How Can We Share a Country If Nothing Is Truly Neutral?

Note: From Learning to Disagree (Zondervan 2024). Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Citations have been omitted.

Our next class session tackles religious influence in public school curricula. To tee up this discussion, I assign a somewhat dated but smartly written article titled “How Christian Were the Founders?” The article chronicles the textbook selection battles in Texas. The state of Texas orders so many public school textbooks – forty-eight million annually – that it effectively sets the market for the rest of the country. You might think that California would play a role, but as the article’s author wryly notes, “California is the largest textbook market, but besides being bankrupt, it tends to be so specific about what kinds of information its students should learn that few other states follow its lead.” That puts Texas in the driver’s seat.

The importance of the textbook market in Texas means textbook selection decisions are really important, which means the Texas State Board of Education is really important. And the conservative Christians have figured this out. The article I assign details some of the characters and personalities who make their way into the decision-making process. It’s a pretty wild story, including a dentist named Don whose “real passions are his faith and the state board of education.” Don is a “young earth” creationist who thinks “textbooks are mostly the product of the liberal establishment.”

The Texans in my class tell me all of this is entirely plausible, and they recall their public school textbooks having some weird stories in them. They seem no worse for wear, college having disabused them of these fanciful historical takes. Better still, college has taught them to be open-minded, unlike Don the dentist. I ask them if they’re open-minded enough to be okay if their kids grow up to be like Don.

This exchange transitions to a robust discussion about whether any classroom or textbook can really be neutral. One of my students notes astutely that even the best math teachers make nonneutral decisions about content and pedagogy; for example, the decision whether to teach linear algebra rather than advanced calculus can nudge students toward different career possibilities. And that’s to say nothing of racial, gender and other biases held by teachers across a variety of disciplines.

I think about this all the time in my own teaching. I try to minimize my biases and encourage rich discussion about the topics at hand. But I also self-consciously set nonneutral limits on the scope of acceptable arguments. When I teach Law and Religion, I don’t take seriously suggestions that the United States should be a theocracy, nor do I entertain arguments that the government should shut down churches. Those political arrangements might be plausible in other countries, but they are not relevant to the legal and cultural realities that frame my teaching at an American law school. We can use the extremes as thought experiments but not as serious arguments.

We Can’t Surrender the Search for Truth

Having said that, recognizing the lack of neutrality in textbooks and classrooms does not mean we surrender the search for truth. We can all acknowledge truth in the world and at times be confident we have found it. We all believe in the mechanics that make cars and airplanes work, the distinctions that tell us some plants are poisonous and others are not, and the theory of gravity. It would be next to impossible to live otherwise.

We also all believe in moral truths. Almost all of us believe the Holocaust was evil and the end of slavery was good. In asserting these beliefs – and many others – we set limits on the scope of the debates we are willing to have. Those nonneutral limits are all around us, and they are crucial to fending off an open-ended relativism.

The question for classrooms – and also for governments and societies – is not whether we achieve neutrality but whether we pursue knowledge and wisdom while interrogating reigning orthodoxies and allowing for reasonable dissent. When it comes to education and politics, almost everything hinges on what is “reasonable,” not on what is “objective.” That in turn rests more on persuasion than pronouncement.

Once we recognize the importance of persuasion, we can move toward engaging people in conversations instead of merely asserting conclusions. This is increasingly important at a time when authority and expertise face mounting skepticism and when countless pundits tell us they are “fair and balanced” or are “the most trusted name in news.” The fair and balanced truth is that there is no way to cover the news neutrally because the news usually involves a great deal of nonneutral complexity.

So too with the law. Judges even divide the way they think about cases into “questions of fact” and “questions of law.” Some questions of fact are disputed, but they are ultimately answered conclusively – the contract expired last Tuesday, the defendant stole the money, the company paid its debt.

Judges also decide questions of law, but these are not neutral decisions. They are judgments about how best to understand facts of the world in light of relevant legal frameworks.

We Can Lead the “Unteachable” with Charity and Clarity

You and I do something similar in our ordinary lives. For example, my daughter Lauren and I both know that she dented my new car forty-eight hours after getting her license (a fact of the world), but we probably disagree about the aesthetics of the dent or whether repairing it is worth the cost (judgments related to what should happen). And this is a relatively benign example. We exercise far weightier nonneutral judgments throughout our lives. Rather than simply insisting we are right, we might embrace the challenge of looking for the values underlying our assumptions and work to persuade others with our words and acts. (Of course, as Lauren can tell you, some efforts at persuasion are more successful than others.)….

The next day, I discover Jennifer Chang’s thesis draft waiting in my inbox. My initial curiosity turns to frustration. She clearly has taken none of my suggestions, opting instead to double down on some of her more strident assertions. But the most disappointing part of reading her draft is seeing flashes of brilliance scattered throughout her myopic arguments. Sometimes I read an unsatisfying student draft and think, She needs to work harder. With Jennifer, I think to myself, She is unteachable.

I decide to wait a day before sending my feedback to Jennifer. I always find it challenging to respond with the right mix of candor and encouragement, but I find it particularly difficult with Jennifer’s draft:

You need to work on the precision of your claims, and you will be best served by sticking closely to the text of the claims you want to critique.
You write that Augustine “always” makes this assumption, but this is factually inaccurate.
I don’t see how your objection challenges the claim you quote.
You would be more persuasive if you argue that this interpretation of Augustine is “misguided” rather than “preposterous.” The author you are critiquing is a leading scholar in the field and has spent a lot of time developing this argument. You don’t have to agree with it, but you should take it seriously.
Your normative beliefs are not neutral views that everyone assumes to be true.

Jennifer will have the rest of the semester to complete her independent study. I have no doubt that it will be well-written and meticulously cited. But it is shaping up to be a diatribe rather than a work of persuasion. This is the challenge of making normative arguments. Once you have realized how much of the world is not neutral – how much of it is up for grabs – it’s natural to want to argue for your view of how things should be. Few of us want to live in a world determined more by the arguments we detest than the arguments we embrace. But persuading others that you have the better account begins by recognizing the biases and judgments implicit in your own views and addressing the best possible counterarguments with charity and clarity. More often than not, if you start with this posture, you will be able to engage with others more effectively and less stridently. Recognizing a lack of neutrality does not mean embracing a lack of nuance.

John Inazu, Sally D. Danforth Distinguished Professor of Law & Religion, Washington University in St. Louis