sex intercourse.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah, but I’m not talking about that I’m just saying not supporting gay marriage. That’s not the same. And it is a pretty common mainstream position. I mean, it is still the Catholic Church’s position that gay marriage is not recognised in the same way that heterosexual marriage is, that is still-
John Inazu:
Oh sure. Yeah. It’s also a very common mainstream position that blasphemy is bad, and it’s a very common mainstream position within Christianity that Christianity is the true faith. So all of these claims are held by millions and millions of Americans. And when it comes to questions of eternal significance and soteriology and other things like that, they are incommensurable claims as well. And they’re not claims along the lines of I believe this but it’s just my personal opinion. They’re claims about how the world is. And then we have to sort through how those claims play out in a legal and policy space in a diverse democracy. But I think it’s entirely plausible and possible for people to hold all kinds of beliefs that other people find obnoxious and offensive. This goes back to where we started the podcast, right? This happens all the time with lots of people.
Shadi Hamid:
Okay. But just to push this maybe one more time in the sense that it is a perfectly reasonable position from a theological perspective in both of our faith traditions to oppose gay marriage and to prefer it to have not been legalised. You and I don’t have to agree with that position but I would just say that is a legitimate position for people to have based on their theological convictions. And if they have that position which many of them do, young secular Americans would say that is beyond the pale because it would… Especially if they themselves are gay and would like to get married, they would consider that to be a personal affront because that religiously inspired position is negating a sense of who they are. I’m just playing out the disagreement here.
John Inazu:
Yeah. So do the same analysis with blasphemy. How is that different?
Shadi Hamid:
Okay, play that out. I am not sure… Do you want to-
John Inazu:
So it’s a perfectly logical position within our faith traditions to say that it would be better if there were a state of the world where blasphemy was not just permissible and mainstream, we might even say rendered illegal. And someone in the world who likes to be able to have the freedom to utter blasphemous words about the God that we worship would say it would be an affront of who I am and of my freedom to hold that position. And yet those two people in our society exist side by side. Now, take another example. Laws against interracial marriage which were in this country largely supported by White Christianity for some time often.
Shadi Hamid:
But that’s not a legitimate position. There is no legitimate theological basis for opposing interracial marriage. There is a legitimate theological basis for opposing gay marriage.
John Inazu:
You’re making a 2024 argument though you have to… I mean, within the tradition and the authority structure of the tradition as it existed say in the antebellum South in this country there was what American Christians considered to be a legitimate argument against interracial marriage. Not only that, but the past-
Shadi Hamid:
And they were wrong.
John Inazu:
Right. But that’s a contextual argument because of how the tradition played out.
Shadi Hamid:
Okay.
John Inazu:
And in a hundred years from now we may or may not have an answer to the question you’re asking now about gay marriage. Right?
Shadi Hamid:
Interesting.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah, Shadi, I guess the word you’re using, legitimate, is describing something that… I guess the word legitimate is doing a lot of work in those sentences in terms of what do you mean by legitimate? What makes a position legitimate or not? And it seems to me in your head when you use the word legitimate you mean all of the Americans who I consider to be reasonable would reject this and that’s what legitimate means. So maybe you’d have to define what legitimate means. How do I know that a blasphemy, gay marriage, whatever, that’s something as a legitimate opinion?
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah. I think the issue here is that with gay marriage it’s legalising something that wasn’t previously legal, it’s not introducing a legal or criminal penalty on a particular kind of behaviour. And I guess I’m just simply trying to get to I think an important example because I think it’s an illustrative one for disagreement in America when you have people with mutually irreconcilable claims about the way the world should be and one party to that considers a religiously grounded view to be an affront to who they are as human beings. I’m just trying to get at whether that’s something that can be resolved or adjudicated or whether that’s something that cannot actually be? Is it better for those people to just say, hey, we’re not going to be able to talk about this? Is there any utility in them arguing it out and is it possible for them to disagree better?
Matthew Kaemingk:
I think in order for a democracy to endure with deep levels of difference, we need as many citizens as possible who can handle objectionable beliefs in their midst. So it’s a problem if citizens are walking around all the time being deeply offended and fearful of lots of different beliefs. We need to have a higher level of resilience for those beliefs that we find objectionable.
Shadi Hamid:
But again we have to draw the line somewhere so people are going to make intensely personal decisions about drawing the line. I think the issue here is that a growing number of Americans who have grown up in non-religious spaces, they consider mainstream orthodox religious views to be beyond the pale and something that should not get a hearing in public life. That is what I’m getting at.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah, and I’m saying that’s a problem for American democracy. American democracy needs to be able to handle traditional religion. And I think back to this quote that has always stuck with me, this great little book called Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves. And it includes a number of quotes of French people talking about headscarves. And this one French woman says “Her headscarf was very aggressive to me.” Describe the headscarf itself as aggressive.
And it seems to me that this is one of the chief challenges for the future of democracy and secular life is being able to handle traditional religion and not see it as an affront or a personal attack that this woman is wearing a headscarf or living by traditional gender relations with her husband and being able to endure that rather than seeing it as an affront or aggressive towards her. Or just the fact that I live amongst some Christians who would want the gay community to be very very constrained in a lot of ways in America legally speaking. And to say, yeah, I disagree with you on a variety of levels but my body doesn’t quake and shake as well.
John Inazu:
I think that’s the more important point, Matt, that you just brought in, which this is not about democracy accommodating or continuing to accommodate traditional religion. It’s the much broader question of pluralism which is can we all accommodate people and viewpoints that we don’t agree with and that challenge and threaten us in deeply personal ways? So Shadi mentioned a minute ago gay marriage but there are plenty of other examples here. The question of abortion or questions of when you have a traditional religious practice that is asymmetrical in its treatment of men and women that’s going to cash out in a very personal way to women in some instances. Or when you say, “I’ve got an exclusive claim about salvation from my religion” that’s going to have a very personal effect on someone else who doesn’t share that.
So in a democracy, in all of our relationships over many many issues we are living out and expressing beliefs that other people will find subjectively painful and demeaning and offensive. And we do this all the time to each other across a range of issues. And then there are a few issues where we’ve said in 2024, unlike say 1832, this is out of bounds. And then the challenge is well how do you decide what else fits into that out of bounds category and who decides? And that’s a super interesting dynamic question that is being fought out today in culture, in the courts, in Hollywood and all kinds of places. And it ends up being what are the lines that you as a society or as substitutions within a society draw as acceptable and beyond acceptable? And one of the challenges that I try to make in this new book is let’s be really careful about who else we’re putting into the unacceptable, outside the bounds of society. Because society can’t function if you throw in large proportions of your fellow citizens into that category.
Shadi Hamid:
So don’t throw them in that category, people. You heard it from our guest John Inazu. Thanks so much for joining us, John. I would just urge everyone to think about buying John’s excellent book which gets into a lot more detail about how to actually practise deep disagreement in your own lives. Again, we’ll include a link to that in the show notes. If you don’t want to buy it you can potentially go to a library, I hear that those still exist in some parts of the country. And with that, thank you, John.
John Inazu:
Thanks, guys. Great to be with you.
Matthew Kaemingk:
So great to have you. Yeah. So friends, if you like what you heard, please do leave us a rating, subscribe, share. Thank you so much for listening to Zealots at the Gate. You can check out our podcast Intellectual Seed-bed at comment.org where you can find articles from Shadi Hamid. John, you’ve written for Comment, haven’t you? Have you written for Comment?
John Inazu:
I think once. I think once I’ve written for Comment.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Okay, good. Yeah. So Comment magazine you’ll find great essays on politics, culture and faith there. And we want to hear from you so connect with us over Twitter. John’s there on Twitter. John, what’s your handle in Twitter?
John Inazu:
I mean, I’m not really on Twitter anymore but-
Matthew Kaemingk:
Good for you.
Shadi Hamid:
Oh well he does have-
John Inazu:
I’ve got a Substack.
Shadi Hamid:
I was going to say he has an excellent Substack which is called Some Assembly Required. So we’ll also include a link to that. Check that out, subscribe.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Well, you can still find Shadi over at Twitter, he spends far too much time there.
Shadi Hamid:
Probably.
Matthew Kaemingk:
And you can write us at zealots@comment.org and you can expect a very sincere exchange. Our thanks as well to our sponsor Fuller Seminary’s Mouw Institute of Faith and Public Life. Zealots at the Gate is hosted by Comment Magazine, produced by Allie Crummy. Audience strategy by Matt Crummy, editorial direction by the wonderful Anne Snyder. Until next time, I’m Matt Kaemingk.
Shadi Hamid:
I’m Shadi Hamid.
Matthew Kaemingk:
See you guys.
Shadi Hamid:
Bye.