Managing Editor Drew Griffin sits down with Prof. Paul Miller to discuss the lack of civility in American politics, the rise of nationalism, and his recently published report on Faith and Healthy Democracy.

Drew Griffin is the managing editor of Providence.

Paul Miller is an author and professor of international affairs at Georgetown University.

Kirkland An produced this episode.

Rough Transcript

Drew Griffin
Welcome to the ProvCast, the regular podcast of Providence, the Journal of Christianity and American foreign policy. I’m managing editor, Drew Griffin. We live in a world, in an era of increasing cultural violence and political division. This week’s news alone gives us a picture, a foretaste, I think, of what the future may hold as the House has begun an Impeachment Inquiry against President Donald Trump. Broader in the culture, we see almost weekly school shootings and shootings in synagogues and churches. We live in an era that seems to be increasingly violent and full of cultural division. And so, to talk about this era, to talk about the role of civility-if it has a role anymore in the public square-my guest today is Dr. Paul Miller. He is a professor in the practice of international affairs at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. He’s a contributing editor here at Providence, a research fellow with the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. Paul has just authored with the ERLC a new study, a report entitled, “Faith and a Healthy Democracy,” and that’s what we’re here to talk about. So, Paul, welcome to the ProvCast.

Paul Miller
Thanks for having me on the show, Drew.

Drew Griffin
So, this report is in part a series of interviews that you conducted, correct, with evangelicals and people of faith, but it’s also a poll that looks at the role of civility in the public square, that looks at the diminishing presence of civility, and really how maybe Christians engage—are engaging in culture. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about what led you to the report and to maybe tease the report out a little bit of some of the details that you found.

Paul Miller
Yeah, thanks. So, this report started life over a year ago, when the Fetzer Institute commissioned the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, or established a relationship with them, to carry out this report on civility and the role of evangelicalism in the public square. The Fetzer Institute is keenly interested in what it takes to sustain healthy democracy using resources of faith, and they’re not a Christian organization, but they recognize the role that religious people can play in supporting a healthy public square. The Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, of course, is interested in religious liberty and in a healthy public square and the health of American democracy. So, they asked me to lead this research project, and I had a team of researchers to help with this. By no means was this my own solo work. We decided to tackle this question by interviewing evangelical leaders. We interviewed about 50 evangelical leaders and there was a long list of folks who participated, and we also commissioned, as you mentioned, proprietary polls from Lifeway Research to ask evangelicals nationwide their attitudes about democracy, about compromise, about particular issues like abortion and racial relations and other issues, and we put it all together, along with some historical research in this report about faith and a healthy democracy, which you can find on the Ethics and Religious Liberties website today. This report goes into some detail on what we found, what we heard from our interviewees, and what the results of the poll were.

Drew Griffin
So, the one of the main kind of questions that I wanted to ask you, and having read the report—I read it kind of earlier this summer—I had an opportunity to spend some time with you and the ERLC up on Capitol Hill where we met with a number of leaders and had some discussions talking about civility in politics. And if you spend any time in Washington, DC, or if you watch the news at all, you might think that there is no such thing as civility in politics. So, I’ll kind of put the question to you, kind of based out of the feedback that you received, is civility dead in America? I mean, is there such a thing as civility in the public square?

Paul Miller
So that was one of the first questions we asked our interviewees and their response was fairly negative. There’s a long list of adjectives they used to describe the state of civility in the public square today. Some of my favorites, or the most common, was ‘toxic.’ They all said that the public square today was toxic, which is something that is poisonous and actively unhealthy to be around. That’s how they thought of politics. But they also described our public square as demoralizing, dispiriting, emotionally exhausting. Somebody said it was a frenzy of political rage, it was inflammatory, incendiary, low, nasty, pathetic, phobic. And my favorites were someone who described our public square as marked by circumambulatory imbecility. And, of course, many people—

Drew Griffin
So that was obviously a professor, right?

Paul Miller
Yeah, I think it was a seminary professor. And people said it was quote, ‘a dumpster fire.’ However, I do want to mention, some of our interviewees were keen to highlight where they saw civility still alive. They saw civility still alive at the local level as opposed to the national level. They saw civility alive in face-to-face relationships offline, off of Twitter. And they saw civility alive in, yeah, in the face-to-face relationships and institutions of civil society. So, it seems that civil public engagement is still possible when we’re talking about local and face-to-face and offline.

Drew Griffin
How big was the disconnect that you saw between the people who were, let’s say, obsessed with social media and involved in an online, whether it’s a Twitter, a Facebook—and maybe people who had kind of one-to-one interactions, like when we had meetings on Capitol Hill, and we were sitting there listening to various congressmen and senators come in, and they were all collegial. They all were kind. They were kind to one another. They were affable towards one another. And yet, if you probably went out one or two rings into their media orbits and into their social media feeds, oftentimes it gets increasingly caustic the further out you go. So, I mean, how big is that disconnect that you see kind of between the personal reality and the social media kind of image?

Paul Miller
Well, so it’s hard to measure that. But I will say that it was something that many of our interviewees specifically highlighted as a concern of theirs. They—we—believe fairly strongly that social media has been pretty harmful for our public dialogue. I want to say right off the bat, we recognize there are some beneficial things that social media brings. Social media is an instantaneous publishing platform. It is access to media for those who do not have access to traditional media, so it can amplify disenfranchised voices. And that’s the good thing about social media. However, on balance, it seems to bring more harm than good because on the whole, many of us are looking to social media as a substitute for our real face-to-face human communities. We surround ourselves with these artificial, constructed, online tribal communities, echo chambers, informational echo chambers, where we only engage with people we already agree with, and we engage with them to hear our beliefs echoed back to us without any challenge, only with affirmation and validation. When we do that, we whip ourselves up into self-righteous certainty and rage against the other side. That’s what these social media bubbles do to us. And so we’re very concerned about what this means for our public discourse. Does that answer your question, Drew?

Drew Griffin
Yeah, no, I think that that’s extremely helpful. That brings up the idea of kind of being siloed and having your own kind of world that you live in, and you kind of exist in. So, I want to talk about that a little bit, in that both on the Right and the Left, there is kind of this mantra that comes up that this is really the worst that it’s ever been, right? You can find people on the Left who say that this is the worst of times, that America has never been worse, it’s never been less civil, that you’ve got the rampant oppression of the patriarchy, you’ve got corporations running amok, you’ve got religion in power that’s suppressing people’s personal individual rights. Then you have people on the Right ideologically who say, “Hey, this is the worst of times. It’s secularism run amok, there’s sexual liberation everywhere, there’s loss of a moral culture abroad.” And each one is existing in its own little bubble, kind of feeding itself, feeding this kind of apocalyptic egotism, that says, “this is literally the worst it’s ever been in America,” with some of the people that you talked about. And I read some of the responses and so I kind of would be interested in your own impressions as well, as a historian and one who studied American history. I mean, is that a fair assumption from either the Right or the Left that this is the worst of times? If we look back in the 1960s, let’s say 1968 and 1969, where we have riots and cities on fire, and you have the Vietnam War, the Americans are extremely divided. You look at the 1850s before the Civil War, you look at Reconstruction, the 1870s, after the Civil War, Jim Crow, give us maybe some historical perspective, and maybe what did you hear from some of the respondents regarding how they feel about this era in American history?

Paul Miller
Yeah, so let’s just go ahead and grant that the 1860s were probably the worst part of American history. Right?

Drew Griffin
Right.

Paul Miller
And Americans were actually taking up arms against each other. And we’re not there, despite what the President tweeted just this morning. He made the veiled comment about civil war. Again, you know, we’re not there and I don’t think we’re going to get there. Praise the Lord for that. There are other areas of American history that were pretty bad. The 1790s actually were very bad in terms of partisanship. The new nation was barely standing on its own two feet and there was a lot of fractiousness about how to interpret the brand new constitution. It was not clear that the nation would survive those early partisan disputes. We did hear from our interviewees many comparisons between today and the 1960s, and I think that’s pretty fair. The 1960s were very bitter, very partisan, and there’s a lot of recrimination. What was different is that in the 1960s, there was actually a lot more violence. There was a lot more crime, but there was also a lot more domestic terrorism. And there was the draft, and there was the Vietnam War, and there was a returning soldiers, veterans, hundreds of thousands, millions of veterans coming back. And it made for a volatile mix in the 1960s on into the early 1970s. And I think Americans today, younger Americans, just simply have no awareness, no knowledge that domestic terrorism was a fairly large problem back then.

You had left wing groups like the Weatherman Underground, the Symbionese Liberation Army, and other groups that were a real problem. And, of course, you had the KKK as a right wing terrorist group. So, there’s a lot of violence back in the 1960s and 70s, bombings and assassinations that we just don’t have today. Praise the Lord for that. So today is not that bad. What is different about today, I think, and here’s—I’m kind of speaking for myself and speculating a little bit… I think the increase in globalization, technology and communications, and, yes, social media, has changed our informational environment in truly unprecedented ways, such that Americans are losing faith and the ability to know what truth is and that makes us distrust ourselves, distrust our news, distrust each other, and certainly distrust the other side. And I wonder if the depth of distrust in the possibility of truth is truly unprecedented in American history. If so, that is deeply worrying. I don’t know if that means violence is around the corner. It does mean that the workings of our democracy, which depend upon knowable facts, are fairly precarious right now.

Drew Griffin
So, what are one of the ways that you found—and your team of researchers—found maybe to a path back towards civility? And I say that, and I want to take a little brief kind of caveat, maybe before you answer that, into there are people who kind of openly decry the word civility, that they would say that, “Look, this isn’t a civil time; the stakes are high.” You’ve got a number of people, people that we’ve written about and people that we are engaging with as Providence, as a community, talking about nationalism, talking kind of about the new Right, the new conservatism out there that says, guys like Sohrab Ahmari or whatnot, that say we’re in a culture war; we’re at enmity with the other side, and this other side, this liberal side… whether it’s, you know, drag queen story hours or whomever, needs to be utterly defeated for the common good, and really, look, these individuals, this new Right, looks to politicians like President Trump, as kind of saying, “Look, he’s not civil. He’s not a pastor. We didn’t elect a pastor. We need someone who’s disruptive, who if they need to break some bones to get the common good work done, so be it.”

So, with that kind of voice in our own camp-our own kind of conservative camp-what path is there to civility, like how do you make the argument then in this kind of environment, even on our own side. Let’s leave secularism out. Let’s leave the leftist liberal side out. Let’s just talk about conservatism in general. How do we make the case to say it is right and good that we go about fighting the cultural fight that we need to but we do so in a way that is civil?

Paul Miller
So, there’s a lot there and I could talk forever on this. The first line of the report after the introduction is “Civility is not the most important virtue in public life. Justice has a good claim to that.” Right? So I recognize that civility is not the highest good and we’re not saying that it is. Many of our interviewees, particularly non-White interviewees, pointed out to us that civility can be a card that White people play to stifle marginalized voices, and that sometimes marginalized voices have to be a little uncivil to be heard at all. And the Civil Rights Movement was, for example, the Civil Rights Movement did civil disobedience, right, did things that were disturbing to the majority, just so they could dramatize the injustice that they were suffering. And that, I think, is entirely justified and appropriate in some conditions. But let me draw a distinction between the Civil Rights Movement and what Sohrab Ahmari is calling for. The Civil Rights Movement called for civil disobedience and the leader of that movement was a pastor, and he did exemplify a gentlemanliness and a dignity, and when he led that movement—I’m talking about Martin Luther King Jr.—he called for the urgency of the now and he called for civil disobedience, but he also called, certainly, not for violence. And he exemplified a certain way of undertaking that kind of politics that I don’t see coming from the so-called, the new Right or the new nationalism.

When the new Right or whatever you call them, the nationalists, when they call for uncivil politics it often sounds to me like they’re just calling for unkindness, incivility, and meanness as virtues in and of themselves. They’re not calling for civil disobedience. They’re not calling for that kind of principled opposition to some unjust policy. They’re just calling for brawlers’ tactics in the public square for its own sake, and I do not think that that is productive. Nor do I think it’s realistic. When Ahmari and the others call for “defeating the other side and imposing a new vision of the good on the public square,” which is almost exactly a quote from Ahmari’s work, when they call for that I think that’s wildly unrealistic. There’s no prospects that we-however you define ‘we’-that we are going to defeat the other side in the cultural war and impose our solution on them. That’s unrealistic. It’s counterproductive because it will provoke a backlash. It goes against our own values by championing incivility, unkindness, a lack of graciousness, and, frankly, it seems to me to commit the sin of gaining the world to lose our soul—losing our soul to gain the whole world. I don’t understand how that could be a justifiable way of engaging in a Christian public witness in the public square. So, I do disagree with those who champion incivility as some kind of new virtue in the environment we’re in. I don’t think that’s true at all.

Drew Griffin
Is there some kind of tie or connection that you can see? And, let’s put on our theologian hats, maybe, or the, kind of, our Christian intellectualism hats. Is there a connection that you see between civility and the idea of meekness in that to be civil is not to be weak or not to be necessarily a pushover any more than to be meek is to be weak, that there’s a way to be strong, there’s a way to be present and truthful and articulate a virtue and do so with strength, and a way that is… it’s countercultural. The world, as Scripture tells, is full of darkness. There is an element to we are to be light in that darkness, there is to be something that is distinct and different among Christians. And I’m backing this away from kind of maybe the national conversation, retreating into our own camp, right, of Christendom. But to the extent to which this is an intra-Christian, intrafaith discussion, and talking about how Christians and evangelicals and conservatives kind of engage in the culture, is civility tied to meekness? Is there a link there? And wouldn’t there be a good argument, then, as this is a biblical virtue that isn’t in any way weak, because Christ Himself was was meek, Christ Himself was civil, even to the point of, yes, being crucified, but if we are to emulate Christ, and to do that in the culture, as Christians, is there a connection there?

Paul Miller
So, you’ve used the word meekness. I’ll quote from Bruce Ashford, who wrote in his book One Nation Under God, he said, the essence of civility is not spinelessness, but self-control, self-control. And that is how he identified the core of what it means to be civil. It’s okay to disagree with people. And, in fact, we ought to disagree vigorously, strongly with firmness, when the other side says something wrong, untruthful, or unjust. When they advocate for unjust policies, we should be strident and unapologetic about expressing our disagreement. It’s one of my more frustrating things when people say, well, Donald Trump’s a fighter. Not really because he does not actually articulate very clearly what we’re fighting for or what the elements of disagreement are with the other side. He’s just kind of mean and insulting. So, for a fighter, I think we need somebody who can articulate well what we’re fighting for, what we’re fighting against, and to do so with self-control and with gracious words, and that is what it means to be civil, and I think it’s actually more productive in the long run to do that. You asked for us to put our Christian hats on and I would say that there… Sorry, I thought I had the verse but I don’t have it. Somewhere, I think in the book of Colossians, Paul says, “Let your words always be full of grace.” I might be slightly misquoting it, but there’s… You read the entire book of Proverbs and it commends being slow to anger and slow to speak and being self-controlled, being wise and careful with your words. I think as Christians, we ought to recognize we are conscience bound; we are biblically bound to be people of gracious words, to be careful with our speech, even as we disagree stridently and vigorously with those who advocate for injustice.

Drew Griffin
So as far as engaging in the—civilly—kind of in common culture, one of the statistics that I found really fascinating in the report is about the common culture itself, and it kind of raises the question, it’s like, do we share anything in common with the people around us? 70 percent of the respondents on this—in the survey—said that they did not participate in any non-religious, civic activities, which kind of gets to this point of like, outside of these silos, outside of these little camps that we exist in, whether our church or synagogue or mosque or whatever religious activities, in terms of broader base civic activities, the majority of us, the majority of people, aren’t participating in anything. So, what is it that we share in common? If we’re going to have a lingua franca, kind of a common language, that we want to kind of be civil, where are the areas in society that we’re gathering around that we hold in common that we can dialogue about? What do you see… What did you find in the report?

Paul Miller
So, I fear that the thing that truly does bind us together right now as Americans is our pop culture. I say I fear that because that’s no certain or sure remedy for national unity. And you can’t—you can’t rest national unity on that. But, think about it, if you meet a stranger, and you’re trying to strike up small talk with them, and you’re on a train or something like that, you’re gonna end up talking about either sports or TV or movies. That’s what effectively does bind us together. We all recreate the same way, or we indulge in the same entertainment, and it fills me with sorrow that that’s the thing that does effectively bind us together because, again, it’s not enough and it will not hold a country together. I would love to see, this is again just speaking for myself here, I think that it would be entirely good for us to re-cultivate a sense of our shared history. I think C. S. Lewis said something about how a love for your country means loving its past—the best part of your past—and desiring to be a part of its future, something to that effect. And, I think that’s true. I think that American history should tell us who we are as a people. Of course, it’s filled with good things and bad things, but we need to have a common understanding of what those things are, and we should in common celebrate the good things, and I think in common we should also aspire to bring those good things in the future. That’s what ought to binds us together, and it’s just not doing that right now.

Drew Griffin
So, we’ve talked a little bit about, you know, civility within the domestic sphere. I want to move out a little bit into the global environment, and, you know, America’s place in the world. And, you know, there’s often, throughout American history, in the 20th century, this kind of… the idea of the ugly American. Americans are kind of… head out into the world and are oftentimes kind of uncivil or oftentimes kind of maybe ham-fisted in the way that they engage with people from other cultures. And then if you look at our own policy or own foreign affairs there’s a number of areas that we head into that can be difficult, and wars that we either instigate or get dragged into, and there’s always a lot of criticism for America on the world stage, and yet we are kind of a global leader up until, I would say, the presidencies of Barack Obama and Donald Trump. There’s been this global order that has been largely orchestrated and instrumented and organized by the United States, and it’s been done so through diplomacy, through measured responses, through the idea of mutually assured destruction during the Cold War and diplomatic, multilateral organizations. So, all of this, kind of, this civil structure, which has begun to kind of unravel a little bit, and there is defenders of Donald Trump who say, “Here he is, again. He is the disrupter. No, he’s not civil. He attacks our allies. He attacks everybody just about at some point.” And, you know, what is the role of that kind of civility on the global stage because we are dealing with bad actors oftentimes; we’re dealing with people who, you know, you can be civil up to a point, but civility won’t stop Hitler from invading Poland or it won’t stop Saddam Hussein from invading Kuwait. I mean, at some points, civility has to take a backseat to the 101st Airborne, I’m assuming. So, how do you see this dialogue about civility going from the domestic sphere into, let’s say, foreign affairs?

Paul Miller
Yeah, no, that’s a great question. And again, I can always quote the report here about how civility is not the highest virtue, that justice is. I even say war is uncivil, but sometimes necessary, and sometimes just. So, you’re right, at some point there’s… you sort of draw a line and you understand that civility is no longer the governing virtue of our political discussions abroad. The liberal international order that has taken root since the Second World War, I think is unbalanced; it’s been a good thing. I know people are… a lot of people are arguing about that right now. I’m on the side that says I think it’s unbalanced but a good thing, and we should keep it and we should continue to invest in it because it’s the outer perimeter of American security, it’s an engine of American prosperity, and it’s a tool of American influence. So, if you want to put America first then you should continue to be a globalist and invest in the liberal order because it’s a good thing. Again, I understand people do disagree about that. To the extent that that’s true, I think we absolutely need to cultivate civility amongst our allies, amongst NATO, amongst other like minded countries that share similar values with us in East Asia like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand. So, there’s a collection of like-minded countries, the free world order, and we are and have been the leader of the free world. And yes, we should cultivate some sense of stability amongst our allies. But just as I said that we should be unapologetic about expressing disagreement with our political opponents at home,, the same is true—even more true—when we talk about our rivals and our enemies abroad. We have no real obligation to pull our punches or to soft-pedal our disagreements with Russia, with China, with Iran, with North Korea, and certainly not with anybody we’re in a shooting war with, not with the Taliban, not with al-Qaeda. And so, there’s a boundary line within which civility is possible and necessary, and outside that boundary line, it is no longer necessary and no longer helpful. Let me anticipate the objection. I know exactly what the nationalists will say. They’ll say we need to import that wartime mentality and use it against the progressive Left here at home. What I have to say to that is, you don’t really understand what war actually means. I have been to war. I am a veteran of the United States Army. I served in Afghanistan. I know what a war actually is, and these people on the Right, the nationalists, they generally don’t, and for them to import the rhetoric of war and say that we need to adopt the attitude of war towards our domestic political opponents is repugnant, it’s irresponsible, and I think it’s unethical.

Drew Griffin
Do you think, as a very civil way of uttering your objection there that I appreciate, I think, I mean, do you find, to even just talk about that characterization of importing this kind of international warfare language into the domestic space and talking about domestic politics, that there is a lot of cover that is given to people on social media, right, that there’s this distance, there’s this anonymity, a tweet is, you know, 280 characters, a Facebook post is, you know, maybe just a few sentences, it’s kind of thrown out there, and there’s some distance. If somebody disagrees with you, you can block them, you can mute them, there are a number—you know, you can isolate yourself from even knowing that their criticism exists, and it gives you some cover to make kind of grandiose statements like that that are divorced from reality. And so, so much of that is happening all the time, and so much of that is kind of being thrown out there with not a lot of accountability. Do you find that that is, you know, one of the factors that exacerbates this instability, is the ability to just throw stuff out there without ever really having to explain it or being held accountable for what you are, you know, throwing out?

Paul Miller
Yes, I think anonymity has helped shield… Internet anonymity has helped shield people from the consequences of their rhetoric. I do want to recognize the positive side of that. Internet anonymity helps dissidents protest their authoritarian governments around the world, so I would—I want to kind of protect the possibility of that. But, those who are indulging in anonymity just so they can be mean or snarky on Twitter is obviously irresponsible. I also want to acknowledge there are plenty of blue checkmarks on Twitter who are equally uncivil and irresponsible in their rhetoric. So, anonymity isn’t the only variable that causes people to be uncivil, but it can be unhelpful when you’re in a democratic society and you’re using anonymity as a shield for your snark.

Drew Griffin
Yeah, well, I guess it’s not even anonymity. It would just be distance, you know, that there’s a certain… They don’t have to stare you in the face and make an argument about that as a veteran. They can just say… just throw something up on Twitter, blue checkmark or not, and then, you know, that level of distance kind of gives them some cover. So, about that, though, let’s real quick kind of talk about… You have senators like Senator Josh Hawley, who is decrying the very thing that we’re talking about, the kind of various biases that exist on social media, whether on Facebook or on Twitter, and how there are voices out there that are highly influential, but there’s very little accountability, and so you have people like him who are saying, “Look, we need some accountability. We need to basically create censorship boards for Twitter, for social media, for Facebook that would attempt to alleviate some of this unfairness” that even you and I are talking about right now. I hear that and it raises all kinds of alarm bells in my head. But, I mean, based off of even your report, I mean, did you find that type of proposal? Do you think that what Holly and others kind of proposed in terms of censoring Facebook or using the government as some kind of apparatus to tap down on negative social media, do you think that your respondents in this study that you did with ERLC would be amenable to that? Do you think that that’s something that there’s an audience out there for that?

Paul Miller
So, in the report, in particular, we focused our recommendations on individuals and on churches, and we steered clear a little bit of public policy, of recommending public policy to enhance stability because this report is part of a long-term project on civility. We think maybe in another couple years, after we do more conferences, events, panels, and other research, we might venture into more public policy recommendations. For now, we focused our recommendations on, again, individuals, families, and churches on how we can train ourselves personally for greater civility. If you’re asking my opinion about, you know, using Facebook or getting the government involved to sponsor civility, I’ll probably express my disagreement with that. I think, the less the government does to police our speech, the better; that’s just my own view. I don’t trust Facebook either. With that, I do think that platforms like Twitter have a very difficult task here. They either are not responsible for the content on their platforms, in which case it should be kind of a Wild West if anything goes, or if they should acknowledge that they are responsible, in which case they are a publisher, and then they should… they should be much more involved in policing the speech on their platforms. Right now, with Twitter as an example, it’s very unclear what the Twitter policy actually is, what is it we’re allowed to say, we’re not allowed to say, and when they decide to take action and ban a person or delete an account or deactivate an account, it’s unclear what standards they’re using, and it seems often to be, you know, just sort of a partisan bias to silence this voice or that voice, and it’s a little uncomfortable. I kind of wish they would pick one or the other. Let’s just go with pure libertarian anarchy, anything goes, Wild West out there, or own up to being a publisher on your platform and start policing a lot more than you wanted to. And if I were doing this, I think I’d probably just ban anonymous accounts. Honestly, I think that would go a long way to deleting the trolls, the Russian bots, and the White nationalists out there. I think that would really help the state of Twitter, for example.

Drew Griffin
Right. The anonymous White nationalists. I guess the ones with blue checkmarks, I guess, would continue to spread their poison. Okay, as we kind of wrap up and close, what… You said you broke down the recommendations in terms of individuals and churches. Let’s look at just maybe individuals right now. What—as people listening to this podcast who are concerned with the state of the culture, but also want to engage and not just completely forgo their witness, and want to be civil, and they want to do so in a, you know, helpful kind of way—what are some of the ways that you guys recommended that Christians and just people of faith and people who care about America, how they should go about engaging? What are two or three things that they should do that they could take away that could change their engagement in the culture for the better?

Paul Miller
Let me mention a few. One of them that we mentioned is trying to cultivate a habit of getting your news from print sources instead of visual sources. So, instead of the TV or YouTube, try a actual newspaper or a magazine, or the online equivalent of that. We… A lot of our interviewees suggested that the visual media are more emotional, the print media are more cerebral, and when you’re forced to think as you read, it will probably turn down the temperature of your engagement and cause you to think more and be more critical in what you’re consuming, what kind of news you’re consuming, news and opinion. So, more print, less visual. That’s just one very simple thing. Another idea that we considered is—this is gonna sound so clichéd and so politically correct, but it’s very true—if you seek out difference, if you seek out people who are different than you are, the polling results—Lifeway did a Civility Index and they found a very strong correlation. People who have friends of a different religion, different ethnicity, different political party, they tend to be more civil. When we expose ourselves to difference it tends to challenge us to grow our empathy and grow our hearts and grow our understanding for others who are not like ourselves. So, seek out difference. Find and make friends with people who aren’t like you, who do not fit your exact demographic category. That’s a good thing. Even if it is a cliché. Last thing I’ll mention on the individual level: try not to have an opinion about everything. Every single day, you can go and find something to be outraged about. You can find a news report about something happening across the world that sounds horrible and you can be outraged about it; it will ruin your day and you can retweet it and ruin somebody else’s day. So, try not to do that. Try not to feel the burden of having an opinion or declaring your stance to the world on every single issue or crisis or controversy of the day. You might just try tuning out quite a lot of that stuff because it doesn’t actually affect your life. Consider focusing on local things—things that actually affect you, your family, your neighborhood, your school—and that could be a much healthier way to engage in the public square than just finding the newest thing to be outraged about.

Drew Griffin
Well, that’s good advice. I appreciate your study. I appreciate your opinion. I’m glad you have one and you were able to share it with us. My guest is Paul Miller. He is a professor at Georgetown University, author of a recent study, “Faith and Healthy Democracy,” co-authored with the ERLC, which you can find at erlc.com, and the Fetzer Institute. He’s also the author of American Power and Liberal Order: A Conservative Internationalist Grand Strategy published in 2016 by Georgetown University Press. You can also read him at providencemag.com as he is a speaker—a writer and speaker—there. So, Paul, it’s been great to talk with you and thank you for being on.

Paul Miller
Thank you.