I've been trying to express that for years... how refreshing!

>From: Daniel Reeves <dreeves Æ umich.edu>

>To: improvetheworld Æ umich.edu

>CC: Nicole Poellet <poelnico Æ umich.edu>

>Subject: article on red-blue alliance

>Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 21:08:14 -0500 (EST)

>Cam writes,

> > My goal here is to urge everyone to create a better world by trying to

> > understand each other. In this case, it means researching the other

> > side to the same extent we research our own vs. blindly pushing for the

> > extreme right or left, while in reality hoping to end up with a slightly

> > different definition of the middle.

>Here's an article in that spirit that I found interesting:

>http://www.techcentralstation.com/112904A.html

> [text of article follows]

>Faculty Clubs and Church Pews

> By William J. Stuntz

> Published 11/29/2004

>The past few months have seen a lot of talk about red and blue America,

>mostly by people on one side of the partisan divide who find the other

>side a mystery.

>It isn't a mystery to me, because I live on both sides. For the past

>twenty years, I've belonged to evangelical Protestant churches, the kind

>where George W. Bush rolled up huge majorities. And for the past eighteen

>years, I've worked in secular universities where one can hardly believe

>that Bush voters exist. Evangelical churches are red America at its

>reddest. And universities, especially the ones in New England (where I

>work now), are as blue as the bluest sky.

>Not surprisingly, each of these institutions is enemy territory to the

>other. But the enmity is needless. It may be a sign that I'm terminally

>weird, but I love them both, passionately. And I think that if my church

>friends and my university friends got to know each other, they'd find a

>lot to like and admire. More to the point, the representatives of each

>side would learn something important and useful from the other side. These

>institutions may be red and blue now. But their natural color is purple.

>You wouldn't know it from talking to the people who populate universities

>or fill church pews.

>A lot of my church friends think universities represent the forces of

>darkness. Law schools -- my corner of the academic world -- are

>particularly suspect. A fellow singer in a church choir once asked me what

>I did for a living. When I told her, she said, "A Christian lawyer? Isn't

>that sort of like being a Christian prostitute? I mean, you can't really

>do that, right?" She wasn't kidding. And if I had said no, you don't

>understand; I'm a law professor, not a lawyer, I'm pretty sure that would

>not have helped matters. ("Oh, so you train people to be prostitutes?")

>You hear the same kinds of comments running in the other direction. Some

>years ago a faculty colleague and I were talking about religion and

>politics, and this colleague said "You know, I think you're the first

>Christian I've ever met who isn't stupid." My professor friend wasn't

>kidding either. I've had other conversations like these -- albeit usually

>a little more tactful -- on both sides, a dozen times over the years.

>Maybe two dozen. People in each of these two worlds find the other

>frightening, and appalling.

>All of us are appalling, I suppose, but these reactions are mostly due to

>ignorance. Most of my Christian friends have no clue what goes on in

>faculty clubs. And my colleagues in faculty offices cannot imagine what

>happens in those evangelical churches on Sunday morning.

>In both cases, the truth is surprisingly attractive. And surprisingly

>similar: Churches and universities are the two twenty-first century

>American enterprises that care most about ideas, about language, and about

>understanding the world we live in, with all its beauty and ugliness.

>Nearly all older universities were founded as schools of theology: a

>telling fact. Another one is this: A large part of what goes on in those

>church buildings that dot the countryside is education -- people reading

>hard texts, and trying to sort out what they mean.

>Another similarity is less obvious but no less important. Ours is an

>individualist culture; people rarely put their community's welfare ahead

>of their own. It isn't so rare in churches and universities. Churches are

>mostly run by volunteer labor (not to mention volunteered money): those

>who tend nurseries and teach Sunday School classes get nothing but a pat

>on the back for their labor. Not unlike the professors who staff important

>faculty committees. An economist friend once told me that economics

>departments are ungovernable, because economists understand the reward

>structure that drives universities: professors who do thankless

>institutional tasks competently must do more such tasks. Yet the trains

>run more or less on time -- maybe historians are running the economics

>departments -- because enough faculty attach enough importance to the

>welfare of their colleagues and students. Selfishness and exploitation are

>of course common too, in universities and churches as everywhere else. But

>one sees a good deal of day-to-day altruism, which is not common

>everywhere else.

>And each side of this divide has something to teach the other.

>Evangelicals would benefit greatly from the love of argument that pervades

>universities. The "scandal of the evangelical mind" -- the title of a

>wonderful book by evangelical author and professor Mark Noll -- isn't that

>evangelicals aren't smart or don't love ideas. They are, and they do. No,

>the real scandal is the lack of tough, hard questioning to test those

>ideas. Christians believe in a God-Man who called himself (among other

>things) "the Truth." Truth-seeking, testing beliefs with tough-minded

>questions and arguments, is a deeply Christian enterprise. Evangelical

>churches should be swimming in it. Too few are.

>For their part, universities would be better, richer places if they had an

>infusion of the humility that one finds in those churches. Too often, the

>world of top universities is defined by its arrogance: the style of

>argument is more "it's plainly true that" than "I wonder whether." We like

>to test our ideas, but once they've passed the relevant academic hurdles

>(the bar is lower than we like to think), we talk and act as though those

>ideas are not just right but obviously right -- only a fool or a bigot

>could think otherwise.

>The atmosphere I've found in the churches to which my family and I have

>belonged is very different. Evangelicals like "testimonies"; it's common

>for talks to Christian groups to begin with a little autobiography, as the

>speaker describes the path he has traveled on his road to faith. Somewhere

>in the course of that testimony, the speaker always talks about what a

>mess he is: how many things he has gotten wrong, why the people sitting in

>the chairs should really be teaching him, not the other way around. This

>isn't a pose; the evangelicals I know really do believe that they -- we

>(I'm in this camp too) -- are half-blind fools, stumbling our way toward

>truth, regularly falling off the right path and, by God's grace, picking

>ourselves up and trying to get back on. But while humility is more a

>virtue than a tactic, it turns out to be a pretty good tactic. Ideas and

>arguments go down a lot easier when accompanied by the admission that the

>speaker might, after all, be wrong.

>That gets to an aspect of evangelical culture that the mainstream press

>has never understood: the combination of strong faith commitments with

>uncertainty, the awareness that I don't know everything, that I have a lot

>more to learn than to teach. Belief that a good God has a plan does not

>imply knowledge of the plan's details. Judging from the lives and

>conversations of my Christian friends, faith in that God does not tend to

>produce a belief in one's infallibility. More the opposite: Christians

>believe we see "through a glass, darkly" when we see at all -- and that

>we're constantly tempted to imagine ourselves as better and smarter than

>we really are. If that sensibility were a little more common in

>universities, faculty meetings would be a lot more pleasant. And it should

>be more common: Academics know better than anyone just how vast is the

>pool of human knowledge, and how little of it any of us can grasp. Talking

>humbly should be second nature.

>There is even a measure of political common ground. True, university

>faculties are heavily Democratic, and evangelical churches are thick with

>Republicans. But that red-blue polarization is mostly a consequence of

>which issues are on the table -- and which ones aren't. Change the issue

>menu, and those electoral maps may look very different. Imagine a

>presidential campaign in which the two candidates seriously debated how a

>loving society should treat its poorest members. Helping the poor is

>supposed to be the left's central commitment, going back to the days of

>FDR and the New Deal. In practice, the commitment has all but disappeared

>from national politics. Judging by the speeches of liberal Democratic

>politicians, what poor people need most is free abortions. Anti-poverty

>programs tend to help middle-class government employees; the poor end up

>with a few scraps from the table. Teachers' unions have a stranglehold on

>failed urban school systems, even though fixing those schools would be the

>best anti-poverty program imaginable.

>I don't think my liberal Democratic professor friends like this state of

>affairs. And -- here's a news flash -- neither do most evangelicals, who

>regard helping the poor as both a passion and a spiritual obligation, not

>just a political preference. (This may be even more true of theologically

>conservative Catholics.) These men and women vote Republican not because

>they like the party's policy toward poverty -- cut taxes and hope for the

>best -- but because poverty isn't on the table anymore. In evangelical

>churches, elections are mostly about abortion. Neither party seems much

>concerned with giving a hand to those who most need it.

>That could change. I can't prove it, but I think there is a large, latent

>pro-redistribution evangelical vote, ready to get behind the first

>politician to tap into it. (Barack Obama, are you listening?) If liberal

>Democratic academics believe the things they say they believe -- and I

>think they do -- there is an alliance here just waiting to happen.

>Humility, love of serious ideas, commitment to helping the poor -- these

>are things my faculty friends and my church friends ought to be able to

>get together on. If they ever do, look out: American politics, and maybe

>American life, will be turned upside down. And all those politicians who

>can only speak in one color will be out of a job.

>I can hardly wait.

>William J. Stuntz is a Professor at Harvard Law School.

>--

>http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/dreeves - - google://"Daniel Reeves"

>Q. How do you tell an extrovert computer scientist?

>A. When they talk to you they look at your shoes rather than their own.