“Why Don’t They Get It?” Brian McLaren and Drew Jackson
⭐ Brian McLaren & Drew Jackson on Faith, Bias, and Christian Division. n this episode, Scott sits down with Brian McLaren and Drew Jackson for a bold conversation about faith, bias, and the forces that shape how we make judgments and moral decisions. From questions like “Don’t they know what they’re doing is wrong?” to the pressures of belonging to a community, they explore the psychological and political biases that influence how Christians relate to one another. Brian McLaren and Drew Jackson are involved with the Center for Action and Contemplation, which draws on Father Richard Rhor's work, and ask: How can Jesus’ call to love, humility, and reconciliation guide us in a world torn by division and contempt? A conversation that challenges assumptions, provokes reflection, and offers a deeper way forward for thoughtful followers of Christ.
Description
Brian McLaren & Drew Jackson on Faith, Bias, and Christian Division. n this episode, Scott sits down with Brian McLaren and Drew Jackson for a bold conversation about faith, bias, and the forces that shape how we make judgments and moral decisions. From questions like “Don’t they know what they’re doing is wrong?” to the pressures of belonging to a community, they explore the psychological and political biases that influence how Christians relate to one another. Brian McLaren and Drew Jackson are involved with the Center for Action and Contemplation, which draws on Father Richard Rhor's work, and ask: How can Jesus’ call to love, humility, and reconciliation guide us in a world torn by division and contempt? A conversation that challenges assumptions, provokes reflection, and offers a deeper way forward for thoughtful followers of Christ.
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Generated Transcript
Scott Rice (00:00)
All right, so before I put the first question out there, Brian, if it's okay, I'm actually just gonna give the definition of bias that you lay out in the first season of learning how to see. And it's this, so bias is a prejudice or a pre-critical inclination in favor or against something. It's what we...
bring to say any event, any conversation that we have and that shapes our interactions, what we're going to be prone to without us kind of even knowing. So the work we're doing tonight is kind of looking internally. ⁓ Drew or Brian, could you get us started and just kind of help us name where this question, you know, don't they know what they're doing is wrong or why can't they see it? Like, where does that happen among
Christians.
Drew Jackson (00:53)
Well, first, I mean, when I hear the question, I am immediately taken to, I think there's a couple spots in scripture that jump out to me immediately. And one, it's Jesus on the cross, right? And this experience of evil and the naming of Father, forgive them. They don't know what they're doing. They...
They don't know. They can't see it. They can't recognize it. And the other part is Jesus on the Mount of
Olives overlooking Jerusalem and crying, you know, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you know, the city that stones the prophets and kills those who are sent to it. And ⁓ when he says, how I wish on this day you knew the things that make for peace, but now they are hidden from your eyes. Right. So, so, so, so we see that even in Jesus's naming of evil, as it were.
He's naming it in this way that's characterizing it as this thing that blinds us from even seeing or recognizing what it is we're doing. So when I think about that question, don't they know what they're doing is wrong? I feel like there's something there that Jesus is trying to say. A lot of times, no. There's something that is keeping them, us, from seeing.
Brian Mclaren (02:15)
You
Drew Jackson (02:21)
You know, so the way that I, when you ask the question, like how does that manifest itself in the church and Christian spaces, I mean there are so many different areas I think where we say that about each other. We look at one another and we say, I can't believe, I can't believe they think that, I can't believe they're doing that.
I think about, historically, think back, think to some churches that ordain women and don't, right. You look back even further at the,
splits between what churches recognize around baptism and what others don't.
Now, I mean, we can talk
about police, things like police brutality and racism here in the United States and ⁓ where some people view things and say, well, if you just obey the law, right, it's law and order. And then others are saying there's a lot more going on than that. And.
Why can't they see it? Don't they know that what they're naming there is wrong? Right? Don't they know? So I think we could kind of list them off, ⁓ but we can see that those dividing lines ⁓ that have made their way, I mean, they're not exclusively in the church, but they have certainly made their way into the church.
Brian Mclaren (03:55)
Yeah, I just want to pick up, Drew, I think that so insightful to go to Jesus and, know, Jesus, in a sense, doesn't want to make the harshest judgment possible of people. He doesn't want to say, oh, they see it and they're just stupid or they see it and they're just rebellious. They don't know what they're doing. And then I think just to build on that, he there's one place where the.
I think the Pharisees, maybe the scribes are with them, say to Jesus, this crowd that's following you that doesn't know the law, a curse be upon them, which I think is like saying, God damn these, this mass of people who don't know the law. you know,
ready to make a judgment. And Jesus responses, they're they're like sheep without a shepherd. And then another place, in other words, why don't they see it? They've never had anybody guide them to a vantage point where they could see it.
And then the flip side of it, Jesus says.
you blind leaders of the blind. So people who can't see it are the people who are teaching and guiding you. And in a certain sense, they make sure you don't see it either, because they can only help you see what they see. And in fact, if they don't see it and you tell them what you see that they don't see, they'll just say you're wrong. And if you trust them, you'll believe them. So it feels to me that, know, that that's why I just love starting with Jesus. He seems so compassionate about that.
Scott Rice (05:26)
what a great way to begin in sense that like, acknowledges these biases are real and on the cross is showing mercy. All right, so we're gonna talk about some things that are introspective that I think anyone who takes the conversation seriously
in a good way will have a hard time. And yet to begin to say, hey, right, there's a sense of grace that comes right at the beginning of this and the way that God looks at us in the midst of all of our
but also Jesus talks to the leaders and he's taking biases really seriously too.
going to talk about three different biases,
But let me begin with community bias. Brian, maybe I'll ask if you can get us going on this one because you name a whole handful of biases in the season of that podcast. ⁓ But it's pretty clear there's a couple that are really high on the list that you say these things pop their heads up all over the place.
So what's community bias and why was it so high on your list?
Brian Mclaren (06:19)
let me start by saying one way to think about bias, anybody who's worked with AI, artificial intelligence, knows that sometimes artificial intelligence, in spite of all the amazing things it does, it just kicks up faulty data, right? It just has wrong answers sometimes. Sometimes, I mean, at all different levels. So there are glitches in the software.
And something we have to say about our software in here, our natural intelligence, is that it has glitches. And one way to understand this community bias is to say, I think the deepest part of our brain, ⁓ what people often call the amygdala that controls all of our unconscious reactions, is really the part of our brain that's...
geared towards survival. So it wants to keep us out of trouble. It wants us to keep to keep us out of being exhausted. It wants to conserve our energy. It's the self preservation mode. And then the next level of our brain ⁓ seems to be oriented toward the things that are unique to mammals. Like people often call that deepest part of the brain, the reptilian brain or the fish brain. But then mammals, when mammals, when mothers incubate their babies inside their body,
and then feed them through nursing, the life of the baby depends on an emotional, deep emotional connection to the mother. Very different than reptiles that lay their eggs and leave, right? And I think the part of us that is geared toward belonging, belonging first to our mother and then our father and our siblings and our family, and then we extend that belonging to, might be a church or it might be a neighborhood or it might be extended family or
profession or political party. But we have these extended identity circles that belonging is deeply connected to our survival. If these people kick me out, I will not survive. I mean, it goes back to our mothers and fathers. If they reject us, I won't survive when we're little children. The part of our brain that seeks for the truth in some ways doesn't even come online until the survival mode.
and the belonging mode of our brain have done their work. And I think that's one of the reasons why this community bias is so powerful. I hope that very brief overview makes a little sense.
Scott Rice (08:47)
It does, does. Drew, let me go to you to see if there's
any ways that just community bias,
any the features of it resonate with you, anything you'd want to bring out for the audience.
Drew Jackson (08:57)
Yeah, I mean, just to really underscore what Brian was saying around belonging. I think that's why ⁓ when I think of community bias and the sort of danger or hazard it is to us in really getting in the way of us seeing or touching reality, it's because belonging has such a strong pull,
so, if saying something or speaking out against something is going to put you at odds with the larger community to which you belong.
that is a dangerous feeling, It's fear inducing, right? And so to actually challenge the consensus thinking
you need courage to do that because you're pushing back against something that is such a of ⁓ a magnetic force in the opposite direction. And so it really does take ⁓ a deep, deep courage to step out against whatever the dominant thought is.
Scott Rice (10:09)
Okay, at the end of tonight's conversation, I want to pose this question about learning. do you learn to love the community that you love so much you'll critique? And how to do that well. So, but I want to say that to the end. Right now, I just want to ask this.
when you feel that tension of being part of a community, but you know that there's something that's kind of, it's something you're discovering, something you're finding that's kind of...
pulling you away from it. You live in that tension. There's such a powerful quote by Rachel Held Evans about like, you know, the hardest part about doubt isn't so much the wrestling with the truth part. It's that it's knowing will you continue to be able to belong to your community as you go through that doubt. is there anything that just can help a little bit to be able to do that well?
Brian Mclaren (10:44)
Exactly.
hmm. Two quotes are coming to my mind, ⁓ one from Jesus and one from Noel Paul Stuckey. ⁓ But I think it was Noel Paul Stuckey. Actually, he may have been singing someone else's song, but he had a song, I think it was called Him, where he says he talks to some theologians. We talked about theology
and we debated your existence.
and something something, the fact that you had been replaced by your assistants. ⁓ And this sense that religious leaders can become bigger in our minds than God, right? ⁓ And this is one of the constant complications of community bias, that we say we're about God, we say we're followers of Jesus. But very often,
our religious leaders have more power over our lives.
in some ways, before we even think about what does God think about this, you know, is this God's truth, we're thinking my leaders wouldn't like me to think this. I know they don't think this. If I think this, I would be in disagreement. And then it reminds me something else. Jesus said, I think it's in John five. Jesus says again to the religious leaders,
How can you believe when you seek honor from one another?
In other words, if your real focus is your status in the group and status is achieved by agreeing with the list of things
our group is uniquely superior on, if you disagree, it gets in the mode of seeing and believing both.
Drew Jackson (12:34)
I keep coming back to this question, right? This question of who are my people, right? The way that I answer that question, it really, really shapes the way that I am able to navigate something like community bias. And I think the, how we begin to break out of that is that our definition of who my people are has to get.
redefined, the boundary line has to keep getting pushed out more and more so that, you know, that my, when I think about who I belong to, it's not just this group here, it's actually the whole human family. Like, to have that shift in consciousness, to see my belonging as toward the whole human family,
I think does something to how I begin to navigate the thing that might just pull me toward this group here or that group there, right? Because my belonging is much broader.
Scott Rice (13:44)
Yeah, yeah, that's really helpful. Who do I belong to? Changing the question, who do I belong to? Or maybe refocusing it. And who am I responsible towards? How does that change how I act? Yeah.
Drew Jackson (13:54)
Yes.
Brian Mclaren (13:57)
Yeah, but you know, can I just say this is
one
the ways that community bias undermines exactly what you just said, because when people say we're the only group that has the truth and in fact, we're the only people who are on God's side and all those other people are of the devil and they're trying to destroy you and lead you astray. In a sense, that move, maybe it's true, maybe it's not. Whether it's true or not, it's pretty dangerous because when you then say, well, then I'm not allowed to.
disagree with this group or I'm disagreeing with God and agreeing with the devil, right? That's a pretty heavy thing to put on people and and it strikes me I Think I used to act this way, you know was a preacher for 24 years and I think I was ready to pull that card sometimes but now I look and think pulling that card I Have a feeling God doesn't even pull that card and Jesus didn't pull that card
So because they're restricting to a little group of people making us more loyal to them and their leaders and what they already think than we are to the truth and to reality. High price.
Drew Jackson (15:09)
You know, as we're having this conversation, I'm thinking about this obscure ⁓ exchange in the book of Joshua, right? In Joshua chapter five, where ⁓ Joshua and the army has an army near Jericho and this man-like figure, it's an angel, appears to them and Joshua ⁓ asks him the question.
Are you for us or for our enemies? Whose side are you on? And the angels' response is, neither. It blows up this entire understanding
Brian, you said one of the ways that community bias pushes back.
on this sense of belonging to the whole human family is just saying, we have the truth, they don't. God is on our side, God is against them. And so for the angel of the Lord to say, I'm not on either side, that's not how I move, just, I think there's so much there to unpack.
Scott Rice (16:21)
Whoa, whoa.
Brian Mclaren (16:21)
story to bring
Scott Rice (16:23)
Okay, let's go to political bias. This might be like one of the topics where think folks think, oh yeah, political bias, that's a real thing, that exists. There's been some interesting works.
that have highlighted
between conservatives and progressives. And it's the moral categories that progressives and conservatives
lean on
so progressives really love the focus on harm, care and justice. Conservatives use those, but also focus a lot on obedience, loyalty, purity and honor. I'm just, drawing on Jonathan Haidt's work, The Righteous Mind.
so you, you see some of this, this way that, you know, there's a, there's, there's a difference here. ⁓
And maybe an example here is like, if you ever pull up to someone, you see a bumper sticker on the back of their car. And if it's something on like, you know, don't, don't harm the earth. have a, you just kind of guess what that person's politics are. Or if it says semper fi, you just have to guess. You may be wrong, but of what kind of what that person's politics are. ⁓ Here's the question I'm hoping you guys will, get into a little bit. Do you think the division that Haidt named there, that I just named there between kind of the, the, the moral principles that the conservatives lift up?
moral principles that progressives lean into, do you see that evidenced in the church in a meaningful way? And then, is there anything that they know about being Christian, about what it means for us to be Christian, that might help us to kind of speak to that division?
Brian Mclaren (17:53)
Well, I'll be glad to go first on that. First, I think there's a lot of value to Jonathan Haidt's work, and he's part of a group that are often called Moral Foundation Theorists. I think there's a lot of value, and I actually use it in that little book, Why Don't They Get It? But let me just complexify that a little bit by saying Haidt is kind of working on the assumption there are two kinds of people.
liberals and conservatives.
I would say if you want to make two kinds of people, you've probably heard that joke, there are two kinds of people, those who divide the world into two kinds of people and smart people, because reality is almost always more complicated than two kinds of anything.
If I were to divide the world into two kinds of people, I might say, no, the two kinds of people are people who are indigenous and people who are colonizers or people with an indigenous mindset and people with a colonizer mindset. People with an indigenous mindset feel they belong to the earth and people with a colonizer mindset thinks the earth belongs to them. And then what I'd say is liberal and conservative are two wings of the colonizer mindset. ⁓
And so as long as you're in a colonizer mentality, you're going to have one group of people who ⁓ feels that the current state of colonization is way better than what it was before. And so let's conserve this current arrangement. And then you're going to have liberal or progressive people who say, no, the current state isn't good enough yet. We have to improve the state of colonization. So that.
And you can imagine how the set of values would separate those two so that they would all agree on the same basic moral foundations, but some would emphasize one set of the other. Now, there's a lot more we could say about that. But what I notice about that framework, the more I've read it and about it and thought about it, is that let me give you some other categories instead of care versus harm, which I think is important, right? Or loyalty versus disloyalty.
What if we talked about foresight versus short-sightedness as a moral foundation? Or what if we looked at full truth versus convenient truth or incomplete truth as a framework? Or if we looked at the courage to differ versus the willingness to conform as one of the key foundations or empathy versus callousness or hard-heartedness or reactivity versus
contemplation. So there'd be a whole different set of the polarities we would look at. ⁓ But given that we live in a colonizer society, is the colonizers one in our society. I'm certainly not saying it's not valid to talk about those moral foundations. That's just my little side thought there.
Scott Rice (20:44)
Yeah.
Well,
Brian, would you, I'm totally open to you kind of complexifying this. Can you tell me how you might see this materializing itself in the church and I mean, it's broadly speaking in a significant way.
Brian Mclaren (21:14)
Yeah. Well, so let me give you an example. In the current political debate, we have Christians who find verses in the Bible that say you should be kind to the stranger and the alien. I mean, in fact, I mean, this is a super common theme in Hebrew scriptures, and Jesus picks it up in unmistakable ways, even expands it farther. And then you find other Christians who use the Bible
to say, no, everybody should respect borders and nobody should cross borders. That's a crime. As soon as you cross a border, you're a criminal. And then we can treat anyone who crosses our border as a criminal. They quote Bible verses and all the rest. At some point, somebody has to say, hold it. What if the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof so that the the the
land doesn't ultimately belong to us. It ultimately belongs to God. And what if all people ultimately are not just accountable to our laws, but they have a deeper accountability to God? And what if God decides that it's OK for some people to survive by crossing a border and our inhospitability and hospitality to them is so against God, even though we're claiming to be defenders of law and order. So in a certain sense,
The fact that we have this idea of obedience to the law versus willingness to challenge the law, that framework in itself puts us in a condition where we may miss the deeper issues of morality. I see Jesus doing this all the time. You can take all of these issues and you find Jesus just flipping the table, so to speak, on that the way the table is set with that polarity.
Scott Rice (23:09)
Brian, would it be okay if I stay with you one more question here and then Drew, I want to go to get your take on this. Brian, I'll admit, I love that vision. Let's look at this in terms of the world belongs to the Lord and that should radically question what our ethical stances are. But what do you say to someone who says, well, you're choosing another Bible verse that you want to privilege. Do you have like...
Brian Mclaren (23:12)
Yeah, yeah.
Scott Rice (23:39)
a greater persuasive reason than that.
Brian Mclaren (23:42)
Yeah. Yeah. So this is where I think we who love the Bible get in trouble because when we when we belong to a community, community bias fits in here. When you belong to a community that says the way you're right here
is by proving your point with Bible verses. And so then we it's a little bit like football. We get our 11 Bible verses lined up and then somebody says, Hut.
And then we see who's left standing and who gained yardage or lost yardage. And we can have those fights and then stop saying, and never once say, how?
Could I be missing the point here? Could I be wrong? I'm so busy playing the game according to the rules that my community set for me. I'm not asking whether this is even the right game to be playing. So I don't have any I don't think there's any shortcut to proving to everybody how right I am or anybody always proving to me how wrong I am. I think it's a messy process. And one of the things that happens in many communities
is they short circuit the process by creating the rules of a game, defining what the six issues are, the four issues are, the three issues are that really matter, and then saying nothing else matters. That in itself becomes a form of community bias.
Scott Rice (25:15)
I appreciate that. And maybe it even underlines why a conversation on what our biases are and how we enter into conversations, the things we bring are so important.
Brian Mclaren (25:24)
You know, I want to try to give a good answer to your question. realize I sort of evaded the question there. And I really want to hear what Drew has to say. But let me just say this is why as a follower of Jesus and I'm not just trying to quote a Bible verse here, but I'm saying this is where I'm coming from. I see the wisdom of Jesus and the wisdom of the Hebrew scriptures in saying what matters most is what you love. You shall love the Lord your God with all your hearts, soul, mind like not.
conservatives or liberals or Americans or Mexicans, you should love God first. And if you love God first, you will always then love yourself appropriately and you'll join God. You'll join God in God's love for you and you'll join God in God's love for your neighbor. And that will create a certain harmony in the same way. I think we have to have people realize how hard it is to arrive at the truth.
And we have to then say, I love the truth so much that I'm willing to go through the costly and difficult process of, a certain sense, always seeking it and always be open to whatever truth I have. I might not have the whole truth in an ideal balance.
Drew Jackson (26:38)
you know, Brian, I appreciate so much of what you shared and, I mean, could kind of go down any one of those trails. The thing that's coming to me as I'm listening to the conversation and I'm hearing the question and just the Heights framework.
Right, around, okay, you have these conservatives and progressives who kind of root in these two different sets of values or moral principles that they judge things by.
Scott, I might ask you to repeat the question that you asked in terms of how that relates to the church and then I'll, can I ask
to say that one more time?
Scott Rice (27:24)
Sure thing, sure
thing. I was coming from Haida, thinking there's popular level books that are saying conservatives and progressives relate to moral principles in different ways. Progressives elevate things like harm and fairness. Conservatives elevate things like obedience and honor. Do we see that in the church? Do they see that kind of divide going on in the church? I'm starting to think about being Christian.
about being followers of Jesus that might help us speak to that divine.
Drew Jackson (27:59)
Yeah, well, I mean, think we absolutely do see that in the church
the evidence of that, one of the evidences of that is sort of what you all were just talking about in terms of the, people go to in the biblical text to make their arguments. I think, you know, ⁓
If I hear someone immediately go to Romans 13 to make an argument for why I should be loyal to the government, that's... ⁓
rooted in this moral value of loyalty to state, that there is something about loyalty to the state that is a fruit of faithfulness, right? Evidence of something, right? And the scriptures say that we shouldn't push back against the governing authorities because the governing authorities are God's hand. And so if you do that, you're pushing back against God, right?
But then, right, you...
If I could look and I could see someone saying, well, okay, I hear you, I hear you saying that, but let's talk about the Exodus narrative. What do we wanna do here? And I could pull on the Exodus narrative as saying, what God cares most deeply about is liberation, freedom, justice.
And so we could go back and forth, right? And I don't know that we're actually gonna get anywhere because we're coming from these two different sets of values of what matters, what is most important. And ⁓ so when you ask the question, is there anything sort of within our shared Christianity that could get us beyond this divide,
I say yes and to that. I say yes because I believe in what Brian just shared that getting down to what Jesus said, what the prophets talked about as what's most essential is love. Love God, love your neighbor. Jesus stretched that to love your enemy. It's getting down to that as most foundational. But then we go to that point and it's, well, how do you define love?
Brian Mclaren (29:59)
You
Drew Jackson (30:25)
Right? then we bring our sort of our moral judgments to even how we define love. What love means, what love looks like. And so we keep splitting, we keep splitting, we keep
there's a...
There's a book that was written by the Catholic priest, Katangale, called Mirror to the Church. And he's talking about the genocide in Rwanda and
he makes the argument that what happened in Rwanda, which was a 95 % Christian nation, should be a mirror to the church in the West, primarily because the brand of Christianity that took root in Rwanda is what was exported from the
But one of the things that he says in that book that always...
strikes me as he says, know, in Rwanda where you had the Hutu and Tutsi peoples who were family, right, ⁓ going at each other, murdering each other because of ⁓ certain tribal loyalties, he says, in Rwanda,
the blood of tribalism ran deeper than the waters of baptism. And so this idea that when I think about our shared Christianity, our values that we find, it still, it in a way comes back again to this question of community bias in a way, right? Of.
Brian Mclaren (31:58)
Mm-hmm.
Scott Rice (32:01)
I see that.
Drew Jackson (32:01)
Who
do I really see myself belonging to? We're always gonna find ways to kind of divide, even when we get to those most essential core values that Jesus saying, this is it, this is the thing, and then we'll debate the thing. Well then who is my neighbor? That's it, it's like who is my neighbor then?
Brian Mclaren (32:21)
There it is.
Drew Jackson (32:24)
and we'll keep splitting on that. So, you know, there's gotta be a way to get underneath of that and I don't know how to do that.
⁓ To me, it really does come back to this, like, there has to be a transformation of the way I see that I don't see myself as just an isolated individual, or I don't see myself as just being connected to this one group of my people and that's it. There's this gotta be this thing that pushes me beyond that.
where I can say, you know, my flourishing, my freedom, my good is bound up with yours. We can only be human together, right, as Desmond Tutu would say. So how do I get to that point? Because that's the only thing that's actually gonna move me beyond just making the argument for my group against yours or my way of seeing things against yours.
Scott Rice (33:22)
Brian and Drew, I have thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. Thanks so much for the gifts and insights that you've brought to us. They have been just that, they've been gifts. Thanks for being guests at Theology Lab.
Brian Mclaren (33:35)
It's our pleasure, thanks.
Drew Jackson (33:36)
Scott.
⁓
