Thank you for writing so eloquently and thouhtfully in these two essays. I haven't read the comments on the first essay yet, but I sure hope there was another thread in that first set which you simply didn't call out in your followup essay. My hope is that I'm not the first to wish you simply this:
Good luck on your intellectual and spiritual journey, and godspeed in your philosophical travels. May your journey be filled with enough intellectual rigor to keep you uncomfortable, but enough certainty about Truth to keep you at peace.
Hi! I want to thank you for the original post and this follow-up. It made me become a subscriber.
I think the truth, which is almost never black & white, makes all sorts of people uncomfortable, on all sides. That is really the beauty of your words.
We live in a country that is factually less literate than it needs to be to not fall into patterned, social thinking. If the rise of the internet has taught me anything in 30 years it is that free-thinkers are not the majority.
We are sold ideas through community, schools and our families. Most of which are from perception, not fact. I grew up on the opposite side as you, and while the hippies were objectively more right than the extreme right, they did not fear or push hard enough on the radicalization and growing “holy war” being waged in some American churches.
Jesus Camp was one of the scariest and most alarming documentaries I ever watched. Those children are now adults. While I may have grown up off the grid, with organic home grown vegetables, I was also given books, access to real information and no rose colored glasses. I also chose to attend various churches and youth groups.
Not a single person told me HOW to think. I was given tools to learn to think.
Thank you for writing these out and for your willingness to care and engage with people in good faith (in the public square!). Not sure if you’ve come across the terms of reflexivity and positionality, but Plato’s cave reminded me that these also present another framework of how we move through the world with our / others’ perceptions - although perhaps more interpersonally.
I think that these two essays have highlighted a very uncomfortable truth that, depending on who is the beholder, you are often a hero or a villain. A small but relevant example, I had an experience last year at a wedding in Europe where I met another American who assumed that I had voted for Trump (very much did not) before they even knew my name. They didn’t care to ask because they didn’t want to know, I don’t think. People are angry, and hurt, and suffering, and sometimes you are someone’s villain because they need you to be, a caricature to reinforce perceptions and create certainty (as an institution, the white evangelical church wields this viciously). When people turn out to be more complicated than what we want because otherwise it doesn’t allow us to make neat sense of things, we are threatened and it all can rapidly devolve into cruelty, of which there is no shortage of examples, as you note.
Your descriptions of the separateness of ideological versus racial tensions I think is an important, but perhaps still entangled, notion. This is entirely based off of my personal experiences and not well researched whatsoever, but I’m not entirely sure they’re wholly separable, just in thinking about how people and religion behave, and how religion and ethnic / race diversity morphing into persecution, prejudice and racism is hardly just an American or Christian phenomenon. Regardless, I was a teenager in the Obama years and deeply immersed in evangelical life, and Obama was literally called the antichrist, a mantra employed to drive people into fearful submission to whatever the church wanted. I understand the distinction that you’re making between your previous disdain for Obama being ideological versus racially motivated, but within the evangelical circles that I was raised in, the tactics involved were indistinguishable from one another. Individual and structural racism and Christian nationalism are obviously entwined, so as much as I’d like to think I didn’t absorb racist messaging alongside the ideological, the honest truth is I most certainly did. The churches were in the SBC, after all. Anyhow, not a statement so much as a thought on how we perceive others and why, and how our environments shape our minds.
I do hope to God I haven’t brought suffering onto others, though again, I most certainly have, much as I want to deny this. And how in my current circumstances now, moving through the world as an American — not even considering race, gender, socioeconomic class, etc. — but just being born in America, I am a benefactor of the suffering of countless other people, and hold a variety of accesses that others will never have. One of the hardest parts of living, I think, is trying to reconcile that you are, in fact, someone’s villain, regardless of having the best of intentions. And how to navigate that with those you’ve hurt, and within yourself. Something I think about quite a lot now, in thinking about what it means to be a Christian.
Shawn -
Thank you for writing so eloquently and thouhtfully in these two essays. I haven't read the comments on the first essay yet, but I sure hope there was another thread in that first set which you simply didn't call out in your followup essay. My hope is that I'm not the first to wish you simply this:
Good luck on your intellectual and spiritual journey, and godspeed in your philosophical travels. May your journey be filled with enough intellectual rigor to keep you uncomfortable, but enough certainty about Truth to keep you at peace.
Thanks for reading! Over 500 comments and counting on the I Was Wrong About Barack Obama essay.
Hi! I want to thank you for the original post and this follow-up. It made me become a subscriber.
I think the truth, which is almost never black & white, makes all sorts of people uncomfortable, on all sides. That is really the beauty of your words.
We live in a country that is factually less literate than it needs to be to not fall into patterned, social thinking. If the rise of the internet has taught me anything in 30 years it is that free-thinkers are not the majority.
We are sold ideas through community, schools and our families. Most of which are from perception, not fact. I grew up on the opposite side as you, and while the hippies were objectively more right than the extreme right, they did not fear or push hard enough on the radicalization and growing “holy war” being waged in some American churches.
Jesus Camp was one of the scariest and most alarming documentaries I ever watched. Those children are now adults. While I may have grown up off the grid, with organic home grown vegetables, I was also given books, access to real information and no rose colored glasses. I also chose to attend various churches and youth groups.
Not a single person told me HOW to think. I was given tools to learn to think.
Thank you so much for reading and subscribing!
Thank you for writing these out and for your willingness to care and engage with people in good faith (in the public square!). Not sure if you’ve come across the terms of reflexivity and positionality, but Plato’s cave reminded me that these also present another framework of how we move through the world with our / others’ perceptions - although perhaps more interpersonally.
I think that these two essays have highlighted a very uncomfortable truth that, depending on who is the beholder, you are often a hero or a villain. A small but relevant example, I had an experience last year at a wedding in Europe where I met another American who assumed that I had voted for Trump (very much did not) before they even knew my name. They didn’t care to ask because they didn’t want to know, I don’t think. People are angry, and hurt, and suffering, and sometimes you are someone’s villain because they need you to be, a caricature to reinforce perceptions and create certainty (as an institution, the white evangelical church wields this viciously). When people turn out to be more complicated than what we want because otherwise it doesn’t allow us to make neat sense of things, we are threatened and it all can rapidly devolve into cruelty, of which there is no shortage of examples, as you note.
Your descriptions of the separateness of ideological versus racial tensions I think is an important, but perhaps still entangled, notion. This is entirely based off of my personal experiences and not well researched whatsoever, but I’m not entirely sure they’re wholly separable, just in thinking about how people and religion behave, and how religion and ethnic / race diversity morphing into persecution, prejudice and racism is hardly just an American or Christian phenomenon. Regardless, I was a teenager in the Obama years and deeply immersed in evangelical life, and Obama was literally called the antichrist, a mantra employed to drive people into fearful submission to whatever the church wanted. I understand the distinction that you’re making between your previous disdain for Obama being ideological versus racially motivated, but within the evangelical circles that I was raised in, the tactics involved were indistinguishable from one another. Individual and structural racism and Christian nationalism are obviously entwined, so as much as I’d like to think I didn’t absorb racist messaging alongside the ideological, the honest truth is I most certainly did. The churches were in the SBC, after all. Anyhow, not a statement so much as a thought on how we perceive others and why, and how our environments shape our minds.
I do hope to God I haven’t brought suffering onto others, though again, I most certainly have, much as I want to deny this. And how in my current circumstances now, moving through the world as an American — not even considering race, gender, socioeconomic class, etc. — but just being born in America, I am a benefactor of the suffering of countless other people, and hold a variety of accesses that others will never have. One of the hardest parts of living, I think, is trying to reconcile that you are, in fact, someone’s villain, regardless of having the best of intentions. And how to navigate that with those you’ve hurt, and within yourself. Something I think about quite a lot now, in thinking about what it means to be a Christian.