I got my first run in today after two months off. It was refreshing in that I was finally moving beyond the pain, but it also gave me that runner’s high oxygenation that lifts my spirit and fuels my thoughts. My wife and I decided a change of lockdown venue was in order so we relocated to New Mexico (after completing and checking our ballots in Arizona, I will note). My run took me up into the local mountain range and around an iconic rock formation. A coyote was sniffing around the trail until I spooked him. Some things are constant across the West, including the numinous sense of peace and calm that overtook me while I recovered under some trees and watched a few fanned-out contrails slowly drift in the high winds.
The fragility of American democracy keeps coming up in the run-up to tomorrow’s elections. Hostility, disinformation, legal actions, disruption, and general uncertainty have overtaken what was once a fairly simple process (Florida in 2000 notwithstanding).
Richard Just wrote a long-form piece in The Washington Post Magazine titled How Religion Can Help Put Our Democracy Back Together, though the title is shockingly more certain than the actual article that rebuilding is possible. Here are some of the ideas that Just circulates:
- If we were all a bit more attuned to the great mysteries that religions promote we would be more humble in our political engagement.
- Perhaps our shift away from religious involvement means that we instead idolatrously attach to political leaders.
- We have become obsessed with politics and lost the sense of inner peace that religions can provide.
- Religious communities are trust building, unlike other kinds of community involvement. If we lean into those communities maybe the political ones will follow suit.
- And related to 4, religion might be able to overcome some racial and identity politics by focusing on a higher truth (despite what many see as the opposite in many religious groups).
The opinions of religious leaders cited by the article are wide-ranging and some very skeptical, partly because they see their own institutions as flawed. Just also dips into some social psychology in the hopes of teasing out why religion and authoritarian ideas have seeming resonance. And in this area I think he might find some traction. While we know religious faith can seemingly bind together with authoritarian perspectives, there are some intriguing studies that appear to show how specific religious values can shape positive social outcomes.
For instance, in Rowatt and Franklin’s 2004 paper, Christian Orthodoxy, Religious Fundamentalism, and Right-Wing Authoritarianism as Predictors of Implicit Racial Prejudice, the researchers at Baylor found that strongly held religious commitments to acceptance and compassion could actually reduce implicit prejudices, but only when faith commitments were internally focused rather than externally focused. That is, when the Christians in this study had internalized and modified their own behavior through some kind of self-analysis and critique in the face of religious study (the authors suggest that observing role models in their religious communities might be a key consideration). The actual measurement scale was a Christian Orthodoxy Scale—Short Form that inventories an individual’s agreement on Christian concepts. That scale was combined with other questionnaires for assessing internal versus extrinsic religious foci.
And, after the dust settled, Right Wing Authoritarian attitudes continued to correlate with implicit racial prejudice and religiosity but, if disentangled from Christian Orthodoxy via factor analysis, the better internalized Christian beliefs resulted in reduced prejudice.
This is interesting! The authors conclude with:
As the etiology of implicit prejudices become better known and understood, models for implicit-prejudice reduction should be developed and implemented. One step in this process could be simply to make people more aware of the implicit prejudices they hold. Another integral step will likely involve allowing people to develop their own autonomous reasons for being less biased […]. Given the patterns in this study, it is possible that implicit prejudices could be reduced by autonomously internalizing inclusive Christian teachings and minimizing authoritarian processes
Hallelujah! Some good news after all. But it hardly needs to be a specifically religious focus. It seems any kind of ethical system that involves the formation of autonomous reasons for reducing bias would be felicitous to the general cause of reducing racial prejudice and, hell, maybe even the tendency to dehumanize others, whether in the political sphere or on the international stage.
This is, of course, what more liberal religious traditions have focused on for years. But, also, it is the essence of a cornerstone of liberal democracy that is currently under siege; expanding rights and opportunities is not a zero-sum game insofar as all parties internalize autonomous ethical reasons why it is a net good.