My graduate studies in public discourse last spring brought the point home once again: Speaking about religious faith in contemporary North America is an activity fraught with challenge, misunderstanding, and polarization. Listening to others speak about faith in a meaningful way is no less difficult.
The 30 of us spent four hours together each Thursday evening for ten weeks reading texts on major public-discourse issues, including war, the working poor, gender, inequality in public education, and the environment, among others. By no means was there unanimity on any of these subjects, but we took them up without strain, in vigorous but respectful and effective dialogue. Then came religion.
In our class discussion on religious faith, responding to Annie Dillard’s For the Time Being and Daniel C. Dennett’s Breaking the Spell, polarization and anxiety kicked in like a full-force gale. I found myself wishing that American Public Media host and author Krista Tippett were in the room with us, moderating the conversation, asking probing yet measured questions, drawing out the stories behind our own belief systems, and reflecting back her own insights from a theologically trained perspective. Alas, that didn’t happen, but we have the next best thing: Tippet’s book Speaking of Faith.
Writing at a website devoted to the weekly radio program that carries the same name (www.speakingoffaith.org), Tippett says, “The first-person approach behind ‘Speaking of Faith’ sidesteps the predictable minefields and opens the subject wide, making it inviting, both in ambiance and substance. It insists that people speak straight from the experience behind their own personal beliefs. How did they come to hold the truths they hold? How are religious insights given depth and nuance by the complexities of life?”
Tippett may be trying to reach the “In the vast middle” where “faith is as much about questioning as it is about certainties.” Where “It is possible to be a believer and a listener at the same time, to be both fervent and searching, to nurture a vital identity and to wonder at the identities of others,” but cyberspace and the media love polarizing issues, and anyone living in the middle of the road (M.O.R.) is in danger of being described as being a M.O.R.O.N. (I should know as I battle my latent moderate tendencies.) Indeed, moderates are the ones who need to hear persuasive arguments of faith, but they are not the ones to give a clear voice to those arguments.
So, what happens when a M.O.R. listens and is convinced by one side or the other to become an activist for that side? Does that mean the listening process was a success or a failure?
To add to your question libraryjim, and does that mean the opposite sides of a polarized issue do not listen?
Libraryjim – I’d say that if that person becomes an activist who refuses ever to listen to other points of view again, then the “listening process” was probably either a failure or something the activist never really engaged in. On the other hand, if someone remains forever in the middle on all issues, the “listening process” has probably become a hotel for an intellect that really needs a good home, and the process itself has become an idol through which the questions are worshiped more than the truth that they point to. Probably the best result of any such listening process is that something approximating the truth (or at least a likely candidate for truth) emerges, and those who have hearts and brains turned on join sides with that truth–all the while keeping eyes and ears open for things that might refine, falsify, or correct that truth. I think that’s how we keep our opinions from becoming idols (even when they’re well-researched) and how we continue to love God with our minds and love our neighbors as ourselves.
Anyway, that’s how it seems to me, and I plan to fight for that position. But I’m open to the possibility that I’m wrong.
Cheers,
Laocoon
It is always good to listen, and equally good to remember that most people don’t have a clear understanding about the origins or sources of their faith tradition.
Please try to avoid the word “listening,” because it has been so misused and so twisted by the left that it has little usable meaning left. The left has, in fact, done this to a remarkable number of words by substituting the agenda for the denotation, and then speaking as if the former and the latter are the same and always have been.
But there are some things one cannot be middle of the road about. If you say that you love God with youor whole heart has to mean that this is not open to debate. AS Garrison K noted about the Woebegonians and the 10 Commandments,” Lutherans in my home town are much given to saying, ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery,probably, but we can talk about that.’ ”
Besides,UGP and LibJ, what does middle of the road mean? Does it simply mean that one is so uncertain about all vital matters that one holds all real decisions in abeyance? I grant you that certainty is murderous, but can a MOR never be certain? To say that one is certain is not the same thing as saying that one is fanatical in the pursuit of establishment. For it is the fanaticism really that is murderous, not the certainty. How does one get from saying one loves God with one’s whole heart to saying that everybody else had better believe it or else? For most Americans, MOTR means wishy-washy, doesn’t it? But there other possibilities surely. L
The listening process in TEC has been going on for 85 years and has produced the following:
1) Approval of contraception
2) Approval of divorce
3) Approval of homosexuality, bisexuality, and sex change
4) Approval of abortion
5) Approval of activist homosexual priests and bishops
6) Almost approval of euthanasia
7) Arguments for other kinds of sex, like polyandry, polygamy, and
Doesn’t anybody remember that the word “gay” actually means happy and carefree? But we listened and now it means something else. We’ve really listened a lot. We’ve really lost a lot by listening. We’ve listened when we really should have been cleaning house.
One problem is that God isn’t “middle of the road”, and he expects us to listen to HIM. That’s why He gave us his Book. But now we’ve listened and it doesn’t say what it used to say.
Guess that all makes me a fundamentalist non-listening insensitive moronic fuddy-duddy.
OK ^_^.
In faith, Dave
Actually, morons for the sake of this thread are persons with latent moderate tendencies. 🙂