On Differing Perspectives

What if we spent more time listening to each other's stories?

I have a lot of friends who were raised Christian. Some of them remain Christian to this day. Many more were raised Christian and then turned their backs on the faith. They became adherents of another spiritual tradition or, more commonly, atheists.

When I first found God, I had a really hard time understanding why someone might find Christianity and then leave it. The reason is simple: to me, God's simply not the kind of being you would ever voluntarily leave. I've described God as the perfect parent, as an omniscient being who knows everything about me and who loves me so dearly that He died on the cross in order to have a relationship with me. I've seen God guide me, patiently and powerfully, into being a better person and help me to do more good in the world. I've seen God's providence show up for me, and I've seen His patient and steadfast love steadily chip away at my feelings of fear, guilt, and shame.

Why, I wondered, would anyone ever leave such a God?

And it's not like I invented my conception of God from whole cloth. I met the divine being through reading Christian theologians: Dallas Willard, C.S. Lewis, Jamie Winship, James K.A. Smith, Skye Jethani. I hear my pastor preach about this God every Sunday in church, and I can feel His divine presence in said church.

All of which led me to wonder: who in their right mind would possibly leave the church?

But then I heard my Christian friends describe growing up in the church. And it started to make sense.

I heard stories of purity culture that made my already-chaste female friends feel ashamed of their bodies and their sexuality. I heard one of my friends tell the story of getting up on stage to deliver a lecture about God and psychology, and being told that her neck-to-calf dress was too immodest and that she was tempting the men of the audience with her body (knowing this friend, I'm tempted to wonder what would have been considered sufficiently modest—a burlap sack?).

I heard stories of endless worksheets focused on highlighting what you did wrong this week and how you're going to try to serve God better next week, and an obsession with doing your way into the Kingdom. I heard stories about guilt and sin and repentance, all seemingly designed to drive home the idea of God as a stern father who doesn't love you but who might be willing to put up with you if you sufficiently self-flagellate for Him.

One of my friends was overseas and struggling with burnout and bosses who had literally gone crazy. She called the support line begging for help. Someone showed up and gave her a worksheet asking how her sins had contributed to the situation.

I heard stories of sexual abuse, of church elders covering up sexual assault and of men who interpreted Ephesians 5:22-23 as evidence that they ought to be able to beat their wives and their wives should just put up with it.

Hearing these stories, I started to understand how someone might want to leave the church.

And these were the stories of people who had kept their faith. What stories, I started to wonder, did my friends who had left the church have?

The fascinating thing is that none of this changes my own experience of God, of the authors I read, or of the church that I attend. But at the same time, my own experience doesn't change the stories of self-flagellation, guilt, and abuse that other people experienced in the church. Both sets of stories are true—and, neither is the whole truth. It turns out that the church is a pretty big place, with a lot of different sides seen by a lot of different people.

I'm reminded of that old story about the blind men and the elephant.

I recently had the opportunity to relearn this lesson in a different context, this one political.

In political philosophy, one of the tests of a just society is called the veil of ignorance. The idea, designed by John Rawls, is: if you were building a society and didn't know where you would be born into said society (that is: you could be someone high-class or low-class; someone gay, straight, white, black; someone homeless or someone impossibly wealthy; etc), what kind of society would you build? Probably one that worked pretty well for the broadest possible number of people.

One anti-woke author I read recently suggested that, in this hypothetical, he would absolutely *not* want to be born into a woke society. I tend to agree. When I look at wokeness, I see a politics of contempt and a circular firing squad of fiery activists who eventually eat their own. I see lectures by woke scholars titled "The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind," and hashtags like #KillAllMen (which circulated quite a lot in the later 2010s). I see conservative black and gay scholars called all kinds of slurs by woke ideologies, and death threats for so-called TERFs like J.K. Rowling. I see, in short, an ideology that I would not choose to put in charge of any society, much less a society in which I didn't know which segment I'd be born into.

But then I talk to my woke friends who are educators, and I suspect their answer would be: if I didn't know which part of society I'd be born into, of course I'd want the society to be woke! Their reasoning is simple: they see wokeness as a way to weed out hidden prejudices so that every human being, even/especially those who have been historically marginalized, can feel seen and acknowledged. Their goal in the classroom is to create a truly inclusive space in which people who don't fit into the traditional mold can still be loved and accepted for who they are, right along with people who do fit into said traditional mold.

Just like with the church, I think that both stories are true. My woke educator friends can't change the stories of woke advocates who show contempt for broad swathes of the American electorate. At the same time, those stories can't change the stories of far-left educators whose only goal is to show love and acceptance to every single student who walks through their doors. It turns out that wokeness, like the church, is a big place.

One of my friends who's a Christian spiritual director has a great question that she likes to ask atheists. When an atheist tells her that they don't believe in God, she asks them, "Which God don't you believe in?" They might then (for instance) describe a divine joyless scold who's constantly disappointed in them. She then responds: "I don't believe in that God either."

I wonder what would happen if more of us used this strategy.

Person 1: "I don't like wokeness."

Person 2: "Okay. Tell me about the wokeness you don't like."

Or:

Person 1: "I hate conservativism."

Person 2: "Cool. Tell me about the conservatism you hate."

I think this strategy might have a few benefits.

First, it might create space for us to listen to each other without getting defensive. If someone tells me that they don't believe in God, I might be tempted to feel defensive, because God is such a big part of my life. But if that person then reveals that they don't believe in a joyless scold who's constantly judging them, then my defenses can come down, because it's apparent that they're not actually taking aim at something that I believe. Once that happens, I stand a better chance of truly seeing the person—including their frustrations and their pain—in front of me.

I also think this might help us to build more common ground. If I'm talking to an atheist, we might both be tempted to think that we don't have much to agree on on this issue. But actually, neither of us believe in a judgmental and angry God who doesn't like us. That's the kind of small bridge that can build common understanding and empathy across divides.

In I Never Thought Of It That Way, Mónica Guzmán says that we can disagree with someone's conclusions, but we can't really argue with their stories of what happened to them. I think that's exactly right. What if we spent less time making assumptions about each other, and more time listening to each other's stories?

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