Defusing religious conflict

So I have these six kids, and I want them to be able to understand and respect other people, and I have to figure out how to help them do that even in a world where people habitually get mad at each other over subjects they feel strongly about...especially religion. That means I have to help them understand the underlying metaphors of religion, which I introduced in this post. (If you haven't read that post then you won't understand this one.)

Let me just say before I start that I'm using gross oversimplifications here, and that I'm using extreme cases to illustrate my distinctions, not because I really think everybody's that extreme. It's exactly the same as with something like the Meyers-Briggs test: there's a spectrum, and some people are obviously out on one end or the other while other people are kind of in the middle and hard to place, but the guys explaining how J and P are different (or whatever) use extreme examples just to make sure you understand what they're talking about.

Also, I can speak from within the Fact perspective naturally, but when it comes to the Family and Therapy perspectives it's like I'm talking a foreign language that I've tried very hard to learn but in which I'm still not really fluent. And I don't try to address the Superstition perspective at all because I have had no luck at all in figuring out where you guys are coming from...I don't even begin to understand you and I am certainly not going to try to explain you because my explanation would be downright slanderous. If you guys who are native speakers of the Family and Therapy metaphors can provide better illustrations than mine, that would be very helpful to me when I'm trying to help my kids understand you guys better than I presently do myself. Just remember that they need to be relatively extreme illustrations in order to make the distinctions clear, even though most of you probably aren't on the extreme edges of any of the positions.

Another important caveat: Most of us actually have a dominant metaphor and a secondary metaphor, for example; few of us work entirely from a single, monochrome perspective. I can try to separate out the metaphors so that you can see how they work, but in real life, you'll find that they exist in individuals mostly in combination. That's part of what makes each person so gloriously unique. Most Kazakhs are going to have a Family orientation, but you may find that some Kazakhs have a relatively strong undercurrent of Therapy subordinated to the Family theme, while others have a relatively strong undercurrent of Fact; and the result is two different flavors of Family orientation. My Kazakh friend Gauhar was entirely justified to complain that her experience is more "multilayered" than I made it sound once when trying to explain Kazakh attitudes toward religion to a group of prospective adoptive parents. If you want to understand any particular individual, you almost always will have to mix at least two of these metaphors together, though in my experience there's always one that dominates the other. To assume that, because a person's primary metaphor is Family, he therefore places no value on Fact, is a bad idea. I'm presenting "pure" orientations because I'm trying to illustrate the metaphors themselves. Please don't think there are very many people in the world who work utterly from within one of these metaphors without any influence from the others.

Finally, what I'm wrestling with in this series of posts is religious conflict -- how do I keep my kids out of unnecessary conflict situations involving religious misunderstanding? It's sort of a common assumption in Therapy-dominated America that you get conflicts when you have Fact people who disagree with each other, but I have become convinced that that's a misread of the situation. For example, I maintained a close and highly valued friendship for years with a Tunisian Muslim who also came from a strongly Fact-oriented perspective, though his was Muslim. I even sent my wife to Tunisia to attend his wedding (I tried desperately to make arrangements to go and couldn't; so my wife went instead). Najmeddine and I disagreed about a lot of religious perspectives; we talked long into the night; each of us cheerfully tried to convert the other and prayed for the other. And hey, I'd've been insulted if he hadn't -- he was pretty sure I was going to hell, so what kind of friend would he have been if he hadn't tried to keep that from happening? I was honored and grateful that he was willing to spend effort praying and working for my conversion. This is not the reaction a Family- or Therapy-oriented person is likely to have when they find themselves "in the crosshairs of a soul-hunter looking to get another notch on his Bible," to use a vivid image from my college days.

My Kazakhstani friends Marina and Gauhar would get along great, despite being Orthodox and Muslim respectively, because they're both Family-oriented. But Najmeddine and I also got along great, and we are Fact-oriented Muslim and Anglican respectively. And I get along so well with my very Fact-oriented Roman Catholic friends that I just finished helping them put on a retreat at St. John Neumann's in Austin, despite not being Roman Catholic; and most of my kids' godparents are Southern Baptist who insisted on long discussions about the validity of infant baptism before agreeing to serve in that capacity, because they also care very much about Fact; and yet despite our disagreements we are devoted to each other. Religious disagreement -- even if you are someone that the average American would label a "fundamentalist" based on your beliefs -- doesn't need to involve disrespect or preclude affection.

And yet the conservative and liberal branches of the Episcopalian church can hardly speak to each other, and the majority of people I know who say that religious tolerance is important to them can hardly manage to speak the word "fundamentalist" without a sneer, and that's not even mentioning the Catholics and Protestants in Belfast...so how do I help my children defuse conflict like that instead of inflame it?

I've thought about this for years, and I've come to think that religious conflict and bitterness and hatred isn't particularly associated with any set of beliefs. It seems to me that when I see people getting angry about religion, almost always one of four things is happening:

1. Frequently, I'm talking to someone who has been badly hurt in a way that they associate with religion. If, for example, I grew up with viciously hateful parents who also happened to be thoroughgoing religious hypocrites, then my reaction against my parents is also going to be all tied up with my reaction to religion in general and my parents' religion in particular.

2. You have somebody who has taken up religion as a tool they can use to pursue selfish, self-aggrandizing goals. The traditional English hatred of Roman Catholicism arose originally out of the English conviction that the Pope was a tool of the French and Spanish kings and was delivering his "religious" verdicts (such as which royal marriages could be annulled and which couldn't) purely with an eye to helping the French achieve domination of England. The English only came to love Protestantism because they first loved freedom, and came to see the Pope as the enemy of English freedom. And most of us who grew up in congregationalist churches have seen our share of nasty internecine fights...I remember one lady in my childhood church years ago. Whenever this lady said, "Now I say this in a spirit of love..." everybody ran for cover 'cause she was about to launch a mercilessly savage attack against some person whom she thought was gettin' uppity and interfering with her ability to make sure the church followed her own personal rules (e.g., "We don't invite colored teenagers to our church 'cause they should stay in their own churches where they belong").

3. In many cases religion has come to be associated with some other, essentially non-religious, source of conflict. For example, the past fifty years of Polish history have pitted an atheistic regime imposed by foreigners, against the will of the Polish people led by the Church, and any Pole will tell you that Communism really ended in Poland when the Pope came home in '79. So it would now be a daunting task indeed to try to get an ordinary Polish dockworker to be able to separate in his mind Poland, Solidarnosc, and the Catholic Church. (If you aren't familiar with the history-changing events of 1979 then you simply must read Peggy Noonan's "We Want God," the best short explanation I've seen of what happened in those astonishing two weeks.) Or, to return to a previous example, the mutual hatred of Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland has very little to do with Catholicism and Protestantism per se, except insofar as they are historically associated with English occupation and Irish subjugation.

4. And when we get past all of these yet still have anger and bitterness associated with religion, what I have realized I almost always find, is a clash of metaphor. It's not that people with different dominant metaphors have to clash; obviously CCCP's local coordinator Marina and I work together and love each other and admire each other even though she's Family and I'm Fact. I really want to emphasize this, because for the rest of the post I'm going to be talking about religious conflict, which is an unpleasant topic, and I don't want it to sound like I think religious conflict is everywhere you look. I'm just saying that when you do find two people hating each other over religion, and the problem is really religion (not personal trauma or conflicts of ego or some non-religious issue wearing a religious mask), you always seem to find a clash of metaphor.

And that's why I'm struggling so hard to find ways to teach my children how to get outside their own metaphor at least long enough to understand their friends and neighbors rather than knee-jerk clashing with them. I don't want them to miss out on friends like Marina or Aigul or Aliya or Gail over nothing more than misunderstandings arising from clashing metaphors.

Okay, just a few weeks ago I was talking to my Sunday School class of junior-high girls, who come from a religious tradition with the Fact metaphor but who attend public schools dominated by the Therapy metaphor, and this whole subject came up because they were concerned about taking flak if they were to express their religious opinions publicly. And I'm sitting there trying to figure out how to explain this whole concept of underlying metaphor to these kids.

What I wound up doing is this: I assigned two of the girls to do an impromptu skit, where I gave them the roles and the situation but left them responsible for the dialogue and emotions. The situation was that a mother was trying to convince her daughter to attend their son's/brother's wedding. But the daughter was refusing to go, because she believed it was absolutely true that her brother was making a bad mistake.

They did a very good job with the skit, I thought. They were both very convincing...the daughter saying, "I don't want to be there and watch him ruin his life and pretend like I think it's a good idea," and the mom saying, "It doesn't matter whether you think it's a good idea or not -- he's your brother, and you should be there."

Then I told them to do the skit again, only this time the mother was trying to convince the daughter that she should support her brother's decision to maintain his heroin habit, because whether she thought he was making a mistake or not, he was her brother, and she should loyally support him. And they absolutely couldn't do it -- the whole room dissolved in giggles. They literally couldn't even try to act out what seemed to them to be such a ridiculous situation.

Then I tried to explain to them that, if you come from a background where Family is the dominant metaphor, then deciding to convert out of your family's religion merely because you think it's true that your family's religion has its facts wrong, seems to your family like refusing to go to your brother's wedding merely because you think it's true that your brother is making a big mistake. What does it matter? Maybe he's making a mistake, maybe he isn't, but he's still your family and by God you go to the wedding. But if you come from a background where Fact is the dominant metaphor, then deciding to stick with the family religion even after you've decided it isn't true, is at best like continuing to believe in a flat earth because that's your family tradition. Is cocaine good for you or not? That is a question to be settled without reference to whatever your family may traditionally have believed about the benefits of cocaine. Do you go to your brother's wedding or not? That is a question to be settled without reference to your opinion about whether your brother is making a mistake or not. But which kind of question is the question of what religion you should follow?

To put it another way, the Family perspective fosters a strong sense of the moral obligation to be loyal -- as my friend Gauhar put it, "I don't see how doing what your parents want is just a family loyalty. It is a girl's religious and moral duty to follow her mother." Do you see that "family loyalty" is, for Gauhar, something that ought not be downplayed by calling it "just a family loyalty" or "mere family loyalty" as if other things were more important?

By contrast, from the pure Therapy perspective, there is no particular religious or moral duty to follow your parents' religion unless it works for you personally. And from the Fact perspective, the primary moral obligation is honesty, not loyalty, and while you do have a duty to obey and respect your parents as long as they are not ordering you to do something immoral, following a religion that is false is immoral and is one of the things you can't do even if your parents command you to. "Anyone who does not hate his father or mother is not worthy of me," said the paradigmatically Fact-oriented Jesus, and while he was using rhetorical hyperbole to make a point, there's no doubt that his point was that the truth is so more important than family loyalty that in any conflict between the two family loyalty ought to be completely irrelevant -- if it takes you longer to snap your fingers than it does to set aside the family loyalty that's standing in the way of living the truth, then you are not yet where you ought to be. And that's a collision of fundamental metaphor, made deliberately violent by Jesus' deliberately shocking phrasing. If you're a pure Fact-oriented person trying to understand a pure Family-oriented person, you have to understand that they feel as strongly about the non-negotiability of family loyalty as you feel about the non-negotiability of speaking and living the truth...and if you're a pure Family-oriented person trying to understand a pure Fact-oriented person, you have to go the other direction.

So I know a lady my age whose mother, long before my friend was born, converted to Christianity from Judaism, on the grounds that Christianity was true (having clearly, at some point, moved from her inherited Family orientation into a Fact orientation, acquired I don't know whence). As a result, naturally my friend grew up with her mom's adopted Fact orientation. But her Jewish grandparents and aunts and uncles were still firmly in the Family orientation. And my friend thought it was just so incredibly bizarre that her grandmother would tell her, "You know, if your mother had converted because she was marrying a Christian boy, that would have been okay; but to convert just because she thought Christianity was better, that was just such an insult." She thought her grandmother was a very nice and sweet lady, but sort of crazy, because why in the world would you be fine with it if your daughter underwent a "hypocritical" conversion to a religion she didn't believe, but would be infuriated by a conversion that came out of "honest conviction"? But of course to convert to someone's religion because you're joining their family, makes obvious sense if religion is about Family...a conversion like the fiance's conversion to Greek Orthodoxy in My Big Fat Greek Wedding would make perfect sense to my friend's grandmother but seems somehow awry from the Fact perspective. So all those years my friend thought her grandmother just had something in her head that apparently didn't work right; but in reality her grandmother's reaction makes perfect sense, given her grandmother's way of perceiving and experiencing religion.

So that's an example of a person from a Fact perspective not being able to understand somebody from a Family perspective, even though they knew them well and loved them a lot.

Now here's a similar but opposite situation, again having to do with a Jewish conversion to Christianity. In this case, I knew a girl in college who converted to Christianity from Judaism, purely because she decided that the evidence was that Jesus had, in historical fact, risen from the dead and was actually the Messiah. I am NOT taking a position on whether this is a good reason to convert; I'm just saying that's why she made that decision. I knew her well, and I can tell you that she was very proud of being Jewish (this probably is making little sense to some of Jewish readers, but just trust me on this), and she continued to think of herself as Jewish even after her conversion, and almost two decades later she still thinks of herself as Jewish by culture and Christian by religion. She can think of herself this way, because she thinks of religion as primarily an issue of historical factuality quite distinct from family heritage and culture; but her grandparents (who are Holocaust survivors) think the very notion of being a Jewish Christian is self-contradictory and even repulsive.

So the Daily Princetonian ran an article on religious conversion on campus...I don't remember the exact details, but say that they chose a person who had converted to Islam from being Southern Baptist, and somebody who had converted to Buddhism from Catholicism, and Amy. (Something like that, anyway.) It was their feature story, and they included a lot of quotes from Amy in which she very explicitly said that she was proud of being Jewish and had converted purely out of factual conviction, not out of any distate for Jewish culture or her family, both of which she admired and loved and valued highly. The very next issue included a full page from the president of B'nai B'rith bitterly attacking Amy for spitting in her family's face, and saying that she was wrong to despise Jewish culture because it was actually a tremendously rich and valuable heritage...and not a word had a thing to do with any question of historical fact about Jesus. This guy was so utterly locked into the Family metaphor that it was inconceivable to him that any Jewish person could possibly convert to Christianity for any reason other than hatred of their Jewish brothers and sisters, and he complained bitterly and at great length that Jewish people didn't deserve to be hated and that Amy was a jerk for hating them -- despite her explicit assertions to the contrary. I had never seen anything like it and (at the time) couldn't understand it. So naturally I decided the guy was a moron and a fool -- which just basically means I was doing the exact same thing to him that he was doing to Amy! Not that I had the sense to realize this at the time, because, as I say, I was even more of an arrogant jerk then than I am now, which is saying something.

So that's an example of a person from a Family perspective finding a person from a Fact perspective completely inexplicable and therefore going off on her with rage and venom (it was a really nasty article) because he completely misread her motivations and emotions.

When we bring Therapy people into the mix...okay, now I have to try to express the Therapy perspective in terms Fact and Family people will understand and sympathize with, and that's somewhat tricky because I don't buy the Therapy perspective myself and never have. I have much more natural sympathy with the Family view than with the Therapy view. So I may not get this right. Only, do please make allowances for the fact that I have to oversimplify and that I'm using extreme examples because extreme examples make the differences clearer.

If I had to try to capture the Therapy perspective in a single sentence, it would be this: from within the Therapy metaphor, what matters about religion is whether it yields the desired results. The results may be sociological; they may be personal; whatever. The question is -- does it work? And, since Americans are a very pragmatic people, this metaphor resonates better with most Americans that does any other metaphor.

Of course you have to ask what the goal is that religion is supposed to accomplish. Here I can only speak to the Therapy people of my experience, which is predominantly (a) progressive Episcopalians, recently, and (b) Princeton undergraduates, rather longer ago. So I can only describe an American variation on the Therapy perspective, and I don't know to what extent this holds true outside of America.

America is an extremely individualistic country, and it is, generally speaking, a relatively hedonistic country. More often than not, the Therapy viewpoint sees religion as a way to make yourself feel better, or to make yourself be a nicer person, or to derive more personal satisfaction out of your life, or to be better adjusted to your surroundings -- the point being that many Americans turn to religion for precisely the same reasons they would turn to a therapist. This doesn't apply to all Therapy folks, I should say. My friend Laura once tried to describe to me a Unitarian perspective that would, I think, be a variation in which religion was viewed more as a way to make society a better society than as a way to make one's own life more enjoyable, if I understand her correctly. (I have never myself gotten to know any Unitarians well and so don't know from personal experience.) But the majority of American Therapy folks I know, think of religion from the perspective of what works for each individual separately.

Where the Therapy viewpoint is aimed at making the culture better or the family happier, then it can coexist pretty well with the Family viewpoint. If, however, you're talking about a more individualistic, 'Sixties type of Therapy angle -- "I gotta be me," so to speak -- then the Therapy and Family viewpoints can come into conflict, in which case the Family side tends to see the Therapy side as selfish and disloyal, while the Therapy side tends to see the Family side as restrictive and controlling.

You've seen Fiddler on the Roof, right? And you know what a terrible time Tevya has with Havilah's decision to marry a goy. Even though she's in love and there's a strong Family motive to her conversion, it's not enough to overcome Tevya's sense of her betrayal.

Now imagine how much worse it could get, if she not only abandoned her own family, but abandoned the entire Family metaphor as well, switching over to the Therapy perspective. Imagine this: instead of Havilah's meeting her father on the road to tell her she's married a Russian, she comes up to him and says, "Look, Papa, this whole Jewish deal just really isn't working out for me. I mean, I know it works great for you and Mama, and I think that's wonderful. But it's not for me. So I've decided I'm going to try the shiksha thing out for a while and see how that goes. And I just hope you love me enough to support me in that decision."

Can you even imagine Tevya's fury? -- which would be a function of the enormous pain he would feel, since for him the Family orientation is dominant to a very, very high degree.

I think when we Therapy/Fact Americans hear about somebody converting to a different religion and then being legally disowned by their parents (I know people who have had this experience, and whose parents consider them to be dead), we naturally feel outraged. But you have to understand that, from the family's perspective, it was the child who disowned the family, not the other way around. Do you see? It's not that the child disagrees with the family; it's that the child has disowned the family. The outrage we naturally feel toward the parents for disowning the child, is very much the same outrage that the parents feel toward the child -- for disowning them. I know that this is an extreme case and that (certainly in America and I think in Kazakhstan as well) not many people are going to disown their children on grounds of religious conversion. But I do think that the pain that Family-oriented parents feel when a child converts away from the family religion, is the pain of personal rejection and disownment, not the pain of disagreement. Again, imagine how Tulia's father in My Big Fat Greek Wedding would feel if Tulia were to walk in and say, "Papa, I've decided I'm going to become a Roman Catholic." That pain would have nothing to do with doctrinal disagreements -- it would be exactly the same pain as if she were to walk in and say, "Papa, I've decided I'm going to consider myself Turkish from now on."

If I were trying to help a very strongly Family-oriented person understand a Therapy-oriented person who seemed to be behaving in a selfish and hurtful manner, I think I would probably go back to the Fiddler on the Roof story and ask them to imagine how horrible it must have been to be Havilah, feeling that all her happiness depended on this man that her family tradition was telling her she couldn't have. Or try this: Imagine that all your life you've been subject to more or less constant nausea and vomiting, and now you have suddenly discovered that it's because (a) having been born into a Cajun family, you eat red beans and rice every other day, and (b) you happen to be allergic to red beans and rice. How would you feel if your family insisted that you had to just keep on eating red beans and rice for the rest of your life because "that's what a Boudreaux is supposed to eat"?

Such a comparison must strike many strongly Family-oriented people as offensive in the highest degree. But from within a Therapy experience, there's nothing bizarre about comparing a bad reaction to a particular religion to a food allergy, because the Therapy mindset finds it quite natural to assume that different people can have different reactions to the same religion and that in fact what "works" for one person won't necessarily "work" for another. If you come from a strong Family orientation and find it highly offensive to have your tradition compared to a food allergy...listen, I'm not saying that the comparison's valid. I'm just telling you, if your children have picked up the Therapy metaphor from popular American culture (in which it is thoroughly pervasive), and you want to understand your children's motivations and feelings, you need to understand that they probably feel much more like Havilah than like Tevya, and that religion may seem much more like a subject for personal variation to them than it does to you.

I really don't know how strong the Family loyalty pressure is in Kazakhstan. I did have an interesting conversation with my young Kazakh Muslim friend Aigul, whom I love like a daughter and who likes me very much, and who also loves two young Kazakh children I tried for two years to adopt (only, ultimately, to fail, and don't ask me to talk about it because it hurts too much). Aigul very delicately tried to warn me that Nurgul and Ramazan probably consider themselves Muslim, and wanted to know whether I would try to insist upon their converting to Christianity if I were to adopt them. It was very difficult to explain to her that, since our family tradition is a Fact tradition, we wouldn't be able to "make" them convert in any meaningful sense. We could hope that they would convert, since we believe that, at the points where Christianity and Islam disagree, Christianity is correct, and that you're better off having correct opinions than incorrect ones. But within our traditional family way of thinking, this is a decision that Nurgul and Ramazan would have to come to on their own, and becoming Christian just because they're joining a Christian family would be a poor reason to become a Christian. In short, our family tradition doesn't encourage people to become Christian for the sake of family tradition. It's a sort of Catch-22, almost like, if you're Catholic and the Pope says, "Hey, guys, I'm not infallible," then what are you supposed to believe?

This whole way of thinking was so alien to Aigul that it was very hard to get her to see that (a) Christianity was literally the most important thing in the world to our family and yet (b) we would never require Nurgul and Ramazan to convert to Christianity in order to be part of our family. To Aigul, coming from a Family orientation, that combination made no sense at all together.

Okay, this leaves Therapy and Fact.

[sigh] This is very hard work, and I don't think I'm doing it at all well. And I was just going to say, "Okay, I give up..." when suddenly an argument, just moments ago, broke out in this coffee shop where I'm typing, in which one person just informed the other emphatically, "Well, not all of us were raised in a family of Bible-thumpers." So I guess I'll take that as a sign to try to keep muddling on.

Here are a couple of stories I might use to try to get Fact people to start working toward understanding Therapy people. You Therapy guys may not like them, but do remember that I'm trying to tell your story in Fact terms, which are probably not the terms in which you would tell your story...if you told your story your way, then the Fact people probably would misunderstand it.

Adults -- the lucky ones, that is -- have often found their "calling." You find work that just calls to you and you love the work and it's what you were born to do. For some people it's raising a family; for some people it's art; for some people it's athletics; for some people it's business...whatever. Now, imagine that you're a woman who has discovered that you have a passion for astronomy; it's what you were born to do, so to speak. But the people who control the observatories have decided, from sheer prejudice, that astronomy is Not For Women, and they tell you that you are not allowed to do astronomy yourself; you're only allowed to take notes for the Real Astronomers (i.e., the men). So you wait until you're alone and you secretly do as much astronomy as you can do while taking pains not to be found out, and you hide the notes so that nobody sees them, and you limp along with this unsatisfying half-life which is all the powers that be will allow you, until you die. And only after you're dead and people are going through your notes, do they realize how much you accomplished and how passionately you loved it and how bloody good you were at it and how much needless frustration you endured purely because of other people's insistence that you live by their groundless prejudices.

That, by the way, is a true story of one the last century's most talented astronomers, whose name escapes me (she held a menial job at the Harvard observatory in order to have a way to stay in the vestibule of the astronomical temple, so to speak). It also is, I think, a story that at least starts to capture how a Therapy-oriented person tends to see the insistence of a Fact-oriented person that everybody has to do it one particular way. If some, or even most, women like raising children and running a household better than doing astronomy, more power to them; but why should the women who find that astronomy works for them, if I may put it that way, be denied that satisfaction and sentenced to frustration? Now when a Therapy person finds a religion that just really grabs them and works for them, and then you come along and tell them that that religion is a bad thing and they aren't allowed to follow it, can you see how they might feel the way this particular lady did?

Or try this: as it happens, I (despite being myself blond to a degree that Anna Nicole Smith's hair maintenance engineer would despair of imparting) do not find blonde women romantically attractive; if you ain't brunette, it ain't happenin' for me. Just a personal quirk, which, since I found a delightful brunette who had the poor taste to be willing to marry me, does nobody in the world any harm. Well, no problem there. But what if I were now to run around trying to pass a law that said that nobody was allowed to marry a blonde woman because they aren't pretty, or that all blonde women had to dye their hair brunette? To a Therapy person, trying to run around telling everybody they have to follow your religion is more or less analogous to telling everybody they have to agree with you on which women have It. How would you feel if I told you you had to dye your hair because Dubya doesn't find women with your hair color to be attractive?

If I wanted to try to get Therapy people to start understanding Fact people, I would tell stories like this:

What if I told you that I believed that the sun goes around the earth? -- or, better, what if I told you that I intended to teach my children that the sun goes around the earth? Would you be comfortable saying, "Hey, if that's what works for you, that's great"? In fact you may have heard a news story of some "religious fanatic" whose children have cancer, but who refuse to allow the child to receive medical treatment because they believe God will heal the child miraculously. How did you respond when you heard that story?

What if I were to tell you that I intended to teach my children that the earth was created in six twenty-four-hour days a few thousand years ago, and that I did not want them ever to hear the theory of evolution? Would you think that was wonderful, and would you feel called upon to support me in my scientific choice?

What if I were to decide that slavery is a painful subject, and therefore I intended to make sure that when I taught my children United States history, I intended to pretend that slavery had never existed in the U.S.? What if I were to decide that I'm happier believing that the Holocaust never happened, and that my children would also be happier believing that the Holocaust never happened, and therefore I decide that I'm going to proceed as though it never happened and teach my children that as well? And what if, when you object that the Holocaust really did happen, I calmly inform you, "Well, I'm sure that's true for you, but it isn't true for me"?

What if, when you started talking about leukemia, I were to say, "Well, I don't believe in cancer"? And you say, "But cancer really exists," and I respond, "How can you believe that? What kind of sadistic person wants children to die in agony before they have the chance to grow up? What makes you think you're so much better than those children that you think that they deserve to die and you don't?" What would you say to me?

Now to a Fact person, the question of whether, say, hell exists, is a question on the same order as the question of whether leukemia exists. They aren't believing in hell because that belief "works for them," in the sense that it makes them happier or well-adjusted. I don't know any rational person who believes in hell who doesn't hate the doctrine, exactly the way those of us who believe in leukemia (which killed my late business partner) hate the disease. Question: Why would you distress a teenager by telling her that her parents went to hell for believing the wrong religion, and that if she doesn't choose her religion wisely, the same thing could happen to her? Like any good Irishman, I'll answer with another question: why would you distress a teenager by telling her (truthfully) that her parents died of AIDS, and that if she doesn't make sure to practice safe sex, the same thing could happen to her? In both cases the answer is simply: because you think it's true, and you don't want bad things to happen to the kid, and while significant emotional distress isn't any fun now, it's better than AIDS -- or hell -- later.

One of my Kazakh friends mentioned in conversation that the Christian missionaries she knows seem too agressive, and I'm sure that's exactly how they come off...and I certainly would remind missionaries from any religion of Owen Wister's observation that, "But I knew he was a good man, and I knew that if a missionary is to be tactless, he might as well be a bad man." But those of you from the Family or Therapy perspectives must remember that one of the most common stories Fact-oriented missionaries tell to explain why they spend their lives doing what they do, is this: if my neighbor's house is on fire, and I know he's peacefully asleep in the bedroom enjoying pleasant dreams, and I don't rush in and do whatever I can to wake him up and get him out of the house before it collapses on him, then what kind of neighbor am I? Maybe the missionaries are wrong to think that's how religion works -- I'm perfectly willing to admit that possibility. But we're not talking about whether the missionaries are right or not. We're talking about understanding them and seeing their actions from within their story rather than ours. And whether religion really works that way or not, that's how they think it works, and that's why they act they way they do. To ask them to "be tolerant" is to ask them to pretend the house isn't burning and nobody's gonna die.

You see, one of the problems with communication between Therapy and Fact people is simply that the same words mean such different things. There are a number of such double-meaning terms (including the term "tolerance"), but the most deadly is, I think, "truth" itself.

To a Therapy person (at least in my experience) "true" means -- if we're talking about religion, as opposed to something like the Holocaust or the theory of relativity -- "useful, producing satisfactory results." To a Fact person, it means "objectively factual, independently of whether any particular person chooses to believe it or not." Thus it is perfectly sensible, from the Therapy perspective, to say, "I'm sure that's true for you, but it doesn't work for me," which statement tremendously confuses and frustrates a Fact person, since in their view if something is true about God then it's true about God, period, no matter what you or I might think about it. It would be like saying, "Well, the Copernican model of the universe may be true for you, but the Ptolemaic one is true for me," and actually expecting that we could both get into our spaceships and successfully fly to Mars. The Fact person naturally thinks, "That's so stupid; what a moron." But all the Therapy person is really saying is, "I'm sure that helps you feel better about religion, but it doesn't get me where I want to be." And there's nothing at all inherently stupid about that. The Fact person's judgment is inaccurate and unfair.

The doctrine of hell is a very good example of how the two different perspectives clash. If a Princeton undergraduate is so deeply embedded in the Therapy perspective that he's never realized that someone might choose a religious belief for any reason other than that it "works for them" or "does something for them," then when he runs up against a "fundamentalist" who believes in hell, he assumes, quite unconsciously, that it does something for the fundamentalist to believe in hell -- that is, that the fundamentalist finds the belief satisfying or reassuring or pleasurable or something. And if that's what you think, then it's very hard for that undergrad to keep from thinking that the fundamentalist is some sort of sadist. You have no idea how many times I've listened to a discussion between a Therapy person who didn't believe in hell and a Fact person who did, and have heard dialogue like this:

Fact: But if you don't believe in Jesus, you'll go to hell.
Therapy: How can you beLIEVE in a place like hell? Why would you want to send everybody who disagrees with you to hell?
[The Fact person, being as clueless about the Therapy person as the Therapy person is about the Fact person, now proceeds to start laying out evidence that he thinks proves the existence of hell, thus confirming the Therapy person's belief that the Fact person is a shameless and enthusiastic sadist.]

There is of course no logical way to leap from "I believe in hell" to "I'm glad hell exists" or "I want lots of people to go there," any more than there is any logical way to leap from "I believe in leukemia" to "I'm glad leukemia exists" or "I want lots of people to die of leukemia." But the whole point is that to the Therapy person, hell and leukemia are in completely different categories -- as are, for that matter, hell and logic. Leukemia is the province of truth as in scientific truth. Hell is the province of religious truth as in emotionally satisfying belief constructs. Why would anybody believe in hell if they didn't find that belief emotionally satisfying?

But I'm going on too long about how Therapy people misunderstand Fact people, when in fact it's just as absurd for the Fact person in this dialogue, having been given this flashing-neon-sign clue that the Therapy person thinks he likes the idea of hell, to respond to, "How can you beLIEVE in a place like hell?" with whatever evidence for hell's factual existence he thinks he can muster. Just the intonation ought to be clue enough that the real question is, "How can you possibly like the idea of hell?" (If the other person were requesting evidence, the intonation would be quite different: "How can you believe in a place like hell?" rather than, "How can you beLIEVE that?") If you answer with evidence, then that's a clear sign that you weren't listening carefully enough to hear the real question.

Fact-vs.-Therapy is not necessarily, by the way, a matter of theological belief. One major point I have to make when talking to Americans about Kazakhstan is that Family-oriented Kazakh Muslims are much more like Family-oriented Kazakh Orthodox than they are like Fact-oriented Tunisian Muslims, despite the American habit of lumping them all together as "Muslims." I have a friend who maintains that Muslims emphasize right actions rather than right beliefs, and she's probably right. But while Saudi Arabian or Tunisian Muslims like my friend Najmeddine may emphasize right actions rather than right beliefs, they still (unlike the Kazakh Muslims I know) work from a Fact orientation, simply because they believe the same moral rules apply to everybody, whether everybody accepts them or not. In their eyes, if you don't see anything wrong with certain sexual practices, for example, then you just don't understand what God's moral rules are. Whether you dance before the wedding or after it, or whether your wedding lasts two hours (like a big American wedding) or two weeks (like Najmeddine's wedding in Tunisia to which I sent Dessie) or even two minutes (like my...oh, no, sorry, that wasn't my wedding...) Ahem. At any rate, how long your wedding lasts is a cultural thing, and it didn't bother Najmeddine or his friends that my wedding hadn't looked like his, and Dessie absolutely loved her whole Tunisian-wedding experience.

But Samiha's brother at one point carefully asked Dessie, "Now, you and your husband -- are you really married, or are you just pretending [i.e., living together]?" To Najmeddine and his family, whether you slept with people without bothering with a wedding or not was a matter of fundamental morality, and if our culture didn't do it that way, then that just meant our culture was screwed up. Weddings two weeks long, weddings two hours long -- interesting cultural variation. No wedding at all -- depraved American culture. With the Muslims of my close acquaintance, I think my friend Suzanne may be right to say that the focus is more on behavior than on belief; but there's still the underlying idea that there is a right behavior, and if you don't recognize that morality, then you are mistaken and potentially in trouble. In Najmeddine's Fact-oriented eyes, sex without marriage is wrong, and anyone who does it is wrong. But the Therapy viewpoint has perhaps rarely been expressed with more passion and heartfelt sincerity than by my gay Jewish friend Gary, from Princeton, who once cried out from the bottom of his soul, "Christians think they're right, and that anyone who disagrees with them is wrong -- and that's just wrong!"

I thought about going on to distinguish between open-minded and narrow-minded Fact people (which is an emotional difference rather than a philosophical one), and on how "open-minded" and "tolerant" mean one thing to Therapy people and something entirely different to Fact people...but I think I should quit here. It's too long a post as it is, and you have no idea how exhausting it is to try to illustrate these points without accidentally starting to either defend or attack specific beliefs and without being utterly unfair to half the people on the list and utterly offensive to the other half. Look, if I can just convince the Therapy people that we Fact people are often constrained by the evidence (as best we can evaluate it) to accept beliefs that we intensely dislike (such as the existence of hell), so that you don't assume that because we have all these horrible beliefs that we are such horrible people that we actually take pleasure in them, that would be great.

It would be a complete bonus if I could get you to see that just because we sometimes think you're wrong, that doesn't mean that we think you're stupider than we are or that you're morally inferior to us. (Of course there are people who are really that arrogant and self-righteous, but almost all Fact people tend to come off that way to Therapy people whether they're really arrogant and self-righteous or not. There are also Therapy folks who are simultaneously intellectually self-impressed and intellectually lazy, but almost all Therapy people tend to come off to Fact people as intellectually lazy whether they really are or not.) My wife, bless her blinded-by-infatuation heart, thinks I'm a genius and loves me; but that certainly doesn't keep her from, frequently, pointing out that I am temporarily making a fool of myself 'cause I'm saying something that isn't true (usually when I'm telling a story and getting all the details wrong). Disagreement, even on matters religious, does not necessarily imply disrespect, and certainly not dislike, when the person doing the disagreeing is a Fact person.

Again, the fundamental attitude I'm trying to create in my kids is that if you tell me what you believe, that will determine whether I agree with you or disagree with you, but it won't have any particular impact on whether I admire you or love you. I find that a whole lot of Therapy people simply can't imagine that you could think they were mistaken about religion but still think they're awesome and admirable and delightful people. But a Fact person sees no incongruity in that at all, and many of us see no value judgment in it, either. (Of course there are Fact people who look down on those who disagree with them, but that's a function of self-righteousness, not of the Fact perspective. I know plenty of Therapy people who hold "fundamentalists" in just as much contempt as the contempt in which the "fundamentalist" holds the "sinners." Self-righteousness is a pleasure in which all perspectives can indulge themselves equally. The Fact perspective does not per se entail contempt of those from other perspectives. Though it does entail disagreement with them.)...

...And I just keep babbling on and I will just have to make myself stop right there: if my Therapy friends haven't yet gotten an idea of what I'm trying to express then another ten thousand words won't help.

And if I can just get through to my fellow Fact people...

Look, I've used examples of how other people have misjudged people by assuming the other people worked from the same metaphor; it's only fair for me to close with an example of how I misjudged a Therapy person and for years held that person in utter contempt, without adequate justification.

I was a classics major at Princeton, and naturally we were held to very high standards. If you were going to write a thesis on, say, the Eleusinian mysteries in the time of Socrates, then you had better never put forward a hypothesis without considering the evidence both for it and against it; you had better consider the reliability of your sources (applying standard, well-known criteria for source reliability); you had better know which conclusions were well established and which were questionable because of lack of evidence and you had better make it clear to your reader which conclusions fell in which category; etc. In short, the task of the scholar was to determine, as much as possible, what could be known to be true, to fill in the gaps where possible with reasonable speculation, and to always, always be clear on what was knowledge and what was speculation and just what degree of speculation was involved. For it was assumed that something actually, in objective fact, happened in those mysteries (or whatever your topic was), and all of the resources at your disposal were to be brought to bear in order to determine, as far as the evidence allowed, what that something really was.

In short, the discipline of history was seen to be a discipline interested in historical truth, to the degree to which it could be obtained, and persons who carefully followed the methodologies that experience had taught were reliable were considered good scholars, and persons who took any half-cocked guess and tossed it out there as "scholarship" were held in contempt.

At the same time, I was trying to establish what was true and what was false about the things I had been taught as a child in the Baptist church and the things other religions taught. I had read the Bible cover-to-cover before I was seven years old; now I started reading the Talmud (though certainly not cover-to-cover) and the Quran (which I have read all the way through, though only in translation, which several of my Muslim friends tell me doesn't count). I took courses in Buddhism and in the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas; I spent long hours discussing Hinduism with a close Sri Lankan friend; I read C. S. Lewis but also Aldous Huxley, Josh McDowell but also Elaine Pagels, Dante but also Kant...I wanted to know what was true and what wasn't. You see, I came from a Fact background, and I assumed that obviously what was important about a religion was the truth of its teaching, and being a genuinely open-minded person (in the Fact sense, though not the Therapy sense -- this is one of those two-meaning terms) I was willing to go to whatever work was necessary and give everybody the chance to make their case.

There was one book in particular that everybody from one particular variant of the Therapy perspective kept telling me was a wonderful book, and how well it proved what it was that Jesus "really" taught. Back then I didn't know that "really" didn't mean to Therapy people what it meant to me, and so I was very excited to read this book. I got it, and I read it...and it was awful. That is to say, everything I'd learned about how to tell pseudo-historical bogus scholarship from solid professional work was just screaming, "B.S. Alert! B.S. Alert!" It was just...I don't know...it was just so sloppy. It was like she hadn't even tried to do her homework. I just don't know how exactly to put it...if I had written that book instead of her writing it, and I had turned it in as my undergraduate senior thesis, the classics department professors would have crucified me.

I can't tell you how much contempt I felt for that woman for years, and, for that matter, for Departments of Religion in general (because the more widely I read the religious "scholarship" the more obvious it became that this kind of "sloppy, not remotely professional pseudo-scholarship" was pouring out of departments of religion and seminaries everywhere you turned). Only much, much later did it occur to me that what I was assuming was the whole point of "scholarship" wasn't even a matter of relevance from the Therapy perspective. This book was inspiring; it was thought-provoking; it provided a whole new way to look at Jesus that works much better for many modern Americans who simply can't be bring themselves to accept the traditional views; it gives an interpretation that hangs together very nicely and cohesively if you don't yank on the curtains too hard. Now, it's true that it happens that if you apply evidential tests to her hypotheses to see where on the classicists' scale of probability they fall, the best you could get for her would be "purely speculative and in conflict with the heavy preponderance of the available evidence." But you would only go to the trouble to apply those evidential tests (which are a lot of trouble and require a lot of work) if you thought it mattered whether Jesus really acted that way or not -- that is, if you came from a Fact background. To a Therapy person, it doesn't matter so much what Jesus' life really was; what matters is what his life Means For Us Today...and that's something that, in the end, is up to us to decide. What do you WANT it to mean? What meaning will "work" in your life? If you find a way to think about Jesus that works for you, what does it matter whether the real Jesus was actually like that or not? And if it doesn't matter, then why would you bother to go to all the trouble to apply all those boring and onerous and completely unnecessary tests?

Well, I wrote her off as a moron and a fool and an academic fraud, and I can tell you I didn't hold much respect for the university that (as I thought) "couldn't see through such a transparent b-s'er." And it still is hard for me to respect, say, the Harvard University department of religion, which has a professor who once confidently delivered himself of a carefully footnoted statement about Neanderthal religious beliefs that seemed to me wildly speculative, and when I checked the footnote, it turned out that his "scholarly" anthropological source was The Clan of the Cave Bear (I kid you not). But I'm slowly getting there, as I just keep reminding myself that the more or less complete absence of anything I would recognize as scholarly method (that is to say, safeguards to keep you from coming up with whatever wild speculation you found attractive and presenting it as the results of your "scholarly research") is not due to stupidity, nor to willful dishonesty, nor even to laziness. When a scholar from the Therapy perspective does religious scholarship, he just has a completely different set of priorities than I have, that's all, and the only thing that to me makes it worth the trouble to read scholarly works at all, is something that he finds of no value whatsoever and hardly even pretends to pursue.

One last thing: I know that many of you Fact people are out there saying, "Well, yes, I understand that they have a different way of looking at it, but their way of looking at it is wrong; and it's gonna cause a lot of 'em to wind up in hell." And there are some Therapy people who are saying, "Okay, this helps me understand why the fundamentalists act the way they do -- they think there's absolute truth in religion. But they're wrong, and it makes them intolerant, and religious intolerance has killed hundreds of thousands of people and ruined countless more lives than that." And there may be a Superstition person saying, "!#@$#@!, the sooner we get rid of this religion virus entirely the better off we'll be." And you know what? Any of us could be right -- but that's for another day.

I'm sorry I couldn't do better, and I'm sincerely sorry for anybody whose views I misrepresented (which views are probably all the views I tried to present except my own), and if anybody from the Family or Therapy perspective can help me do a better job of explaining this to my kids when the time comes, I'll be very sincerely grateful.

Kenny

Coming in later posts, I hope:
Difficulties of Fact-to-Therapy evangelism
Difficulties of Therapy-to-Fact, um, evangelism, for lack of a better word
Open-minded Factists vs. narrow-minded Factists (i.e., Fact orientation does not preclude a high degree of doubt and uncertainty)
Do the different orientations correspond to different human needs fulfilled by religion?
Tolerance vs. agape, including ruminations on why the people who talk about "tolerance" the most seem to display it the least
How the Episcopal schism between Factists and Therapists generates misleading "presenting issues" (homosexuality, ordination of women, authority of Scripture, etc.)

UPDATE (27 September 2005): When I first wrote this out, I used the term "Truth orientation" rather than "Fact orientation." I have been uncomfortable for a long time with my original term "Truth orientation," because the word truth, as I mentioned above, is one of the words that means either of two radically different things, depending upon whether the person using it comes from a Therapy perspective or a Fact perspective. Driving to the coffee shop this morning it suddenly occurred to me that "Fact" would be a more accurate, and much less ambiguous, designation than is "Truth." Mr. Data, make it so! (That's not a Star Trek reference; it's a TMQ reference.)