Episode 11: Finding Common Ground in Uncertainty

This episode is about coalition — and I want to be honest, right at the start, about something difficult. The people whose manufactured certainty has been weaponized against my son are not, on the whole, people I find easy to approach with generosity. I am not writing this from a sense of serene magnanimity. I’m writing it with the practical awareness that we won’t find a solution unless we find common ground.

A faith coalition is essential to finding that common ground. I’m not asking religious people to leave their convictions at the door. I’m asking them to do what the best thinkers in every tradition have understood is required: to offer their neighbors public reasons their neighbors can actually assess. I draw on John Courtney Murray and Reinhold Niebuhr, and on the prophetic tradition — the Black churches, the affirming congregations, the synagogues — that manufactured certainty tends to erase.

I tell the story of difficult community conversations in Saline, Michigan, and of what worked and what didn’t. Leading with the argument doesn’t work — it triggers a threat response. Leading with the relationship does, because when someone already cares about you, the evidence of your humanity doesn’t have to argue its way past the amygdala. It’s already in.

And I get concrete. In 2017, my hometown’s school district found language that could hold more of the community than the language of culture war could — two principles almost no parent could reject: the safety of every child, and the dignity of every student. That is what common ground looks like. Not agreement — coexistence under shared principles.

Transcript

Episode 11: Finding Common Ground in Uncertainty

This episode is about coalition — and I want to be honest, right at the start, about something difficult. The people whose manufactured certainty has been weaponized against my son are not, on the whole, people I find easy to approach with generosity. I am not writing this from a sense of serene magnanimity. I’m writing it with the practical awareness that we won’t find a solution unless we find common ground.

The coalition has to be built on a shared commitment to evidence, to democratic norms, and to the dignity of every person. It has to include people whose faith and political ideologies we do not share. A faith coalition, in fact, is essential to finding that common ground. 

The most common objection I hear to the argument I have been making is some version of this. You expect people to leave their religious convictions at the door when they enter a public debate and that simply can’t be done.

Let me address this objection directly, because I think it obscures what I am arguing. I am not asking religious people to leave their religious convictions at the door. I am not asking them to pretend their faith does not shape their moral intuitions, or their sense of what their community owes its most vulnerable members. I’m asking them to do what the best thinkers in every tradition have understood is required: when public policy and legislation is at stake, arguments must be backed up with logic and reason — not a person’s strongly held beliefs. 

This distinction is not foreign to religious thought. It is at the center of the most sophisticated religious political philosophy in the American tradition. 

John Courtney Murray, the Jesuit theologian who shaped the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Religious Freedom, argued that a pluralistic democracy requires its citizens to justify their political claims in terms accessible to all citizens — not only to those who share their faith. That was not a concession to secularism.

Reinhold Niebuhr, the Protestant theologian who shaped American public theology for most of the twentieth century, was similarly insistent. The proper role of religion in public life, he argued, was to provide the moral seriousness and the critique of power that public life requires — not to impose particular theological conclusions on people who do not share the theology. Niebuhr was one of the most politically engaged religious figures in American history, and one of the most insistent on the limits of what religion could legitimately demand of a pluralistic democracy.

You can believe, privately, that your tradition is the one true path. That is your right. But when you walk into a legislature, you have to offer your neighbor reasons your neighbor can evaluate critically and universally, whether they share your faith or not.

These are not arguments against religion’s public presence. They are arguments about the form that presence should take. They call for the kind of religion that speaks to the conscience of the powerful on behalf of the vulnerable — the prophetic tradition — rather than the kind that speaks on behalf of the powerful to suppress the claims of the vulnerable. The kind of religion practiced by Black churches that embrace the social gospel, the inclusive and affirming congregations and synagogues — the ones that manufactured certainty tends to erase.

The question I am putting to religious communities in the current moment is which of those traditions they are choosing. And the prophetic tradition is not a marginal one. It is the Black churches organizing voter registration in states restricting the vote. The mainline communities offering sanctuary to immigrants. The UCC congregations declaring themselves open and affirming to LGBTQ families. The Jewish communities organizing legal aid for transgender people whose rights are being curtailed. These are substantial communities, and they represent a genuine theological tradition that manufactured certainty about religion and politics tends to erase.

I want to tell you about a specific conversation I had in Saline, Michigan. Saline is a small city in Washtenaw County. Predominantly white, predominantly middle class, with a significant evangelical Christian community. In 2019 and 2020, a series of incidents in the Saline Area Schools — racist language directed at Black students, LGBTQ students reporting hostile environments — produced a community conversation that was contentious and difficult. I participated in some of it.

What I observed in Saline was the full range of responses to the evidence. People who denied the incidents represented a systemic problem. People who acknowledged the incidents but resisted the conclusions about structural factors. People who engaged honestly and arrived at conclusions they had not held before. And people — some of them among the most committed Christians in the community — who brought their faith explicitly to the question and arrived, through that faith, at a commitment to equity and inclusion more durable than what secular organizing alone could have produced.

The lesson I took from Saline is not that religion is the answer or that secular organizing is insufficient. It is that the coalition capable of addressing manufactured certainty has to be broad enough to include people who arrive at the same commitments through different routes — and that dismissing the religious routes is both theologically arrogant and politically self-defeating.

There is, within Christianity itself, a rich tradition theologians call apophatic — negative theology — which approaches God not through affirmations about what God is but through acknowledgment of what God exceeds. Thomas Aquinas drew on it. Meister Eckhart built on it. It runs through Jewish mysticism and Islamic Sufism. Many of the deepest spiritual thinkers in the world’s major religious traditions have understood that authentic faith requires something very close to what I am calling the embrace of uncertainty. That faith is not what I am arguing against. What I am arguing against is the certainty that has been politically and institutionally engineered to maintain hierarchies of power. That kind of certainty does not represent the best of religious tradition. It represents its corruption.

The Black Freedom Movement is, for me, the most powerful demonstration available of what happens when people of faith insist on that distinction. Ella Baker. Martin Luther King Jr., Coretta Scott King, and their children. John Lewis. Rosa Parks. Bayard Rustin. Fannie Lou Hamer. Andrew Young. The Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray. Jesse Jackson. These were deeply religious people whose faith was the engine of a commitment to human dignity that was, simultaneously, fully compatible with democratic pluralism and the scientific spirit. 

King’s vision of the Beloved Community — a world in which, as he put it, our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation — is not the vision of a theocrat. It is the vision of someone who had internalized the uncertainty that authentic faith demands — that your own tribe is not, in fact, the final measure of moral worth.

Coretta Scott King understood the principle did not yield at the edge of any group’s comfort. The same dignity that insisted on the equality of Black Americans logically required the equality of LGBTQ Americans. She was right.

Here is something I have learned, after years of doing this work. The communities most capable of building genuine coalitions across difference tend to share a specific quality. Call it a high curiosity quotient. They hold their convictions with real moral seriousness while staying open to the evidence that arrives through the lives of people different from themselves. It is not a coincidence that the congregations most likely to stand alongside transgender families are also the ones with the longest traditions of theological inquiry — of wrestling with the text rather than deferring to it.

Curiosity and solidarity turn out to be related. When you are genuinely curious about another human being — when you approach their life as evidence to be taken seriously rather than a problem to be resolved by a pre-existing doctrine — coalition becomes possible. When you are not, no amount of organizing can manufacture it.

And the inclusive church, at its best, knows something purely secular movements sometimes don’t. For millions of Americans, the language of justice is most powerfully articulated in a religious register. The Letter from Birmingham Jail is not only a political document. It is a theological one — its appeal to a law higher than human law, its indictment of the white church’s cowardice, its insistence that the moral universe has a direction. Scientific Rebellion needs both languages. It needs the rigor of evidence and the fire of prophetic witness.

Let me be concrete about what finding common ground actually looks like, because I have spent years trying to do it. What doesn’t work — leading with the argument. When you approach someone whose political and religious identity is organized around manufactured certainty with a stack of evidence that contradicts their certainties, you are not having a conversation. You are triggering a threat response. The person does not hear your evidence. They hear an attack on their identity. They respond with defensiveness, dismissiveness, or anger. The evidence, no matter how compelling, has not been processed. It has been rejected at the gate.

What works — leading with the relationship. The most consequential conversations I have had about my son’s existence have not been with strangers at political rallies. They have been with people I already had some relationship with — neighbors, colleagues, relatives — who were given the opportunity to encounter my son not as a political symbol but as a person they already, to some degree, cared about. When someone already cares about you, the evidence of your humanity arrives differently. It doesn’t need to argue its way past the amygdala. It is already in.

This is why visibility matters. It is why pride parades and public testimony and books like this one matter. Not because they change everyone’s mind — they don’t — but because they make it possible for people already in relationship with LGBTQ people to integrate that knowledge with their political choices. The research on this is consistent. Knowing an LGBTQ person personally is among the most reliable predictors of support for LGBTQ rights. The relationship precedes the evidence, and the relationship makes the evidence receivable.

The same principle applies to race and to every other form of dehumanization. The civil rights movement’s most powerful strategic insight was not the legal briefs, though those were essential. It was the decision to make the suffering of Black Americans visible to white Americans in ways that could not be dismissed — to make the evidence of shared humanity impossible to ignore for people who were already, at some level, capable of recognizing it.

The people who are not capable of recognizing it will not be reached by visibility or evidence or relationship. They are anchored in a certainty that the recognition of that shared humanity would destroy. They are a minority. The strategy of Scientific Rebellion cannot be primarily aimed at persuading them. It has to be aimed at activating the much larger number of people who are already, somewhere, capable of recognizing the shared humanity they are being asked to deny.

Those people exist. They are, in most polls, a majority. They oppose book bans. They support access to medical care. They believe people should be treated with dignity regardless of gender identity or race. But they are not, for the most part, activated. This is the gap that Scientific Rebellion exists to close.

Reverend William Barber’s Poor People’s Campaign, which he relaunched with Reverend Liz Theoharis in 2018, is one of the most significant attempts to build exactly the kind of coalition I am describing. Broad-based. Explicitly connecting racial justice, economic justice, LGBTQ equality, immigrant rights, and environmental justice as components of a single moral and political project — grounded in both prophetic faith and empirical evidence. Its analysis is that these are not separate issues. They are manifestations of the same underlying structure: the use of manufactured certainty about who deserves rights to maintain hierarchies that benefit the few at the expense of the many. That is the argument of this book, stated in the language of the prophetic tradition rather than the language of engineering epistemology. The language is different. The structure is the same.

Barber has documented, in The Third Reconstruction, the long history of interracial, interfaith coalitions in the American South that challenged the racial hierarchy well before the civil rights movement — coalitions white Christian nationalism worked hard to suppress. That history is itself a resource. It shows the alliances Scientific Rebellion needs have precedents. They have been built before. They can be built again. The Moral Monday movement Barber led in North Carolina — which brought thousands of people to the state capitol every Monday for months, representing religious communities, LGBTQ organizations, labor unions, civil rights groups, and environmental advocates — proved that fusion politics can be built in practice, not only in theory. It changed the political landscape of a state Christian nationalism had claimed as its own.

I want to tell you a story about what common ground actually looks like in practice. In 2017, the Dexter Community Schools district in my hometown was navigating the I Am Jazz controversy and the broader question of how to support LGBTQ students. The administration did not retreat from the commitment it had made. But it also understood that the community contained people with deeply different views, and that the path forward required finding language that could hold more of the community than the language of culture war could.

What eventually emerged — through many meetings, much difficulty — was a framework organized not around ideology but around two principles that almost no parent, whatever their theological convictions, could reject. The safety of every child. And the dignity of every student. Not the approval of every identity. Not the celebration of every family configuration. Simply the commitment that every child would be safe at school, and that no child would be subjected to humiliation, harassment, or exclusion based on who they are.

This is common ground, and it is not nothing. It does not resolve the theological disagreements. It does not ask people to abandon their certainty about what God designs. It asks them to agree that whatever their certainty, it does not authorize the harm of children in their community. And it asks the school to be the institution that protects children from that harm — not by deciding theological questions, but by maintaining the basic conditions under which all children can learn.

This is a limited victory. It does not protect transgender children in states where the law has been weaponized against them. It does not change the minds of people who still believe my son’s identity is disordered. But it protected my son, in his school, during the years when he most needed protection. And it did so by finding language that spoke to the values of people who did not share my theology or my politics. That is what common ground looks like. It is not agreement. It is coexistence under shared principles that are not derived from any particular theology. It is, in the oldest sense, democracy.

The challenge of Scientific Rebellion is to extend that coexistence — that shared commitment to evidence, to safety, to the dignity of every human being — from the school district level to the state level to the national level. It is the challenge of making the limited local victories into the framework for the next period of American democracy. I am not sure we will succeed. I believe we have to try.

And the actual organizing is worth describing concretely. The manufactured certainty movement is successful, in significant part, because it is organized at the local level in ways most people do not notice until the consequences are already felt. School board elections attract turnout of less than twenty percent. Candidates backed by Moms for Liberty and aligned organizations have flipped school boards in dozens of communities by organizing a few hundred votes in elections most people did not know were happening.

The response is not complicated — it is difficult, but not complicated. More people have to show up. Run for school board, or recruit someone who understands the evidence on inclusive education. Attend the legislative hearings, because when the only people who testify on a bill restricting gender-affirming care are affiliated with that movement, lawmakers hear one side of the evidence.

The other side has been organizing at the school-board and statehouse level for fifty years. They understand that the daily experience of a transgender child in a public school is decided in a room of nine people on a Tuesday night, and that the legal architecture constraining those nine people for the next generation is decided in Senate confirmation votes the public mostly does not watch. They understand both ends of that pipeline. Everyone who opposes them needs to understand both ends too.

None of this is glamorous. But the decisions that determine the daily experience of real children are made by real people in actual rooms at actual times. Scientific Rebellion is the commitment to be in those rooms. We won’t find common ground if we don’t.