Chapter 8

Reasoning Together About Beliefs

In one of the Old Testament’s most memorable passages, God issues his people an invitation to come and reason together. (Isaiah 1:18, KJV) There are other ways of translating the word “reason” in this passage: e.g., “talk this over” (JB), or “argue this out” (REB). But whatever English words may be chosen to express it, the invitation itself is as germane for our churches today as it was for Israel’s Divided Kingdom three thousand years ago. Now as then, those who respond to it in faith and obedience find that their sins, once “as scarlet,” can become “white as snow.”

The particular “scarlet” sin with which this chapter deals is the sin of condemning people who do not share one’s own understanding of what Christians should and should not believe. How to overcome the impulse to judge and condemn, and to resolve disagreements about faith, belief, and action in a spirit of mutual respect and gratitude for other believers’ presence in and impact on our lives is the principal concern of the sections to follow. The discussions will draw especially upon guidelines previously offered for talking with people whose questions reflect a conservative or a liberal orientation toward the Christian faith.

Keeping Belief and Faith in Proper Perspective

To all who have felt the effects of hostile and usually fruitless debates about who is and is not “really” a Christian, the Christian tradition as a whole offers three especially important insights into the relationship between the beliefs that nourish the mind and the faith—that is, unconditional trust in God—that sustains the soul. Making these insights our own is the first step toward reasoning constructively about our sometimes very different understandings of what faith requires of us.

The first insight is that beliefs about God, the world, and the future play an indispensable role in the life of faith. Christianity, then and now, is anchored in the proclamation of a message about a loving God revealed in Jesus Christ. From everyone who hears the message, those who deliver it ask not just an acknowledgment but a two-fold response: (a) believing that the message is true, and (b) trusting enough in the message to shape the whole of one’s life in accord with it. The New Testament uses the same word for both kinds of response: faith. Thus, though faith is more than merely believing to be true certain things that are said about God, the world, and humanity’s place in it, faith is not less than such believing. Trusting in the Christian message with all our heart is inseparable from believing the truth of the message with all our mind.

The second insight of the Christian tradition into the relationship between belief and faith is, that though the Christian message contains beliefs that are essential to a saving relationship with the world’s Creator (e.g., the belief that there is no God but the one, true God), some of these beliefs can be difficult both to understand (e.g., the belief that it was necessary for the Son of God to suffer an ignominious death by human hands) and to accept (e.g., that Jesus was raised from death by God, with flesh and blood intact.) That this is so and has been so from the very beginnings of the Christian community, carries important implications for how Christians are to live out their faith in today’s world. One is that every believer has both the right and the responsibility to ask and pursue every earnest question he or she may have about what the church says people should believe and do. To express this point in biblical terms: we must test the spirits moving among us to see if they are truly from God. (1 John 4:1 ) Another implication is that it is never easy to give a credible account of what Christians are to say to a world filled with people of radically different religious orientations, and with people of no religious orientation at all. Though beliefs are an essential component in faith, they are far from self-explanatory as to their meaning and anything but self-evidently true.

The Christian tradition’s third insight about belief and faith is that uncertainty and doubt about what we have been taught to believe can seriously impair the ability to give ourselves wholly to a joy-filled relationship with God and with those who share a common faith. In specific, when faith as belief is in jeopardy, so is faith as trust. To an honest confrontation with this unnerving possibility, there are two typical responses, one healthy and the other not. The healthy response is to articulate confidently the foundations of Christian belief with clarity and conviction, while treating the uncertainty and doubts of sincere inquirers, including our own, respectfully and caringly. The unhealthy response is to cling either to the church’s authoritative teachings or to the skeptics’ doubts as if for dear life, while dismissing any questioning of our chosen stance haughtily and judgmentally. The cases to follow illustrate concretely the differences between these responses.

When faith and belief collide

A seminary student of mine, Anne, once shared with me a deep crisis of faith: I’m terrified that I don’t know what I believe any more, and the guilt I feel about losing part of my faith is just overwhelming. It all began, Anne went on to say, when she tried to counter her agnostic boyfriend’s negative attitude toward Christianity, especially its teachings about the providence of God, the divinity of Christ, and the promise of eternal life. The more she tried to defend her faith, the more doubtful of it she herself became:

I was so smug in my certainties, and I just knew I would be able to answer all of his questions. Instead, the questions he threw at me just blew me into very deep water, and I’ve been barely treading it ever since. What kind of a Christian can I be, losing hold of the very beliefs I was trying to share with someone who matters to me so much?

For Anne’s pastor, the resolution of her crisis was simple. He counseled her to give up her unbelieving boyfriend and to stop taking “his kind” of questions seriously. Reluctantly, she took the first step, and broke off the relationship. But the second step proved impossible. Her boyfriend’s doubts had become her own, in spite of her pastor’s best efforts to frame them as inspired by the Devil.

Anne could not finally accept her pastor’s view that the best way to overcome doubts is either to refuse to acknowledge them at all, or to deny that there might be some basis for them. Instead, she allowed herself to trust that the best way to overcome doubts is to track them to their most frequent source, the misunderstandings and misrepresentations of what Christians do and do not believe, and why. Anne began reading and studying harder than she ever had before, and sought the counsel of the most competent faculty members our school had to offer. Instead of continuing to try to make something out of the very worst expressions of her faith tradition, Anne worked on developing a deeper understanding and appreciation of the best that more conservative expressions of Christianity have to offer, and in the process became a helpful mentor to fellow conservatives struggling with issues similar to her own.

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For another of my students, Kit, things did not turn out as well. Kit grew up in a strong Fundamentalist household that equipped him poorly to deal with fellow Christians who think deeply about their beliefs, who take for granted that questioning strengthens both the belief and the questioner, and who insist upon having good reasons before assenting to any belief. Whenever Kit was challenged to think for himself in matters of faith, he took refuge in a popular doctrine of the Holy Scriptures, usually referred to as the doctrine of “plenary inspiration,” and used it to stifle further conversation. Basically, Kit viewed every word of the Bible as directly inspired by God and, therefore, inerrant and unquestionable: “It’s an all or nothing proposition for me: the whole Bible or none of it. I choose to accept all of it. It’s all I need, and it should be enough for anybody.”

Today, having left seminary without graduating, Kit only reluctantly ventures out from the tight enclave of an ultra-conservative congregation whose members welcomed him with open arms. “Out here in the real world,” some of his friends have told me, Kit is floundering in his efforts to combat alternative faith-perspectives which people all around him find convincing. He frequently encounters at his work faithful followers of Islam, who not so gently put it to him that it is the Qu’ran and not the Bible that is directly authored by God. He is also chided by many of his Christian friends to take a closer look at the very Bible he imposes on people so confidently.

As these friends see it, though the Old and New Testaments are vitally important for faith, they include books that contain errors both of fact and of understanding. The clear implication for them is that some biblical books are more reliable and valuable than others. One of Kit’s friends once said to me with a gesture of incomprehension, “Who in his right mind would let himself get tied up in knots over the Book of Lamentations, for God’s sake?” Without blinking an eye, he went on to say that the Bible would be more believable had some books not been included in it at all. He is not alone in his conviction. Since at least the second century, many of the church’s most influential teachers have raised important questions about the authoritativeness for faith of more than just one book of the Bible, e.g., Esther, James, Hebrews, Revelation, and more surprisingly even Matthew, Mark, and John.

At mid-life, Kit’s defensive strategy of refusing to consider seriously any perceived threat to his belief-system is not working. And he does not know what to do about it. People he respects and admires, including the several Muslim co-workers whom his fellow believers call “infidels,” and his more liberal Christian friends are raising questions which he cannot answer about his most cherished convictions. It remains to be seen whether Kit will risk reaching out for help from more knowledgeable Christians than his own narrow circle of believers contains.

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Recently, a pastor friend told me about what it was like for him as he struggled to become more probing in his theology while remaining respectful of his denomination’s fairly conservative teachings:

I started out with a vengeance, believing that I had to go over what I was taught as a Christian ten times over, to make sure that I dealt with every question, every objection, and every alternative before I re-committed myself intellectually to anything. And you know what? When I got through, I didn’t believe anything at all! The worst of it was that I picked up more Christian friends by being skeptical like this than I ever did by being loyal to my church. It was then that I knew something was out of whack.

Things became really interesting in this conversation when another pastor broke in to scold my friend for losing his nerve, theologically:

I liked you better when you weren’t so weepy-eyed about losing touch with our tradition! Truth is better than tradition any day, and the only way we’ll ever get to truth is by reminding ourselves that most of the official views about truth have always been designed to keep the officials in power. Old Constantine knew that pretty well, don’t you think?

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Finally, one “liberal-and-proud-of-it” Roman Catholic laywoman stood up in a class, that I was teaching in her parish one evening, to proclaim proudly: “I began to grow spiritually when I started giving contraception priority over doctrine.” It interested me that her parish’s priests were laughing as hard as everyone else was, as if they, too, were giving up on the importance of defending allegiance to one of their church’s most clearly defined and ardently proclaimed doctrinal positions.

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These cases are intended to illustrate what can happen to faith when the vital middle ground between believing too much and believing too little becomes mushy. Or, they illustrate what happens when taking beliefs seriously—crucial for a truly mature faith—either inflates into taking beliefs too seriously, at the cost of making the church a battleground instead of a haven, or collapses into not taking them seriously at all, at the cost of making the church an assortment of spiritual narcissists instead of a caring community in ministry. In truth, a maturing faith is a “graying” faith. It recognizes both the necessity and the difficulties of dwelling in the gray areas between the more colorful extremes of rigid dogmatism and incorrigible skepticism, of legalism and libertinism, of fanaticism and nihilism.

“Talking things out,” then and now

In its larger context, the ancient invitation to come and reason together meant something considerably more limited and limiting than what many of our churches most need today. What the prophet Isaiah had in mind was that his people would simply give themselves over to God’s own persuading, that they would stop doing what they had fallen into the bad habits of doing and start doing what God told them to do instead. The problem with taking this interpretation at face value, and applying it whole cloth to resolving modern-day questions about beliefs, is that too many church people are arrogating to themselves the role that God plays in Isaiah’s vision and, as a result, getting nowhere in persuading others to think as they do.

If we are ever to accomplish the goal that the ancient prophet had in mind, therefore, we will have to adopt a somewhat different strategy. Reasoning together, as we might understand the ancient prophet’s words for today, will depend first and foremost upon cultivating a willingness to examine our own fetish for certitude and colorfulness in faith and to search more earnestly for a connectedness in the grayer areas of thinking and deciding at faith’s wider boundaries. It will depend upon cultivating the openness to learn from, rather than the passion to convert, one another. If we reason together only to convince people to accept our own pre-conceived ideas, there is little likelihood that any bridges between us will ever be built. At the extreme, we will simply go on bellowing at each other across an ever-widening chasm. On the other hand, if we are truly desirous of becoming agents of reconciliation in the church and the world, then not even our most heart-felt disagreements about what we should believe need prevent us from taking the essential first step of all genuine dialogue: listening carefully, empathically, and non-defensively to the other.

One kind of listening is especially needed. It proceeds from a willingness to set aside what we may think is wrong about the convictions of a fellow believer or inquirer in order to focus on the truth that he or she is struggling to express by means of them. The listening itself must be attuned to the other’s intended meaning more than to the other’s explicit words. One lay shepherd, Bill, set a good example of this working principle during an exchange he had one evening with some very agitated members in a Men’s Bible Study he was leading:

Cal: I’m the kind of guy who’ll forgive people for most anything, because I don’t see how we can be sure what the right thing to do is anyway.

Don: You can talk all you want about how hard it is to figure this stuff out, Cal, but you know what? It’s really easy—very easy. Here’s how to do it: Jesus is the way, and if we don’t do what he says, we’re going to hell. Period. End of story. What could be simpler?

Tex: Good Lord, Don, what kind of a Jesus is that? Not the one who’s in my Bible!

Leader Bill: Hold up just a second, Tex. I know Don’s got you riled up, but I don’t think he’s saying what he most wants to say right now. Don, help me out here. As I’ve heard you reacting to some of Cal’s ideas before, I think what’s getting to you is that his philosophy sounds too much like an “anything is okay” kind of thing, and that you want some rules to live by.

Don: I can go along with that. Maybe the Jesus-or-else way is a little over the top, but I know I’m not willing to go the do-it-if-it-feels-right route.

Cal: I hear you, Don. For whatever it’s worth, I’m not willing to go that far either. I guess I’m gonna have to think a little more about how I ought to be saying what I want to say here.

Leader Bill: I move that we table this particular debate until we’ve all had a chance to figure out another way of putting what’s most important to us about the beliefs we hold. Do I hear a second?

It is not easy to listen in the way that Bill did that evening. When issues of belief are in dispute, everyone is vulnerable to sudden attacks of certitude that his or her understanding of what should be believed is better than anyone else’s. Even experienced pastors and counselors, trained and practiced in the art of listening, can become momentarily bewitched by their own authority and hurl into the middle of their conversations with parishioners and counselees some astonishingly ill-timed declarations of what religious people should and should not think about this issue or that. Predictably, the outcomes are usually negative, as the following two examples illustrate vividly:

I knew I was in trouble as soon as I said it. I worried out loud that my daughter would go to hell if she got an abortion, and my pastor (Susan) started in on me about how things are different now than they were for the people who wrote the Bible, and that we shouldn’t get hung up anymore on rules and laws made, literally, by men. I’m sure she thought she was being helpful, but I just wanted the conversation to be over and to get the heck out of there.

Harry was begging me not to leave him, and in desperation we went to our pastor for help. I prayed he’d cut me even the tiniest bit of slack, but I knew he wouldn’t. And sure enough, Pastor Jim read me the riot act. He threw Bible verses at me, and laid the guilt on really thick by blaming me for even thinking about doing something that would make our kids’ lives so miserable. He never once asked me what I thought Jesus would say about Harry’s contributions to our marriage collapsing. Actually, Jim acted like he didn’t think I was even a Christian. So, I walked out of the session, the marriage, and the church.

Failing to listen respectfully, to be supportive, and to communicate a genuine desire to understand others’ experiences and point of view—however different they may be from our own—will doom not only our best efforts at persuading others to see things our way, as Susan discovered to her chagrin, but will threaten our very relationships with them as well, as Jim learned the hard way to his parishioner’s detriment and to his own.

I first learned about these encounters when Susan and Jim sought me out to explore together how they had let things deteriorate so dramatically in their respective situations and how they might prevent anything like this from happening again. One question I asked both of them was what they might say to their anguished parishioners if by some magic they could start all over with them. The answers that Susan and Jim gave show real insight:

Susan: Wow! Another chance! Please, Lord, just one. If I ever did get another chance, the first thing I’d say would be: Art, it’s tearing you up something awful to see your daughter about to do something you believe to be so wrong in God’s eyes.

Jim: To me, divorce is wrong, period. But I know I drove Beth away by failing to give her the one thing she had a right to expect from me as her pastor—empathy. It was uncaring of me to try to push her in a different direction by laying on her something she already was tortured by. Maybe I might have been able to get her to look at repairing her marriage if I had been more respectful of what living with Harry had actually been like for her, and of how guilt-ridden she already was for letting everybody—God included—down.

Clearly, Art and Beth were struggling with crucial decisions, another’s and their own, and they needed the support that their pastors’ attentiveness, empathy, and understanding could have provided them in abundance. Instead, as Jim acknowledged, they only got pushed around by people they had counted on to know better. Both Art and Beth reacted to the spiritual bullying in the same way, by putting as much distance as they could between themselves and their tormentors. Reasoning together, beginning and ending with good listening, might have made things turn out much differently, and much better.

Feelings, Ideas, and Faith: Connecting the Dots

When a deeply felt discussion about faith and belief gets out of hand, it is generally because those who generate them fail to put their discussion partners’ needs to be heard above their own needs to speak. They listen neither to others’ ideas nor for the feelings that lie behind them, and before long their disagreements are beyond mutually satisfactory resolution, at least until someone calls to mind the single most important principle of all good communication, whether about faith or anything else: listen patiently, try to understand the other’s experiences and perspective, and work to say less rather than more. This section sketches what can happen positively when proponents of conflicting beliefs begin to put as much emphasis on this principle as they did on their militant advocacy.

Getting to the feelings behind thoughts

Some time ago, I gave a talk to lay members of parish worship committees on theology’s contributions to liturgical reform. During the lunch that followed, a life-long Episcopalian, Lila, shared with our table how much spiritual pain the revisions of her denomination’s Eucharistic liturgy had caused her over the years. Insensitively, I stated right away my appreciation for the more positive view of human nature that these revisions contained, in contrast with sixteenth century depictions of humanity’s utter sinfulness before God (e.g., “ . . . and there is no health in us . . . ”). Politely, Lila interrupted me:

I’m sure that what you say is right, and that I ought to be more accepting. Maybe I’m just an old lady too set in her ways to enjoy anything new anymore. But I miss so much (she begins crying softly) how beautiful the older language is—the sense of mystery in it, holiness all around, the wonder of it. Most of my friends just don’t appreciate how important all of that is to me, how much I feel we’ve lost.

By this time in the conversation I realized that for this new friend, participation in the liturgy has less to do with the focusing of understanding than with the expression of feelings and, even more, of deep spiritual needs. While inwardly kicking myself for trying to offer her erudition instead of empathy, I asked her if she might be willing to tell us a little more about the feelings she used to experience in worship. I have never forgotten her response:

I felt safe, so very safe. I didn’t have to think—I knew all the responses by heart, you know. I didn’t have to worry about not keeping up or about doing something wrong. And all the while I was saying the words, I just felt like I was in the presence of a great mystery, and the mystery was about love, and assurance that everything was going to be all right.

Wherever it is manifested—in families, societies, or the church—the desire to “conserve” and the satisfaction that comes from being a good conservator root in a deep spiritual need for security, as well as in the vulnerability to anxiety whenever safety and security are perceived to be threatened. As I drove back to my office that day, I began thinking also about unappreciated spiritual needs that underlie more liberal orientations to the Christian faith. Almost immediately, I recalled an important lesson that I learned much earlier in my ministry, comparable to the one I had just received from Lila.

During my first pastoral appointment as a United Methodist pastor, my denomination was engaged in creating a new statement of its doctrines and doctrinal standards. The project was a mandated part of a just completed merger with the former Evangelical United Brethren Church. Reports coming out of the Theological Study Commission guiding the work upset more than just a few of my parishioners and none more so than Henry, one of the congregation’s most devoted leaders. One afternoon I sat with him at a work table in his barn, watching him repair a tractor part while he told me how angry he was with our church’s “getting a whole bunch of new doctrines.” When I tried to explain what I thought the Study Commission was and was not trying to do, he got even madder.

Pastor, the big reason I’m a Methodist is because I can believe what’s right to me and not to a bunch of church officials and—excuse me for this, doctor—theologians with their heads up in the clouds somewhere. For three generations before me, my family were all strict Lutherans who toed the line on everything and never let me raise even so much as a murmur about what they told me I had to believe. It’s taken a lot to get out from under all that, and now here comes the this new, ”United” (his voice is dripping with sarcasm now) Methodist Church to tell me how to shape up all over again.

In the light of what disturbed Henry about our new denomination’s theological self-appraisal, it is somewhat ironic that the major criticism of its final report was that it left too much room for individual opinion about what and how Methodists should believe. I wanted very much to get this deeply faithful man’s thoughts about how the doctrinal study eventually came out, but he died before the work was completed.

The reactions of Henry and Lila provide valuable insights into why Christian disagreements about beliefs and practices in the church involve so much more than coming to different conclusions on the basis of purely rational discussion and deliberation. Lila needed to keep her grip strong on a doctrinal orientation that many thoughtful Christians regard as outmoded, because it gave her a sense of security. By contrast, Henry needed to cast aside ecclesiastically defined doctrines because they threatened his hard-won sense of freedom to think for himself as a Christian accountable to God and not the church. What made Lila and Henry so different is not the particular beliefs they held, but the deeper spiritual needs that they were attempting to meet by means of their very different approaches to belief in the life of faith.

Judging the worst by the best

A characteristic feature of the current debates between staunchly conservative and liberal Christians is the intensity with which each camp focuses on the very worst expressions of their opponents’ outlook as the basis for their attacks. For instance, conservative Christians excoriate liberals for picking and choosing only the biblical passages that appeal to them instead of submitting themselves to God’s Word as revealed in the Bible as a whole. And liberal Christians chastise conservatives for deforming the gospel message into a staccato citation of one biblical text after another, torn from the Bible’s own God-given context as an anticipation of and witness to Jesus Christ. Or, liberal Christians pillory conservatives for presenting the Christian message to a non-Christian world with a give-no-quarter, take-it-or-be-damned attitude that is in the most literal sense of the word, dis-grace-full. And all the while, conservatives condemn liberals for selling out the very heart and soul of Christianity for the sake of winning the acceptance of non-believers on non-believers’ own terms.

In spite of all this, however, there are still many conscientiously conservative and liberal Christians in the church who are less interested in converting people to their theology than they are in helping people develop a Christ-centered faith. To them, advancing the cause of “isms”—whether conservatism, liberalism, or any other kind of “ism”—can only be the Devil’s work. As the following narrative will indicate, just about all but the most doctrinaire Christians grasp this fundamental point almost instinctively.

During a Christian Beliefs course I once offered to college students in a retreat setting, a young woman asked me in front of everybody if I would please “cut to the chase” and give them the short version of what I thought Christians should and should not believe. The group’s laughter told me that she was not the only one impatient to hear about the “Basic Christianity” I kept promising to talk about. “Ok, you’re on,” I said. “Let’s take our break now, and when you come back I’ll have a list of core Christian beliefs on the blackboard for us to look at together.” While the group was out of the room, I decided to experiment a little, and put up the four affirmations discussed in a previous chapter of this book that I believe to be at the heart of every form of conservative Christianity. “Tell me,” I asked the members when they returned, “whether you think this list is something like what you had in mind.” Several asked questions for clarification and others took modest issue with one or another of the statements, but by the end of the session there was a general agreement that the list represented reasonably well what they thought Christianity stands for.

At the next session, I continued my experiment, and began by asking the group whether anyone had any second thoughts about the way we had previously defined the basic beliefs of the Christian faith. No hands went up. “Well,” I offered, “I couldn’t help doing a little more thinking myself across our quiet time, along the lines of maybe adding a few things to the list we’ve already talked about. Would you be willing to look over what I came up with, and tell me what you think?” The group agreed enthusiastically, and so I wrote four new affirmations on the board, this time ones that I consider to represent liberal Christianity at its best.

After a short pause, one member of the group, Darlene, remarked that even though what I had just written looked different from what we discussed earlier, it also said pretty well what Christians probably do believe. By contrast, Wylie focused on the differences and wondered whether the lists could be combined at all. “Well,” Cary offered, “they sure don’t seem to be saying the same thing, but maybe they’re trying somehow to get at the same thing. Does that make any sense?” Lynette broke in with a positive answer to Cary’s question: “It sure does to me. See, these two lists we’re looking at—I want to say ‘Yes!’ to both of them. Please don’t tell me that I’m just totally confused.” Before I could respond to Lynette’s plea, Wylie jumped back into the conversation by saying, “Lynette, if you’re confused, then I know I must be, because I’m right where you are on this: I don’t want to give up anything on either of these two lists!”

For several months prior to this particular class, I had been immersed in conversations and correspondence with pastors, seminary students, and church leaders who felt caught between conservatives and liberals over how the church should transmit its message especially to the unchurched and the non-believing. I enjoyed conducting my little experiment with this group of college students on retreat because it gave me a chance to test out a hunch that was forming in my mind as a result of these previous months’ labors. The hunch was that whenever conservative and liberal theologies are put forward as positive expressions of the gospel rather than as denunciations of anyone else’s understanding of it, and in their best rather than their worst characterizations of core beliefs, then most Christians will see and affirm the truth in both perspectives and resist accepting one at the expense of the other. In the just described conversation, Cary’s response to Wylie expressed especially well what I was struggling to make clear to myself at the time. In essence, both conservative and liberal expressions of the Christian faith are attempts to get at something that all believers can hold in common.

Every time I have had an opportunity to conduct this little experiment with other groups of inquirers, the result has been almost exactly what it was the first time. If the responses of these groups is any indicator, therefore, then conservative and liberal Christianity in their most visionary forms—and not in their most entrenched ones—seem to be equally credible and powerful expressions of the Christian faith at its very center. Employed together by communities of faith for whom unity rather than uniformity of belief is the goal, both conservative and liberal theologies can lead believers and inquirers alike to a better understanding and appreciation of what Christians should agree on, of what they can continue to disagree about, and of how they will know the difference.

Taking back our projections

A while ago, I listened to two family law experts debate amending the Constitution of the United States to define the marital relationship as heterosexual, monogamous, and based upon mutual consent. In her opening statement, one of the participants told us that her lesbian partner had just given birth to their first child from an ex-husband’s sperm. Not surprisingly, she argued for laws that would expand, not constrict, the kinds of marriages our society should recognize. The other speaker, a devout Mormon, gave an account of the State of Utah’s efforts to enforce its long-standing ban on polygamous marriages. He argued for better enforcement of present prohibitions against being married to more than one person at the same time. Toward the end of his presentation, he revealed that he had himself grown up in a polygamous family of Mormon separatists. The discussion following this fascinating debate quickly became heated, even more so after an elderly Hindu man rose to ask anxiously whether people from his community are going to be imprisoned for arranging the marriages of their daughters.

Over lunch, I asked my fellow attendee, Roger, what he thought about the morning. Expecting to glean some wisdom from him about marriage and the Constitution, I was somewhat surprised by his answer:

Roger: I can’t get over how intense we all were in there. It was as if we were in a life or death struggle to prove our point of view to the next guy. What’s really getting to me is how defensive I got.

Leroy: Defensive of your point of view?

Roger: No, worse than that. I consider different points of view all the time and it doesn’t bend me out of shape. All in a day’s work kind of thing. But in there, it seemed like what we were defensive about was our own egos. At least, I know I was. It was like I absolutely had to have people agree with me. Is my ego that shaky?

It interested both of us that we were veering away from the content of the debate we had just heard, toward the participants’ behavior during it and the listeners’ defensive reactions after it. The conversation continued:

Leroy: Don’t take this the wrong way, but I think you’ve got a pretty good size ego to worry about its getting shaky.

Roger: Ouch! Ok, I’ll give you that one . . . I think what I’m really trying to get at is that I couldn’t admit to myself that the lady lawyer and the Hindu gentleman had some points worth considering. So I went after everybody who agreed with them like they’d committed some terrible crime.

Leroy: Tell me a little more about why what they said upset you so much. I’ve always thought of you as the kind of guy who never gets flustered about new ideas.

Roger: But these are ideas about marriage. The sanctity of marriage. Like God intends it to be. Or does he?

Leroy: Watch out now! You’re right on the verge of taking a second look at what you’ve always thought God was saying.

Roger: I think maybe I am, and it’s got me scared and angry at the same time.

Leroy: I get the scared, but I’m not sure I understand the anger.

Roger: Well, it’s like this. As a Christian, I should be like the Mormon speaker, coming down hard on the side of traditional marriages. But a lot of what the lesbian and the Hindu said in there was very attractive to me, and I’m angry with myself for letting it be.

Leroy: And maybe a little angry with them for making you feel bad about yourself?

Roger: Yeah, I have to admit that what you say is true. I do this a lot—get torqued at people who make it so easy to be like them when I know I shouldn’t want to.

Sometimes, the things we see in other people that make us judgmental and combative are the very things that we will not admit are attractive to us. Roger, a competent and highly regarded family law practitioner, found himself all of a sudden giving credence to views of marriage that he thought he should be opposing with all his strength. He began dealing with the incongruity in a way typical for him, by forcing his own position on others vehemently and angrily. To his credit, Roger accepted responsibility for his destructive behavior: “Better to be angry at them for saying what they said, than at myself for liking what I heard. Really mature, don’t you think?”

Like Roger, most people who disagree strongly about matters of belief and action get angry with each other not when the other’s point of view seems the most flawed, but rather when it seems the most credible. Afraid to admit that people on the opposite side of the fence might see things more clearly than we do, we distort their point of view in as inflammatory a way as possible, and then pour character assassination on the flames while fuming at our opponents’ wrong-headedness. “Conservatives are just plain mean,” one liberal Christian friend once said to me. Another Christian friend, a very conservative one, had his own thing to say about liberals: “They’re naive and stupid.” Modern psychology refers to the kind of behavior exhibited by both friends in terms of defense mechanisms and projection. Jesus spoke of it in a folksier way, contrasting the fixation on specks in others’ eyes with the ignoring of logs in our own. (Matthew 7:3)

Although some of the animosity between Christians who understand faith differently has to do with specific beliefs and doctrines, a good bit more of it is the detritus of blocking out the fear of uncertainty and the embarrassment of finding plausibility in beliefs prematurely determined to be erroneous and dangerous. The first kind of animosity can be remedied by taking a closer look at the Christian tradition as a whole and rediscovering in it that affirming the right beliefs and asking the right questions are inextricably intertwined. The second kind can be remedied by declaring a moratorium on blaming others for holding the “wrong” opinions and by looking for ourselves more honestly in the negative images we project on them. If the moratorium holds long enough, believers of very diverse theological orientations can discover that learning from, instead of attacking one another, is the single best way of achieving just the kind of unity in the church for which every genuine Christian most earnestly yearns.