Shadi Hamid:
Welcome to season four of Zealots at the Gate, a podcast of Comment magazine. I’m Shadi Hamid.
Matthew Kaemingk:
And I’m Matthew Kaemingk.
Shadi Hamid:
Thanks so much for joining us and make sure to subscribe wherever you listen and give us a rating if you can. We always appreciate that. Matt, over to you to introduce our special guest.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Absolutely, a very special guest. Ms. Elizabeth Oldfield. I have been looking forward to this for some time. Elizabeth is the host of one of my favourite podcasts, The Sacred in which she engages a wide variety of guests from a wide variety of religions, philosophies and ways of life about the things they see to be sacred to them and to their lives. And just the way that she models a really compassionate and careful curiosity amidst a polarized culture has been just quite a model to me. Elizabeth is also a columnist and a contributing editor at Comment Magazine, which is our host magazine.
So we’re really proud and excited to have her. She comes from London and she also serves as a senior fellow at Theos, which is a UK leading think tank on religion and public life. Finally, she’s the author of a new book, a wonderful new book, which Shadi and I have been going through and texting one another about over the last few days. The book is called Fully Alive and in that book, Elizabeth makes a number of claims, but what’s really fascinating is that she has decided to talk about flourishing in public life through the lens of the seven deadly sins. This is a curious and surprising way to get after that Elizabeth.
Not really the bridge building technique that many Christians use when they engage in the public square. Often when we Christians try to jump in and make friends, we usually go with the love of Jesus or mercy or grace, but you just went after evil and vice, which to me was delightfully shocking and revealing and that is really where I’d love to start off and focus in our conversation today, which is why did you go with evil as the way to build a bridge with the diverse populace of the UK? And really, your book is getting picked up here in the United States quite a lot, which is exciting to us, but why evil? Why wickedness as the way you chose to try to make friends in the world?
Elizabeth Oldfield:
I don’t know if the book is about evil because of the way I’m trying to think about sin. Actually, I had a conversation with Demet with Shadi’s comment on one of your other podcasts and he was like, “Talk to me about evil.” And I was like, it’s actually one of the things that I feel is not as fully fleshed out in the book as I would like to like it to be. But the honest answer, Matt, is that I got very much pushed/led into this. It was not where I started. I had a real sense of frustration. I worked at the BBC, I led a religion think tank. My sense of the richness and depth and beauty of my tradition and its applicable wisdom for now, for these times, for everyone was so out of whack with the public story of it, of what people actually encountered in the public square that I was just trying to close that gap a little bit, just complicate the story.
And so, I had all these themes I wanted to write about. I wanted to write about attention and ritual. I wanted to do a kind of feminist defence of the Christian sexual ethic. I wanted to talk about money and consumerism and the way we are killing our earth with our insatiable desire of things. And I was working with an agent and sort of writing all these essays and putting together a proposal and she said, “You need a structuring device.” And I sat down and looked at it, and I went, “Oh no. Oh no, It can’t be that.” So I kind of went away and tried a bunch of different things. I was like, no, that’s what it is. And funnily enough, I think my agent is not religious at all and she went, I love it. It’s so strange. I know enough about it, that doesn’t sound super religious. It’s like I think of horror.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah.
Elizabeth Oldfield:
And that forced me to really reckon, with the heart of the thing for me which is this, connection and disconnection moving towards life, pulling back in on ourselves, the things that get in the way of fully aliveness. And at that point, the whole thing came into focus.
Matthew Kaemingk:
It seems striking to me … and I wonder if you can speak to this just a little bit, which is, you talk about living in sort of like a post sin society in which we’ve sort of done away with sin and vice as language that we would use, and yet paradoxically we do feel quite judgmental. Doing away with the language of sin hasn’t done away with that sort of loss of relationship and sort of the denial of evil hasn’t seemed to help us. I’m wondering if you could talk just a little bit about what we lose when we lose the language of sort of the severing of relationship or the isolation.
Elizabeth Oldfield:
So my working definition of sin, is very much a working definition. I’m really trying to be thinking aloud in public rather than saying this is my grand watertight thesis. But my instinct about the way … the reason I find the concept of sin so helpful is that it is one pole of two poles that we can pull towards. And that this phrase that both St. Augustine and Luther used always comes back to me, “Homo incurvatus in se,” humanity turned in on itself. And that turning inwards, that pulling away like an ingrowing toenail feels like a dynamic that I notice in my life and I see playing out in society and we don’t really have language for.
And there are some good reasons why people got nervous about the concept of sin, right? It can be used really badly. It can be a cause to beat people with. It can be, riddle people with the terror of hellfire. It can be just a way that we point fingers at other people and we try and make ourselves morally pure on the outside and Jesus has some things to say about this. But what it does in its, I think, healthy form, this idea of sinners disconnection is it gives us something to do with it, right? If we notice these disconnecting tendencies in ourselves, we notice that we are pulling into ourselves whether through this kind of avaricious over-consumption of stuff or through wrath and this polarization, and this hatred of the other.
It doesn’t have to be an identity thing. It can be something that we have somewhere to go with because sin and forgiveness of this pair, that good Christian theology holds together incredibly tightly and never wants to let pull apart, grace and justice. And in a society where the sin language has been let go of, and we have generally moved to a more therapeutic understanding of ourselves, some of which we really want to celebrate, some of which I think is really, really healthy. And these frameworks of … and you could also just say it’s another way of thinking about formation that Christians have always thought about.
Understanding what we have been formed by and where that has formed us towards life and where that has deformed us away from life, those stories and those scripts that have been spoken over us, that we can have freedom from, I just want to affirm all of that. I think it’s fully aligned with the goodness that I see in my tradition, but when you fully let go of any sense that there is a direction towards life and there’s a direction away from it, there are things we can do to live more connected, relational lives and ways that we can disconnect and pull back into ourselves. As you move, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks is amazing on this, from a guilt and forgiveness culture to an honour and shame culture.
And that difficulty with disentangling our actions from our identity that you get when you release sin and forgiveness, I think leads to a different set of problems and can leave us feeling quite paralyzed and also interestingly, very morally harsh because people are either good or bad, they’re either worthy of shame or honour, they’re either inside or outside the group. And when you hold onto sin in its healthy form, you’re also able to hold onto the possibility of redemption and restoration. And those are things I think we desperately need.
Shadi Hamid:
But isn’t there an issue here that one person’s healthy understanding of sin is another person’s not so healthy understanding of … some of these things are quite subjective? I mean, just to give one example, you said that we don’t want to riddle people with the error of hellfire. Totally agree. However, there’s probably somewhere in between where we want to at least maintain that there is some kind of divine accounting and punishment and one that can be quite literal and not just a metaphor for being disconnected from God because we as human beings need incentive structures, generally. That yes, there’s this special among us who can aspire to greatness through just the sheer love of God.
And that kind of outward facing approach that is very wholesome and positive and all of that. But then there’s a lot of people, a lot of normies who need to be scared a little bit. Otherwise, they might not do the right thing. So maybe just starting with how would you view the hellfire question as it relates to how we talk about sin?
Elizabeth Oldfield:
I just really don’t agree with you on that. I don’t think fear or shame is ever a useful motivator. And I have thought that intuitively as I often do, come to things intuitively and then, go looking to post, but rationalize. I don’t remember ever having been scared into anything that I could then sustain in any way that was actually life-giving. And I think the social science about how people actually change their minds and change their behavior is really clear on this. We change when we feel safe. We are able to make better decisions when we encounter some unconditional love that then encourages us to move beyond those things. And you can obviously think about that, in a theological setting.
I think perhaps the most kind of accessible way of thinking about it is the recovery movement. That what happens in recovery is they have this incredibly morally robust, morally formative community with a very strong pathway that involves ritual and tradition and basically a sacred text. But what it is, is it holds an entirely unjudgmental space and you go into recovery and you might have killed someone, right? There is a very radical openness in recovery that says, we … Am I okay to swear or is that going to cause you problems?
Shadi Hamid:
No, it’s fine.
Elizabeth Oldfield:
We have F’d up. It’s quite a sweary book, but the American version is cleaned up. We have all messed up and we are going to come together and hold each other in this supportive space and help each other change. And I just see … And this is what keeps me coming back to the gospel, despite many of the challenges and questions around Christianity and its institutions, is the idea that change comes because of what we have received. Because we know ourselves loved, we know ourselves accepted, and then out of the overflow of that, we can kind of shake off all these unhealthy temptations to disconnection, which we’re basically using as proxies for the things we really want.
Just deep connection and intimacy into see and be seen. We can let go of those unhealthy proxies slowly over time. I am working on it and move towards connection. I really resist the idea that humans need to be scared into doing what’s right.
Shadi Hamid:
I mean, maybe scared isn’t quite the right word, but the idea that there should be consequences or … I mean, we know that certainly if we look at politics or even if we look at our just basic interactions and everyday life with people around us, we’re always attuned to consequences, if we have a fear that we’ll do something, that will then lead to some kind of punishment or consequence, then I think we all have experiences where we’re like, “Well, actually, you know what? I don’t think that I’m going to do that because I know that there’s a consequence.” So I think we just … at a very basic level, that’s kind of how human beings work. And isn’t that also why the concept of sin can be a useful one?
Because at some basic level, we’re supposed to feel bad about the sins that we commit. Maybe again, not everyone has to think this way, but again, if we’re thinking about normal, flawed, broken people, people respond to different incentives and inducements. And so something might not be right for say Elizabeth or Matthew, but it could be right for someone else. But I do think there is a bigger point here that sin is … sin has a strong meaning. It’s an evocative word, and it’s one that also has a strong secular usage precisely for that reason. The language of sin is everywhere. This idea of atoning for sins or the sins of the past or the sins of the founding.
And whether or not we agree with the politics of certain ways of using the word sin. I think that we can all agree that it’s meant to be heavy and it should be heavy. If we have committed sins, we must atone for those sins. And if we don’t atone for those sins, there will be consequences. So I’m just curious what you make of any of that.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah, and just to jump on that, I think you are right, Shadi. Earlier I said we live in a post-sin society, but that’s not at all true in many ways, right? Many people who have left the church still do use that language of the need to atone and the sins of the father and all those sorts of things are still rife within our society. There seems to be some need we have for that kind of language.
Elizabeth Oldfield:
I think that might be one of the cultural differences, because I don’t think it is … and it might be why it’s being received with some level of people finding it refreshing here is that, it’s not so life as a language in the UK. I am going to swear because I think it’s rhetorically important. It’s one of the reasons why one of the chapters of the book about sin is called the human propensity to fuck things up because I think that word retains some of the brutality that I want people to hear, that I think sin is a relational concept, and I think that’s an entirely valid read of the biblical tradition. And it’s breaking, it is a fracture of these relational threads.
Between us and our own soul, actually we’re numbing and stuffing and distracting our own soul between us and other people, between us and the created world, which I didn’t develop that much in the book, but I think is increasingly obvious, the damage of that disconnection and us and God. And you are right, that we are motivated by consequences, but there’s a great book coming out of in May called Don’t Talk About Politics by an Oxford scholar called Dr. Sarah Stein-Lubrano, and she goes very deep into the social psychology. She’s a kind of political theorist and she’s, how do people actually change their minds on in a thing in this realm? And the consensus in the research is because of relationships.
My fundamental understanding of who the human person is, and this is because I get it from good theology, is relational, is longing for, in need of motivated by relationships. And so yes, the consequences that are meaningful to us are about the loss of relationships, are about loss of status, about being embarrassed in front of people about loneliness, right? Ultimately, I think disconnection from God is the meta frame of all of that. So it’s not that we are not motivated by the threat of consequences, but that it’s all the same thing that this call towards connection and fully aliveness is us living in those healthy relationships, horizontal and vertical and inward.
And sin is all the breaks and the fractures and the undermining and the stretching and the tearing of those connections. But what I see the atonement language being about is much more about restoration and reconciliation and repair like reconnection not, you must be punished, but something must be rewoven in order for life to flow again.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah. Yeah.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Shadi, I wonder if you could speak from your own Muslim faith on this issue of do we do good out of fear or out of consequences or out of a knowledge of … that there’s this sort of scale. You’ve talked before about a scale of good deeds and bad deeds and that being weighed with perfection. Can you tell us just a little bit about your own story that you bring to this discussion about sin and shame?
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah, so in the Islamic tradition, sin has a different kind of valence. There is this sense of a kind of perfectly calibrated system of justice that, it’s not literally that your good deeds are being weighed on one hand and your bad deeds are being weighed on the other. Although that is kind of the metaphor that is often used in the Quran and in the prophetic tradition. And it does get at something important that sins count. And if you do … let’s say you have a couple of months where you’re just doing a lot of bad things, there’s also this sense that you can make up for it by repenting, but then also, doing good deeds to kind of shift the scale and to have a better balance and so forth.
And also, just the conception of being saved is different in Islam, that being Muslim is not enough to be granted direct entry into heaven. So even a fully believing Muslim has to think about works and not just, do I have correct belief? So again, I think that’s a little bit different than various … certainly evangelical conceptions of what it means to be saved. Anyway, there’s a lot that could be said about that, but I think I’m coming from a sort of Islamic approach that takes hell as something that could very well happen to even believers. Yeah, that’s maybe on that. I do now want to just turn to a little follow-up on the phrase “Fully Alive” because it is the title of your book and it’s a very good title.
And I think that you’re clear in the book about what that means to you and why you think that’s a powerful frame. But this is again, where I get a little bit concerned because I know a lot of people who use the language of being fully alive, who are doing things that make them feel fully alive, but it’s not necessarily bringing them closer to God. I think about people who have a revelation about being polyamorous, that having multiple partners for them is a way to feel fully alive or committing adultery because they’re unhappy in their marriage and they feel more alive with someone who isn’t their spouse. Because we can’t always trust our own instincts of what … just because something makes us feel good doesn’t mean it’s right.
So that makes me a little bit nervous that if we’re telling people to embrace the idea of being fully alive, we’re trusting them with a lot. And again, what we know about human beings is that they’re easily tempted by sin. And they can tell themselves stories of rationalization and justification that, “Oh, well actually, there’s a reason that I’m doing this sin and so forth.” So I’m curious how you would respond to that, because I think you mean something about … very particular when you say fully alive that maybe others would use it in a little bit of a different way.
Elizabeth Oldfield:
Yeah. Well obviously, this is a manifesto for polyamory, so that’s what I was going for. No, I think … Yeah, I feel the exact same way and that’s partly why I wanted to reclaim it, right? And the public story of my faith looks a bit dead, right? It looks gray and boring and restrained or terrifying and hateful, depending where you look.
Shadi Hamid:
Maybe just say what your faith is just because people might not be fully aware of what you’re referring to here. I mean, what is your faith?
Elizabeth Oldfield:
So I don’t love any of the labels, but I am a big fan of Jesus, so I’m a Christian.
Shadi Hamid:
But you’re not necessarily part of an organised dispensation or movement or denomination.
Elizabeth Oldfield:
I don’t know what that means. I currently go to a church, an England church. I’ve been in all manner of churches. I’m not a Catholic, because you have to really decide that. But I like the Catholics. I don’t know, I think because I came a Christian in my teens, not from an especially strongly Christian family. I don’t feel a lot of team spirit for one bit of the church. I’m like a raving charismatic. I speak in tongues. I dance around just like some people call me Pentecostal maybe, but I also really like candles and silent retreats with nuns. I think what I am is greedy.
Shadi Hamid:
Okay.
Elizabeth Oldfield:
For all the types, you’ve really thrown me here by asking me this question.
Shadi Hamid:
No, that’s really interesting. So what if you have a question in your mind, is this right or wrong or is this a good idea or bad idea? According to Christianity, what source of authority do you turn to?
Elizabeth Oldfield:
The Bible.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Your voice went up at the end. Was that a question or-
Elizabeth Oldfield:
I was like, is that not always the right answer?
Matthew Kaemingk:
No, she’s a profound Protestant, right? She goes straight for the Bible. That’s good. Yeah.
Elizabeth Oldfield:
So honestly, I’m a Protestant … We live in a small Christian intentional community, which means I’m living … I’m practicing my faith up close with someone other than … People other than my spouse every day. So we pray morning prayer, we pray Compline, we pray for each other, we read the Bible together. So the honest answer is my own personal prayer practise of seeking to listen and pray, reading the scriptures and then, doing those things also with other people. So I do believe in the witness of the community. All my big decisions now go to the community. If I get speaking invites or job stuff or we’re deciding about schools for the kids, that all happens in our community.
Shadi Hamid:
Just very quickly, why if you have a speaking engagement, would that need to be cleared … We can talk more about this, because I’m fascinated by the intentional community that you’re part of and we want to definitely dive into that more. But just to clarify that last thing you said, I’m just curious why is … you’re your own speaker, you’re an individual, why does the community have dibs on whether you speak or not.
Elizabeth Oldfield:
I’m not an individual, Shadi. That’s exactly what I’m trying not to be. One of the covenants that we have is we’re trying to call each other deeper into our vocations and to discern what is the work that God has given us to do in the world and seek to do that. And so, speaking kids come in and some of them are for people who are Christians, some of the people who are outside the church. I think my primary calling is to be trying to translate across borders. So that’s one of my things. And then, there’s the other like how much time am I going to be away from my kids? How much money are they paying me? I was just deciding on that criteria. But now I have more than I have time to do. And so they pray with me and they listen to God and we try and work out what is the most important work for me to be doing so that I don’t burn out.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Elizabeth, I wonder if part of it is related to Shadi’s other question where Shadi you were saying we have a tendency to fool ourselves to talk ourselves into things that we shouldn’t.
Elizabeth Oldfield:
It’s accountability.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah, in awareness-
Elizabeth Oldfield:
Some of it is really well paid but not at all vocational. It’d be very easy for me to say yes to those things and they’ll always ask me that question. And sometimes it’s still the right thing to do if it’s very well paid, but not always.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. So Christian community is sort of a way of yeah, holding ourselves accountable to making those kinds of wise decisions. I want to bring it back to sin just because I love this topic of sin and being a Calvinist, of course, we love talking about depravity-
Elizabeth Oldfield:
All depraved.
Matthew Kaemingk:
And all those wonderful things. All depraved, but I picked up on some notes in your book that really reminded me of Elizabeth Bruenig, another lovely Elizabeth that we’ve had on the podcast who has talked a bit about cancel culture and the ways that we place people outside the pale, when they’ve done something wrong, something worthy of punishment. And the deficit is essentially that there is no modern road to atonement. There’s no path by which a person can be reconciled back into the community after they have done some real evil. And I pick up on that a bit in your book as well. It’s just kind of wondering if you could talk to us a little bit about the ways in which you see your book intersecting with cancel culture and a particular way that it might point a way through for us.
Elizabeth Oldfield:
Well, I’m trying to resist making a really cynical gag about there’s no way back except for certain pastors. Yeah, so this is one of the interesting places where my book has really intersected with audiences I wasn’t expecting. There’s a woman called Clementine Morrigan who is like a polyamorous, vegan, queer Marxist zen maker. She’s brilliant, she’s very thoughtful. She carries a lot of trauma. She’s writing about that in public. But she is a sort of doggedly anti cancel culture leftist. Partly because of her experiences in recovery and her sense that punishment does not change people’s behavior, what you get is this huge kickback that we’ve seen when someone gets cancelled, particularly someone who is at home on the left, just watch, just watch.
It’ll be five minutes and they’ll be on the far right of the manosphere. And that sense that shame and exile could ever be, how people might grow and learn, is a very faulty logic at the heart of cancel culture. So Clementine Morrigan, who loves my book and happy on her podcast, is talking to all of her audience about these themes because we have very different beliefs about lots of things, but we really share this sense that everyone is redeemable. No one is beyond the reach of grace. Humans can actually change, which is a very radically offensive thing to say in some circles now. And it’s possibly my most offensive Christian belief that everyone is redeemable.
I’ve just done a podcast with Jameela Jamil about this who is a very publicly feminist progressive, who went through a long stage of just calling her enemy’s names and has come to the conclusion that that was not productive and is now, thinking about what might it mean to communicate in ways that people can actually hear. And so, this sense I have essentially that the grace, that the beating heart of my theology, which is that when we were far off, when we were enemies of God, when we were so disconnected and turned in on ourselves that we could not get up, we could not come back out of our hell that we built for ourselves. God came and got us. That sort of flesh is out into how we should be with others.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. I actually want to go back to your point about how someone on the left makes a couple of statements that gets them banned, that gets them canceled and you said in five minutes, you’ll see them over on the right. I have seen that as well. I’m wondering if you could talk just a little bit about why you think that happens. Why, once someone is out in the wilderness, been sort of pushed out of the left? Why do you think that might happen?
Elizabeth Oldfield:
Because our deepest longing is for belonging. And you can argue that case from a theological anthropology. You can also just argue it from straight anthropology, from evolutionary anthropology. We are social animals, we are hyper social creatures. If you’re happy with this language, we evolve to live in groups that when we exile someone, there is some deep sense in us that we are in danger of death, right? We might have designed a hyper individualized consumer society for those of us who are privileged enough to have access to it where we can sort of survive without other people, because we have these great apps, but deep down … That’s very recent. We meet each other’s needs. We have each other’s back. We are deeply reliant and interdependent creatures.
And so, when you say to someone you are no longer welcome here, when you inflict silence or insult on them and eject from them from the group, we go into full-blown file flight, that the survival mechanism kicks in quite fast. It’s absolutely terrifying. I don’t know if either of you … it has happened to you. I’ve had very mild versions. I know people who have had extreme versions and I don’t think it’s an overstatement. And we do overstate this word a lot, but I don’t think it’s an overstatement. It’s traumatic. We are social enough that the whole sticks and stones can’t break your bones, that thing is bullshit. They absolutely can wound us. And then out of those wounds, people can’t live outside a group. They can’t live outside a tribe.
They can’t live outside the tent, so they go looking for someone and groups that have seen them be cancelled for views that they agree with them or even it seems like they might adjacently agree with them, like come over here, we’ll make you welcome.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah, I mean, I’ve seen that in my own life. I’ve seen it a number of times for public thought leaders, I’m putting that in quotes, who sort of inhabit a middle space, a difficult or a third way and then, they can get just pounded on social media to such a degree that ultimately they seem to quit on trying to listen to both sides and they become just another ideological mouthpiece. Just the other day … I’m not going to name this guy, but he is a Christian who has been a real friend to Muslims for many, many years and has defended Muslims and Muslim dignity for a long time. And I had many people say, “Hey Matt, you should go talk to this guy.” Because he seems kind of like you. And I’m like, okay and then, I check in on him and he is full-blown Zionist.
And is just now, bashing Palestinians. And something has happened within him that he couldn’t handle living in that in-between space. It’s just something I’ve been thinking about quite a lot. I don’t know, Shadi. Have you seen people in your life who sort of inhabited a middle space? I mean you tend to bother people on a variety of levels.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Do you feel that temptation as well to join a tribe when people are getting angry with you?
Shadi Hamid:
Well, I’m kind of politically homeless at this current moment. I did feel a little bit like I was missing out during inauguration week, because I do have a bunch of right wing friends and a bunch of them just descended onto Washington and were going to all these inauguration parties and balls. And I was on a group chat with a bunch of these people and they just seemed so vindicated, excited. It was like they had been this counter elite for such a long time, and they had been blocked from the halls of power and influence and then, all of a sudden Washington was theirs. And they didn’t have to be embarrassed.
They didn’t have to go into hostile territory. They didn’t have to adjust their views. They could be fully Trump curious or fully Trumpist. And so, I saw a lot of that excitement and I was like, “Wow, wouldn’t it feel good to be part of a movement where you felt like this is where I belong, these are the people I belong with” and maybe others. And I think there will be people who will gravitate more and more to the right in the coming four years precisely for this reason. I guess I’m still enough of a contrarian that I just wouldn’t feel comfortable doing something just for belonging, although I guess it’s a normal sort of incentive. So I feel that pull and I also feel in the other direction, like if only the left could accept me and not attack me all the time and stuff like that.
But I think there is something else here going on, which is … I mean liberals are also just kind of annoying and smug. So I think that is also a big part of what leads people who are formally on the left to entertain being on the right there is something … there is a kind of delicious feeling that comes with owning the libs. That’s why we have a phrase, own the libs. There’s no equivalent on the conservative side. There’s no saying, “Oh, own the conservatives.” No one gets really excited about that. So I think unfortunately liberal … Folks on the centre left have made themselves so easy to make … So out of touch and smug and just unlikable that it creates a counter effect.
And that’s something the left is going to have to work on. At a very basic level. They have to stop being annoying if they want to win elections.
Elizabeth Oldfield:
I feel like you could make a lot of money consulting around that strategy. That’s your four-year plan.
Matthew Kaemingk:
But I think … Here’s the thing, so I totally buy … Being a Christian myself and I totally buy your argument, we are communal. We are tribal. We long for connection. And it does seem that when we look for community and connection, wholly in our political parties and political ideologies. It’s destructive to our common life and ultimately, it’s destructive to us. And it seems to me that a healthy democratic society depends upon the flourishing of communities that are not primarily ideological or political, that we need an identity with certain friendships and family members and schools and whatnot. That is not about our political beliefs, but something deeper.
I’m wondering if you could talk just a little bit about that because sometimes in this polarization tribalism thing, the message can be, we just need to transcend our tribes, so we need to sort of be beyond these tribal communities, but that doesn’t seem quite right. We are tribal, right?
Elizabeth Oldfield:
Yeah. I’m trying to write something on this at the moment. And I’ve come across this concept called polarity management, which is a kind of business school thing. But it’s really helping me because again and again, and I’m just going to root this in my church context at the moment, it feels like there’s a false binary at play. And you can either have thick community, distinctive culture like faithfulness to the roots, or you can be hospitable and open to the other and they’re opposites, right? And when one goes up, the other goes down. And that does sometimes play out. I really struggle with interfaith stuff because it feels like the price of interfaith is that no … I loved Shadi being like, no, actually I see this since really different in my traditional I was, yes, let’s just own the fact that this is an actual deep difference.
And no one has to freak out. And lots of the interfaith stuff that I’ve come near is, let’s pretend that everything we have in common means that there’s no real differences between us. However, I think that it’s not a binary, it’s a polarity and that both things are true. And I keep coming back to this phrase like deep roots and wide branches that I want to be weird. I’m increasingly unashamed about my faith and about my speaking tongues and the fact that I think Jesus rose from the dead crazy-
Shadi Hamid:
You speak in tongues?
Elizabeth Oldfield:
I speak in tongues. A prophetic dance, I love that stuff. And the weird thing is that the more undefended and undefensive about it, I am in public and the more curious and open to other people’s beliefs, the easier that interaction actually gets. And so, I think there is a real … it’s not a binary that when … And sociologists talk about bonding social capital and bridging social capital, and it’s often taken to be, you can work on one and you can work on the other, but you can’t work on both at the same time. I think healthy theology and maybe other sources means that you can and you should do both. I think the more I know I am loved by God and I have deep roots into living water, the more my branches can spread and be fruitful and that fruit is for other people.
And yeah, I just really think we can … I live in actual micro-monastery, right? We are weird. We pray compline. We are increasingly distinctively counter-cultural and people from all different random … We had a witch and a Muslim and a Marxist-Polyamorous person and two of their non-binary partners for dinner the other week and a social conservative critic, around the table and almost us being unapologetic about our identities meant that they could be two. And so, I don’t think that opposites, I think you can do both, but you have to keep an eye that you’re not leaning too far from one to the other.
Matthew Kaemingk:
What’s convinced you of that, Elizabeth? In your own experience, what has convinced you to be more strange in public? To put it simply, how have you seen that work? You’ve seen it be sort of invitational rather than … it hasn’t stopped the conversation for you. Can you give us an example of being odd and how that’s actually helped
Elizabeth Oldfield:
You? Yeah, so the phrase, when I usually … we used to talk about confident non-defensiveness. And I do think that when we are relaxed in ourselves and comfortable in our own skin, we give other people to be relaxed and comfortable in their own skin. And it was probably most obvious when … so there is an institution in the UK called the RSA, the Royal Society of Arts Manufacturing and Commerce or something. It’s like 1760, it’s a building on the Strand and for a long time its tagline was 21st century enlightenment. The guy who ran the Tony Blair policy unit went there and ran that and it was very wonkish and left brained and hyper secular.
And they did this piece of work around spirituality, which … You could sort of hear them putting air quotes around it, because they were so scared of the concept, because they had this sense that something about spirituality might be important for healthy societies, but obviously, we didn’t want the superstitious nonsense and the weirdos, so what could we rescue? And it was this big room of psychologists and sociologists and wonks, and then me. And they were graphs and charts and there was no skin in the game. No one was showing up as a human being and talking about this is real and lived. And so, I junked my whole talk and started my talk with, I pray in tongues, would anyone like to talk about that? And it shifted the energy in the room completely.
And then, a bunch of us went to the pub afterwards and had actual real conversations and we have stayed friends and been this kind of weird reading group for 15 years and we believe radically different things. And so, I think when we are able to be slightly playful and to tolerate the awkwardness, I kind of find it fun. I think it’s mischievous. When you say something weird and you watch somebody often you’re like, it’s okay. It’s all right. We kind of have this tension.
Shadi Hamid:
Okay, so-
Elizabeth Oldfield:
I don’t hate you. That’s … I don’t hate you. That’s what people need to hear from us when we’re being weird.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah, so one thing I want to just come back to because it’s come up sort of organically a few times, references to polyamorous folks and it’s not so important for … polyamory is not the issue here.
Elizabeth Oldfield:
I’m not going to psychoanalyse this.
Shadi Hamid:
It’s more about using polyamory as a kind of case study of how some of your thinking works. So I mean, I don’t know, I’m guessing that I actually don’t know what you think about this and I’m going to be quite curious to see what you’ll say, but I would argue that being polyamorous brings you further away from God. It’s a way of interrupting a deeper relationship with the divine. It’s a way perhaps one to kind of use old-fashioned terminology. It’s a kind of disobedience towards God. I’m guessing you have a different view of it. But at the same time, if you are a Christian, I’m also presuming that at some level you’re not a relativist. You don’t believe that all paths are equally valid.
And if my premise is correct there, then you do make your own judgments. I think that I pushed you on any number of issues, you would sort of be forced to admit that you think some ways of life are better than others and that they’re not all equally good.
Elizabeth Oldfield:
Yes, I’m not relativist and I don’t know that I have developed views on polyamory. I’m not poly. I would be really interested in listening to a more traditional Mormon on this. There are religious communities who wouldn’t see this binary between their relationship with God and what we would see of as unconventional marital setups.
Shadi Hamid:
I’m talking more about secular polyamory here to be clear. Yeah.
Elizabeth Oldfield:
Okay. I mean sure there’s loads of decisions that people make, that I don’t know if they’re wise, but it just doesn’t … it sort of doesn’t feel like my job, the phrase of Jesus is that I come back to the most is judge not lest you be judged. And I want people to know that they are loved. I want people to know … I want people to know Jesus. And that’s true for poly people. And if that happens then that is a conversation between them and God, in the same way lots of things … in the same way. Lots of things are in my life, right? In the last chapter, quite a strong defence of marriage. I think marriage is a beautiful practise of attention and it can help us grow and that is what I have chosen.
And I think it is good. I don’t mean to be equivocating. I’m a funny kind of social conservative in that what I am is someone who cares very deeply about relationality and relationships. And I think the reason I would struggle to outright condemn all polyamory as unhealthy is one, people who are not seeking to have a strong connection with God. That’s not their framework. I don’t want to want to just legislate for righteousness that people are not interested in by trying to externally, socially engineer their choices. The loving and knowing God and being known and loved by God bit has to come first and then, everything follows from that. And the other thing is I have poly friends who are incredibly ethically rigorous and thought out and would see it as in service of deep connection.
As in service of seeing and being seen, knowing and being known without the constraints of formal ownership. And that’s not my philosophy, but neither do I want to sort of outright say that it is evil and wrong.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah, so just to kind of join Shadi and push you a little more. You do speak quite strongly in terms of how we care for the earth and issues of racism.
Elizabeth Oldfield:
Yeah. I’m pretty clear that those things are bad and I’m really happy to say that.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Okay, but not so with polyamory I think is sort of the thing.
Elizabeth Oldfield:
It’s really helpful and generative challenge. Okay, here’s what I think … this is really helping me clarify my thinking. Here’s what I think. If fully aliveness is connection. I think the invitation of the gospel to love God and to love people, there are some choices that are obviously disconnecting us and other people. And I think that racism is always that and knows it, right? And polyamory, at least in its felt motivations is not trying to do that. So for people who are not Christians, I feel clearer about saying racism is always a terrible thing for all of us because it has obvious direct harm, often to people who are vulnerable. Polyamory looks messy, looks risky, looks like probably ending up more disconnected than connected in my experience.
I wouldn’t do it. I’m not sure it’s wise, but it’s people trying to figure out connection and in service of that. And so, I think the difference I’m wanting to draw is about … is what’s the motivation and is it possible that it is somehow on a journey towards deep connections. I want everyone to know the love of God in Christ. And as far as I can see, the scripture is … Well, is it pro-marriage? It’s actually quite ambivalent about marriage, it’s complex about marriage. There’s a call to holy singleness, right? It’s not this nuclear family thing, but what it definitely is, is a call to love God and love people, love our neighbours and love our enemies. And polyamory doesn’t look super wise, but racism is obviously in opposition to that. And that is why … Thank you for helping me figure that out. I am happier to more strongly condemn one than the other.
Matthew Kaemingk:
I see.
Shadi Hamid:
I like that. Yeah, that works for me.
Elizabeth Oldfield:
Thanks.
Shadi Hamid:
I can get behind that.
Elizabeth Oldfield:
Thanks. I don’t think … I’m definitely, wooly on some things, but I think I can make a case for that one.
Matthew Kaemingk:
All right, but just to set the record straight, Elizabeth is monogamous.
Elizabeth Oldfield:
Super monogamous.
Shadi Hamid:
Well, speaking of monogamy and family structure and that sort of thing, maybe now is a good time to maybe just hear more from you about the journey that led you to be part of a sort of neo-monastic intentional community that is very unorthodox and I mean most of us haven’t lived in intentional communities and I think that’s why we find them fascinating because we sometimes fantasize about them, but most of us aren’t willing to actually make the requisite sacrifices to actually live in one. I don’t think I’d be able to do it personally, but maybe, I’m wrong about that. So maybe just tell us … Obviously, it’s probably a long story, but maybe give us the condensed version of how you got from point A to point B in that regard.
Elizabeth Oldfield:
There were lots of drivers and one was just slightly more ideasy sense that the way we are living in general is not working. That we have a loneliness crisis and a climate crisis and a housing crisis. And living in increasingly smaller and smaller units was not helping any of those. It was having kids and realizing how poorly designed individualism is, to support the family. And it was a sense that I had become a Christian, sort of lost slash really struggled with my faith and then come back to it. And in the coming back, I had this real … it’s quite a lot of effort, energy. It was just like, “Well, if I’m going to do this, I’m going to do this.” I don’t want to live this mild and dilute cultural version of Christianity.
This seems radical to me when I read the New Testament. There is a deeply counter-cultural flipped on its head understanding of status and value and what a good life is. And I want to try and at least live slightly closer to that, but I’m aware that particularly going into our 30s, more responsibility and kids, the formation of wider culture that is basically accrue more stuff … acquire more stuff, accrue more status, aim for comfort and convenience, basically, get a kitchen island and go on nicer and nicer holidays seems to be all that is offered by kind of prosperous middle life, middle class life, where I live. I mean, it looked mind numbingly boring and unlikely to make me fully alive.
And so, this idea that if we could live more, if we could live closer up with other people, it would be good for our discipleship, which is just a sort of how do we become more like Jesus? It’d be good for our witness, because I’m sort of a weird kind of evangelist and so, is my husband and I like talking to people about Jesus. And when you live weirdly, people are more likely to want to talk to you about Jesus and just be more fun, like I was looking for an adventure. So there was a long, long being met with blank stares as we basically asked people out. And then, we eventually found the family that we now live with and did a long discernment process and then, rented together and then, moved into this house together nearly three years now. And it’s been completely amazing, very difficult.
Shadi Hamid:
Okay, so it’s two families, so you and the other family and that’s what it’s limited to at this point?
Elizabeth Oldfield:
Yeah, mainly because, well one, financially getting a place bigger than we’ve got in London is really, really difficult. If we were doing this slightly more classic move to the countryside and buy some land and be like … Americans call it crunchy, which I really like, that would be easier. But we felt really cool to the city. I have a thing about the way the city forms us and how we can be forming the city and there being something important about that. And also because there are young kids in the mix and I have no illusions at how badly wrong this can go, the level of trust required to bring other people up close to my kids meant that we basically only found one other family that we felt that level of trust with.
But we have guest rooms, there’s a lot of people that come through and we have 16 people for dinner most Mondays, and it’s like a busy and full house with a small core community.
Shadi Hamid:
And is there anything maybe negative that you’ve learned from the experience? It sounds like it’s largely positive and that you like it, but I’m wondering have there been any things that you or your kids have sort of been like, “Okay, here’s the dark side of this.” When you actually get really close to people who aren’t technically your family, sometimes there can be fallout or sometimes you see things you don’t want to see. Do you have a sense of … is there much of that darkness or is it just primarily light?
Elizabeth Oldfield:
It’s not primarily there’s a lot of difficulty, but it feels like healthy difficulty. I write in the book about this concept of homeasis, which is basically biological processes that stretch us but then make us stronger. That’s why people are super into cold water to swimming. So there’s no way to hide in community. And so, what’s difficult is my sin is very visible. My worst parts, you can’t keep a lid on those forever when you’re sharing a kitchen. And that’s true of other people. And so, the unlovely parts of ourselves are seen, but this comes back to what we were talking about, about non-judgmental space and how it helps us change. Because there’s a very deep covenant between us to love each other, not because we’re lovely, but because we’ve chosen to.
Not because we’re like God, but because we’re trying to at least model that in some way, to love each other, because that’s what we’re called to, there is a sense in which I can be the spiky dark parts of myself and then grow, not because I’m shamed, but because I’m seen and there’s enough rigor for me to be like, “Oh, I was to bring it into the light and it’s terribly vulnerable.” But then there’s something very healing about that. We regularly annoy each other and there are definite compromises, but the sense of me growing up my soul, and I think all my housemates would say this. And a sense of more capacity and more care, when there’s four adults, one of us is almost always having a hard time, but then there’s three people who are not.
And that’s much easier than a two person ratio. There’s more support, there’s more energy, there’s more creativity, there’s a wider range of skills. We are designed to live in complex groups because one person knows how to do the Excel spreadsheet and one person knows how to bake the brownies for the neighbour, and one person can fix the plumbing. And then, there’s me who throws a good party. And I think it is just that … even the hard bits feel healthy, and that’s not always true. But we spent a lot of time putting in quite a rigorous, non-rosy tinted scaffolding to try and hold it in its healthy form rather than tip into the dysfunctional form where it can really harm people.
Matthew Kaemingk:
So bridging this into the political, Elizabeth, I wonder if you could talk … I mean you engage in a lot of difficult conversations out in the public square, with a lot of deep difference. How do you see the importance of having a home base, a sort of haven that you come back to? Maybe you wouldn’t describe it as a haven, with all the difficulty as well. But how would you describe or sort of narrate the benefits of having this home community for your public life engaging in lots of deep difference debate, disagreement, standing your ground?
Elizabeth Oldfield:
Yeah. Well, it loops back to what we were saying about that false binary, right? I have deep roots and so, I can stretch out. And these morally formative covenant communities, Jonathan Haidt talks about this really well in the Anxious Generation about communities where there’s a high bar to get in and then, a high bar to get out is how we change. And what we have instead designed in digital spaces is there’s very ease of entry and very ease of exit. You don’t have to work through anything. You don’t have to rupture and repair. You don’t have to fracture and reconcile. So I know that I’m not going to get exiled or rejected easily, and I am seen and known as myself. My housemates do not take me seriously. That’s helpful. Keeps my ego in check.
Matthew Kaemingk:
They don’t call you a thought leader, do they, Elizabeth?
Elizabeth Oldfield:
No. So yes, there is a sense of safety and that means, so we use this phrase, community makes you brave because I was leading a think tank. I was doing some things in the public square and then we moved in together and within three months I was like, I think I need to leave that job leading a think tank. I left with no … I had this strong vocational sense, but the first sense was that I need to rest. That was only possible with living community and I was like, I think I need to write this weird ass book. They cheered me on. And every time things feel scary, there are three other people saying maybe that’s because it’s important and maybe it’s because you haven’t done it before, no one’s done it before. It’s needed.
So there is a definite … I love the way that encourage literally means put courage into people. There’s an encouraging role that living in community plays. Honestly, it means when I’ve had a terrible time, I did a debate recently and the horrific misogynist trolls who were beating up on me at the internet for daring to show emotion. I made the mistake of glancing at it and was pretty thrown by it. And then, I can go home and be with people who just love me and give me a hug.
Matthew Kaemingk:
There is one question that’s been burning with me, because as I mentioned at the beginning, Elizabeth, I do just really love your podcast. I absolutely love it. I love … It is a gift, I would say to our democratic life, but it’s also a gift to the church, I think in a really important way. In all the ways that you model a profound curiosity. To me the word is curiosity. When I think about how you enter into those spaces, and you always start with that question of whoever you’re talking to is what is sacred to you. And you really pursue your guests with a sort of fervent curiosity throughout your interviews. And I’m wondering if you could distill for us as we think about … specifically in the realm of the political, embodying a curiosity with other citizens.
How we might pursue that curiosity with others. I mean, one of the things that I really enjoy about Shadi is he’s pretty greedy about people’s first principles. So Shadi will sort of pursue your first principles. He’ll keep asking his way down until he finds them.
Elizabeth Oldfield:
I felt that.
Matthew Kaemingk:
And I wonder if you might offer the two of us and our listeners just some of the lessons learned about pursuing curiosity with those who are quite different from us politically speaking.
Shadi Hamid:
I’ll just add to that. I mean, I think what’s really striking to me about you, Elizabeth, is that you actually genuinely seem to like people. Do you like people?
Elizabeth Oldfield:
Yeah.
Shadi Hamid:
And I remember actually … I mean I’d been on your podcast before, but we hadn’t met in real life. We met in real life for the first time, just a couple of months ago at a mutual friend’s birthday party. And I just also have this memory of you. We were having lunch in a little circle and most of us didn’t know each other. And then, you asked me a very direct intense question. I can’t remember exactly what it was. It could have been something like, are you happy or something very … that probably wasn’t that, but something that was disarming and unexpected. And then, the whole circle got into a sort of deep intense conversation because you kind of like … you didn’t care. There were a lot of DC people there and they were trying to probably be like, “Oh, but you didn’t care about that.” Anyway, I just wanted to add that as just a little bit of context.
Elizabeth Oldfield:
Thanks. Shadi. Yeah, I quite … not always, but most of the time I’ve just let go of the desire to be impressive and that really helps that slightly mischievous what’s going to happen here if I throw a curveball into a conversation, like I have high chaos tolerance basically and high social awkwardness tolerance. Chaotic good is what I hope. So my very first principles are, I don’t think you can be genuinely attempting to live the New Testament ethic and allow yourself to hate your enemies. And I think in hate we can cluster be contemptuous of and dismissive of. There’s a very direct command. Love your enemies and seek to bless them. And so, that default posture … I’m called to love my neighbours and my enemies, that’s everybody.
That is everybody. That is … Every human being is made in the image of God. And therefore the radical claim of my tradition is that everyone is carrying a spark of the divine within them. And the more you start looking for that, the more you can see. And I think I’ve just been looking for it for a long time. And so, I’m more able to see through the nonsense, which I carry a lot.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah, but the pursuing the curiosity of pursuing. Go more into that part. Yeah.
Elizabeth Oldfield:
Well, I think a decision to have that posture really helps. A decision to go, this person might be really annoying and hold views that I find difficult. They might even think I’m illegitimate as a woman or whatever it is, but that doesn’t mean I’m allowed to write them off because God doesn’t. And that somehow a connection across those differences will help us both become more fully human. And so, there’s a kind of first principle of this is good for me, it’s good for my soul, it’s good for them, it’s good for society, it’s how we become more fully alive and it’s how we stay human. If you think of sin as humans pulling into themselves, that when we resist connection with other people, we’re moving in the wrong direction basically.
And so that’s the sort of first principle thing. Just decide. Decide it’s important, and if you’re Christian, we’re very clear scriptural basis for that. But I think you can make a sociological argument for it. It’s just obviously good. I just think it’s obvious. Why do we need persuading? And then, there’s the practises thing. And the practises are really just these things that sound safe and weak and are not … which are a commitment to listening and really listening. And often, that means giving up on being able to say your piece. And so, I very rarely argue with people. I very rarely challenge people. I’m much more on the like, be ready to give an answer for the hope that you have and of apologetics.
Than on the, let me tell you why I’m right and you’re wrong. Because my deep intuitive understanding, and again, I think this is being very strongly demonstrated in the literature, is that it’s pointless, because we have this thing called reactance, which is the psychological process where we can tell someone’s trying to change our mind. We put up barriers towards it. People only change their mind in relationships with trust and respect. So even if you’re just in a strategic thing, then listening to people long enough to build a relationship with trust and respect is when you might actually have a chance of changing their mind.
But along the way, as soon as you start listening to them and asking deep questions and good questions and just seeing them as fascinating, they transfigure before your very eyes into a complex, fragile, often wounded, often scared person.
Matthew Kaemingk:
And I see that happen in your podcast. And that leads me to one other thing that’s confounded me multiple times listening, is you talk to some really brilliant people, really brilliant. Sort of top of their field, fascinating people, but often when you press for their foundations, their answers are actually not very impressive at all. It’s quite apparent that they haven’t thought about it.
Elizabeth Oldfield:
They don’t know.
Matthew Kaemingk:
And in a distraction society of consumption or career ambition or whatever else, people aren’t asking those first principle questions. They’re not asking what is this all about? Because we’re sort of running on these treadmills so fast. And yet, you’re quite tender with them in that moment where they’re reaching. I wonder if you could talk just a little bit about those moments. And I think Shadi and I have a hard time because we are quite curious about people’s first principles, but when we talk with them about it, they struggle to find it or to understand the assumption, the faith-based assumptions that they’re making.
Elizabeth Oldfield:
Yeah.
Matthew Kaemingk:
It just genuinely is all people are living by some kind of faith, but the vast majority of them haven’t examined that kind of faith. And it is a thing to figure out how you cultivate those conversations and keep them from sort of dying out.
Shadi Hamid:
And I’ll just add to this, I’ve been really struck, but Matt captured it really quite well, conversations, especially over the past year or two in particular, there’s been a number of these with very prominent celebrated figures in their fields, including philosophers. And when you ask follow-up questions to them, which … a variation of basically why do you believe what you believe or what is the source of the claim that you just made, why is that important to you? It’s not that they self combust, although sometimes it almost seems like that’s happening. It’s like how … I mean, not to say that we’re all special or anything like me and Matt because we have special insight into these questions, but it’s that there’s a lot of people who don’t seem … It’s almost as if the question hasn’t really occurred to them.
And I do find it a little bit remarkable. Anyway, I’m curious what you make of that. And as Matt said, if you could just maybe say more as to how you approach that with your own interview subjects.
Elizabeth Oldfield:
Yeah. It honestly is quite horrifying, how often I ask someone what is sacred to them and they give an answer that is so thin or they just don’t know. But I honestly-
Shadi Hamid:
What’s an example of a thin answer to that question?
Elizabeth Oldfield:
Well, the thing is people can say the same thing and it’d not be thin depending on them. Someone can say kindness because that’s all they can think of. And I can tell that is not their deepest value. And for other people, it’s like they’ve gone through the simplicity to the complexity and they’re in their second naivety about actually the combustible power of kindness to change the world. So it’s not so much what they say, it’s … I don’t usually feel judgy about it because I think it is the unacknowledged gift of being part of faith communities, that we are formed by morally formative communities where we have been gifted space to reflect regularly on what meaningful life is and read text with others and talk to others about it.
And it’s one of the many horrifying things about secular liberalism. Liberalism is no one invites you to do that. And if they do, it’s very much in this self-improvement frame of like, what are your intentions? And they’re mainly about how to look hot and make more money. So the sacred question rarely elicits something deeply profound, but what it does is it shifts their mental space. And then, I go straight into childhood and I am more and more like I’m not that interested in disembodied ideas. I am interested in the person and how the ideas are showing up in their life. And so if you ask someone about their childhood, they immediately shift into … they and the listener, their threat response goes down. So people will come and fool me.
They don’t know me, they think they’re just doing a book promotion interview or they think it’s going to be adversarial, so they’re very guarded, their guard is up. As soon as you ask them about their childhood, you can see their eyes go up into the left and they are having a memory. And as they have that memory, there’s a body thing that happens. And as a listener, if you listen to someone describing themselves being eight, it’s much harder to hate them. So then, I take them through their life and try and go, why do you think you did that? What was it about that that interested you? And that’s easier for people to access. And then the values are implicit there, but we as a listener can sometimes hear what’s been driving them.
They can’t always hear it, but my deep thing is everything we believe is because of relationships. It’s basically because of testimony. It’s because of people that we trust and people that we respect. And that had … the CEO of Vote Leave on, it’s not out yet. A guy called Matthew Elliott. He and Dominic Cummings, the kind of architects of Brexit known in the public eye on the kind of remain side, is these big evil, terrible people. I asked him something quite simple and he started talking about his dad and he started crying and then he was like, pull back. And there was this moment where I was like, let yourself be a human in public because this is what this is for.
And as soon as you put it in their real story and their real relationships, it stops being an abstract ideas thing, and I think you can get something much more generative maybe.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Well, Elizabeth, it has been a profound gift and I thank you so much for your willingness to stick on a little longer with some of these questions that have been sort of haunting me about your podcast. And we do commend Elizabeth’s podcast to you. We will leave a link to that in the show notes. But Elizabeth, thank you so much for your time. This has been tremendous.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah, this was really wonderful. Thank you.
Elizabeth Oldfield:
You really made me think, and that is a lovely thing.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. Were you planning on defending polyamory today, Elizabeth?
Elizabeth Oldfield:
I got to text my mate and be like, this is what I mean about relationships changing our minds, because if I wasn’t friends with you, I would not be on this podcast having more complex position on it, than otherwise I would be, but that’s what happens when you’re in relationship with people who hold different views as you two, offer a good demonstration of this.
Matthew Kaemingk:
All right, well, Elizabeth, we thank you so much. This has been wonderful. And to our viewers and listeners, goodness, thank you for listening to Zealots at the Gate. If you like what you heard, please do jump online and give us a rating. You can check out the podcast’s intellectual seedbed at comment.org. Comment magazine is where you will find essays from both Shadi, Elizabeth and myself and lots of other brilliant people working in politics, culture and faith. If you’d like to connect with us or talk with us about what you’ve heard, you can connect with us over at Twitter or X. Shadi Hamid and @matthewkaemingk, or you can write us an email zealot@comment.org and you can expect a 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. It’s produced by Allie Crummy. Audience strategy by Matt Crummy and editorial direction by the wonderful Ms. Anne Snyder. Until next time, friends, my name is Matthew Kaemingk.
Shadi Hamid:
And I’m Shadi Hamid. Thanks for joining us.
Matthew Kaemingk:
See you.
