An Interaction

On Tuesday and Thursday mornings I teach an 8:00 am logic course. Because my classroom is inside the library, and the library does not open until 7:30 am, I often sit in the faculty lounge and read over my notes to prepare for that morning’s session.

The past few weeks I’ve gotten to know a co-worker who is often in the building around the same time that I am. We say hello and periodically check in on each other. This past Thursday, she came in and asked me if I had seen the news about Portland, Oregon. I hadn’t, of course, and then casually offered how Portland is a great town that I’ve visited a handful of times.

Her response surprised me – she described a city that had descended into chaos and anarchy – a city governed by “brainless liberals” who not only had the audacity to feed people without restriction, but to also decriminalize illicit drug use, among other things.

Given that it was not yet 7:30 am in the morning, I wasn’t quite sure how to respond. My initial strategy of “say nothing” was immediately cut off when she asked me my opinion about the “issues” in Portland, and I responded by suggesting that whatever the facts on the ground are, that addressing drug use, the unhoused community, or those who are hungry, required a multi-faceted approach rooted in the basic recognition of our common humanity and the realization that solutions will likely be complex and take time to render.

Not only was I then accused of being a “brainless liberal” (and stupid too), her next line of attack (because attack is what it felt like) was to suggest that I didn’t know what I was talking about because, among other things, I lacked personal experience.

Apart from the fact she knows very little about my personal or professional experiences, I encouraged her to avoid personally attacking me, as reasonable people can disagree without denigrating our shared humanity. I suggested that a person could draw from their personal and professional experience when thinking about how to approach societal issues, but she simply scoffed and started to walk away.

At some point in the discussion I offered that one reason I do not, for example, believe in drug testing people in order to receive food benefits, is because of my religious convictions. She seemed to pause here, and offered up that she too was religious – Roman Catholic. In all the strangeness of this messy conversation, this point stood out to me when I was reflecting on it later that day.

A philosophical thought

If I approach a problem bringing to bear the resources of science (whether social or otherwise), there is some sense in which the content of those discourses are more easily accessible. Assuming, for example, an economic analysis is rigorously carried out (i.e., as much bias is reduced as possible, the variables are meted out and carefully considered, etc.), the appeal to the logic of that science is, unless one denies the possibility of factual discourse altogether, approachable and accessible by a wide audience (at least, there is no pre-requisite that requires belief first in the possibility of economics, nor is there a corresponding claim in the non-possibility of economics).

But religious discourse seems different. In one sense, we hear the notion that religious beliefs are and should be private – economic discourse, for example, is publicly and communally accessible. What an economist might consider in private (in terms of theory) is made publicly available as an alternative for action. But in religious belief, what is interior is apparently meant to remain disclosed only to the self. Except that in practice, this is not the case.

I regularly hear, across the spectrum of Christian theological belief and practice, a call to put one’s faith into action, a call to publicly express or impose on society at large, through voting for example, interior or even community specific religious beliefs. What this means, in a practical sense, is that if one’s religious community compels its participants to use their religious sensibilities (or argue for the adoption of the values of that specific religious community) in the public sphere, then those specific religious communities cannot be surprised when religious leaders and believers who express alternative religious convictions do the same thing.

This presents us with at least two considerations: one, are religious beliefs and practices solely private (or are they publicly oriented in the same way that economic ones can be), and two, if religious considerations are to, categorically or conceptually speaking, have the same weight as any other knowledge domain, then how do those religious worlds interact with non-religious (i.e., secular) considerations? I am careful to note that I am not suggesting that the self is functionally dissectible between the various forms of knowledge (or ways in which we are) to the degree that a person can only express themselves in one way or another. I am not making or excluding metaphysical claims. What I am reflecting on are the ways that we attempt to make sense of our activity in the world, such as it is.

In the western context, secularity is often conceived as the solution to addressing the religious question. And yet, there is good reason to see secularity as more or less a competitive ideology, at least when it comes to the question of religious beliefs and practices (or what might even be thought of as a religious way of being).

There is much, much more to be said here. And, all of this flooded my mind when I offered to my co-worker that my religious habitus is at least a very significant part of what informs my belief that people should be fed or housed first, free of any restriction that might otherwise prevent them from being seen first as fully human (that requiring, for example, a drug test before receiving food benefits is counter to my religious and, therefore[?], political) sensibilities.

If my coworker found this unpersuasive, she didn’t say one way or the other – but it did effectively end our discourse, that, and the fact that it was time for me to head to class and try and persuade 25 or so first year college students of the effectiveness of truth tables in discerning validity in deductive arguments.

Come to think of it, my early morning conversation was probably the easier task.