Misinformation, Humility, and Charity: How to Conference in Babel
Photo by Maxim Hopman on Unsplash
Who decides what is misinformation in a church? How can such judgments be made in a disinterested manner under conditions in which assets and budgets are at stake and trust is low among different parties?
This essay will discuss the question of ecclesial "misinformation" by drawing on the work of psychologist Jonathan Haidt and cultural critic Neil Postman. It will suggest that a proper response to deep differences currently facing a dividing United Methodism—and a divided Protestantism more broadly—must involve epistemic humility and a hermeneutic of charity. In a situation in which truth itself is contestable, a Christlike love for enemies must be our ruling impulse.
Our Fractured Reality
Last year The Atlantic ran a fascinating piece, "Why the Last 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid," in which NYU social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argued that Genesis provides the most accurate image possible to name the American cultural crisis of the last decade: "The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past."
From debates over vaccines to election questions, it seems obvious that many Americans inhabit drastically different worlds in which not only policies or ideologies are divergent, but the view of reality itself. What Haidt says of American culture is also true of the church in America. At least, it seems to be true in my corner, the United Methodist Church.
Most readers will be aware that there has been much consternation, infighting, and grief in United Methodist circles for decades. A release valve has been recently opened with the formation of the Global Methodist Church (GMC). Other churches have left to become independent, or to join networks of independent churches reminiscent of Acts 29. Not all of the roughly 2,500 disafilliations have landed in a new ecclesial structure, and some will remain simply independent.
Disaffiliation processes, however, vary from place to place depending on the culture of the conference and the munificence of its leadership. For at least a year there have been periodic and anecdotal charges of "misinformation" against the Wesleyan Covenant Association or GMC organizers seeking to persuade clergy and congregations to depart the UMC. What had been whispered in private or charged on social media has now become an official claim in some places. In Arkansas, three large UMCs were prevented from disaffiliating by the Annual Conference despite following the process fully, at least in part because of charges of "misinformation" that were brought from the floor. Now another annual conference has hit pause on all disaffiliations, citing similar concerns.
To be fair, I have personally heard accounts of what I would at best call exaggerations happening at some churches and gatherings when discussing disaffiliation. Hopefully, most churches who need them are having fair and open processes in which arguments for staying in and departing from the UMC are heard, in which both GMC and UMC leaders are allowed to make their case. I can think of a large church near me which has had numerous public meetings, for instance, and put all of their written resources and recordings online. This is how it should be, but it would be naive to think that everyone in every place is acting virtuously. It would also be naive not to recognize that leaders of both the GMC and the UMC—like politicians in campaign season—face strong incentives to exaggerate their claims in both private conversations and public venues. Further, few of us are likely as open-minded in these fraught debates as we would like to believe. The work of Haidt, again, is helpful here.
The Elephant, the Rider, and Why We Are All Lawyers
In his early writings, Jonathan Haidt became known for a simple but profound image for understanding how our moral reasoning actually works. In an oft-cited journal article, "The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail," Haidt claims that for all of our Western belief that we function as independent rational agents, coming to our own conclusions, research has shown something far different. "The reasoning process Is more like a lawyer defending a client than a judge or scientist seeking truth," he says. Put differently, intuition comes first and our conscious thought comes second. He refers to this in The Righteous Mind and elsewhere as the "Elephant and the Rider."
The elephant is our intuition, our emotionally-driven, pre-cognitive views on a whole host of questions. The rider is our rational, conscious thought, which sits on top of the elephant. According to Haidt, his and other research has shown that moral reasoning begins with the intuitive elephant mostly pre-loading—or at least heavily influencing—our beliefs and responses, and only then do our rational riders come up with post-hoc reasoning to defend them. This is why we are more like lawyers defending a client than scientists searching for truth.
This insight has helped me to appreciate the complexity of conferencing in today's Methodism. Similar to American culture-war debates about social policies, history, COVID, and elections, Methodists on different sides of our current division seem to inhabit completely different worlds. I have close friends and colleagues on both sides, and I often do not recognize how they describe one another, much less how they describe what is currently happening. And if you have ever sat through an extra long day of legislative work at an annual or other official conference, with tempers flaring while the air conditioning seems to be failing, you have no doubt thought, "This is going nowhere." We talk past each other, and both good argument and its polite cousin, kind conversation, seem impossible.
The Prophets Who Warned About Babel
Neil Postman's 1985 work Amusing Ourselves to Death has proven to be incredibly prescient of today's cultural and ecclesial crises. Following on the insights of Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan, famous for coining the phrase, "The medium is the message," Postman was a canary in the coal mine who attempted to warn us that new forms of media would damage our ability to reason together. Today many, if not most, Americans get their news packaged as entertainment. Postman saw a danger in this when there was no internet and only a handful of TV networks existed. He is worth quoting at length here:
What is happening here is that television is altering the meaning of 'being informed' by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation....Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information—misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information—information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing. In saying this, I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?
It is difficult to imagine a more apt description of our current state both culturally and ecclesially. We cannot adjudicate between ignorance and knowledge. Wisdom is not even in the discussion. What Postman could not know is that new media like talk radio, blogs, YouTube, podcasts, and social media would make it possible for people to get their information only from sources with which they already agree. I doubt Postman could have imagined a media situation so severe that some long-defeated diseases might return as public health crises, or that flat-earth theory would make a comeback. But who can distinguish conspiracy from reality in such a landscape? This is particularly the case when billion-dollar tech giants control the algorithms that determine what we do and do not see. (Watch The Social Dilemma on Netflix for more here.)
Faithfulness in the Midst of Babel
How, then, do we move forward? We do so with humility and charity. I have recently been reading some of Billy Abraham's work. From Abraham and his students I have learned two major lessons: First, the question of truth—in philosophy, the discipline of epistemology—is one we cannot sidestep. How we explore and defend truth is a matter not only of intellectual virtue but theological rigor and missional effectiveness. Truth matters. Secondly, how we seek the truth, and how we comport ourselves with those who possess a different understanding of truth, matter equally. Professor Abraham was renowned not only for his razor Irish wit and deep learning, but also his generosity to friends, students, and especially to his opponents. This is the sort of intellectual virtue we need today in the church, both humble in one's own estimation of the truth and charitable to those with whom we disagree.
It is an odd feature of current UMC debates that some of those most committed to pluralism—who are open to all sorts of divergent accounts of Christianity's message and practices—are also some of those most convinced that the present schism is an unalloyed evil. Bishop Willimon, for instance, recently criticized those who want a church where "things are fixed and final without debate," and yet he himself seems quite fixed in his views about what he terms the "Methodist divorce."
When I teach Christian ethics, I usually begin by having my students watch a TED Talk titled, "The Danger of a Single Story" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. In this lecture, the Nigerian author narrates her own experience of facing the "single story" of Western beliefs (read: stereotypes) regarding her culture. She also, in an act of intellectual virtue, narrates her own "single-storying" of others. It is an eye-opening lecture, for it forces us the viewer to see how we all view the other with reductionistic and self-serving narratives.
The story of our UMC division, like the story of our cultural divisions more broadly, is not a story of heroes and villains. It is a story of good people who have spent decades literally talking past one another, who often fear and thus distrust one another, and who also have sincere disagreements about ecclesiology, Christian morality, biblical interpretation, and a host of other matters. In such a setting, what is and is not "information" is going to be a highly contested question. Outside of serious evidence about unfair or misleading processes, we should thus exercise caution before accusing one another of misinformation. Calling each other liars is an unfruitful strategy when we are already unable to agree on the truth.
Conclusion: No Such Thing as Too Much Grace
United Methodist leaders often talk about the value of working together across differences. "Let's not be like the world!" they say. "The world divides, but we can be united." I don't wholly disagree with this sentiment. But the primary test of Christian virtue is not whether we can be united in our differences in good democratic fashion. The way of Jesus is far more radical than that. The test is whether we can sincerely love and pray for our enemies.
The more we exercise epistemic humility and interpretive charity now, the easier it will be to work together for God and with God's people when the dust settles. Our elephants predispose us to one position or another, and our riders can defend those positions and attack our opponents. We inhabit a world which cannot distinguish truth from fiction, in part because of divisive technology we have allowed to use us more than to serve our flourishing. And the more we hate each other, the more dollars the advertisers and pundits get.
Fortunately, we have a Lord who loved us even when we were his enemies. We worship a Savior who not only speaks the truth but is the Truth. In his good time, the church on earth and in heaven will be one, and denominational distinctions will dissolve in our shared worship around the throne of God. Until then, let us approach one another in humility and interpret each other's motives and actions with the maximum possible charity.
At the called Annual Conference to handle disafilliations in the North Carolina Conference, Bishop Leonard Fairley gave a beautiful, heartfelt homily. He described accusations he had faced, admitting, "It has also been said that I've done nothing to prevent this, that I've simply been too gracious." Then, in a poignant moment, he added, "Friends, I never thought there was such a thing."
In a fraught season, when reality itself seems contestable, it is impossible to be too gracious to one another. This may be idealistic, but for a people oriented to what John Wesley (following 1 John) called "perfection in love" it is not too lofty. May we so cling to Jesus Christ and trust the power of the Spirit that we stun one another with the grace we show not just to those in our tribe, but even to our enemies. This is the only way to be the people of God in the midst of Babel.
Drew McIntyre is an Elder in the Western North Carolina Conference and the pastor of Grace United Methodist Church in Greensboro, NC. He also serves as an adjunct instructor in the Department of Religion at Greensboro College. To read more from Drew, visit his blog: https://drewbmcintyre.com/.