Tag: belief

Recommit…

.Reading time 6 minutes.
Sen. Tammy Duckworth (IL)

Over the last three months I’ve made tremendous progress toward earning my PhD at the University of Virginia.  My dissertation project has been approved, and I am now officially writing.  My goal is to finish in May of 2027.  Apparently, the number “7” is my thing…Princeton ’87, Pacific School of Religion ’17, UVA ‘27…kind of cool.

Rep. Terri Sewell

As I approach this threshold, I recognize that my work is needed in the world.  While parish ministry gave me a great deal of practical on-the-ground experience and the opportunity to make one kind of contribution, the experience of immersing myself in the deep study of why people do what they do has been an even more natural fit.  I’m now positioning myself to be able to publicly write, speak and teach in a way that contributes to the capacity for people everywhere to live better with one another.  Specifically, my work responds to the weaponization of belief…belief based on religion or belief that is simply held as if it were religion…a.k.a. dogmatism.  Belief conflated with government defeats the basis of a pluralistic society and we are already mired in that morass.  Stark ideological entrenchment reinforced by technological echo chambers has proven to be the most toxic and potentially lethal invention of the 20th century.

In order to stay focused, I’ve had to remain largely offline over the last few years and particularly since January.  Today, my 61st birthday, however, I’m recommitting to being part of the conversation.  The balance between the day-to-day of academic life (researching and teaching) and the whiplash of modern politics is a lot to manage, but I’m feeling greater urgency as I get more fluent with this work and as more extreme positions of dogmatism emerge.  I believe that it is essential for scholars like me to focus on practical applications for what we study and not just obsess over our personal grain of sand at our computers.

I want to point you toward three moments from this past week that have kept me thinking about what it means to commit to being a public scholar in this time:

Senator Tammy Duckworth on Iran War Powers Resolution

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Representative Terri Sewell confronting RFK, Jr. on his racial (racist) comments

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“Charlie Kirk Laws” promoting religion and free speech

Each one of these moments is a lot to take in.  But a significant line of human logic connects them through what I named before:  weaponization of belief.  The literal weaponization of belief pulled us into the war with Iran; the willingness to weaponize an unfounded racialized belief about black children and families, makes RFK, Jr. a genuine threat in public service; and the weaponization of religious belief is attempting to turn the US Constitution into a legislative sword for Christianity.

My dissertation is about Rev. Ethelred Brown (1875 – 1956), Black Unitarian minister from Jamaica, and the sermons he delivered during the height of the Harlem Renaissance as part of the New Negro movement.  But inside that grain of sand, I’m asking questions about how Brown understood himself at the intersection of Caribbean, Harlem, Black and Unitarian identity and how that understanding translated into his public words as a minister.  I am asking about what Brown believed, why he believed it and how he expressed that belief in his sermons.  While I am humbled by his ministry a century ago, my dissertation goes beyond revealing an important history.*  For me, Ethelred Brown is primarily a foundational case study on whom I hope to base theories and practical tools that might be applied toward the challenges we face in the way belief is activated in the public discourse today.

This blog is a “note to self” to stay in this work.  I will invite you to also consider how you might stay committed to being an engaged participant.  It doesn’t need to have a big splash, but it does require conscious intention.  That is how we disrupt the bots and memes and careless disposable rhetoric.  All of our active and deliberate participation is required.  Not just for the American experiment, but for the wider grand human experiment to realize its full promise and potential.

–ALD

*See the excellent historical work about Brown from Mark Morrison-Reed, and Juan Floyd-Thomas

When Belief Becomes Policy…

.Reading time 7 minutes.

I recently began studying for a Master in Public Policy degree at Tufts University.  Someone asked me why I was doing this when I already had a Master of Divinity degree and they wondered how the degrees were related.  My answer is playing out in real time this week with the 2020 United States Presidential Election.  Although my initial impetus to pursue the degree came from a desire to counteract the harmful ways in which I recognize religion is being turned into a policy weapon, I see that this violence is much more wide spread.  Nor is it specific to one religion’s (Christian) fundamentalism.

…we are living in the age of the…“celebritician.” These are people who are not so much public servants who wish to help govern our society as they are eager to craft and promote a brand that has a high market value.

As we watch an electoral map unfold in what is an unthinkable way for many people on both sides of the political spectrum, what we are seeing is a combination of things. First, there is the vast difference in which sources people use to acquire news.  With the emergence of Fox news as a veritable state television network for Trumpism and with CNN working to create some kind of counternarrative to that bias, news and news sources have become inherently political.  Add to this the plethora of podcasts, YouTube channels, vlogs and blogs, none of which are regulated or assessed for bias, people are capable of creating their own comfortable echo chambers tuned specifically to what they want to hear…24/7.

Next, we are living in the age of the celebrity politician…“celebritician.” These are people who are not so much public servants who wish to help govern our society as they are eager to craft and promote a brand that has a high market value.  We first flirted with this with Jack and Jackie.  Then Ronnie and Nancy literally brought Hollywood to Washington. The Clintons monetized their political lives to a level that has been questioned by GOP pundits as criminal.  Michelle and Barack were the total anomaly that we couldn’t/can’t get enough of…and are willing to pay for no matter what the cost.  The pinnacle of celebritician has been “The Trump Show” fully produced for syndication with story arcs, villains and heroes, costumes and characters and of course fabulous hair.  Think Dallas in D.C.  Where this becomes problematic is when a celebritician becomes the total embodiment of what we expect to see as the face of public policy.

The final piece of this toxic equation is the level to which aspirational culture has taken over our political sensibilities.  I recently described this through the metaphor of how people attach a personal affinity to sports teams.  For many people in the United States, we attach a personal sense of ownership and aspiration to what sports teams do on the field, ice or court.  We don’t just cheer them on, we invest in knowledge about their training and the makeup of the team.  We follow and work hard to predict the statistics on how well they will perform and we believe on a certain level that we can will them to an outcome.  We project on sports teams a level of aspiration to “win” that may or may not be healthy from a psychological standpoint, but when applied to politics and policy is obviously doing us all tremendous harm.

What I’ve realized is that together these elements (information, embodiment, aspiration) add up to the reason I’m pursuing my degree.  Together they create the framework for something that is the cornerstone of what ministers are trained to understand deeply: belief.  Religious belief is based on a source of information, how it is embodied either by prophets or within the self and how that information and embodiment add up to aspirations for everything from having an afterlife to literally turning your body back into the earth.  Ministry is the business of belief and more and more so are our politics.

But it is not just that we have entered into a time where politics are beliefs, it is that we have no modern, evolved tools or language to process what that means.  This leaves the left and right hunkered down in their opposite corners assuming that every move made by the other side is going to be one of aggression or attempted erasure.  Ministers will tell you that living in suspicion is much more dangerous than living in fear.  Suspicion is the ground in which assumption grows and assumptions are what eventually become underpaid women, caged immigrant children and dead unarmed black people.

We are in a desperate need of a way to completely rethink what it means to be political.  We have to ask tough questions about what it means to navigate the world we have created where belief drives policy.  What are the common sources of information, the embodied sources of mutually respected leadership and the unified goals and aspirations that we can all work toward within a wide range of belief systems?  These are the questions that our policy makers must learn to be asking.  That is what I believe the future of public policy will hinge on.  Without it, we may literally tear each other apart.

–ALD