The Cave Writes Back

A follow-up to “I Was Wrong About Barack Obama”

Author’s Note: This is a follow-up to my essay 'I Was Wrong About Barack Obama.' It will make more sense with that context, though this essay can stand alone.

The essay went out and the cave wrote back. Five hundred comments and counting, which is not a number I have ever seen under anything I’ve written. I am grateful for all of it. I have also spent the better part of a week reading what amounts to a more comprehensive survey of motivated reasoning in action than I could have designed intentionally.

Two things kept happening in the comments that I want to address, because they are more interesting than they first appear.

A meaningful portion of the critical comments from the left accused me of racism — in some cases thoughtfully and with genuine reflection, in others with considerably less patience and tact. A meaningful portion of the critical comments from the right accused me of Trump Derangement Syndrome, liberal brainwashing, or some version of having recently seen the light the Democratic Party had been dangling in front of credulous ex-evangelicals like me. I am also a Communist sympathizer, per at least one reader. A f***ing racist, per another.

Same essay. Same argument. Two diametrically opposed verdicts.

I want to resist the temptation to treat that as simple vindication. It isn’t, or not entirely. But it is evidence. The original essay argued that tribal formation produces a reading apparatus that filters incoming information through pre-existing allegiance rather than through the text in front of it. The comment thread demonstrated this, without intending to, on the very essay making the argument. Fascinating. Jonathan Haidt could not have designed a better field study.¹ I say that not as a boast but as an observation about what the machinery really does look like when you get to watch it operate in real time.

So let me try to do what the first essay called for and apply the same scrutiny to myself and to the response.

I. On Being Called a Racist

Several commenters said some version of the same thing. What I described in the essay — the skin-crawling discomfort with Obama’s press-conference manner, the ambient readiness to believe unflattering characterizations of his motives, the sense that his competence was somehow suspect — was racism, whatever the theological packaging around it. The psychological framework, in this reading, was just a more elaborate version of the same thing. That was, obviously, lost on more than a few of these accusers.

I want to take that seriously rather than just dismiss it, though, because there is something true underneath it that dismissal would let me avoid. There is also something imprecise in it that the larger argument depends on.

What evangelical cultural formation did to my perception of Barack Obama was not the same thing as what individual racial animus does and treating them as equivalent actually lets the more serious problem off the hook. Individual prejudice is a character flaw with a clear moral address. It can be identified, confessed, and in many cases corrected. What I was describing is harder to account for because it is simply harder to see.

Here I need to be precise about something the original essay did not say clearly enough. For many within the evangelical formation I inhabited, perhaps for most, the discomfort with Obama carried a racial dimension I will not minimize or explain away. A tradition that has treated Black excellence with suspicion for a very long time, and that the community I was part of did nothing to interrupt, shaped how a great many of those people perceived him.² I believe that is true and it needs to be said plainly.

My own experience was different in a specific way that I failed to convey adequately the first time, and the comment thread made that failure clear. What made Obama dangerous in my worldview was not the fact of who he was but the ideology he represented, a worldview I had been conditioned to see as a threat to everything I believed was right and true. The skin-crawling was about what he said and how he said it — the precision of a liberal argument presented with calm authority — not the color of his skin or the syllables of his name. That is not a defense. A formation that generates ideological blindness and a formation that generates racial blindness are not unrelated; they share architecture, they reinforce each other, and they can produce some of the same results. But they are not the same thing and calling them identical by default forecloses the more serious conversation about what is actually happening inside each of them.

This distinction is important because it changes the diagnosis, and the diagnosis determines the remedy. The charge of individual racism, as rhetorically satisfying as it apparently was for some readers, actually protects the larger machinery by making the whole thing a matter of individual confession rather than broader structural examination. You fix a character flaw by fixing the individual. You fix a formation by examining the institution that produced it. Those are not the same project, not the same scale, and not addressed by the same tools.

I should also be precise about a second misreading that showed up across both sides of the comment thread. Several readers assumed this essay described a recent conversion — an evangelical Trump voter who had a road-to-Damascus moment and arrived here repentant. It doesn’t and I didn’t. I was a disciplined, principled conservative, theologically and politically, who considered himself careful in his thinking. If someone as attentive as I believed myself to be was still unable to see Obama clearly, the question of what that implies for those less careful in their worldview is in need of exploration. For most of those years I thought I was being true to scripture and to what was right. What I discovered, over time and not in any single moment, was that I had been true to a system. To a shadow.

That is the distinction the original essay was trying to draw. The deluge of comments helped elucidate why it obviously needed to be drawn more sharply.

II. On Having Simply Joined a Different Tribe

The most substantive critical response in the entire comment thread didn’t come from the left. It came from a reader who argued that the essay had “the vocabulary of wisdom without the stability of a compass.” I had diagnosed everyone else’s ideological capture without demonstrating any real belief of my own, had simply reversed my assessment of heroes and villains while calling it intellectual liberation, and a person who treats every strong belief as a symptom of tribal conditioning eventually has nothing left to stand on. Humility without something to actually believe, the argument ran, becomes amorphous.

That is a real challenge and a substantive one.

The reader is right that deconstruction is not, by itself, an intellectual destination. A person who has dismantled every inherited belief and replaced them with a perpetual readiness to dismantle the next one has not necessarily gotten smarter. They may have found a more sophisticated way to avoid committing to anything, at most. I have watched this happen in the post-evangelical ecosystem, where the critique of evangelical certainty sometimes produces its own set of certainties, where having deconstructed one’s faith becomes its own identity complete with its own in-group signals and its own immunity to outside challenge. Trading one dogmatic formation for another while thinking the second one is enlightenment is a real danger, and I want to expose it rather than pretend it isn’t there.

G.K. Chesterton, in his Autobiography, put the underlying demand precisely: “The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.” That is what the reader was asking for, and it is a fair ask.

So here is what I actually believe, stated as plainly as I can manage. All of the readership deserves that.

I believe the Sermon on the Mount describes a way of living in the world that cuts against the instincts of every political coalition I have ever observed, including the progressive ones, to some degree. All of them by their very nature. I believe Jesus was talking about something specific and demanding when he described mercy, peacemaking, and love of enemy, and that the tradition has been remarkably creative across the centuries in finding ways to avoid those implications. I believe the church’s responsibility to the poor and the vulnerable is not a policy preference to be weighed against tax rates but a constitutive feature of the faith, one that has been systematically buried under culture war priorities that were always more about tribal solidarity and power than about scripture.³

I believe a faith that cannot survive contact with history and honest, rigorous scholarship was never as solid as it claimed to be. And I believe what survives that contact is more interesting than what preceded it. That is, in a nutshell, deconstruction as I define it.

That is not a complete theology. It was never meant to be a complete theology. But it is a beginning of something, not an easy evasion.

III. On the Double Bind

Several other readers, from different directions, circled around a similar observation. Barack Obama was required to be the most capable person in any room he entered while performing as though he didn’t quite know it (the reasons for this will need to be explored in another installment), and the resentment his presence generated in certain quarters was inseparable from both requirements being simultaneously in play.

One reader asked the question directly: why does expertise function as a trigger for some people rather than a signal of competence? The answer isn’t simply that those people are anti-intellectual, though some surely are. The fuller answer is that competence, when it arrives in a body that certain rooms were not designed to accommodate, reads as aggression at a subliminal level. The professorial manner that made people in my former community uncomfortable was no affectation; it was the only available response to a perceived impossible set of conditions and the discomfort it generated had less to do with how he spoke than with what his presence in that office represented — competence, authority, legitimacy — none of which anyone in those rooms had granted him.⁴

Here again, the distinction from Section I applies. For some in those places the threat was indeed racial. For me it was ideological: a competent liberal presenting a worldview I had been trained to see as existentially dangerous, doing so with calm precision and no visible apology or hedging. That combination — the competence, the platform, the ideology — was what produced the reaction in me. Reducing it to racism may be emotionally convenient and easy, but it is reductionist in a way that forecloses the more uncomfortable examination. There are several logical fallacies available to people who prefer an easy verdict, and the reflex accusation of unacknowledged racism is one of them at play here.

I did not see any of this clearly enough while it was happening around me. I see it more precisely now. His manner made me uneasy. I should have asked myself earlier and harder precisely why.

IV. On the Record

The original essay argued that Obama is, by comparison, a qualitatively better president and a better person than Donald Trump. I said that clearly and I stand behind it. I fully realize this is a subjective claim and one that cannot be applied to consensus. What the essay did not do, and what I want to do briefly here, is apply the same consistent standard to his actual record that I was asking his critics to apply.

He oversaw an aggressive drone program that killed civilians, including at least one American citizen,⁵ with limited transparency and less accountability than the scale of the operation warranted. That is documented fact. His administration deported more people than any president before him, earning him the “deporter-in-chief” designation from immigration advocates who had previously supported his election. He bailed out the financial institutions whose recklessness triggered the 2008 collapse and did not pursue criminal accountability for the people who ran them. He entered office with congressional majorities and did not push as hard for single-payer healthcare as the political moment arguably allowed. His governance was more cautious in practice than his rhetoric suggested it would be, almost consistently, and the gap between the two disappointed a significant number of people who had taken him at his word.

None of that resembles the evangelical caricature of the man or his presidency. It also doesn’t look like sainthood. It looks like a complicated human being making difficult decisions under conditions most of us will never face, some of which were right and some of which weren’t, and nearly all of which were made with more intellectual seriousness and more basic decency than the current alternative has managed on his best days. There’s that qualitative difference.

Holding both of those assessments simultaneously is not a contradiction. It is actually the whole point. That the comment thread had difficulty holding them simultaneously, defaulting to either defense or dismissal depending on which team was doing the reading, is precisely what the original essay was about.

V. What the Response Taught Me

Those who read the original essay will remember that its central image came from Plato — the prisoners in a cave who mistake the shadows projected on the wall for reality, and the difficult, disorienting work of turning toward the light. Getting out, I argued there, is not an event. It is a practice, slow and ongoing and never entirely complete.

Here is what the comment thread added to that argument. Every reader who showed up to that essay brought a lens. The evangelical formation I described is one kind. The progressive certainty that appeared in portions of the comment thread is another. The person who knew in advance what any essay about race and religion was going to argue, before reading a word of it, was operating through a lens. So was the person who knew in advance it was a liberal hit piece. Pretending otherwise; pretending to observe the world from nowhere, from pure reason unmediated by formation of any sort is not enlightenment. It is just a more sophisticated version of the same error the original essay was describing.⁶

The honest question is not whether you have a lens but whether you are willing to examine it, and whether that examination will actually change what you see in some way. Most of us already know the answer to the second part of that question, and most of us don’t ask the first part often enough.

Several readers from the ideological left told me, in various registers, that they could not forgive me because I was doing nothing to stop the damage the current administration is causing. I understand the frustration behind that and I honestly want to resist the temptation to return the question — to ask them what precisely they are doing and whether ideological alignment by itself constitutes action. Because ideology doesn’t do anything on its own. It positions the opposition as the enemy. It generates the language of the in-group. It points you in a direction. But it does not, by itself, move anything or say anything. What I am doing here — saying something, in public, with my name attached — is a choice to do something with what I have, which is words and a readership and a story that is apparently more common than I knew. It may not be enough. It almost certainly isn’t enough. I am not the right person to judge that. But it is not nothing. And the argument that confession without revolution is worthless would disqualify most of the important writing that has ever actually changed anyone’s mind. I know I don’t need to cite examples.

More than one reader also asked what the turn looks like in practice — not the essay about it, but the actual life. What comes after the admission, the confession? What is actually being built here?

I am still working out the full answer, which is what I said in the original essay and which remains true. What I can say is that the question I am trying to ask now is different from the one I was asking before. Before, the question was whether the person or argument in front of me fit the categories I had already established. The question I am trying to ask now is whether my categories are adequate to the person or argument in front of me. See the difference?

That is a seemingly small change in orientation. It turns out to rearrange a great deal more.

One final observation. The fact that five hundred people felt strongly enough about an admittedly long essay on theology and politics to type a response tells me the conversation is not finished and that more people are doing some version of this reckoning than the ambient noise of our public life would suggest. I did not expect the original essay to travel the way it did. I did not expect to be called two opposite things for writing it. Both surprises point toward something significant.

The cave is crowded. More people are turning toward the light than you would ever know from the loudest voices in the room. I choose to take some encouragement from this observation.

Notes

¹ Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon, 2012). Haidt’s central argument is that moral judgment is driven primarily by intuition, with the rational mind serving largely to justify conclusions the intuition has already reached. His moral foundations framework — care, fairness, loyalty, authority, purity, and liberty — describes the different moral vocabularies across which political and religious cultures diverge, and goes a long way toward explaining why the same essay can generate diametrically opposed readings from different audiences.

² Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity (Simon & Schuster, 2020). Jones, founder of the Public Religion Research Institute, documents through survey data and historical analysis how white Christian identity in America became entangled with racial hierarchy, arguing that white supremacy is not a corruption of American Christianity but a constitutive feature of its dominant expressions. His work provides the empirical grounding for claims about what evangelical formation did and did not interrupt in the communities it shaped.

³ Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (Liveright, 2020). Du Mez traces the decades-long transformation of white evangelical culture from a theological movement into a cultural-political identity organized around militant masculinity, nationalism, and tribal loyalty — a transformation that made the evangelical embrace of Trump not an aberration but a logical conclusion of a seventy-year project. Her account of what displaced the Sermon on the Mount in evangelical priorities is the most thorough available.

⁴ The performance demands described here have a long intellectual history in accounts of Black life in America. W.E.B. Du Bois identified the underlying dynamic in The Souls of Black Folk (A.C. McClurg, 1903): “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” The specific constraints Obama operated under — performing competence while not appearing to know it, never visibly angry, never unguarded — are Du Bois’s double consciousness made visible in a modern political context.

⁵ Anwar al-Awlaki, a dual American-Yemeni citizen, was killed in a CIA drone strike in Yemen on September 30, 2011 — the first American citizen deliberately targeted and killed by his own government in the modern era without trial or judicial review. His son Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, also an American citizen and sixteen years old at the time, was killed in a separate strike two weeks later, on October 14, 2011. The Office of Legal Counsel memo authorizing the targeting of American citizens overseas was released only after FOIA litigation by the ACLU and the New York Times. See Charlie Savage, Power Wars: Inside Obama’s Post-9/11 Presidency (Little, Brown, 2015).

⁶ Dan M. Kahan and colleagues at Yale Law School’s Cultural Cognition Project have documented extensively that people process empirical information — including scientific evidence and policy arguments — through the lens of their cultural worldview rather than through neutral rational evaluation. The effect Kahan calls “identity-protective cognition” is not a defect of intelligence; higher scientific literacy correlates with greater polarization on contested empirical questions, not less. See Kahan et al., “The Polarizing Impact of Science Literacy and Numeracy on Perceived Climate Change Risks,” Nature Climate Change 2 (2012): 732–35.