We dread political conversations with family because of how tense they can be. But what if we could get through them and actually find some common ground?
That’s the goal in this episode, in which Chico State professor Kate McCarthy turns to her experience studying inter-religious communications to provide some productive concepts for political dialogue. It might finally be safe to talk politics at the dinner table again.
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KATE POST, Host: This is Out of Curiosity, a podcast driven by the wonder of lifelong learning from California State University, Chico.
TRAVIS SOUDERS, Host: There is one big rule almost every family knows at the dinner table.
Kate: No elbows on the table?
Travis: OK, there are two rules. No elbows on the dinner table, AND: no talking religion or politics.
Kate: But why is that? The obvious reason is that those topics can be heated. These subjects, formed around strongly held beliefs, have the power to cause division—but they also have the power to bring us together. That is what today’s guest, professor Kate McCarthy, has observed over her career studying comparative religion.
Travis: Professor McCarthy is the dean of undergraduate education at Chico State, and she shared with us how some of the principles of interreligious communications can be applied to today’s American political divide.
Kate: As you’ll hear on this episode of Out of Curiosity, Professor McCarthy sees several principles in interreligious conversations that can apply to creating productive dialogues elsewhere—even in politics.
McCarthy: So I’ve studied religion for my whole career, starting as an undergraduate, and I’m fascinated by it. And the main thing that fascinates me about it is its power to unite and divide. I’ve done this work, especially on interreligious relations, for years–what makes some groups get along, and others not, why did Catholics and Protestants in Ireland have so much trouble, not such a problem in the United States, right? And so, that’s been the frame that I’ve sort of seen the world through for a long time, but then starting after the 2016 election, it became super clear to me that in this society, we are way more divided by politics than we are by religion. So I wanted to start thinking about, what have 30 years studying interreligious relations taught me that might be useful to think about in terms of getting people with very deeply held political views to talk to each other?
Travis: Professor McCarthy explains that if we can practice “seeing the whole person,” being vulnerable, finding things to collaborate on, understanding each other’s moral frameworks, and simply tell each other’s stories, then we have a much better chance of healthy community building, instead of endless debating that goes nowhere.
Kate: The first concept to consider is that we all get to be more than one thing. Even the staunchest of advocates on either side of the spectrum are not simple caricatures. There’s more to us than just our differing opinions. It’s much more productive to focus on our similarities if we want to engage productively in our communities.
McCarthy: My Jewish neighbor is not just a Jew; my Jewish neighbor is also someone who plays tennis, someone who votes like I do, someone who has the same kind of dog that I do, right. So, if we see past that one identity marker, toward a much more complex identity marker, we’re more likely to find something to connect on.
Travis: One challenge with that approach is that, especially in political conversation, there seems to be more deal-breakers than ever in the era of social media debate—even people making an effort to converse will draw lines in the sand and shut down the conversation entirely. Professor McCarthy explains, though, that we can stay true to our convictions while also not dismissing those who don’t share them.
McCarthy: I would have said, until quite recently, there are no deal-breakers. We share space in a community, you’re a human, I’m a human, we’re going to find a way to connect. But we’re in a really unique political time, with a leader who has said and done things that cross so many lines that I think for many of us, there’s sort of a level of moral compromise involved in engaging across that line, that’s very difficult to make. And so, I think we have to honor those lines that we have, and–you know, if we think of the political spectrum as having these poles, and we all stand somewhere on that line–I’m over here pretty close to the blue pole–I’m not going to reach that person at the red pole, but I might reach someone two ticks to the right of me. So, maybe I don’t have to pay attention to that unbelievably egregious thing somebody said on social media, but maybe I can engage constructively with somebody else on something where it’s a little less egregious.
Kate: Professor McCarthy also discussed the principle of being vulnerable, and understanding that hearing someone else out—truly challenging your own ideas and being an open-minded listener—doesn’t diminish the belief systems you hold so dearly.
McCarthy: When you push an individual or a congregation to do that work of interfaith dialogue, an immediate resistance is often, “No no no, that will compromise our faith, I don’t want to dilute my congregation’s faith. Our identity is too important to us.” But what actually happens in the process is that nobody converts. Never happens. Doesn’t happen. What happens is, your questions to me—I’m a liberal Catholic; your question to me as, say, as Muslim or a Buddhist, make me say, “Oh wait, why do I believe that thing that I believe? And what does my tradition actually teach about that? I don’t really know that; I’m going to go back and find that out.” And I end up with a different and usually deeper relationship to my tradition than I came in with. So I’m not trying to – on one level of course, I’m trying to get that person to see the world the way I see it because I see it that way for a reason, I think it makes sense and I think it will move our community forward. But in the course of the conversation, I’m trying to find a connection, I’m trying to keep the sense that we are worthy of respect and dignity equally, and that there is surely something on which we can collaborate.
Travis: Working together despite our differences isn’t always easy. It takes a good-faith effort to be a good listener when you know you disagree on an issue. Professor McCarthy shares how she helps bring groups together with an exercise that requires a bit of self-reflection.
McCarthy: Teams of red and blue community members go into a separate space, and reflect on what they think the other group thinks of them: What are the stereotypes about liberals, the stereotypes about conservatives, and then you had to develop a counter-narrative; no that’s not true, what’s really true is X, and then you had to say, “But the kernel of truth in that caricature of my position is actually this.” And then you had to come out into the public room again and share that–very, very hard.
But we came out of that exercise not beating ourselves for that kernel of truth in the stereotype that we love trees more than we love humans, but “Oh, we have to do a much better job of talking about environmental priorities in light of the concerns of working people in rural communities who have depended upon logging industries,” et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So that vulnerability. And again, I think it’s a kind of moral courage to confront the limitations of your own position.
Kate: One of the greatest pitfalls of trying to have productive conversations with people who you disagree with is you end up talking past each other—and you lose the big picture. Despite your differences, the point is that you’re both trying to improve the world! What McCarthy’s interfaith work suggests is that finding projects to do together is much more productive than bickering online.
McCarthy: Don’t sit around talking about your different beliefs. Find something to do. Do something together. Get a project you can agree on. And if you think about it, the Camp Fire was kind of an interesting bookend on this—2016, November 8; 2018, November 8—because what happened after the fire? Very conservative Paradise, medium-progressive Chico, nobody was talking about that. It was, “Oh my God, crisis, we’re all in this,” and people were thrilled to be able to be part of that, those of us who were not directly affected. You know, Rebecca Solnet wrote this book, A Paradise Built in Hell, about how crises, moments of hell, create a kind of temporary utopia in terms of how community works. So, I think that finding something to do on a shared good, sometimes those are easier to see—a fire makes those really easy to see—but they’re there all the time. There are things we agree we want to work on. You know, something like Habitat for Humanity is a great example of that. Most people can get behind helping low-income people have a place to live. It’s not a super controversial thing. You know, taking care of the parks and that sort of thing. So yeah, find something to do together.
Travis: We also need to consider who we’re talking with, and how they see the world—in other words, we need to understand their moral framework. McCarthy references psychologist Jonathan Heidt’s Moral Foundations Theory, which considers sets of values that we all apply to our reasoning.
Kate: Heidt’s moral framework recognizes six value sets: Care/Harm; Fairness/Cheating/; Loyalty/Betrayal; Authority/Subversion; Sanctity/Degradation; and Liberty/Oppression. Knowing which of these value sets is more important to the people we’re speaking with can help us empathize, be better listeners, and frame smarter conversations.
McCarthy: We all operate with these six or seven moral spectrums, but the idea is we all have all of them, but for whatever reason, some of us emphasize one set more than another set. So you really can say, “Oh, OK, I need to frame this in terms of a purity argument. I need to frame this in terms of an equality argument, because I’m a conservative, I’m going to talk to a liberal about this, I’m not going to say, ‘But it’s the law,’ because that’s an authority argument. I’m going to talk about it in terms of fairness.” So if you could think of illegal immigration in that way, right? One instinct might be to come at it through an authoritarian, “Yeah, but they broke the law,” but then you would have more success, a conservative would have more success with a progressive, if they came at it from a fairness argument, because that tends to be emphasized.
It doesn’t do away with very divisive positions on these issues, but first of all it can do away with a lot of very unproductive rhetoric. I think it can help us be more productive with our engagement across these lines and our efforts to make policy.
Travis: And lastly, one strategy for creating productive dialogue is to focus on storytelling, rather than argument-making.
McCarthy: I’m not going to tell you why I think this theological position is true; I’m going to talk to you about religious festivals that my family observed growing up and what they meant to me, and we’re going to find a connection there, I’m much more confident, right? So, I did this exercise with a group of students where I took a very controversial statement about guns—I can’t remember whether it was “All guns are good” or “All guns are bad,” some sort of very polarizing statement about guns—and I asked them to divide themselves into those who agreed with the statement and those who disagreed, and then they had to partner up with somebody across that divide, and they had to tell a story illustrating how they came to that position. And then they had to ask a curious question of their dialogue partner: “Oh, tell me more about that time when your friend was killed by random gun violence in your community. How did that make you feel?” A legitimate, curious question. Do that back and forth, and then together they had to try to identify, are there any shared values in how we came at this?
So I had a rural student from a very rural background talk about how for her, guns were a norm in her community, in her family. They were hunters, but it was also a source of protection when they were in kind of a vulnerable location with not many neighbors, et cetera. And another student from an urban background had talked about how a friend had been a victim of gun violence. They both are talking about safety! There’s a common value. We’re both interested in community safety, so maybe now we could talk about specific gun policies in a productive way, rather than this polarizing “pro-anti,” because we’ve shared something here. We’ve found some connection on it.
Kate: Possibly more than ever, it’s critical that we continue to learn to listen to each other. It makes for stronger communities, more productive conversations, and dialogue that allows room for us to respect each other.
Travis: And it definitely could make those holiday dinners more enjoyable.
Thank you to our guest, Professor Kate McCarthy. This has been “Out of Curiosity.” I’m Travis Souders.
Kate: And I’m Kate Post. This podcast is a production of University Communications at California State University, Chico. Never miss an episode by subscribing wherever you listen to podcasts.
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