Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
Romans 12:21
For five days in a row, I screwed up the courage to call my three congressional representatives. For four days, the only person to take my call was a calm and composed staffer of Rep. Randy Feenstra. His voice was not pretentious or unkind. It exemplified the characteristics of a good staff member—courtesy and attention.
Meanwhile, as the week progressed, my own demeanor transformed from tentative conviction to anger to sad conciliation. On the fifth day, my call was sent to voicemail at the very moment I was done with “talking at” another human being; I wanted to converse. Instead, I spent the voicemail thanking the staff and then exposing my fears for the future. I put down the phone and blinked back tears.
In some tiny way, my façade of strength was cracked by the voice of a live human being working to oppose things I hold dear. I found I could neither demonize nor excuse him. I wanted to plead. These brief exchanges drove home to me the limits of anger, on its own, to restore our functioning democracy.
I suspect I’m not the only person who, in the face of our nation’s recent authoritarian turn, is struggling to define a posture between outrage and despair—one able to weather the long haul without either capitulating to evil or caving to corruption. In what follows, I’d like to suggest that a clue to the solution is given in the nature of democracy itself.
Tyranny is the rule of might makes right. Democracy, as many theorists have pointed out, is founded on trust. That’s what makes it so fragile, as we are currently discovering firsthand.
It’s for this very reason that resistance movements find themselves constrained in ways authoritarians do not. Despite the checkered path that led to his victory and the premonition that things would get much worse, democrats chose to recognize the legitimacy of Trump‘s election by the people. Not to do so would’ve been to give up the goal. A functioning democracy depends on decisions like this, demonstrations of good faith, even when it hurts.
It takes trust to respect a court ruling one considers unjust, or to disobey it civilly rather than violently, as an appeal to shared governance. If trust is totally absent—if you no longer count on me to consider your interests and, by extension, no longer commit yourself to shared reasoning or common rules, all we have left is a contest of might.
In a remarkable book, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. the Board of Education, Danielle S. Allen makes the case that democratic citizenship is a species of friendship, and that sacrifice is its lever.
Front and center in her account is Elizabeth Eckford, one of the “Little Rock Nine” who enrolled in a formerly whites-only high school in the wake of Brown v. the Board of Education. In this historical moment, claims Allen, we were “re-constituted” as a people. By the courageous actions of nine children and their families and through the medium of the photojournalism, Americans across the country were made to see up close the practices of exclusion and acquiescence that gave lie to our unity as a people.
The parents, advised by the school superintendent, made the excruciating decision not to accompany their children all the way to the school building that day, despite knowing the risks to their children. Instead, the local leader of the NAACP arranged for a white minister and police officers to stay near the children. Why would any parents agree to this? The suggestion was that, flanked by their parents, black children approaching the school building would appear more threatening to the white mob, and could incite greater violence. In just this way, the vulnerability of the children correlated to the strength of their appeal to the American people. By letting their guard down, they gave their fellow citizens a window into their vulnerability as a people excluded.
Did these families trust their white neighbors to respect their children? Probably not, no. But did they extend them trust on that day? Yes. For they actively entrusted their daughters and sons to that walk to school. They knew, on some level, that winning the trust of their white neighbors was the only possibility for their hoped future together in the same school.
Little Rock 1957 is an interesting case, because it shows us that the necessity of extending trust doesn’t meet a limit with those who would dehumanize me. In extremis, I am forced to recognize that my flourishing depends upon even those neighbors whom I tend to despise or who despise me. To a significant degree, trust is a strategy of survival. Eckford and her parents made a conscious choice to increase her vulnerability for those precious minutes or hours in an appeal to the recognition of her white neighbors.
Elizabeth might not have felt safe, but she placed her life in the hands of those hurling slurs at her that day. Entrusting herself to her neighbors while refusing to retaliate was the only means by which she could make an appeal to their humanity on behalf of her own. Needless to say, no one can impose this sacrifice on another. It can only be taken up freely.
For Danielle Allen, the lessons here are straightforward. Since trust is the structure of democracy, I am obliged to become trustworthy, even to those whom I might prefer to live without. According to Allen, democracy is unique in that sacrifice is baked into it. Democracy encourages us to see ourselves as sovereigns and then requires that we accept the losses that inevitably, immediately come. If we become adept at sacrificing for the right things at the right times, then we make a compelling appeal to our neighbors to trust us.
This means that some tactics are ruled out for pro-democratic efforts. This is not, in the first place, because such tactics are unworthy of us, but simply because they are powerless to achieve the ends of democracy: shared rule.
Don’t get me wrong. I believe in collective action, speaking truth to power, and strategic initiatives to pressure the powerful to protect the rights of the weak. But these collective actions rely on growing communities of recognition, including coalitions of those who would disagree with one another on a swath of other issues.
I believe that the delicate task we face today requires getting the nuances right: To speak with courage but with calm, to pair persistence with patience, to speak truth to those in power without belittling our neighbors, to apply pressure without succumbing to physical or rhetorical violence, and to continue to differentiate illegitimate from legitimate exercises of democracy, even when the latter don’t go our way. In showing ourselves trustworthy to our neighbors through our words and actions, we appeal to their recognition.
Perhaps we have a model of such a disposition in the gospel. Isn’t this what the incarnation comes down to: God’s self-humbling in Christ meant to convince us that God is one whom we can trust? Then, even more directly, is not Christ’s humiliation and death—God’s demonstrated willingness to abide our rejection and violence—done for the sake of making a clean start with us?
Make no mistake, this path entails accepting losses, abiding confusion, and suffering scorn. We can’t get back to trust any other way.
After all, you can’t force a person to see another’s humanity. You can only ask them to.
Header image by Agnieszka from Pixabay
Elizabeth Eckford photo by Will Counts – Distributed by the Associated Press
18 Responses
Thanks for this thoughtful reflection. My daughter is a theology prof down the road from you at Dordt.
Yes, she and I cross paths from time to time. It’s good to have theological partners right down the road. Thanks for reading.
Thank you for this, Cambria! So profoundly logical, systematic, patient, and kind. Democracy is admittedly frustrating, slow, compromising, and inherently bureaucratic…… yet SO much better than every totalitarian system history has given us. It is not just What Would Jesus Do? What DID Jesus Do?!!
One of the best things I’ve read in a while.
Thank you once again, Cambria! Your writing seems to me to be so true to scriprture and the gospel, and therefore so challenging.
Thank you. This is further motivation for me to do what I believe is also crucial for the long term: to build bridges with friends and neighbors through civil conversations.
Fantastic! Modeling trust in democracy is an important challenge for us!!
So much to ponder here. Trust is a concept too seldom considered in political — and philosophical and theological — discourse today. Hard to build, yet easy to destroy. Ought those whose trust proves unfounded respond with courtesy and respect and control their anger? Always? Even a betrayed spouse? Even the tens of thousands who put their trust in US asylum procedures, waited a year for a scheduled appointment rather than cross the border without our government’s permission, then were sent away without any notice or recourse? Hard questions.
Really important questions, and I think smarter people than me are thinking about them. But my own answer is no, trust can’t be obligatory. There has to be the choice to exit the relationship– even the body politic, whether physically or emotionally. And there is also the choice to wait and see, while withdrawing from public discourse. Even in Elizabeth Eckford’s case, the choice of when and where was strategic. I don’t know what that means for us today, exactly. Maybe a more modest point is simply not to overlook the necessity of strategically choosing trust to advance democracy.
There is a fascinating coda to the story of Elizabeth Eckford and the famous photograph. In 1999, the original photographer brought Eckford and Hazel Bryan, the girl shouting at her in the photo, together for a new picture in front of the high school. The meeting resulted in a friendship between them, although one that soured after a few years, undone by what Eckford believed was Bryan’s self-justifying account of her behavior. Trust is a fragile thing, but what is the alternative?
https://www.npr.org/2011/10/02/140953088/elizabeth-and-hazel-the-legacy-of-little-rock
Thank you for this link to another side of the story.
Thank you for sharing!
To a significant degree, trust is a strategy of survival. Eckford and her parents made a conscious choice to increase her vulnerability for those precious minutes or hours in an appeal to the recognition of her white neighbors.
I keep thinking about the role of the photographer and the news media in this hoped-for process of appealing “to the recognition of her white neighbors.” The photographer captures the essence of racism and then holds it up as a mirror to the nation. The news media decides to publish it, and all of us, even Hazel Bryan, are exposed and invited into a process of self-examination. I fear that such a call to public self-examination is no longer possible, people too isolated in their media silos. I hope I am wrong about that.
Thanks for this precious reflection. Trust is the social glue that holds everything together. So it’s no wonder that it’s the defining action that unites us with our Saviour. Trust accounts for America’s economic development, as we discovered while living in a majority world country where trust was a rare commodity. Thank you for connecting trust to the Little Rock Nine, a new thought for me. The Little Rock Nine exhibited behavior that Jesus prescribes for all of his followers: proactive non-violent submissive righteousness. And the outcome vindicates God’s claim that such behavior is the path to victory for the kingdom of God. The path can be costly, but not even death can prevent the coming of the kingdom when that path is followed.
I do wonder if democracy often depends upon imposing the majority’s convictions upon others. Or those in power do so in the name of “the people” they claim to represent. Brown vs Board of Education was the Court’s imposition of their understanding of the rule of law upon public institutions. The President used the military to impose that decision. I think you’re right that opponents of such decisions may finally accept them out of trust, but its also possible they did so from intimidation. Even in the service of justice and righteousness, democracies will not shy away from the use of some kind of force to realize their ends. Nothing I’m saying here undermines your argument. Following you, I worry that our lack of patience with pursuing and cultivating the trust you describe can make imposition and force appear to be our only option. I just have to ask myself when I’m tolerant of the state’s imposing its will on others, and when I’m not.
Thanks for this, Mike. I agree with everything you wrote. The options look very different to us when we are in the majority! While we’re in the minority, we are forced to build trust. I like the lesson you take away. Another feature of Allen’s book is looking at how losses are disproportionately distributed and the erosion of trust that results. A reason to resist resorting to force when in the majority would be to avoid a build-up of resentment among those who might one day have the majority.
Yes to this! True democracy must presume that winner-take-all is not a valid outcome. Shalom is the prevailing value.
Cambria,
Thank you for this. I think Mike already said it, but I want to reiterate that the world works with this truism: It is always people of color who must earn the trust and make themselves vulnerable (at least in the US, my context), while white folk like me are given it without question. So we demand or at least “discover” that the only way we can have true democracy is if those in the minority demean themselves to the right handed power of white folk, and as we’ve seen recently, those white folk can take that power away capriciously, and it seems not to matter. While this is always true, white folk storm the capital, put on hoods, lynch, take up arms, do all manner of violence, and nothing seems to change in regards to the trust we are given.
You write these words,
“Eckford and her parents made a conscious choice to increase her vulnerability for those precious minutes or hours in an appeal to the recognition of her white neighbors.”
I understand the sentiment, but until we realize that black folk don’t need their white neighbors “recognition,” I don’t think we’re ever going to get to where we want to go. I hope I’m wrong, because I see no evidence that those in power will ever “recognize” our black siblings (or any person of color). It might just be time to acknowledge that we white folk are not trustworthy, and I say that with a broken heart. We have a lot of work to do, at least 400+ years of work to do to be worthy of anyone’s trust.