The Worst Way to Change Minds
When religious certainty is challenged, some leaders appeal to fear—but persuasion works better.
Join the Atlantic staff writer Jerusalem Demsas and its editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, for a discussion about Demsas’s new book, On the Housing Crisis. The conversation will take place at Politics and Prose at The Wharf, in Washington, D.C., 610 Water Street SW, on September 3 at 7 p.m.
As Dorothy Fortenberry noted in an essay for us this week, “We live in a strange moment when religion remains a powerful force in American public life even as churchgoing declines precipitously.” Citing a new Louisiana law mandating that schools display the Ten Commandments, Fortenberry asks if such breaches of Church-state separation are a sign of Christianity’s strength in the culture or its weakness—a kind of “last-ditch attempt to get the government to do the work once accomplished by Sunday school.”
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic’s books section:
- “Poem With the Last Line as the First,” a poem by Didi Jackson
- When victimhood takes a bad-faith turn
- “Keepsake,” a poem by Roey Leonardi
How did the United States come to this crossroads, in which religion frequently seems to polarize people rather than unite them? Fortenberry focuses on Eliza Griswold’s new book, Circle of Hope, about a progressive Evangelical congregation that collapsed following 2020’s COVID shutdowns and Black Lives Matter protests. When Circle of Hope’s services moved to Zoom just as pastors and congregants were attempting to face their blind spots regarding inclusion and tolerance, tempers flared and misunderstandings proliferated. Instead of having hard conversations, the pastors either fell back on DEI buzzwords or stubbornly defended the Church’s mission.
Fortenberry places Griswold’s sad case study in the context of a larger national social and spiritual crisis—the decline of communal spaces and the rise of isolation and despair. It made me reflect on three other books we’ve recently covered that explore moments when religion’s role in society was gravely challenged and compromise felt impossible.
In Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation, Brenda Wineapple recounts the Scopes “monkey trial” of 1925, when a teacher was charged with violating a law against covering evolution in the classroom. The two lawyers who faced off in the trial—Clarence Darrow, the crusading liberal ACLU attorney arguing for the defense, and William Jennings Bryan, the pious, conservative prosecuting stalwart—each brought to the case a sense of righteous fervor. Contemporary narratives tend to cast Darrow as the hero and Bryan as the backward bigot. Wineapple portrays it slightly differently: Darrow could be arrogant, flip, and alienating, and many felt he did Scopes no favors.
In his essay on the book, John Kaag writes that “in Wineapple’s incisive treatment, the trial reveals how opponents in a cultural conflict can be similarly vulnerable and shortsighted.” Bryan and Darrow were both trafficking in and driven by fear. For Bryan, accepting that humans evolved from hominid ancestors over millions of years, instead of being divinely created, meant nothing less than the collapse of American society. Darrow feared that convicting Scopes would ring the death knell for progress. Their debate left no room for consensus on what the country’s future balance of power between religion and science might look like.
Bryan won the battle (Scopes was convicted and fined $100) and Darrow won the war (evolution is broadly accepted and taught), but neither made much progress in persuading the public. Rather, as Kaag writes, “many people around the world looked on with equal parts awe, embarrassment, and disgust. It was a moment when a relatively young country showed itself to be without tact or sense.”
Are all such debates doomed to be circuses that bring out the worst in leaders? I found consolation in Wineapple’s Atlantic article earlier this month about two books that reached even further back in history: Michael Taylor’s Impossible Monsters and Edward Dolnick’s Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party. Each addresses the moment, in the early 19th century, when the discovery of dinosaur fossils shook the foundations of Victorian society.
One of Taylor’s key subjects, the scientist Thomas Henry Huxley, seemed particularly effective at spreading a radical new gospel of how life on Earth came to be. Taylor quotes Huxley telling a theologian: “Sit down before a fact as a little child. Be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, [and] follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.” That might be a lot to ask of a Victorian man of God, but Huxley’s reference to humility stands out. He wasn’t asserting a monopoly on all knowledge; he was extolling a spirit of openness and exploration, the cornerstone of the scientific method. His appeal was not to fear but to curiosity. He was making his case in a very different time, but his approach might be worth emulating today.
Why Did This Progressive Evangelical Church Fall Apart?
By Dorothy Fortenberry
In her new book, Eliza Griswold examines the forces that led to one congregation’s collapse.
What to Read
Fit Nation: The Pains and Gains of America’s Exercise Obsession, by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela
Years into her career as a cultural historian, Petrzela, a New School history professor, turned her attention to the history of America’s obsession with fitness—in part because to outsiders, her passion for exercise seemed at odds with her academic life and interests. In chronicling the evolution in America’s attitude toward exercise, from skepticism to an equation of fitness with moral superiority, Fit Nation brings the academic and athletic worlds together. The book touches on the history of the sports bra, Title IX’s impact on women’s participation in sports, the first running boom, the mania for aerobics and yoga classes of the past, and how current brands, such as Barry’s and Peloton, have become shorthand for an entire set of ethical, aesthetic, and financial positions. Exercise, Petrzela argues, is no longer just about bodily benefits; it’s also the manifestation of our collective, if fraught, belief that fitness represents virtue. — Amanda Parrish Morgan
From our list: Eight books that will inspire you to move your body
Out Next Week
???? Lovely One, by Ketanji Brown Jackson
???? Death at the Sign of the Rook, by Kate Atkinson
???? Small Rain, by Garth Greenwell
Your Weekend Read
Young Men Have Invented a New Way to Defeat Themselves
By Ian Bogost
Rawdoggers seem to believe they have invented a new form of meditation, and who am I to say they have not? Whereas the Buddhist might accept the captive circumstances of a long flight as an invitation to let go of worldly snares, the rawdogger seeks to overcome them through refusal and its public performance. He rejects the movie. He rejects the frail crinkle of the plastic airline-refreshment cup. He rejects the tender sorrow that cruising altitude somehow always amplifies. Having ascended thanks to the ingenuity of humankind, the rawdogger now rises above the very idea of ascent. And then he publishes a TikTok as proof, which perhaps millions of people view.
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