Spiritual formation, moral knowledge, and the common good of our communities
A Q&A with Michael Wear, author of “The Spirit of Our Politics” and founder of the Center for Christianity and Public Life
Michael Wear is a writer, nonprofit founder, and former Obama White House staffer focused on cultivating public life to be “a forum for loving your neighbor.” He’s the author, most recently, of The Spirit of Our Politics: Spiritual Formation and the Renovation of Public Life and the Founder and CEO of the Center for Christianity and Public Life (CCPL), a nonpartisan nonprofit with a mission to “contend for the credibility of Christian resources in public life, for the public good.”
Michael and I sat down for a conversation relevant to anyone who cares about the role of religion in shaping the social fabric of our communities and our shared public life. Why is it important for Christians — and people of all faith traditions — to extend their resources to the public good? How has civic engagement become yet another individualistic and therapeutic outlet? And in a country increasingly defined by moral pluralism, can our communities still promote spiritual formation?
At a time when religious communities seem to be increasingly turning inward toward private life, Michael articulates an affirmative vision for how Christianity can be oriented toward the common good. It’s a perspective that matters for anyone who is committed to strengthening civic life in this country — Christians and non-Christians alike.
- Sam
PS: If you enjoyed my conversation with Michael, consider reading his book, attending CCPL’s annual summit in October, and following his work on Substack, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
I see your organization, the Center for Christianity and Public Life, and your new book, The Spirit of Our Politics, as a single, shared project. How would you begin to describe the throughline across all of these projects?
At the heart of both projects is the same kind of principle but stated in opposite directions. Spiritual formation is central to civic renewal — the kind of people we are has much to do with the kind of politics we have. Then, stated from a different direction: the future of American democracy is inextricably tied to the character of Christianity in this country.
For all of the talk about the decline in religious attendance and affiliation — which is a real thing — there are few things that more Americans share than the identification of being Christian. Now many of those Christians disagree on exactly what that “being Christian” means. But it is something that is shared demographically, has influenced our politics and communities from our founding, and is a major contributor to a healthy 21st century civic pluralism grounded in a shared investment in the flourishing of our communities.
How do you define the concept of “public life” that is central to your work? How does it differ from “private life?” Why do you see it important for all of us — Christians and everyone else — to extend our resources toward the “public good?”
When you're participating in public life, your actions, behaviors, and presence are open to the view of people that you do not intimately know. Now, we're based in DC and my background is in politics, so the center of gravity for us when we're thinking about public life is in the civic realm broadly construed. But I'm not someone who thinks politics and public life are synonymous. Public life includes much more than politics, but it does include politics — that is, what’s involved when political issues and conversations are in the room.
Why is it important? Again, let me take it from two directions. For Christians, if they are not thinking about what it means to be Christian and what the implications of their faith are for how they show up in public, they will be depriving themselves of connecting the dots — of living an integrated life. From a pastoral perspective, it's vital that Christians are thinking about what it means to think and act Christianly in civic and public life because Christianity has a great deal to contribute to it. I would want people to consider the implications of advancing an argument other than that Christian resources be oriented towards the public good. If Christian resources are not oriented toward the public good, that opens up some pretty negative and destructive possibilities for how Christians engage in public life, and how we — people of all faiths or no faith at all — relate to and think about one another.
Do you see this dynamic of Christians orienting more toward private life and away from public life as confined to Christians, or part of a broader trend toward privatization?
It’s certainly tied up with rising social distrust and distrust in institutions broadly. It's tied up in a radical individualism that even separates people from the idea of sacrifice and commitment — not just regarding an obscure public — but even at the level of the local church. JFK’s call to ask what we can do for our country and for others is now imperative across institutions, including the family and the local congregation. These days we must, “Ask not what your church can do for you, but what you can do for your church.”
Perhaps an even deeper dynamic here is a concept I refer to in my book as “the disappearance of moral knowledge.” This is the idea that in the latter-half of the 20th century, it was decided by important institutions that religion — and even moral knowledge broadly — does not offer and cannot count as offering publicly available knowledge that is fit for teaching and informing decisionmaking. There’s been this disastrous view — though it arose for some good reasons — that moral knowledge can't be taught by public institutions because it doesn't count as real “knowledge.” One reason this is disastrous is that we live in a moral universe and we are required to make moral decisions regularly. Much of the anxiety and distrust we see is because our public life is haunted by the sense that we are constantly forced by reality to make moral decisions, but we must do so now without even the possibility that those decisions could be based on moral authority grounded in moral knowledge.
What I’m talking about is different than the rhetoric we hear about how we’ve quote, unquote, “lost a Christian America.” The disappearance of moral knowledge wasn't just imposed from the outside — Christians contributed to it and acquiesced to it from within their own institutions. It's not a secular-religious divide, it's more of a philosophical development.
The last chapter of your book features a powerful line: “Spiritual formation is essential to civic renewal.” Spiritual formation also happens in communities, which, for the most part, are now defined by moral pluralism. Do you see spiritual formation and moral pluralism in tension with one another? How can spiritual formation be promoted in morally pluralistic communities?
I think they are in tension with one another, but I think it's an essential tension. Spiritual formation is inherently social — it is difficult to conceive of spiritual formation absent community and absent difference. Spiritual formation is the process by which the human character takes on a specific shape. Difference strengthens and provides support for an integrated life because you are forced to consider that there are alternatives to the kinds of formation that you are pursuing.
There are various religious traditions, which are very thick and have very developed means of both personal and communal formation, but provide an opportunity to leave the community and experience something different. I visited an Anabaptist religious community where if you were raised in the community, to join the community as an adult, you have to first leave the community and then return. So, if you decide to reenter, there's no longer the looming question in your mind, “What are the alternatives that I'm missing out on?” The thickness and definition of those communities are made possible by how intentional they are about exposure to alternatives. In this way, pluralism is essential to formation.
However, pluralism can undermine formation if a requirement of building a healthy pluralism is to flatten or exclude questions regarding the nature and shape of what constitutes the good life. We need a pluralism that is robust enough to support thick conceptions of the good life. Too often, we are afraid of what might happen if people are embraced in a community while they are expressing visions of the good life that are by definition exclusive. It's a complex thing to do, but a lot of the political and social tension we're facing today results from this pretension of neutrality that, in reality, is not all that neutral.
The other day, I was on my way to meet with my friend, Tara Isabella Burton, in DC’s Woodley Park neighborhood. As I was walking on the Duke Ellington Bridge to where we were meeting, I noticed this little neighborhood marketing campaign displayed on all the banners. The banners included the name of the neighborhood, and then these modern self-help slogans, like “live your truth” and “savor the moment.” I imagine the thinking here is, “These could be representative of our neighborhood because who would disagree with them?” But a lot of people could disagree with them! There's an assumption that they're benign when, actually, they're incredibly laden with values. I was struck, especially given that I was meeting with a friend who has written extensively about this type of expressive sloganeering.
You write about our need to “bear each other’s burdens,” “love our neighbors,” and seek to help rather than win. These disciplines are partially an individual responsibility, of course. But a good part of these disciplines are also mediated and conditioned by our neighborhood and community institutions. How do you think our institutions — not just our individuals — need to be formed to promote these spiritual practices in public life?
T.S. Eliot has this quote, which I’m paraphrasing slightly here: “The folly of the great human endeavor has been to try to create a system so perfect that people no longer have to be good.” How much of what we do in civic life — particularly as policymakers and people who have a particular responsibility in shaping systems — is done to avoid the people who make up our common life instead of creating environments where they can change and flourish and contribute?
In my books, I’ve argued that politics is causing great spiritual harm, and a big reason for that is people are going to politics to get their spiritual and emotional needs met. One of the ways our political institutions can address this is by providing opportunities for citizens to draw closer to and have more of a say in the act of self-governance. This would help our civic life become more of a place for the stewardship of responsibility, rather than one more therapeutic outlet for general aspirations and grievances that our politics must then seek to process.
So many of the people involved in promoting civic engagement feel comfortable in our civic life as it is, which is why they’re involved in civic work. However, this also makes them tremendous outliers. The vast majority of Americans do not feel comfortable in our politics and do not feel our civic institutions are made for them. This creates a great disconnect when we try to motivate others to engage by emphasizing how good it feels to express yourself and make your voice heard. Well, the problem is that many people are not engaged because our political culture sets an expectation of comfort and devotion that they do not and should not have to feel to participate. They walk into the ballot box and they think, “Well, I was told this was how I could make my voice heard, but my voice isn't represented on the ballot.”
I remember a conversation with a woman who was running an organization that was doing advocacy within the Muslim community. She was relating her experience in a voter registration effort that she was running and it was exactly this dynamic. She thought that she could go to Imams and say, “It's so important that our community is represented in our civic life.” The response she received from so many was, “My faith is too distinct to attach it to the limited means of political engagement which are on offer today.” So, it was actually by invoking the centrality of their faith as a motivation for civic engagement that they felt more wary of civic engagement.
I've begun to argue, somewhat counterintuitively, that we need to consider how we might increase civic engagement and strengthen community bonds by lowering the morally freighted language. We need to reject turning our politics into one more consumer product and seek to motivate engagement through the self-interested language of marketing (e.g., “your values are on the line” or “stand up for who you are”). Instead, we need to ground civic involvement in something that is less therapeutic and less individualistic. It is quite striking how individualistic the campaigning is to get people to invest in community. The vote is probably the least expressive political action a person can take. You don’t vote to express your pure, unmediated will. Your vote is a stewardship of a responsibility you already have.
What will it take to cultivate a better relationship between — to use your words — the people “who have a responsibility in shaping systems” and the “people who make up our common life”?
We need to take some responsibility for helping people imagine a place of dignity they can hold in our vision of the country we are seeking to build and the communities we are seeking to create. And yet, we have a lot of rhetoric in our civic and public life right now suggesting that people are on their own to figure it out.
It is a dangerous place to be when you are seeking to influence a group of people that you do not love. The skepticism that we see about public servants and about philanthropy is rooted in this assumption: “These actors do not will my good. If anything, I am a wrench in their plans and not someone they are building for.” Drawing on Christian resources, it's very important to be able to say specifically to Christians: “If your politics is not an expression of willing the good for those that you disagree with, your politics is not Christian in its character.”
You’re teeing up my last question perfectly. In the book, I appreciated your contrast between the fragility of human love and relationships — and the durability of spiritual ones. Can you speak a bit more to this comparison? What are its implications for public life?
Our politics has become a reservoir for our hates, our loves, our aspirations, our resentments, and our grievances. I have been tremendously moved by the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer — speaking specifically in the context of very thick Christian community — and he says something along the lines of, “When Christians meet, they never meet one on one. Jesus stands before them and between them.” He continues: “You never have an agenda for the other person. There's a mediation of goodwill.”
We need more of this intention in our politics right now — more humility about the rightness of our instrumental political views, and more recognition that we should not seek to enact our will on our neighbors. I wouldn't imagine that everyone takes me up on the idea of imagining Jesus between them and their political interlocutor. But who or what else are you looking to other than defeating your political enemies? Because that is a poor master of how we show up in our politics and in our communities.