Understanding the role of faith in disagreement
John Inazu's book explores what happens when our deeply held commitments clash
This is my second post on John Inazu's book Learning to Disagree: The Surprising Path to Navigating Differences with Empathy and Respect, which was released April 2, 2024. The first post is here. Inazu teaches on criminal law, law and religion and the First Amendment at Washington University in St. Louis. He is an expert on religious freedom. And he is a senior fellow with Interfaith America. He writes on Substack at
.In March, I went through Mustafa Suleyman’s The Coming Wave.
In February, I went through Nick Troiano’s The Primary Solution.
In January, I went through Michael Wear’s The Spirit of Our Politics.
The book of the month schedule is here.
“Men hate each other because they fear each other. They fear each other because they don’t know each other. They don’t know each other because they can’t communicate with each other. They can’t communicate with each other because they are separated from each other.” - Martin Luther King, Jr., September 2, 1957
John Inazu's book Learning to Disagree tells us to look for ways to have healthy, life-giving conflict. This, he argues, is disagreement that takes place slowly: in the context of relationship, over time, where it can be encased in trust and bracketed by friendship-building.
One of the key elements to Inazu’s relational approach, he argues, is to recognize the important and central role of faith in every person's life.
"Everyone has faith in something — we all choose a path that rules out other possibilities and implicitly stakes our lives on one faith claim or another" (82).
"When we recognize that everyone places their trust in some kind of faith, we can more easily relate to those around us," he adds. "Even though our actual beliefs and commitments may differ, the uncertainty and vulnerability that come from acting in faith can remind all of us or our shared human condition" (96).
The Law and Faith
Inazu grounds this chapter in his experience of teaching a law school class on Law and Religion.
He explores "how and why the law makes distinctions between different expressions of faith" (82).
He goes through examples of a "Neo-American Church" deemed to be "full of goofy nonsense" (83) by a judge. He agrees with the judge's assessment but also stipulates that our views of what is true religious commitment and what is "goofy nonsense" are highly conditioned by our cultural views and norms.
He also reviews the Supreme Court's rulings in 1940 and 1943 on attempts by members of the Jehovah's Witnesses to exempt their children from reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools. In 1940, the court ruled that the children could not refuse the pledge, and the decision prompted an outbreak of violence against Jehovah's Witnesses across the country.
In 1943, the court reversed itself after the Jehovah's Witnesses proposed a pledge they would be willing to recite that did not elevate government law above the precepts of their religion.
Inazu uses this history to talk about the ways that our religious symbols and rituals are deeply important to us as individuals. He also believes symbolic acts and deeply held values are important to "sustain our collective American identity" (90).
That collective identity is under serious strain these days. That's at the core of the concern in Inazu's book. We can't disagree productively, and much of our disagreement is over competing values and beliefs that often don't come down to plain and simple facts.
MLK spoke of separation by racial segregation, which led to a lack of communication, and then to fear and then to hatred.
Americans are separated from one another today by multiple other forces, but one of the biggest is the fracturing of media and information sources into echo chambers, where too many hear only what they want to hear.
Coming together, however, is not enough, Inazu says. We must understand that to come together will mean navigating the ways that our most deeply held and cherished sentiments and commitments clash with one another.
"The challenge for each of us is to leave room for others to render the respect or dissent they deem appropriate without insisting that our loyalties become theirs" (93) he writes.
Can you avoid insistence?
Inazu brings this point home by sharing how his own sentiments overlap with those of the Jehovah's Witnesses.
Inazu is a former Air Force officer who was working in the Pentagon on 9/11 when a hijacked airliner hit the other side of that massive building. He is also the son of Japanese-American father who was born in an internment camp during World War II, where his American citizen grandparents were incarcerated for three years simply because of their ethnic heritage.
This, along with Inazu's deep religious commitment to Christianity, informs Inazu's attitude toward how he behaves when the national anthem is played at a sporting event, or when the Pledge of Allegiance is recited at a political event.
"I no longer swear oaths. I don't even pledge allegiance to the flag or put my hand over my heart during the national anthem," he writes. "I still stand at attention — as a veteran, I think it's important to honor the significance of these solemn occasions. I just don't want to give them too much significance" (92).
This is also where I've landed on these things in recent years: I too stand at attention during the national anthem but don't place my hand over my heart, and I don't usually say the pledge of allegiance at public events. My reasons were somewhat similar, but I also grow uneasy whenever I suspect we are elevating performative acts over and above authentic faith or devotion.
Our "collective identity" or unity, then, depends on whether we can "recognize that some of your friends and neighbors lack the intensity or even the directionality of your own loyalties." At that point, he says, we can "aspire toward a kind of patriotic unity that does not depend on uniformity" (93).
I had a little difficulty understanding how the legal analysis of faith and law applies to disagreements in our personal life. But Inazu seems to be encouraging friendships and conversations that recognize the role of faith — religious and otherwise — in all of our lives, and how it informs our political, cultural, and identitarian commitments and habits.
"You will likely find that encouraging greater honesty about differing beliefs leads to more authentic relationships," he writes.
The role of modesty
And finally, recognizing the role of faith means approaching disagreement with self-awareness.
“Your normative beliefs are not neutral views that everyone assumes to be true,” (110) Inazu writes.
In other words, we too often assume that it’s those other people who are irrational, or who are making assumptions based in superstition or leaps of logic.
But seeking, finding and building healthy disagreement means looking for the ways in which we are undergirding our own seemingly impenetrable or foolproof opinions with beliefs or faith.
The person who believes in plotting cabals of elites has faith that wrongs can be righted by overthrowing the elites and using a strong man to smash their hold on power.
Conversely, there are those who believe in our rules-based order, even if they may acknowledge its flaws and shortcomings. They have faith that this is the best system, and that to trash it would lead to ruin for the very people who have been hurt most by the system's failures to date.
Part of this requires that we acknowledge that none of us sees the fullness of reality perfectly.
"Whatever the truth of the world may be, it's not fully my truth, and it's not fully yours" (138) he writes.