The Religion Underneath Our Arguments

During lunch earlier this week, a friend and I discussed the difficulty of judging which version of events are real and which aren’t, which analyses to trust and which to disregard, during a quickly developing news story. Sometimes our public debates make it seem as if we’re all arguing from different sets of underlying facts.

The same dynamic plays out in more metaphysical discussions too: Instead of different sets of facts, we argue from different sets of assumptions about the nature of the world—or reality itself—and our place in it. And as Kevin J. Brown writes in today’s Dispatch Faith, so many times the fights we have about the concrete details of our lives are really about bigger, more eternal questions. Call those beliefs worldviews or religions or ideologies. But whatever monikers we choose, those deeply held differences are the wellspring of so many of the political, cultural, and societal arguments of our day. 

We should be paying more attention to them, Brown writes.

My first marital argument was over the existence of aliens. 

I was surfing TV channels and came upon a show about supposed extraterrestrial activity. After a sarcastic remark about what I was watching, my wife paused, then asked, “You don’t believe in aliens, do you?” 

I gave the most unhelpful response possible. “Define alien.” This led to a nonsensical argument over space creatures, the limits of knowledge, and whether it even mattered.

Several decades of marriage later, we now know our first argument had little to do with aliens. It had to do with us. She wanted to know if I was going to be dependable, like her father, and not weird. I wanted to know if she was going to accept a husband who did not conform to her idea of what a husband should be.

Put differently, the thing we were talking about was not really the thing we were talking about. 

Disagreement is seldom about the presenting argument. Beneath our disputes lie animating commitments, values, and a mental map of the world. Arguments cannot be separated from belief, and belief, at its core, is a matter of faith.

In recent years, stories of fractured discourse and division have dominated the headlines, but the problem of pluralism—people with different visions of the good life living among each other—has bedeviled the Western landscape for centuries. Polarization, remarked political scientist Jonathan Bernstein more than a decade ago, is “not some sort of freakish un-American phenomenon.”

Helping people with different visions of the good life live together peaceably and productively is the goal of political liberalism. It seeks to foster conditions of fairness, impartiality, procedural justice, and state neutrality toward competing conceptions of what people believe and how they want to live their lives. For example, political liberalism says that whatever else we want to attain, the government should function to protect things like rights, liberties, and equality because they represent fair conditions and secure basic freedoms for everyone—hallmarks of a liberal democracy. Beyond that, live and let live. 

At face value, these ideals are desirable. Political liberalism is a proven solution to the challenge of navigating reasonable disagreement. But what if our problem is deeper than disagreement, or worse, what if we are attending to the wrong problem? 

Today, social discord and affective polarization are not simply the consequences of differing opinions. They are symptoms of social groups who find one another more and more incomprehensible. And, importantly, agitating for fair(er) conditions won’t fix the underlying problem. In other words, the thing we are talking about is not really the thing we are talking about. We cannot have productive discourse without considering the transcendent, world-shaping narratives underneath our beliefs and values.

Here is why. It is a mistake to think difficult questions can be settled by conditions of impartiality alone. Modern societies have understood justice in a manner that does not rely upon a particular vision of the good life or human purpose, grounding individual rights in a neutral framework which, among other things, requires impartiality. In political philosophy, this is the idea that human rights are established prior to any universal vision of what gives life meaning, what is morally worthy of our pursuit, and what makes us flourish. The freedom for individuals to pursue their own visions of the good life was expressed and embodied in America’s founding.

But there is a problem. Impartiality alone is still inadequate to sort out contestable moral traditions. This is helpfully illustrated in a thought experiment by Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen. Imagine three children fighting over a flute, he says. Anne wants it because she is the only one who can play it. Bob wants it because he is poor and has no toys. Carla wants it because she made the flute herself.

Each child makes a separate claim appealing to a particular philosophical tradition. Anne would find favor with the utilitarian, Bob with the egalitarian, and Carla the libertarian. All three appeal to impartiality, but the very impartiality they appeal to is partial to a specific moral tradition. Awarding the flute will not come from criteria of equality or impartiality, but rather the moral tradition the giver aligns with.

The same problem arises with pluralism. While there is value in creating room at the table for a variety of voices and backgrounds, not all forms of pluralism are the same. 

Cultural pluralism—various food, literature, art, music, artifacts, and history—enriches a society. Equally valuable is institutional pluralism. A wide variety of heterogeneous institutions—schools, businesses, charities, non-profits, interest groups, sports, arts—make for a healthy, well-functioning community. Citing a host of desirable benefits, organizations increasingly strive for ethnic pluralism,and rightly so.

But in a different category altogether is diversity of meaning and purpose—what some have called “directional pluralism.” Societies have long addressed enduring questions central to human existence and flourishing. Who am I? What defines a good person? What is a good life? What makes a society just? Here, differing answers are unlike the diversity we appreciate in cultures, institutions, and ethnicity, because when it comes to questions of meaning and purpose, the goal is not simply to represent various perspectives, but to discern what actually leads to flourishing. 

Not only are these questions fundamental, attempts to answer them trade on competing moral visions that are often incompatible and cannot be simultaneously true.  The famous political philosopher John Rawls understood this. But Rawls’ answer to directional pluralism was for social participants to set aside moral and religious convictions when entering the public square—as if we could neatly separate debates about rights, privileges, laws, and social institutions from the larger bundle of inherently religious questions about meaning, purpose, and the good life. 

The desire to empty politics from contestable moral and religious considerations may seem practical or even fashionable (e.g., John Lennon’s song  “Imagine”)—but “this ambition cannot succeed” writes Harvard Philosopher Michael Sandel in his book Justice. “Many of the most hotly contested issues of justice and rights can’t be debated without taking up controversial moral and religious questions.” To borrow a phrase from Wendell Berry, pluralism may only amount to “a superficial courtesy to … a confusion of claims.” Without interrogating the moral vision underneath these claims, questions of justice are often settled through power and privilege—not persuasion. 

Here is the point. When it comes to pluralism and civil discourse, the thing we are talking about is not really the thing we are talking about. 

While we may appeal to neutrality, fairness, and equality or other desirable ideals—we are really talking about which moral vision should guide our lives and how we relate to one another in society; we are talking about the proper way to see the world. As Jonathan Haidt argued in his 2012 bestseller The Righteous Mind, there is no neutral ground. We are all beholden to an underlying moral vision—or metanarrative—which animates our political beliefs, establishes values, and governs our actions. 

And, importantly, religion is the most developed form of metanarrative we have. You might say that our underlying vision of the world is inescapably religious. Even in the wake of institutional religiosity’s decline, faith or no faith, we still, writes Tara Isabella Burton in her book Strange Rites, practice religion that “seeks … to provide us with the pillars of what religion always has: meaning, purpose, community, ritual.”

To comprehend one another requires us to look at the stories underneath our presenting arguments and behavior. “Narratives make intelligible our actions and our utterances,” writes the late philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre. Related, in his book Moral Believing Animals, sociologist Christian Smith cites a variety of totalizing cultural metanarratives that govern our lives. “Much of the social discourse of the West for the last two hundred years and even today,” writes Smith, can be attributed to “struggles between these major rival narratives.” He cites the Christian metanarrative, the Capitalist Prosperity narrative, the Progressive Socialist narrative, the Expressive Romantic narrative, or the Scientific Enlightenment narrative as examples.

These narratives share core elements—sacred and profane, higher and lower, light and dark—moral matrices that inform our evaluative judgments, shape our action, and tell us what is valuable and worthy of commitment. 

Charitably considering the narratives of those we disagree with will not necessarily dislodge deeply held commitments or settle entrenched and emotionally charged ideological disputes. Nor is this an argument for moral relativism—the belief that all metanarratives are equal. They are not. 

Rather, mining the narratives underneath our presenting arguments recalibrates the discussion to what we should be talking about—the totalizing stories guiding and governing how we talk, act, and live together. 

For decades, Sandel has critiqued U.S. politics as devolving into a “procedural republic” concerned with enabling consumers to choose their own values, and less with cultivating their character as citizens. Among other problems, a procedural republic reinforces the illusion that we can neatly separate our public and private lives—the latter of which carries our beliefs, values, and moral obligations. 

Not only is it difficult to separate our public and private selves, says Sandel, we shouldn’t. Our political deliberations must reflect our best understanding and articulation of human ends and their relationship to flourishing. “Don’t arguments about justice and rights unavoidably draw on particular conceptions of the good life?” he asks. 

He is right. The thing we are talking about is not really the thing we are talking about. Like the alien argument early in our marriage, my wife and I were really arguing over deeper questions of what kind of people we would be. Similarly, our social discourse will not rise and fall on conditions of fairness. Public reasoning cannot be separated from deeply held assumptions of meaning, transcendence, and directionality. Our moral visions are not mere personal preferences. They are stories suffused with what is ultimate, religious in character, telling us how to live, who we are, and why life matters.

Disagreement is the surface of deeper stories. Whether sacred or secular, these underlying narratives often rely on religiously shaped assumptions about the good life. Moving from inflammatory discord to functional discourse will require more than impartial procedure or empty platitudes of respecting another’s differences, fairness, or niceness. It will require disciplined practice of seeing our neighbor as someone governed by a story. Mutual comprehension is made possible by attending to the narratives that give life its ultimate meaning. 

That is what we should be talking about. 

Portions of this essay appeared in Front Porch Republic’s print publication, Local Culture 6.2.

Mosul, Iraq, was once one of the most diverse and culturally rich cities in the Middle East, including its mix of Muslims and Christians. But the brutality of ISIS compounded by years of war left the city ravaged. But, as my friend Mindy Belz reported in a piece we published earlier this week, the city is finally rebounding. Recovery is coming both from the bottom-up work of those who call the city home, but also from international actors who care about preserving the city’s heritage who find that rebuilding community—especially among believers of different religions—is harder than rebuilding structures.