Ideas - On Culture Wars in Christianity

Episode Date: June 5, 2024

The 'culture wars' have been a staple of modern politics for decades now. They are especially entrenched within Christian communities. Philosopher and author James K. A. Smith has a radical prescription to move beyond this: the church needs more mystics. 

Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood, or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. We do feel like God has a special plan for this country.

Sowing racism, homophobia and transphobia creates life or death dangers for many people in our society. We're witnessing the newest evolution of the culture wars, a term first popularized nearly 30 years ago in a book by James Davison Hunter. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. The culture wars did not start in 1990 when James Davison Hunter wrote the book that gave us the name. One of our oldest analyses of culture war dynamics can be found in a book of philosophy from 1807 called The Phenomenology of Spirit by Hegel. My wife is just staring darts at me right now. She's like, you're talking about Hegel on a Friday night at church.

At the very least, culture war dynamics have defined the American political landscape for decades. Friends, there is a religious war going on in this country. Who gets to be included as a Christian in America? It is a cultural war. Completely antithetical to the teachings of Jesus, which is love thy neighbor, do unto others. The enemy, meaning leftists who don't like Christians, had stolen our nation. And to compound the problem, the nature of truth has been contested to an almost surreal degree. You God-hating communist America, you'll find out what an insurrection is,

because we ain't playing. We're going to protect Christianity. Each side sees the other as an existential threat. If you believe in butchering babies, and you celebrate stolen elections, and you're against the Second Amendment or even the First Amendment, then leave. Look at the issues that they grab onto. Abortion, same-sex marriage, gender identity. All of those are driven by fear. Each side has their own reasons and their own facts,

and there's this sense of exhaustion. What's the point of talking through our differences? When I was a 20-year-old punk kid from Embro, I used to be kind of a circuit preacher, I used to be kind of a circuit preacher, and I used to preach at chapels in Elma and Gorey and Wingham and Wallenstein. You didn't know this, did you? I'm one of you. Philosopher and author James K.A. Smith has been interested in how the culture wars play out at the granular level, within congregations, within human hearts. Imagine an intimate friend from your congregation, and all of a sudden they become somebody that's kind of hard to recognize. It's like somebody else's voice is speaking through this friend you've known for years, saying honestly hurtful things. You no longer recognize one another.

It's like you kind of just want to like hold them by the shoulders and say, it's me. Who am I to you? His diagnosis? That people in Christian communities have come to identify personally with what they know and believe,

and that this identification is what fuels the current polarization. His prescription is radical. If we want to get beyond culture wars, we need more mystics. The path, I think, from culture war to solidarity requires us to pass through the cloud of unknowing. In April 2024, Jamie Smith spoke at a conference called Beyond Culture Wars, sponsored by Martin Luther University College at Wilfrid Laurier University and the Institute for Christian Studies.

Ideas producer Sean Foley headed to Waterloo, Ontario to record his talk and later sat down with him for an interview. His lecture was called The Mystic Crucible of Unknowing, From Culture Wars to Contemplative Spirituality. Hey, good evening, everybody. Thanks so much for being here. And you're here on a Friday night. Where I come from, we have a name for people who come to a church on Friday night. you're here on a Friday night. Where I come from, we have a name for people who come to a church on Friday night. They're called the elect. So you are in. You are in. You'll have to forgive me, but I sometimes worry that the people who attend and speak at conferences on the culture wars

are not just innocent bystanders. I'm guessing we've got alliances and allegiances on one side here. And I think if we want to get beyond the culture wars, I think it's very, very important that we be careful to consider whether we just are hoping the other side surrenders. If we want to get beyond culture wars, we need more mystics. The path, I think, from culture war to solidarity requires us to pass through the cloud of unknowing. We need to demodernize our ways of thinking about faith primarily in terms of knowledge and belief. The path from culture war to solidarity

is not a path of enlightenment. It's a journey of disorientation that takes us from fear to love. So my animating exhortation tonight actually comes from that wonderful early modern saint, mystic, St. Teresa. Let us abandon our reason and our fear into God's hands. In some sense, I think culture war is internalized in religious communities when we are susceptible to what I'm going to call ideological capture. This is going to sound more fun than it sounds right away, okay?

I hope this is helpful. So what I'm calling ideological capture is when we become the sorts of people for whom we think what makes us who we are, our identity, is what we know, what we believe, the truths that we proclaim. But here's the piece that I think we often don't appreciate. I think it's also very, very, very important for us to be seen as the people who know those things. That's going to be the important piece. become ideologically captured when we try to satisfy what are actually deeply human, pre-intellectual needs and desires to be seen, to belong.

When we try to satisfy those needs and desires by being part of a group or a movement that knows something, that knows the truth. And in fact, what comes to distinguish our knowledge is knowing that what you know is false. It's a fabrication, it's a myth, it's a conspiracy, it's a lie. You believe a lie and disinformation. We are on the side of facts and truth. What's really scary is people on both ends of the polls think the exact same thing.

So you are suckered by your media, whereas our media exposes the lies and fact-checks your myths. Should I say, like, my sort of full name as an author? You can do whatever you feel naturally. You're formally introduced in the episode. So I'll introduce myself as Jamie then, because that's how you and I are going to have the conversation. Okay, perfect. Yeah, sounds good. Yeah, that sounds great. Okay. Hi, I'm Jamie Smith. I am a professor of philosophy at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and an author and writer. All right. Thanks, Jamie. Does that work? Yeah, that works great.

That works great. Great. So you talk about something called ideological capture. And I wanted to kind of relate this to the idea of identity politics in the culture wars, which is often cited as a social ill by conservative voices. And I wonder if you see an irony in your thesis that, you know, Christians themselves are over-identifying with knowledge and belief, and that's trying not to put all my cards on the table here, but I would say that the irony is that it is often the most conservative forms of reactionary Christianity that are so dismissive and skeptical about identity politics that play out their own martyrdom in the public square, which completely operates on the rules of identity politics. And so, yes, I think that we mimic, we end up mimicking even what some people think that they are opposed to. In ideological capture,

what I'm, and that was really, you know, I'm thinking out loud there. I'm trying on an idea, which is, I think if religion and spirituality just gets flattened to beliefs and ideas and doctrines, then I think it's actually something that is more susceptible to just being co-opted by political stances or ideological flags that we sort of stick in the ground and have to identify with. If we recover the thickness and almost the kinesthetic aspects of being a believer, and ironically, we wouldn't think of it as just believing. It would be about loving and longing and desiring. And this is what the spiritual adventure is about. The dangers, as you just described of, of this identification with

knowledge and belief and doctrines and things. I thought of, you know, the story in Genesis, the creation story in which the forbidden fruit is on the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It's not on the tree of life. I wonder if you sense a parallel there. or have you sensed a parallel there? Yeah, I haven't thought through that enough, but I think there's something about knowledge being a certain sort of temptation. Now, I'm not anti-knowledge. I'm a philosopher. I get paid to think. I'm pro-knowledge. But it's more like what we think knowledge achieves, what we think knowledge gets us, what we imagine we can do with it. I think that's the temptation. And to imagine that now knowledge is a lever we can pull to control things and to keep

some in and some out, I think that's part of the temptation. things and to keep some in and some out, I think that's part of the temptation. In a strange way, when Christianity is kind of reduced to knowing the truth, the God that is known is actually more susceptible to becoming enlisted for our own interests and aims and projects. This is an analysis as old as Blaise Pascal, who constantly warned about the idol parading as the god of the philosophers and the scholars. Ouch. But you might know Bob Dylan's version. You never ask questions when God's on your side. Okay, well, why would a fixation on knowledge make us more prone to idolatry? Because that's kind of what I'm suggesting. Why would that be? Well, I think

because for the most part, in modernity, and that's the water that we all swim in, in modernity, knowing tends to be thought of as comprehension. Now, why is that significant? That's a metaphor, actually. To think of knowledge as comprehension is to actually think, I'm going to get my arms around this. I'm going to encompass it. Do you notice that the other metaphors we use with knowing

are related to the metaphor of possession. Think of it this way. When you finally understand something, you say, got it. Got it. I own it. I've mastered it. As if to know is to own. God becomes one more thing about which we say, got it. to own. God becomes one more thing about which we say, got it. I know it. And we somehow get comfortable with this very, very strange performative contradiction of domesticating God's transcendence. And then we slide into a form of Christianity where now God serves us. So this is why I think there's this strange synergy between domestication and dogmatism. They're intertwined. Because I'm confident in what I know, my comprehension of the faith, it becomes easier for me to see this knowledge as what distinguishes me from your benighted naivete

and willful ignorance. Or to unpack Dylan's insight a little bit, by the way, it's not because God is in our side that we can know him. I think it's because we imagine that we know God so well that we confidently assume he's on our side. You quote Bob Dylan, which is awesome, because why not, right? You say, I think it's because we imagine that we know God so well that we confidently assume he's on our side. And I wonder how this works in a post-truth era. Is that a whole new dimension of culture war? Yeah, I think you're right. In other words, to what extent is the culture war changed when we are cynical? I still think now it's a question of knowing who's with me and who's on our side. And there's a confidence about the God who's going to serve your ends. And that's what assures us that God is on our side. And the our now is who are my people, who are my alliances. And I think that piece of it

still functions in that way. So I'll try one specific example on you, a very simple one, which just has never left my mind, which is Donald Trump posing in front of the church in DC with the Bible in hand after these protesters have been dispersed, you know, I'd say relative with relative violence, um, that as a symbol of what exactly, like, you know what I mean? Yeah. I mean, it's just for me, uh, Donald Trump is, uh, almost such an extreme case that I don't think he has really much interest in knowledge or truth. He's interested in winning an image. So for him, that's a performance of an alliance.

You know, I'm taking your side. I'm going to fight for you. And then he performs that. What I'm more interested in is then all of the religious folks and Christians who have to go through the work of rationalization of why they would then support this person who is utterly cynical about such things, I think. But they have to do a sort of internal rationalization in which they know this is symbolizing that this is someone who's going to fight for our interests. And so now Christianity is kind of an interest group, and what you know is who's going to fight for your interests. worries me so much about it, about the performative aspect, is that it obscures what the real work that Christian communities arguably should be doing. Absolutely. Absolutely. And in fact, the Episcopal Church in which he did that in front of in DC,

right by Lafayette Park, is deeply involved and invested in ministering to the poor and the homeless right in that neighborhood. And that is not any of the association that Donald Trump was invoking when he just awkwardly holds up a Bible in front of this building. It's almost like two different language games is the way philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein would put it. Wittgenstein is this fascinating character, and he has this great line in one of his books where he says, if a lion could speak, we could never understand him. And it's because the lion just has such a different form of embodied life and community that this is not just a problem of translation. There's whether there's even a

language to be shared. Sometimes I think that's how some of us feel inside our own religious communities of late. It's like, you are speaking a language. I know that there are noises, but I can't enter into the form of life in which that makes sense. The culture wars, by the way, are a lot older than you think. The culture wars did not start in 2016. The culture wars did not start in 1990 when James Davis and Hunter wrote the book that gave us the name. that gave us the name. In fact, I would suggest that one of our oldest analyses of culture war dynamics can be found in a book of philosophy from 1807 called The Phenomenology of Spirit by Hegel. My wife is just staring darts at me right now. She's like, you're talking about Hegel on a Friday night at church. I won't bore you with the details. I'll just say, in this 1807 book,

one of the most important books in Western philosophy, Hegel analyzes this brilliant, brilliant clash and encounter between faith and enlightenment. What's interesting and prescient and fascinating in Hegel's account of this war between faith and enlightenment is that he sees this as a civil war. They like loathe and despise each other, believers and say secular reason advocates or something like that, but they're actually playing the same game. The battle between faith and enlightenment then is a sort of inside squabble. Faith doesn't realize how modern it is.

Enlightenment doesn't realize what it has learned from faith. In some ways, their mutual incomprehension stems from being too close to one another. They are so-called polar opposites, but actually they are sort of mirror images of one another. So this dynamic of mutual incomprehension is part of what happens when we are so close to each other and we don't realize that despite the deep animosity, we are maybe more alike than we realize. I want to suggest tonight we need a third way altogether. I'm a big fan of third way. Yeah.

But I'm wondering if you could describe the concept of a third way. the concept of a third way. Yeah. A third way here is not just some brokered compromise between the two poles. Instead, the third way requires a kind of new level of consciousness and self-consciousness where we recognize ourselves anew because we can see ourselves locked in this polar mirror opposite wrangling. And in that sense, the third way recognizes the gifts and goods that each of the poles represent. So it's not like just splitting the difference and kind of meat in the middle.

It's not just milk, toast, vanilla. Oh, you know, let's make everybody happy. It's going to be something a little more revolutionary than that. You know, listening to you describe the third way, I thought there's an irony that Christians in particular might somehow be prevented from seeing or being receptive to a third way, because so much of Jesus' teaching is always pointing to a third way. I've done programs on particular examples of this, but the woman caught in adultery, the initial thing is, well, should we stone her to death or not? What do you think? And Jesus' whole thing is, well, I think everybody's got to take a look inside themselves at the shadow, you know? Yes, exactly.

We're not talking about whether we should kill someone here. We're talking about what's in you that makes you want to kill. Yes. And so I find it ironic that the third way seems somewhat absent from Christian public discourse. Yeah, I think, and that could be because we don't realize the extent to which we've just sort of accepted kind of available models around us. I mean, I'm really intrigued by your suggestion, because in many ways, I think those moments of Jesus' discourse are the moments in which he's trying to implode our tendency to set up everything as binaries. And this is exactly where I think the mystical traditions sort of inculcate us, right? They're like, get over these binary poles and try to imagine a different way of configuring these things.

And in this respect, you'll also find a lot of sympathy in, for example, Buddhist traditions, which are often trying to also implode our same sort of binary thinking. Yes, some of the contemplative Christian tradition I've run into, like the work of Richard Rohr, where he's really working on this idea of unit of consciousness, trying to get people to drop that binary,, but I do think that one of the things that frustrates this for us today is there's a lot of money to be made in maintaining binaries. sort of late capitalist environment is set up to profit from binary thinking. And I think we have to refuse a lot of things to get past that. Philosopher and author Jamie Smith. Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on US Public Radio and on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas.

You can also get ideas wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayyad. Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goldtar, and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films, and most of all, true crime podcasts. But sometimes, I just want to know more.

I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast, Crime Story, comes in. Every week, I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley. The list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. Jamie Smith is professor of philosophy at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and a prolific and popular author. He's written about the nature of time, about the public role

of religious belief, about having St. Augustine as a travel companion, and about how mysticism might just be a third way out of the deadlock of the culture wars. So, let's pivot from diagnosis to prescription. Everybody doing okay? And that's where we join him, plotting out that third way. What if all our dogmatic rancor and culture war fervor is actually camouflaging a deeper fear. What if we're all just terrified of being alone? Of being left out?

Of being unseen? What if at the deepest level, we have somehow come to imagine that unless we believe the right way and affirm the right views, that we risk losing God's love. I think we will only set out on this adventure towards solidarity if we relinquish this modern desire for knowledge and comprehension. This is what I want to call the mystical path. And I don't know how you all feel about mysticism. I want you to feel good about it. That's the goal of tonight, okay? Again, I want this to kind of be our frame from St. Teresa. Let us abandon our reason and fear into God's hands.

Or as Catholic theologian Karl Rahner said almost a hundred years ago, the Christian of the future will be a mystic or not exist at all. So what's this mystical path? I'm going to home in on one moment of this path, which I think is sort of the pivot of mystical contemplation. If the mystic withdraws into stillness and quiet, the whole point is to find a space and place to encounter God's fullness and infinity and mystery. But this encounter and experience is regularly described by these mystics in terms of disruption and de-centering. Immersed in God's infinity, our categories are kind of overwhelmed. Our preconceptions fail.

And so when you hear mystics and monks describe this, they actually describe it as a very harrowing experience. To pass through this is actually to be opened then to a portal of wonder. Learned ignorance reaches towards awe of the world, of ourselves, of others, of God. It's a pathway to openness, to a newly honed capacity for attention, to see, to attend, to listen. And this de-centered wonder leads always, every single time, the mystics and monks testify to humility. Not a book deal or an Instagram post. It's humility. We acquire new empathy because we finally hear and see our neighbors in all their fullness and complexity. It's true that mystics were often persecuted as heretics. It's not because they rejected the church's dogma. That's never the case, actually. And in fact, many of them, you know, all these

mystics, they prayed seven times a day in church, right? They gave themselves over to the rites and rituals, the liturgy of the body of Christ. They're wholly committed. The reason that they're misunderstood and persecuted as heretics is simply because they refuse to believe that knowing was the most fundamental way to relate to God. And I think the arts do exactly the same sort of bypass around intellect in important ways. I can think of being in the Museum of Modern Art, the City Museum in Paris last summer. And I ran into a painting I'd never heard of before or seen before. I can't recall the artist right now because I had never encountered them before. The painting was called Oran. And I'm guessing this was some allusion to the city in Algeria. And it was this

massive canvas, like 10 by 12. and it took up a whole wall. And as I first encountered it, it just looked so dark and foreboding, but there was something that sort of drew me to it. And it felt almost kind of oppressive. There was a sort of weight and darkness about it. And yet, when I then stood there for a while and spent some time with it, I realized there was gold shimmering through it in different places. And if you got close enough, it really took up your entire field of vision. And now you're just awash in this. It's not even an image. It's a field. It's a space. And you're sort of swimming in it. And you realize that darkness and light are at play here. And both of them speak to something about what you know in your soul.

And because I'm formed as a Christian and the Psalms are kind of our hymn book, I couldn't help thinking of Psalm 139 where God says that even the darkness is as light to him. And it brought me into a space where I didn't know, I wasn't asking, what is this painting or what is it about? It was instead the experience of dwelling in a place that was complex and both spoke to experiences of evil and suffering and darkness, but also came with this hope in the gold that shimmered through.

And yeah, I'll never forget it. I've tried to track this painting down and cannot find it. The only thing I have is this little record on my phone. And it's almost like I wonder if this painting was some sort of like visitation and it wasn't really there. my phone. And it's almost like, I wonder if this painting was some sort of like visitation and it wasn't really there. There's days in which I'm like, did I really see this painting? It seems like no one else knows it. But, and yet it, for me, it was really a spiritual encounter. That is beautiful. So you say that

the church needs more mystics. How did you realize what the prescription was? Like, was there a mystical moment for you when you realized that mysticism was the prescription? Yes. So I find myself just slightly nervous to talk about it. Let me put it this way. I can recall the failures of propositional knowledge for my spiritual life. Let's put it that way. And I will say that this is related to going through the darkness of depression in which I realized that I was not going to think my way out of it.

There was an experience of maybe not being able to hold all the puzzle pieces together the way I thought I had figured it out. Like the mystics, I remember then months of arid experience, like a very cold desert experience. And then I just remember a dawning of a deep sense of being beloved in a way that I could never articulate or communicate, but I also could never forget. And that has never left me, even if it is in some ways a memory of that moment or that encounter, I'm living off of the memory. And I have found that that deep, prelingual, pre-propositional sense of being beloved by God is more enduring than my answers. I probably could never have had the encounter of belovedness if I hadn't first walked what felt like a valley of abandonment. And then as I start reading the mystical tradition, you realize, oh, this is a pattern. This is not figuring something out. It's not getting it right.

It's not intellectual correctness. The fullness of being human is found in communion. Communion. That's the end. It's communion with this God outside of myself. It's both a cosmic dependence on divine love as well as the social web of friendship and neighborhood that suspends us. Mystic contemplation is like a journey of awareness where we step into the dark so that when just the right light dawns, these webs become illuminated and you see that we are held by love and made for love. Let me take this work called The Cloud of Unknowing. Has anybody ever heard The Cloud of Unknowing before? Great. As just one example, we can't think our way to God. That's why I'm willing to abandon everything I know to love the one thing I cannot think. He can be loved, but not thought. And so the author continues, make your home in this darkness.

Here lies the dark way that is contemplative knowledge, they say, a comprehension under which the very name knowledge buckles as inadequate. Only in mystic contemplation that ranges beyond my own mastery can I become aware of the mystery of my own being. And this is also scandalous and humbling because it requires that I let go what I'm really good at, what modernity has sort of trained me to do so well, which is think. And instead, I'm supposed to attend to love. The compassion of love is found on the other side of the cloud of unknowing. We need to make our home in the dark, they tell us, in order to unknow. But do you notice, it's not fetishizing ignorance, it's to get to love. To make our home in the dark, to give ourselves to unknowing, to get to love,

this is a big enough challenge for an individual, um, as you've experienced, you know, even for someone who's convinced that it might just work. But I wonder what are the hopes for the broader community or for an entire nation or a people, uh, that, that people could give themselves to this? Yeah.

Um, feels above my pay grade, but I will say, well, two things give me hope. First of all, I think the way we are playing these things out in our culture war agendas is unsustainable. And I think we're starting to see a certain exhaustion with that. The other thing I guess that gives me hope is within Christian communities, I do see a noted uptake of interest and openness. You mentioned Richard Rohr earlier. I mean, I think there's a really growing community of people who are looking for this third way, this other way. It's slightly hard to imagine its institutional incarnation. Instead, I think we need embodyers. We need witnesses. It's sort of like we need bodhisattvas to come back and just be among us and give us some hope. And I think it's going to be the dynamics of encountering people who exhibit serenity and hopefulness and compassion that will be

the sign and the signal that we could be human otherwise. Yeah, I appreciate your thoughts on this because the closest I get to, and it's good, it's a nourishing symbol, but I get to that symbol of seeds or yeast, you know, that that's really the scale at which this is operating. Yes. Yes. And maybe the mystics are the mustard seed among us. Here is where I think the witness of St. Teresa of Avila is so important for us. witness of Saint Teresa of Avila is so important for us. As she attests, the love discovered in the cloud of unknowing is fundamentally a recognition that we are beloved. That's the

adventure here. The recognition that happens in the cloud of unknowing, what you become aware of in a deep way that you never ever would have known before, is that you are beloved, and that's never going to change. In fact, St. Teresa's favorite name for God is The Beloved. Beloved in whom I am beloved. So with respect to our diagnosis of the culture wars, Teresa emphasizes that meeting God as beloved and seeing ourselves as beloved of God, that is the perfect love that casts out fear, right? Have you ever thought of the dynamics of this? Perfect love casts out fear. And one of the threads in her marvelous book, Interior Castle, that is so prescient and so timely, is precisely her attunement to the fears that lurk within us,

the anxieties that lurk within us. The question we should be asking ourselves in the midst of the culture wars is not, what do you believe, what do you think, what do you know. It should be asking, what are we afraid of? What are we afraid of? At bottom, I think we are afraid of being misunderstood, unseen, unrecognized, bereft of love. We want to be known. We want to be recognized. We want to be liberated because we are loved. And so I think Teresa's counsel is at once a scandal to the intellect, but it is also an invitation to our hearts. Let's remember it again. Let us abandon our reason and fear into God's hands. So you say, you know, the question isn't really, what do you believe?

What do you stand for? But what are you afraid of? What are we afraid of? But what are you afraid of? What are we afraid of? And I wondered, what if anchors on 24-7 news channels or reporters at press conferences put this question sincerely, non-confrontationally, non-ironically to politicians or to powerful people? What would happen? Or would it just be too weird? I love it. Of course, what would happen is we would always immediately already be thinking, how are people going to see me if I answer this

question in a certain way? But I think you're right that if we could actually get people to a space of vulnerability where we could honestly say, this is what I'm afraid of. This is what's giving me anxiety. This is what I'm worried about. First of all, I think it's so deeply human to hear that from people. It's incredibly leveling. We're on the same plane here when we have those conversations. And in that sense, it would explain a lot of what we're chasing and what we're trying to manage if we knew what we were afraid of.

To be loved beyond fear is to be liberated now from all sorts of frantic pursuits and defensive measures. So Teresa describes this fearlessness of the soul that finds herself beloved and that finds herself in the beloved and she says I'm no longer frightened by every little thing I'm no longer anxious that's what it is to be beloved is to be fearless and on the yonder side of the cloud of unknowing, awash in the awareness that I am beloved, I can lay down my fears. I can lay down all my defensive weapons, including my knowledge. Because I'm beloved, because we are beloved, we become fearless. For what? It's like, what will we do with our fearlessness? For Teresa, we will be compassionate and we will be humble. Why? For Teresa, fearless speech is not first and foremost or primarily speaking truth,

even if we also have to speak truth to power. Fearless speech for Teresa is the willingness to confess. You talk about the idea of confession, and it's a term weighed down with all kinds of cultural baggage, from the prurient or salacious to the shameful. Could you clarify for yourself what we're more talking about is an owning up and recognizing our brokenness, our limits, our purview, our blind spots, and recognizing that our interlocutor is the same sort of creature. So the confession moment is itself already mutual, and it's its own act of recognition. I both recognize myself in a new way.

I recognize my limits. And even the one who is othering me, even the one who is excluding me, they're a creature just like me. And in that sense, now, I inhabit a different world, right? Like, I've already moved into a new space. I'm laying down my sword. I mean, in many ways, I think this was exactly what Dr. King's rationale and Gandhi's rationale was for pacifism, which was to say, don't underestimate how much it is a witness to not act in defense. There's this crazy passage in the Epistle to the Romans where Paul says, if you actually just forgive the other person, it's like heaping coals upon their head. It's a weird passage because it's almost like, it's a weird passage because it's almost like,

if you really want to get to somebody, forgive them. And I think there's something about trying to break a cycle here. Maybe that's what we're saying. Confession breaks the culture war cycle of defense and reaction. Can we imagine a solidarity that is not founded on commonality?

A post-Christian, post-consensus solidarity that is not dependent on agreement? This, in fact, is, by the way, also Hegel's question. Sorry, one last time. What breaks the ongoing cycle of alienation and estrangement, says Hegel, is the self who is willing to relinquish being right for being seen. Free footnote here. This is kind of cool. So he says, you only get to a place of real recognition if you go through confession and reconciliation. And the way that that happens is you have to let go of your kind of defenses and your protection. The word that he uses for letting go here is the German word that translates the word kenosis in Philippians chapter two. Do you remember Philippians

chapter two? Have this mind in you, which was also in Christ Jesus, who being in the very form of God did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but emptied himself in the German Bible and Tausserung, let it go, relinquished. What does it look like for us to find solidarity? Hegel says, I have to let go. It's sort of like, it's like, it's me. Hi, I'm the problem. It's me. That's the beginning. That's the beginning of it. The one who is willing to confess has already let go of their own distorted self-perception. I think this picture of solidarity is realist. It's a realist picture of solidarity because it is neither a solidarity of consensus and agreement, nor is it just some communion of the pure. It's a community of mutual recognition in which we recognize each other's weaknesses in our own.

each other's weaknesses in our own. Forgiveness is a renunciation that echoes the renunciation of the judge who was willing to become the judged. The God who relinquished, let go, emptied himself of divinity, relinquished a grasp on status and distance in order to forge solidarity with humanity in the incarnation. That's the model. In fact, it is no accident that these final pages of chapter six of the phenomenology of spirit are actually mirroring the Lutheran liturgy for communion. Confession, absolution, reconciliation. This is the movement of the spirit, and it is also the script for moving beyond the culture wars. Let me close with a picture of this beyond, if you will,

that I witnessed just a couple of weeks ago. A dear friend of ours was finally ordained as a minister of word and sacrament, and the trek to this day was long and arduous and painful because our friend is a married gay man. He was raised in a home and a church community that lacked any capacity to imagine the reconciliation of his identity with a call to ordained ministry and i realize some of us might see exactly that his father was a man of deep conviction he in fact refused to attend our friend's wedding and has never spoken to his husband. And there was a question of whether he would attend this ordination ceremony.

When we arrived in the sanctuary, we could see our friend's parents were, in fact, there. And the service was beautiful and powerful, and, of course, it culminated in the first opportunity for our friend to preside at communion. And the liturgy included all the exact same moments that we just walked through. There's a moment of confession, there's an assurance of pardon and forgiveness, there's the passing of the peace in which we are reconciled to one another, and then there's communion around the table. and there's communion around the table. As we processed to the altar, I ended up just behind my friend's father,

and he was coming forward to receive the sacrament. In fact, I saw him pause as he got to the front because he wanted to make sure that he got to receive it from his son. And so he stepped forward, and his son offered him the body and blood of Jesus with glistening eyes and a wide smile. And after his father received the elements, the sacrament, the most incredible thing, he leaned in

and kissed his son on the cheek. he leaned in and kissed his son on the cheek. Did they agree? Absolutely not. In fact, I imagine the father was as surprised by that moment as the son. This was a beginning, not an end. And having humbly confessed, they saw each other anew. Their differences were not resolved. I'm not pretending they were. Their views no doubt remained divergent, but they both fearlessly met one another,

saw one another, recognized one another. Each was seen and loved in spite of everything. Thanks very much. applause Thank you. co-sponsored by the Institute for Christian Studies and Martin Luther University College at Wilfrid Laurier University. He joined Ideas producer Sean Foley in conversation. Special thanks to John Malloy and Hector Acero-Ferrer at Martin Luther University College, to Kendrick Satterfield at Calvin University, and to Andrew Martin at Lincoln Road Chapel.

Technical assistance from Laura Antonelli, Juliana Romanek, and Gabby Hagorilis. Our technical producer is Danielle Duval. Our web producer, Lisa Ayuso. Acting senior producer,

Lisa Godfrey. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly, and I'm Nala Ayyad.