Brady Bowman
Hi Malin
The contemporary democratic ethos may look askance at evangelism and proselytizing in the public square because of past abuses. Changing the ethos with respect to evangelism may well require us to think of evangelism less in terms of defeating an enemy and more in terms of showing hospitality to the stranger—that is, showing respect in the face of our important differences. [A] distinctive Christian contribution to late modern democracies should be the introduction of mercy and compassion as unifying virtues, reflective of the gospel we profess.
Democracy highlights the significance of diversity and encourages us to see more fully the splendor of God’s diverse creation. Democracy has also illuminated human brokenness and our long history of stereotyping and exclusion. It has provided a minimal set of procedures for dealing with our important differences, though it is often more frustrating than fruitful. Neutral procedures by themselves will not right the wrongs of exclusionary practices. Righting wrongs is a necessary moral project and thereby requires a moral framework. Democracy has taken us on a journey, but when we have reached a fork in the road its only counsel has been, “You are free to choose whichever fork you prefer.” When the fork in the road is the choice between inclusion or exclusion, absolute freedom is not an adequate grounding for making a responsible choice. Responsible choices require morally responsible agents, and morally responsible agents require a moral framework to which they are accountable.
Where can we find the moral principles to deal with the underlying pathologies of discrimination and exclusion? It is not enough to say that we all know these actions are wrong. There must be a moral framework that explains why discrimination across certain kinds of differences is wrong. Defining ourselves outside of a moral tradition inevitably leads to arbitrary claims of victimhood or entitlement. Stripped of a moral tradition, biological or geographical or group identities will not satisfy the deep longings of the human heart for enduring significance and security.
Doing justice both to the history of discrimination and the complexity of cultural formation has been the challenge of American democracy’s public discourse on diversity. Glossing over the complexity of cultural formation simply leaves stereotypes of cultural groups in place and doesn’t allow for genuine identities to form outside of those stereotypes. However, the existence of stereotypes undoubtedly forms the conceptual backbone in the narrative of discrimination across America’s history. A fine line has formed between recognizing the reality of stereotypes that have been placed on others and accepting those stereotypes as defining their key identity markers. Turning generic ethnic or racial categories into defining cultural frameworks pigeonholes individuals and communities into the very stereotypes that created the problems in the first place. It also imposes undue obstacles to the emergence of transethnic and transracial communities, and thereby makes it more difficult to fully engage the work of reconciliation across these differences.
Re: the placing of stereotypes on others and the receiving of those designations from others, I’m reminded of a Phil Christman quote from How to Be Normal.
The polarization of our contemporary cultural conversation has resulted in the loss of confidence in democratic liberalism even as democratic liberalism provides the structures by which it is possible to complain about the polarization. Without a common civic morality to restrain large consumer forces, the public square is not only empty but also alienating. People tend to look for social reinforcement of their own self-identity in homogeneous communities when there is not a set of shared goals promoting the common good. Ironically, the greater the yearning for a common good, the more suspicion there is about any one group imposing its sense of the common good on others. The fracturing of the sense of belonging to others becomes the dominant paradigm. “If you are not for me, on my terms, then you are against me.” But the more tribal the search for self-identity is, the more polarized our common life becomes and the greater our tendency toward conflict. Without a larger perception of the common good, or at least of some form of commonality among all our differences, our social polity is doomed to failure. It is not an accident that democracy itself seems tenuous in an age of global capitalism, corporate corruption, identity politics, and theocratic terrorism.
An important irony is the ever-growing disparity between the descriptive diversity of contemporary culture and the actual homogeneity of the communities in which we experience day-to-day life…. Under the pressures of pluralization, we tend to socially migrate to safe havens of unity. Social conservatives tend to listen to socially conservative commentators. Social radicals tend to read other social radicals. We migrate toward homogeneous communities as a response to the increase of diversity around us.
Matthew Crawford argues this point persuasively in The World Beyond Your Head. He points out how beneath all the rhetoric around freedom, choice, individuality, self-expression, and self-actualization, we are actually manipulated consumers, addicted to our tech and prone to groupthink. For all the apparent diversity, we inhabit a mono-culture. As Crawford demonstrates, the task of “becoming an individual” is not as simple or straightforward as we might assume.
Richard Lints, on the experience of diversity in modern life:
We are ever more conscious of diversity—not only in terms of Christian worship but across a broad array of factors: we encounter diverse political communities, ethnic and racial communities, vocational and economic communities, even communities with passionate diversity of sports loyalties. Our social contexts are pluralized in countless directions and experienced at many levels. The “contemporary” is often marked out from the “traditional” purely by the plurality of experience, with the contemporary connoting a much higher volume of diversity—diversity of music, of religion, of vocation, of culture, of language. Tension in each of these spheres arises as different communities bump into each other.
C. S. Lewis in The Great Divorce (quoted in Lints' Uncommon Unity):
Life is not like a river but like a tree. It does not move towards unity but away from it and the creatures grow further apart as they increase across time.
There’s an apologetic for Protestantism buried within that quote, for the person skilled enough to unearth it. Bavinck has similar things to say in some of his works. At some point I’d love to put them (and others) in conversation on this topic.
