With unflagging and unwavering hope in our civic life Michael Wear (Center for Christianity & Public Life) wants to renovate the character of Christian political engagement. He’s a former White House and presidential campaign staffer and his new book is called The Spirit of Our Politics: Spiritual Formation and the Renovation of Public Life. In this conversation with Evan Rosa, he reflects on what it means to seek the good of the public; the problem of privatization; what it means to be politically homeless and how to avoid angst about that; the meanings of political parties and how we end up fractured and confused when we look for an identity in them; he reflects on Dallas Willard’s epistemological and moral realism and its prospects for political life; and the virtue of gentleness and giving away the last word.
With unflagging and unwavering hope in our civic life Michael Wear (Center for Christianity & Public Life) wants to renovate the character of Christian political engagement. He’s a former White House and presidential campaign staffer and his new book is called The Spirit of Our Politics: Spiritual Formation and the Renovation of Public Life.
In this conversation with Evan Rosa, he reflects on what it means to seek the good of the public; the problem of privatization; what it means to be politically homeless and how to avoid angst about that; the meanings of political parties and how we end up fractured and confused when we look for an identity in them; he reflects on Dallas Willard’s epistemological and moral realism and its prospects for political life; and the virtue of gentleness and giving away the last word.
About Michael Wear
Michael Wear is the Founder, President and CEO of the Center for Christianity and Public Life, a nonpartisan, nonprofit institution based in the nation's capital with the mission to contend for the credibility of Christian resources in public life, for the public good. For well over a decade, he has served as a trusted resource and advisor for a range of civic leaders on matters of faith and public life, including as a White House and presidential campaign staffer. Michael is a leading voice on building a healthy civic pluralism in twenty-first century America. He has argued that the spiritual health and civic character of individuals is deeply tied to the state of our politics and public affairs.
Michael previously led Public Square Strategies, a consulting firm he founded that helps religious organizations, political organizations, businesses and others effectively navigate the rapidly changing American religious and political landscape.
Michael's next book, The Spirit of Our Politics: Spiritual Formation and the Renovation of Public Life, will be released on January 23, 2024. Michael’s first book, Reclaiming Hope: Lessons Learned in the Obama White House About the Future of Faith in America, offers reflections, analysis and ideas about the role of faith in the Obama years and what it means for today. He has co-authored, or contributed to, several other books, including Compassion and Conviction: The AND Campaign's Guide to Faithful Civic Engagement, with Justin Giboney and Chris Butler. He also writes for The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Catapult Magazine, Christianity Today and other publications on faith, politics and culture.
Michael holds an honorary position at the University of Birmingham’s Cadbury Center for the Public Understanding of Religion.
Michael and his wife, Melissa, are both proud natives of Buffalo, New York. They now reside in Maryland, where they are raising their beloved daughters, Saoirse and Ilaria.
Production Notes
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Visit us online at faith.yale.edu.
Michael Wear: The crisis is not that Christians are politically homeless. The crisis is that they ever thought that they could find their home in politics at all. Christians need to understand that if their public activity is not oriented toward the good of their neighbors and even the good of those that they consider to be their enemies, then their behavior, their activity is not Christian in its character.
Your vote, your political activity is not an unmediated, pure expression of your identity. That's not what politics is. We are trying to steward the limited influence we have in a way that's oriented towards love of neighbor. We are trying to will the good of our neighbors and our body politic, and that changes the emphasis from this expressive sort of therapeutic politics into something that is more limited, more right sized, and also, I think, more productive.
Evan Rosa: This is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. I'm Evan Rosa with the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. There's a paradox at play when it comes to Christianity and politics. It'd be easy to point out recent examples, but it's not new. I mean, one way of looking at it is that Jesus himself set it up in the Gospel of John.
Being fully in, but not fully of, the world has proven to be a tricky teaching to follow. We think Christian political witness should be pervasive, but not so pervasive that we become Christian nationalists. So we might correct from that maybe, back off, live a little more parochial private life, but not so privatized that we lose sight of loving the neighbor and the stranger.
So it's easy to go wrong on either of these prepositions: in but not of. To quote Al Pacino in Godfather III, "Just when you think you're not of, they pull you back in." So, will 2024 pull you back in, and if so, what's your plan for doing that well? With unflagging and unwavering hope in our civic life, my guest today, Michael Wear, wants to help renovate the character of Christian political engagement.
He's a former White House and presidential campaign staffer under the Obama administration. He recently launched a new think tank resource based in Washington, D.C. It's called the Center for Christianity and Public Life, and his new book is called The Spirit of Our Politics: Spiritual Formation and the Renovation of Public Life.
The book is an exploration and application of Dallas Willard's thought on spirituality and character to contemporary politics. Willard was a philosopher at the University of Southern California, a Baptist minister, and an author that brought the practice of spiritual disciplines back into vogue for a generation of Christians coming of age during the culture wars of the nineties and the aughts, and yet were deeply disconnected from historical Christian spiritual practices that might help to cultivate a flourishing spiritual life.
Willard taught us that grace was opposed to earning, but not opposed to effort. Willard is quite a deep well, and Michael Wear thinks we can learn and do a lot by exploring how Dallas's spiritual formation applies to politics today. In this conversation, we discuss Michael Wear's new book, The Spirit of Our Politics, including what it means to seek the good of the public.
Earlier in the conversation, I asked Michael to unpack his extended quotation of C.S. Lewis's poignant sermon, "The Weight of Glory," as the epigram of his book. This sermon is not often appreciated for its political implications. We talk about the problem of privatization. We consider what it means to be politically homeless and how to avoid angst about that.
Michael considers the meanings of political parties and how we end up fractured and confused when we look for an identity in them. We consider Dallas Willard's epistemological and moral realism and its prospects for political life. And we close with an essential but essentially lost virtue of gentleness, a characteristic that Dallas himself exuded.
Thanks for listening today.
Michael Wear, it's so awesome to have you back on the show.
Michael Wear: It's really good to be with you, Evan. Thanks for having me on.
Evan Rosa: I wanted to start by just giving a shout out to the Center for Christianity and Public Life that you've been building and give you an opportunity to say a little bit about the spirit behind that, what it's been like to build that, who it's for.
Michael Wear: Yeah, thanks so much. So we are in our second full year of operation. The Center for Christianity and Public Life is a national nonprofit, nonpartisan based in the nation's capital with the mission to contend for the credibility of Christian resources in public life for the public good. And we do that through two streams of work.
The first is that of Christian civic formation. We resource and convene a range of Christian civic leaders and Christians interested in civic life, from young professionals to elected officials. And the idea here is to form a community of Christians who are convinced that spiritual formation is central to civic renewal.
And then we advance work through a public imagination stream, which is basically a research think tank where we explain Christianity to the public and advance Christian resources for the good of the public. And, uh, the work is going great so far. We held our first summit last year. That was wonderful.
And we're heading off to a strong 2024, but yeah, folks can learn more at ccpubliclife.org
Evan Rosa: Beautiful. I think that phrase "for the good of the public" is worth honing in on. I think it's gonna help you launch into a discussion of your new book, to The Spirit of Our Politics. But, you know, when I first saw you use that, that phrase that "for the good of the public," I also thought, "Well, what about the common good?" Right?
Like every, like the phrase common good has been used prominently before. And there's kind of a, an appeal to the polis as a shared public space. But I like something about the formulation for the good of the public. One, you get a little bit of the emphasis on the good.
And I think this is going to tee things up for the discussion of the book because of the ways in which you are advocating for a more particularized and less privatized expression of concrete goods in public life that come through in, in the case of you and your work in the center, Christianity. And bringing the richness of every individual conception of the good into that public space is going to be an important aspect of that conversation for eventually getting to that point where, where we do encounter the good in public.
Michael Wear: I think we have some really like baseline assumptions that have to be addressed in public life, which is, as I talk about in, in, in the new book, this idea of both among Christians and the general public, that when Christians enter, uh, uh, the public square, enter politics, they do so as an act of, uh, as an act of imposition, not out of a spirit of loving service.
Christians need to understand that if their public activity is not oriented toward the good of their neighbors and even the good of those that they consider to be their, their enemies, then their behavior, their activity is not Christian in its character. And we, we, we need to be able to assert that now we can get into all kinds of nuanced discussions about, well, what I'm not saying is everyone must perceive every action that's done as for their, their good.
There are going to be differences about what, what the good is, but we're, we're talking here about an orientation of the heart that even if that changed, even if, even if the output didn't change at all--I think it would, I think it necessarily would--but even if the output didn't change at all, if the character of the output was such that there was a thought to, at least an attention to, what it means for the public, then I think not just our public life would be healthier, but also the church and questions of mission and questions of the public's perception of what Christians are here for would change a great deal as well.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. You start the book with a really wonderful epigram that is dear to me. I've, I can't count how many times I've read C.S. Lewis's essay, "The Weight of Glory."
I was struck and grateful I think that you began the book with this piece. And it's, it's, it's probably the centerpiece of that essay. If you have it nearby, I would love to have you read it.
Michael Wear: I would love to. This is from Lewis's "The Weight of Glory," and yeah, this is what I lead off the spirit of our politics with:
"It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare.
All day long, we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics."
Evan Rosa: I mean, that brings up so much for me. It must for you. I wonder if you can comment on why this decision and, and, and even as you read it now, what, what do you notice again?
Michael Wear: Well, the, the, the sort of new thing that just hit me is in light of these overwhelming possibilities is one of the quintessential sort of statements of hope that like that is that that to me is the distillation of what Christian hope does for the Christian's vision of the world.
The hope is in the Lord. But what hope rightly placed in the Lord does is it opens up possibilities for hope for a whole range of things. And so that, that word, that word possibilities is really, really interesting.
Evan Rosa: Um, I love this. It's, it's one of those phrases in that little quote that might've been, overlooked perhaps because we're going to focus on, you know, our conduct, you know, the, the, a creature that you're tempted to worship.
And yet those overwhelming possibilities are possibilities for each other.
Michael Wear: Yes.
Evan Rosa: It's for, it's for those creatures, those uninteresting and, and dull, in Lewis's words, creatures that we pass in our cars and as we walk into work and in the school pickup line or wherever it is that those creatures have overwhelming possibilities. And they are not merely neutral possibilities.
They take those individuals in particular directions and yet they are truly overwhelming, perhaps not only in their quality, but in their quantity. We, we don't yet know what will become of each other. So you attaching the word hope to it, I think is absolutely brilliant because it's, it's, it truly is a hope for future possibilities for, for even those that we might write off as uninteresting and dull at best, or, you know, a creature from a nightmare at worst.
Michael Wear: Yes, yes. No, I think that's exactly right. And so the spirit of our politics, one way to describe the book is it's an application of Dallas Willard's ideas to politics, public life. Very briefly, we've talked more about this, but Willard was a philosopher, taught at USC for decades, for a time was a chair of the philosophy department.
He was also a Christian author and teacher. One of the reasons why I focus on Willard in the book, in addition to just the profound personal impact he's had on me, is that I think people will be surprised to find not just how naturally the dots connect from Willard's teaching on spiritual formation to things like politics and public life, but how often he actually nodded and gestured and sometimes explicitly wrote in that direction.
And that's the reason why I picked this quote. I think, uh, "The Weight of Glory" is so wonderful, and it's talked about for so many reasons that I have found people just completely--I mean, Lewis couldn't make it any more apparent. It's what he ends the, the climax of, of, of the arguably of the entire sermon on all politics.
And yet I have never heard, whenever that's referenced in a sermon or in the talk, never heard, "Oh gosh. Isn't that interesting he included politics?" Or, "Hey, isn't it interesting that there's an entire chapter on politics in a, in his book called Mere Christianity? That, what does that suggest?" You know, it's so, one argument I make in the spirit of our politics is that particularly in the American context, we have placed politics either above the gospel or outside and irrelevant to the gospel.
Evan Rosa: Oh, very interesting. Yeah.
Michael Wear: When instead, politics ought to be within and under a broader, a broader vision of, of the gospel, of, of what Willard calls "our God breathed world." And this quote from Lewis does that as well as I could possibly hope to. Yeah.
Evan Rosa: That's right. It brings out the hope of the gospel as it relates to our neighbors in such a way that it's pervasive, like it truly does pervade through all of life.
And so this is maybe an opportune moment for us to talk a little bit about privatization, which would be the opposite of that pervasiveness, right? That we would compartmentalize that we would reserve a particular persona for one location, say in the way we deal with our children and another persona for our online lives, for who we might be from the pulpit or in a political debate or in the media, any countless other scenarios that pervasiveness we need to address in relation to privatization.
So I'm, I'm, I'm hoping you can kind of mark that problem and help, help explain what is the problem of privatization as you see it and what, what's the step at this point?
Michael Wear: Yeah. There are, there are a number of ways to talk about this. Let me take two approaches here. One would be the problem with privatization is that it doesn't reflect reality. It is what my former boss called "a practical absurdity" to expect that people of faith in this context in politics could leave their faith outside of the door when they enter politics.
And there's a reason why it's a practical absurdity because that's, that's not how faith works, that's not how the heart works, that's not how life works, and so we're, we're actually forcing ourselves and forcing people into a kind of disintegration, a kind of incoherence when we suggest or act as if, you know, there are these huge swaths of life in which the faith is irrelevant, in which, in which our deepest beliefs are irrelevant.
There's just the reality question. Um, there's, there's also, it's a matter of trust. And, and I, I find that so many people view politics, and this is how they're appealed to, politics is where you get stuff done. Politics is already corrupt. It's, it's secular. We have a secular politics. And so if you're going to, if you're going to think about politics at all, if you're going to interact with politics at all, um, go there to get what you need so that maybe you could be Christian in your own personal and private life.
And just what, I mean, there are so many problems with that, but one of them is that kind of logic doesn't stay contained or quarantined to politics, like that's just not how formation works. If you don't think, in this context of Christian formation, you don't think the way of Jesus holds up in politics, if you think it's impractical, or unwise, or not safe, then again, that has a whole range of public implications, but what I would want individual people to do, if I'm having coffee with someone who's, who's sort of talking in this way, you know, I, I'd want to explore what other areas of your life is following Jesus not a safe or wise thing to do?
What kinds of circumstances, you know, when the pressure is on, who is your teacher? And so as C.S. Lewis writes in that, in his chapter on politics, like very quickly, these political, you know, these political questions first sort of like draw you out, okay? If I'm trying to think Christianly about politics, the idea of loving your neighbor seems like a natural place to go.
But then Lewis writes, very quickly, the questions then turn back inward into, in my language and Willard's language, the kind of person you are. So, and then this sort of privatization makes whole life discipleship completely impossible. And just let me say one more, like, word on that. I think there's this idea, both individually and socially, that like, well, like, my life's a mess, the life of the church is a mess, let's get our own house in order and then we could attend to politics.
There have been all these books written this century, my dear late friend David Kuo's book, a number of other books that have come out more recently that have been like, you know, Christians have gotten it so wrong in politics. They need to withdraw from politics, get their own act together, and then maybe there could be like a re-emergence.
And what I want to argue is that no, formation doesn't work that way. You don't sort of like, well, I'm gonna like, I'm gonna like, get how I relate to my spouse right but leave the rest of my heart a mess. No, it all happens together. Like we're all, doesn't all have to happen at once, but you have to have a vision for the kind of person you're going to become, not sort of segment and silo off these various aspects of your life and think that there's going to be a coherence to that.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. It's what Anne Snyder might call the whole person revolution, right?
Michael Wear: Exactly. Right.
Evan Rosa: It's in our wholeness, right? We need to see the ways in which the different aspects of our lives are in fact influenced by other aspects. And, but then it becomes a very difficult challenge of just becoming who you are.
Michael Wear: Yes.
Evan Rosa: Who you could be. I want to ask though, about political homelessness in this context, because there's a kind of wandering. You know, I'm, I'm prone to bring up Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos on a regular basis. And so with, with apologies to anyone who's heard me say this too many times, but, but Lost in the Cosmos is this glorious experiment in, in language and discussion of the self.
He's talking about the modern condition, of course, but, but Lost in the Cosmos talks about a kind of an aimless wandering ghost that the self is wandering through the cosmos almost. And you might say that that's sort of cosmic universalized. We could ask it of ordinary life, ordinary common life, our everyday lives.
And, and when you bring in the political valence and start wondering, well, where is my home? And I know all sorts of people have turned to the phrase politically homeless kind of as a, a salve, like a, a kind of a bandage, maybe like a kind of recovery house of sorts, politically homeless. I don't need to stand with one of these parties.
It becomes a kind of comfort.
Michael Wear: Yes.
Evan Rosa: Come on in, in from the cold and you can stay politically homeless here.
Michael Wear: Right.
Evan Rosa: But then you point out, well, the problem was that we ever thought that politics might be our home in the first place. And yet. There is this, this very important question around, well, what is our identity?
Insofar as our home helps us to define ourselves and define our identity to become who we are, of course.
Michael Wear: Yeah.
What do we say about this phenomenon of political homelessness? I've, I've, I feel like I've been dying to ask you this particular question for years.
I think it's a really important question.
And I think I think you're absolutely right that for many people, it is, it's a landing spot and a mark of turning from sort of mistakes that they feel that they sort of made in the past. I want people to have a level of discernment about what this kind of talk means when it's coming from actual political actors, people who have been in politics for decades.
It's a platform building technique. Like these people aren't, aren't idiots. They see rising dissatisfaction with both parties. So people who were some of the most belligerent, hateful sort of presences in our politics, the very kind of people who made the arguments just a decade ago that there's only one right party, God only supports one party, all this stuff.
Now, now all of a sudden it's, it's, it's political homelessness for some, maybe there was as genuine a sort of change. For others I, I, it's, it's, it's, it's just more political marketing. And what I am trying to argue for, what I argue for in the book, is that all of this whether it's political homelessness or like this, putting people who, who have never volunteered at, at their local political office, not to mention held a political job, putting, you know, their party in their, in their social media bio or, or, or.
You know, their political party is one of the first two or three things that comes up when you ask, like...
Evan Rosa: ...who are you?
Michael Wear: It's this over identification with politics in general. Like the crisis is not that Christians are politically homeless. The crisis is that they ever thought that they could find their home in politics at all.
And political parties, in my view, we need to turn from seeing them as brands, as sort of identity statements. Now, right, the political interests are very clear. It's very helpful for political parties to position themselves as brands, to position themselves as, look, we are the arbitrators, so we sort of decide what the, what the views are.
Which, if you pay attention, changes all the time. So this idea that our political parties are these static, sort of airtight logic models is just, no, that's not what political parties are. Political parties are vehicles for mediating political difference. Not just between the parties, but within. And so if we are basing our identities, if we are basing our identities in political parties, no wonder why there's so much instability in our own, in our own identities.
We're being forced to argue for things. And take on as central to our identities, things that were completely contrary to what was being argued four years ago. If you are basing your identity in whatever your party is arguing at the time, you're going to find yourself with a pretty fractured identity.
Evan Rosa: I want to get to knowledge, and I want to get to Dallas Willard.
But before we go there, I feel like to round this out, something has to be said around, again, pervasiveness and political home, right? Because what you've just described is someone who, and this is not to, this is probably to caricature and stereotype at some level, right? Because of course, like to take Lewis seriously, they're creatures who I might bow before, but, but there are folks, there's a kind of person that we, I think we imagine whose world is politics.
It is pervasive in the sense that we were talking about, but perhaps what you say as like the fact that they have made their home there. Right, they, they really have kind of operated from it or from a political party as a home, right?
It seems like we are trying to find a distinction there between viewing our contribution to the good in compassion and service in public. We want that to be pervasive, and yet we need to avoid political homelessness on one side, and we need to avoid a kind of political idolatry on the other. Because I think what's lurking in the background here for me is Christian nationalism, where this is one way for your religious understanding to indeed pervade your politics.
Michael Wear: Yeah. If, if I could reframe slightly, please, I think the thing we need to avoid is angst about political homelessness. Like I think political homelessness is actually like a healthy, healthy thing. I think what I would argue is that it's most important to assert political homelessness when you feel some level of satisfaction or some level of comfort of like, "Oh, I know exactly who I'm going to vote for in the next election."
But I feel what Jamie Smith, the philosopher at Calvin calls ambivalence. He says that Christians' politics should be tinged with ambivalence. And I think that's exactly right. And that ambivalence is most important when we are most arduously arguing for a specific direction.
Evan Rosa: Miroslav Volf talks about being unreliable allies.
Michael Wear: Yes, that's exactly right. Instead, what we have now is political homelessness. It is a sort of assertion of none of the available options are good enough for me. I am sort of above what our political system has decided upon. And what I'm trying to argue for in the book is this idea that your vote, your political activity is not an unmediated, pure expression of your identity.
That's not what politics is. And your political expression is actually not about primarily your identity. We are trying to steward the limited influence we have in a way that's oriented towards love of neighbor. We're, we are trying to will the good of our, our neighbors and our body politic in politics.
And that changes the emphasis from this expressive sort of therapeutic politics into something that is more limited, more right sized, and also I think, uh, more, more productive.
Evan Rosa: Yeah, I think we need to go toward Dallas Willard. Dallas is maybe most well known for a few books like The Spirit of the Disciplines or The Divine Conspiracy.
And you did introduce him earlier as both a philosopher who was, who worked in phenomenology and ethics. And, and so he had his professional philosophical life, but he was also, I believe, a Baptist preacher, a pastor, as well as like a Christian author. He was writing books on spiritual formation at a time when the concept of spiritual formation to an evangelical audience really raised an eyebrow.
Michael Wear: Yes.
Evan Rosa: And so I would love to hear, you know, what's personally significant to you about Willard's legacy, why you think his philosophy and spiritual theology is relevant to political life today?
Michael Wear: Yeah, one of the things that's special about Willard, and he was not a perfect man. He is the last person who would have ever wanted sort of followers of Dallas Willard.
So I just want to be very sort of clear about that. And those closest to him are most clear about this. But, but, but, but what I would say is, um, I think in this moment in particular, for younger people, but, but I think there's a general need here, Willard is someone who was teaching and active in the, in the late eighties, nineties, the, the first decade of this century.
So the height of the culture wars, right? Never took his eye off the ball. No, no major controversy. There's, there's just this model of, oh, following Jesus isn't just a power play.
Evan Rosa: Yes.
Michael Wear: There are people who really believe these things.
Evan Rosa: That, that they do it for its own sake.
Michael Wear: Yes. Right.
Evan Rosa: That, that, that power play that you're referring to is definitely a means and kind of thinking. It's that instrumentalizing of faith.
And I think that's one of those things that we're really seeing happening is the instrumentalizing of Jesus in politics. So, you're bringing up, like, the fact that this is, no, the sincerity there. And that's what really does seep from the pages of any Dallas Willard, is sincerity.
Michael Wear: And I write in the book about, so you asked about sort of personal meaning, I mean, Willard, I was introduced to Willard's work at a really pivotal moment in my life, but, but Willard grew up in Buffalo, Missouri, and had a, had a difficult childhood. And I won't get into all the difficulties, but, but what his biographer Gary Moon sort of makes very clear in, in his excellent biography of Dallas, who was also a personal friend of his, um, is that Dallas's theology had an epistemological realism to it.
Dallas's childhood was challenging enough that he was not interested in a faith of platitudes, in a sort of, in a few lines of doctrinal certainty that, that don't actually have contact with real life. Dallas was the kind of person who thought, if this isn't real, I don't, I don't want, want any part of it.
And I am, I am similarly, I am similarly oriented. There's, you know, I came to faith, you know, reading Romans, you know, and that was the main message I got from Romans, which is I had thought religion was a crutch and all that stuff. And my, my point of view is you could read Romans, and you could reject the argument there.
Uh, you could reject the vision there, but you can't read Romans and then, and then say with any sense of earnestness, "Oh, there's no there, there in Christian." He argued the gospel, Jesus's gospel, was the announcement of the present availability of the kingdom of the heavens. That, that, uh, as he would say, eternity is now in session.
That we, that when Jesus talked about that we could have eternal life, he wasn't talking about the afterlife alone, but that we could, we could, as Paul says, take off the old self and put on the new self with its practices, which is being renewed in the knowledge of the image of its creator.
And so Willard has had this vision where the, the pinnacle of the Christian life is not when you, and as in my experience, a lot of sort of Baptists and evangelicals, the pinnacle of the Christian life is not when you raise your hand in the auditorium or say the sinner's prayer. And then it's all sort of like downhill from there. No, that, that's just the beginning. And in some ways, not even the beginning. And so that that's, that's been very, very meaningful to me.
Evan Rosa: Let's hone in on epistemological realism because that's going to tee us out to talk about moral knowledge and its disappearance.
I think the story is that Willard was working on, on a kind of longstanding project, The Disapp-, which is The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge when he, when he died and a few of his students picked up the project and I'm really, um, I'm blessed to know two of them, um, Steve Porter and Greg Ten Elshof.
And this project is so fascinating, and it became even more fascinating when you identified it as something that might apply well to politics. So, I'm wondering if you can give us a little bit of a primer on what Willard thinks about moral knowledge, why it's disappeared and, and why the attention on it to hope for its reappearance.
Michael Wear: Yes. So to be succinct, uh, the, the, the basic argument here is that in the post World War II era, gatekeepers of knowledge, by which Willard principally means academia but also others, decided as if and acted as if religious and moral knowledge did not count as publicly available knowledge, could not be taught publicly, not just as a matter of propriety, but that that it didn't count as knowledge.
And so, uh, this, this sort of moral knowledge at best is maybe for your personal life, maybe can be, can be helpful in developing sort of one, one's own personal decision making, but it's not something that, that could be, that is, again, publicly available. This has profound consequences because, of course, public decision making politics are, are, it requires and runs on moral assumptions, runs on some sense of what the, what the good is.
Evan Rosa: I mean, it has to be available to a public to be able to sufficiently debate, for instance.
Michael Wear: And right, Evan, that is both generally true. It is also, and this could be like, right, an entire conversation. I don't mean to be like too provocative here, but in a democracy, especially.
What are the, what are the democratic implications? If, if, if you hold the assertion that politics necessarily involves the moral, and yet you proceed down a cultural path in which moral knowledge is taken to not be publicly available, what does it mean to have a democracy? And what does it mean to have a functioning democracy that's supposed to be about deliberation?
And yet, what's been taken off is the explicit ability to discuss those moral decisions in a way that's grounded in some kind of authority. I think that underlies so much of the anxiety of our politics right now, which is that it's not that moral assertions have disappeared. I think we have a more moral politics than we've had in decades.
I think the nineties era concerns about relativism, which some continue to talk, yeah, no, relativism is gone. There are still people talking about it because they haven't sort of like caught up. But if, if you, I mean, you're on a college campus, relativism is gone. The anxiety is that we have a politics full of moral assertions but complete insecurity that these assertions have any basis in reality at all, that they're more than just, that they can be more than just assertions.
And that's a, that's a, that's a really, really difficult place to be.
Evan Rosa: Or that we might bring the tools of logic, the tools of discourse and discernment, careful thinking about these moral claims, right? It's, it's the, the kind of absolutism that we're observing is one which appears to be impervious to questions impervious to discussion or debate or wondering or considering possible alternatives. And And so it's, it's not even about re-establishing a kind of like certitude for the sake of sort of lambasting and exerting power.
It's really about creating what liberal democracy was made for and what a gift it is, right? To allow a pervasive presence requires this kind of liberal democracy in which we can question morally what holds water, what appears to be true, what appears, what we appear to know, or what appears to be just a falsehood.
I'll share a brief story, and this, this comes through a friend, Steve Porter, a mutual friend of ours and one of Willard's students. And really Steve picked up a lot of this conversation and The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge.
Michael Wear: And the executive director of the Martin Institute at Westmont College, and Steve's just a wonderful guy. Yep.
Evan Rosa: Yeah, which exists for the continued study of Dallas Willard. He once told me a story about a personal practice that Dallas had of when in debate, when receiving a kind of argument or question or criticism or skepticism, he would put his arms behind his back and just hold his hands.
Michael Wear: Yes.
Evan Rosa: That has stuck with me as this expression because I remember seeing him like that.
I've gone to talks with him standing in just that position and knowing that he was doing that to enter a peaceful mentality, a mode of reception and a mode of listening where he wasn't about to put his dukes up. That symbolizes a gentleness, that, that you, that you are trying to, to bring out in the spirit of our politics.
And we need a gentle politics. I'm wondering if you might close with just a few reflections on, on that.
Michael Wear: Yeah. So there's an entire chapter in The Spirit of Our Politics about gentleness and, and I wanted to dive right to the heart of I think people's like practical questions about politics. And you know, we have a politics that's full of language about hope, whether that language is, is, is sort of spot on or not is a question, but, but gentleness is something that we just head spin.
Yet it's, it's a fruit of the Spirit. I'm about to go talk about gentleness on Capitol Hill to Hill staffers. And there, I think there's real difficult practical questions they have to have. Like they're the, these staffers, like their boss wants them to get a statement out and they have to make a practical decision.
What I find really striking is people with no political responsibility outside of being a citizen saying, "You know, gentleness doesn't work in politics." And the question is like, what are you trying to make work? You know, like what, what, what are the pressures you feel? And I mean this sincerely, not as a rhetorical question, but what are the pressures you feel in your life that make you think that something other than gentleness is required in our politics?
And that's like a question to sit with. So this has been really important to me as well, this idea of Willard sort of folding his hands behind his back. You know, it comes out of the fact that he, he he's expressed significant regrets about his early pastorate.
And he, he, he reflects on in his sort of mind's eye, he could see and recall, you know, as he was trying to make a point, as he was trying to urge on his congregants to do what he thought the Lord was calling them to do. He, he has in his mind's eye, like, him sort of putting his hands on the podium and leaning forward and sort of using his, his, his body to, to try to elicit affirmative response.
And our politics is just full of that. That sort of like leaning over and trying to put this sort of pressure on people that has nothing to do with the content of what we're, of what we're actually like asking them to do, what we're asking them to vote for, what we're asking them to support. And we need to be very careful about that kind of manipulation.
But the other story I'll tell maybe to end with is, um, and I think this is very appropriate for our politics. This was near the end of Willard's teaching career. It wasn't in the first five years. It was, uh, uh, he would, he was teaching, and he had a friend who was sitting in on the class, someone who had known him for years.
And near the end of the class, a student challenges Dallas. They sort of have some exchange a bit. The student sort of continues to reject what Willard is, is, is saying. The bell, the bell rings, the class lets out, and Willard lets the class go, and after the students leave, Willard's friend walks up and says, "I, I've heard you dismantle the kinds of arguments that that kid has been making for, for years, you know, why didn't, why didn't you go and, and really just cut him down to size?"
And, and Willard responds, "I am practicing the discipline of not having to have the last word."
Evan Rosa: Yeah
Michael Wear: Practice the discipline of not having to have the last word, and see if that doesn't improve the character of your interactions around politics after a period of time. I dare listeners to, to test that for themselves.
And see what it does in your life when you decide that for a season, you don't have to have the last word, and things will be okay.
Evan Rosa: Thank you for that, Michael. And thank you for joining us. I see your project as just a continuation of that reclaiming hope, of just continuing to inject that into our public spaces.
And so I'm very grateful for your work. Very grateful for this book. Thanks for joining us.
Michael Wear: Thanks Evan.
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured Michael Wear, production assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, and Tim Bergeland. I'm Evan Rosa, and I edit and produce the show.
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