Liberals and Conservatives Can Benefit From Each Other

This post is part book review, part pastoral reflection. The book in question is The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. This 2012 book by moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt is a must-read volume for religious and political leaders today. The pastoral reflections throughout this post are my own, brought into conversation with Haidt’s helpful categories and ideas about morality.

Liberals and conservatives are not the only two camps in the political and religious divides across American society, but they are clearly the dominant poles. One easily sees the deep divisions in our country, with over 73 million votes cast for one party’s candidate and over 79 million for the other. Either total eclipses the previous record number of votes for a single presidential candidate. People today are deeply engaged and emotional about politics, and our divisions seem profound and insurmountable.

The grim news about polarization is not limited to politics. We see energy and emotion surrounding splits in nearly every major religious group. Progressive and traditional camps view things through differing moral lenses. Splitting denominations seems preferable to cohabitation since negotiating these differences is nearly impossible.

In the last year or so, I have stopped pretending I can somehow bridge the divide and have instead devoted myself to understanding it. I know intelligent, kind, generous people who sit on opposite sides of religious and political debates, and no amount of reason seems to help them shift their stances or soften their views of one another. Why is this so?

In The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt explains why some people are liberal and some are conservative. The simple explanation? Nature. People are born with a proclivity to one or the other. Nurture or environment can certainly shift or harden a person’s leanings, but the explanation for our differences truly boils down to the way we are made, not to whether we are rational or irrational beings. Differing folks simply see things differently.

He builds his scientific and highly researched case in three major parts. The first discusses the idea that intuitions comes first and reason follows behind. This runs counter to what so many people naively believe about their deepest convictions. Folks assume that a logical thought process has built their moral compass, but this is only partly true. Yes, we are logical beings. But we build logic on top of our gut intuitions, not the other way around. In other words, we start with assumptions that our sense of reason then seeks to explain.

We know this is true from our religious histories. Churches of Christ, for example, have been known for a cappella singing. Like many others who grew up in Churches of Christ, I was taught that this practice grew out of sound, theological reasoning. The truth, however, is that the theological reasoning came after the practice was well established. A cappella singing had been necessitated by the circumstances of poor, post-Civil-War churches who had no resources for organs or other instruments. The logical reasoning explained the intuitive need for singing without accompaniment.

The second major part of Haidt’s book breaks down differing aspects of morality. This was most enlightening to me. It forms the backbone of the book and comes from his own breakthrough research in morality via anthropology. Haidt uncovers a major bias and flaw in most Western, academic thinking about morality. Researchers have tended to use Western university students as the subjects for their research. This inadvertently created a closed feedback loop that simply affirmed what they already assumed regarding morality.

As Haidt began to take his own morality research into India, Brazil, and then back into non-college-educated America, he discovered vibrant systems of morality that do not mesh well with the Western, educated, individualistic system assumed to be universally true by academic researchers. Haidt grew to realize how these divergent understandings of morality cut to the heart of political and religious divisions today.

You have to read it to truly understand it, but he and his co-researchers eventually settled upon six pillars of morality that are present in all systems. Liberals tend to base their sense of right and wrong on just three of these. Conservatives take their sense of right and wrong based equally upon all six. (Libertarians, interestingly, only lean upon two pillars.) When you begin to understand how these differing moral matrices work, you can start to see how folks have developed patterns of speaking and thinking that do not compute to those in opposing camps.

In the third part, Haidt tackles another common misunderstanding in evolutionary science and moral psychology: that groups bind us and blind us. Starting in the 20th century, scientists began to dismiss the importance of “group think” (my term) on our rational and moral development. Everything in science, from economics to genetics, focused on individual adaptations. But in recent decades, scientists like Haidt have begun to once again factor in the crucial role of groups.

While we like to think of ourselves as independent beings who chart our own courses – and to some extent this is certainly true – we also do many things in life because of the groups to which we belong. As Haidt says, we are bound and blinded by our groupings. Even our human evolution is increasingly understood to have depended on our ability to belong to strong groups. Stronger, healthier groups outperform weak groups or solo individuals, thereby increasing the likelihood that our ability to conform to groups becomes a dominant trait.

What are we to do with the groupish polarization in our world today? First, we need to understand it. People don’t lean one way or the other because they are dumb or ignorant. They may be programmed that way. And the strong factions to which they belong then cement such thinking vis-a-vis the moral psychology of other groups.

Second, we as Christians must realize the importance of the church to create its own strong grouping. The church should bind us to God and to others and thereby blind us to the things that might otherwise keep us apart. There’s a good reason why marriage is an excellent analogy for the church. According to Gen. 1:27, God created us with inherent differentness, not sameness. Being male and female can function as a kind of metaphor for the various and differing ways we understand what’s right and wrong. Rather than condemning us to bunkered lives of separation, the creation narrative invites us to see our differences as helpful and necessary balances gifted to us by our creator.

To make a difference in our divided world, churches should unapologetically lean into the power of relationships. Through the Spirit of God and the reconciling work of Jesus, we ought to be bound together more deeply than any other grouping. To accomplish this, we must recognize that we need one another.

Conservatives need liberals to guard them against their weaknesses. Liberals needs conservatives to protect them from their own worst instincts. This is how we are made – to need one another. The categories in Haidt’s book shouldn’t be taken as fixed groupings that define and confine us. Rather, they are helpful tools giving us the chance to increasingly appreciate how our differences can actually strengthen us for the days ahead.