Dispatches from across Deep Divides

Red, blue, purple: What I’ve learned from mixing it up in America which might help us here.

“The primary impulse of each is to maintain and aggrandise himself. The secondary impulse is to go out of the self to correct its provincialism and heal its loneliness.”

C.S. Lewis

Kale Zeldin, Rod Dreher and me at Midwestuary

This week I've been in the US again. Fully Alive seems to have touched a nerve there, perhaps more so than in my home country. I was speaking in Chicago and Little Rock, Arkansas, and in both places doing something that many people there seemed astonished by: crossing tribal lines. "It's so funny," several people said to me, "you were in a progressive city amongst conservatives, and then in a conservative state amongst progressives!" This kind of thinking is common in America in a way that still feels strange to me. So many conversations open with them trying to triangulate me politically and theologically. Sometimes I want to save them some time and say “I am confused about most things and a big fan of Jesus. I don’t hate you. Does that help?”

In Chicago I was speaking at Midwestuary, an in-person gathering of a group who call themselves This Little Corner (TLC) of the internet. They originally formed around Jordan Peterson discussion groups, kicked off by pastor Paul Vanderklay. These metamorphosed into Estuary groups which are a bit like philosophy or theology discussion groups where you can also raise personal stuff. They have provided a way into real friendships for many in a lonely age. People come to Estuary from lots of different perspectives and backgrounds now, drawn by a place which models respectful conversation about sometimes neuralgic things. Probably because of the Peterson origins, the centre of gravity is still male and right of centre. This was reflected in the other speakers alongside me and Paul Vanderklay: Jonathan Pageau, John Vervaeke, Kale Zeldin and Rod Dreher. Other than Kale, I had interviewed all of them for The Sacred, and in John Vervaeke's case had a couple of other delightful conversations.

I've written before about some of the challenges of being the "token woman". I accepted this invitation after that post, knowing I would indeed be the only woman speaker. I did so because I have concluded that when I can tolerate the tensions of it, not allow myself to be cowed by the ambient cultural pressures to either play the masculine intellectual sparring game or be fawningly agreeable, it can be a pretty powerful and interesting place to be.

So it proved. I've also written elsewhere about how developing resilience to the discomfort of difference is a bit like exercising a muscle. I’ve been getting in my reps and so being the token woman is easier. I am more relaxed, have ceased trying to fit in, trusting that the spread of voices is part of the point. Partly because of this, being at Midwestuary was a joy.

Some of it was the hospitality. I participated in a Supra, a sort of ritual meal traditional in the country of Georgia, with toasts and songs and a deep sacred philosophy of uniting a group of people around a table. It was my favourite night out in a long time. I was taken to a Cubs game at Wrigley Field, which was really intense and exciting for the last ten minutes and the rest of the time the sport equivalent of background music.

Midwestuary was enjoyable, but not relaxing.

A volunteer was tasked with driving me around. This person expressed his views that “native” populations (by which he did not mean indigenous populations) should not have to deal with incomers who would replace them demographically. He also shared that he spent a lot of time in what he called the “red pill manosphere¹”.

When these deep differences first emerged, I tensed up. My body did the thing that bodies do when we encounter views which are significantly different around powerful questions. I went into fight or flight. I felt the impulse I think C.S. Lewis was describing as the first instinct in the quote at the top. I sought to “maintain and aggrandise my sense of self”. I felt the need to tell him why he is wrong. I also, honestly, had a moment of fear at being alone in the car with him. I think a lot of women would.

Fortunately, I been thinking about this stuff for a long time. I know my signs. Twitchy hands, crossed arms. Withdrawal, in other words. It also helped that my whole keynote (which I may post here once I’ve tidied it up a bit) was about precisely these moments. About what it takes to resist Lewis’s first impulse and so avoid the relational fracture of either attack or defence (fight or flight). I am trying to instead seek to keep a connection open, moving into Lewis’s second impulse to go out from my self, seeking to understand another. I have written about why Friendship is my Theory of Change, and you can check out that post for more.

Fundamentally, we were both faced with a choice. We could spend the car ride trotting out our women vs men, “left” (at least on the status and dignity of migrants) vs “right” talking points, leaving us both only further entrenched in our respective positions, or we could sit in silence, or we could do something else. So I took a deep breath and asked some genuine questions.

He shared, and I listented, and then he listened to me. We interrogated some of the terms (how many generations does someone have to have been in a country to be classed as a “native”, for example). We parted after several car rides over the conference on good terms. I am fairly sure neither of us changed our minds, but I think we both complexified our mental picture of the opppsing “type” of people. He left me with a quote from “red pill” thinker, Rollo Tomassi “We [men and women] are better together than apart”. Next time I hear about “nativist” views and “red pill” anti-feminist men, I will have a real, fragile, complex human person attached to those terms. I still think these perspectives are deeply, deeply troubling but it will be harder for me to tell a dehumanising story about the people who hold them.

I also had a public conversation with

Rod Dreher

, onstage in front of 300 people. Rod is a writer and speaker who lives in Budapest and converted to Eastern Orthodoxy from Roman Catholicism. You can find my Sacred interview with him here. We have lots in common, and our keynotes were weirdly similar, both quoting Martin Buber and Iain McGilchrist. He even used the W. H. Auden quote which is the closest thing I have to a “life verse”:

“You shall love your crooked neighbour with your crooked heart”

I found his talk beautiful and moving. This is not surprising because as I have said a thousand times, we tend to like people who agree with us.

However, I also know that Rod is the kind of conservative who voted for Trump. Twice. It massively confuses me how two people with such similar intuitions on some things can arrive somewhere so different. Part of his reason for being in Budapest is (I believe) his admiration for Victor Orbán. My summary of his views on migration is they are similar to my car ride conversation partner (I might be wrong here and am happy to be corrected). Whatever I am politically, I am not that, mainly because I think the Bible is pretty clear on our obligation to the stranger and sojourner in our midst.

The morning of our conversation I was a bundle of nerves. Should we just focus on the stuff we had in common? Was it bad manners to bring up a topic that had not yet come up elsewhere? I know a lot of “conservatives” feel scolded by “liberals” (again, I don’t know why wanting to defend the human dignity of people who have moved country is inherently liberal rather than biblical but there you go), who can it’s true, often sound shrill and condescending. I know we like to think tone is trivial when the stakes are this high, but it is not. I neither enjoy nor think any good is done by classic ding-dong debates. I had decided to just leave the topic, then Rod said something about the need to be open to the stranger and our moderator took the opportunity to ask a question about our different attitudes to migrants.

I have never seen a room tense up so fast. Two men got up and walked out. I stopped and prayed aloud (it is not an explicitly Christian conference, but I really felt the need of it, and the mood was awkward enough already). Then we tried to move through the stress response into something I don’t think I have ever seen done: a respectful, open conversation about our radically different intuitions around migrants. Not point scoring, but questioning. I have not seen a recording so I honestly don’t know how well it went. I probably expressed myself badly at points. I may have blacked out in the middle there, I was concentrating so hard on being brave and clear and kind at the same time. I leant into the need for more both/and thinking, a world where we can care about the concerns of white working class communities AND people who have moved country, often for horrifying reasons, and did not ask to be dumped in a hotel outside a regional town. Both young white men AND young brown men, both of which get tarred by different groups as inherently problematic sexual predators, and all of whom are made in the image of God and unutterably precious. I know I wept, and refused to apologise for it, despite knowing that Rod deplores “sentimental humanitarianism”. Again, I don’t know if anyone changed their mind, but my guess is a lot of people were changed. We had a moment of moving past Lewis’s first instinct to retract, and out from the self to correct our parochialism.

There is lots more I could say about this conversation, and maybe I will once the recording is available. I fully expect to have pissed off a bunch of people from “both sides” but my tolerance for that is going up. I don’t care about “winning” or momentarily making people who agree with me feel good. I care about genuine encounter, about how we actually change, and only complicated, nuanced conversations can do that. If you were there I would be interested in what you thought (politely!).

After I got off the stage a tall Eastern Orthodox priest in flowing black robes came striding up to me. I braced, expecting to be scolded. He smiled widely and laughed. “You forgot the Good Samaritan!” he said. I was confused. “Yes, the Torah teaches the people of God should welcome the stranger and the wanderer because they are strangers and wanderers too, but Christians don’t take the Old Testament as seriously as Jesus. Jesus said we have to love our neighbour, and our neighbour is a Samaritan! Another race and nation! It’s all there!”. I tried to keep a straight face as my bundle of ill-informed prejudices about what an Orthodox person would think of the topic crumbled.

After a wonderful time in Arkansas with a group of mainly Episcopalians and Presbyterians, many of whom wanted to make clear they were neither “woke” nor “Trumpy”, I came home. Even since I left a week ago, more St George flags have appeared. I quite like the English flag, the idea that we, too, are allowed a national identity. I don’t see it as inherently racist, not least because St George was in fact from the Middle East. However, my guess is the flags are not there as a joyful expression of national identity, but because of the rising temperature around the question of migrants in the UK. Reform, led by Nigel Farage is on the march, and my refugee friends from church who live in an “Asylum Hotel” not far from us will be feeling less safe and less welcome than they did.

I do not have any easy answers for this moment. Immigration policy is one of our most contested questions. What I do know is that the conversations us ordinary people have around it matter. We are increasingly locked in our echo chambers, hearing and sharing the stories that confirm what we already think. We believe the lie that this has to be either/or, us or them. Whether it is the dehumanisation of migrants themselves which is creating political cover for policies of deep cruelty, or the dehumanisation of people who are tempted by those politics, it never helps.

These kind of imperfect attempts at non-judgemental, empathetic conversations even around subjects which tend to trigger fear, anger and contempt in us can sound like appeasement. In fact, they are one of the only things we know are effective at shifting anyone, on anything. In the explicitly political campaign arena similar postures have been codified into what is known as Deep Canvassing and have astonishing results. Through my work as Chair of Larger Us I have had a tiny part in Climate Conversations, a project that is betting on the courageous conversations of ordinary people to shift the dial on the need for creation care.

The funny thing is, I am not primarily interested in changing anyone’s mind. I don’t have the temperament of a campaigner, don’t instinctively think that is my job. I am driven by encountering the other, truly, without my “impulse one” guard up, and seeing what happens. I am fully aware I may also be changed, and that feels like really living.

The posture Lewis calls us to, to “go out from the self” rather than stay in defence or attack mode is simply a more interesting place to be. I have come to believe it is the only way to hold onto my own soul. Dehumanising others is abrasive for our own humanity. And we are going to need our humanity, very much.

1. I have struggled to find a source to explain this for those unfamiliar which I think this person would not see as misrepresenting it. So this is a link to someone I know he respects explaining it. He was very clear that although it is often associated with Andrew Tate, Tate is not representative. For another source, this is what The Conversation has to say.