How Did We Get Here? Our Crisis of Solidarity with James Davison Hunter and Bill Haslam

After tonight’s Trinity Forum event. This is a now longstanding collaboration between Montgomery Bell Academy, Saint Paul Christian Academy, and the Trinity Forum, and it is a relationship that I come to cherish evermore. Each passing day, I think the conversations that the Trinity Forum invites and encourages in our community, both here and nationally, are so important for us to sustain, and we are honored to be a part of it. And so glad that you could be here to join us. Our boys had the privilege of spending time with doctor Hunter earlier today in class, and have gotten wonderful reports from his time with them, and I trust that the conversation here tonight will be thought provoking and hopefully encouraging. So it is my honor to introduce to you Cherie Harder, the president of Trinity Forum.

Well, thank you so much, William. And it really is just a delight to be with you tonight and to get to welcome you to this Trinity Forum Montgomeryville Academy and Saint Paul evening conversation on our crisis of solidarity. As William mentioned, this is actually our 11th year of getting to partner with NBA and with Saint Paul. It has been just a rich and really enjoyable partnership. We’re so glad to be able to do it, and also just want to give my particular thanks to both William and Will for their leadership in sustaining this initiative. We really appreciate it and really enjoy you both. I also wanted to thank the friends and the organizations that have helped make tonight possible through their sponsorship, which includes Sims Funk PLC, the Cherries Foundation, the Creed and Culture Fund, and our friends and supporters Lee and Mary Barfield, Janet and David Chestnut, Jessica and Kevin Douglas, John and Laura Foster, Bill and Elizabeth Hawkins, Eric and Eleanor Osborne, Ed and Molly Powell. Giff and Anna Thornton, also trustees of ours and Chris, Chris and Eleanor Wells. We so appreciate your support. I also just want to mention we’re so delighted each of you are here. We are completely sold out tonight. So thank you to all of you who came back. And a particular welcome for all of you who are here for the very first time. And if you are one of those people that have never been to a Trinity Forum event before, we work to try to cultivate, curate and disseminate the best of Christian thought and to provide a space for leaders to wrestle with the big questions of life in the context of faith through programs and publications like exactly what we’re doing tonight in the hopes of through such wrestling to come to better know the author of the answers. And we hope tonight will be a small taste of that for you today. And certainly Only one of those big questions of life is how we live well with others, and particularly with others with whom we disagree. What makes for a flourishing community and society, and how should we pursue it? And one of the big questions of the Christian life is what it means to love one’s neighbor, both personally and in public spheres. Now, these questions are always challenging and contested, but they’ve also grown increasingly entrenched and even paralyzing. Disagreements about how we should order our common life have devolved into a form of trench warfare, with various sides dug in, exhausted and seemingly perpetually at war. It’s gotten so bad that a recent Axios poll found that a fifth of all Americans say that they would support what they called a national divorce, Where Republican leaning states could separate from Democratic leaning states, or vice versa, essentially exiling those with whom we disagree. And while I’m betting that regardless of how one voted, many of us are breathing a real sigh of relief that the election is over and that the outcome is settled rather than confused or contested. It still seems clear that many of our current divisions won’t be resolved by either clear election results or even political mandates. In the words of one of our guests today, we’re at a moment when answers to the fundamental questions about the vitality and the longevity of liberal democracy can no longer be assumed. Not because we are polarized, but because we no longer have the cultural resources to work through what divides us. So how did we get here? And even more importantly, what can we do to restore and re weave solidarity and the love of neighbor back into a frayed civic fabric and move together towards a renewed commitment to the common good? Now, those are big questions. And to help us wrestle with those, I’m really delighted to be able to introduce two extraordinary observers and analysts of our cultural and political challenges, one, as a scholar and sociologist, the other as a practitioner, a longtime public servant, as well as two term governor James Davis and Hunter and governor Bill Haslam. James Davis and Hunter is the LeBron Levinson Distinguished Professor of Religion, culture, and Social Theory at UVA, as well as the executive director for the Institute and Advanced Studies and Culture. He is also, I am very proud to say, a Trinity Forum Senior Fellow. He has been called by David Brooks, the nation’s leading cultural historian. He’s credited with coining the term culture wars in his 1991 book by that title, a work that was provocative, even controversial at the time, and now recognized as being quite prescient if restrained. He’s the author of several other influential books as well, including The Death of Character, science and the good has a Very important work to Change the World, which articulated a vision of what he called faithful presence within cultural institutions as a hopeful model of Christian civic engagement, and his new release, Democracy and Solidarity, which we’ve invited him here today to discuss, is a truly excellent, if deeply sobering, work on the cultural roots of our current civic dysfunction, as well as the cultural preconditions for renewal. Joining him is governor Bill Haslam, and of course, Bill Haslam needs no introduction, but he’s going to get one anyway. Bill served as the 49th governor of Tennessee from 2011 to 2019, after previously serving two terms as the Mayor of Knoxville during his tenure. Tennessee became the fastest improving state in the country in K-12 education, and the first state to provide free community college or technical school to all of its citizens. In addition to adding close to half a million net new jobs, he serves on several boards including teach for America and Young Life, is a visiting professor of political science at Vanderbilt, where he is also co-chaired the Vanderbilt Project on Unity and American Democracy, and is the author of a book called Faithful Presence, which draws upon some of James ideas about Christian public engagement. He’s joined tonight by his wife, Chrissy, who is here somewhere. There she is. Who? They’ve been married, I think, over 40 years now with three kids and ten grandchildren. So James and Bill, so excited to welcome you to this evening conversation.

Thanks, Cherie

So, James. Justin, starting off. You have been culturally prescient a number of times. You were the one who coined the term culture wars way back in the early 90s, and then articulated an idea of faithful presence, which really guided so many people in thinking how they think through their engagement in public life. What led you to write Democracy and Solidarity, and what did you see that propelled you to put pen to paper?

Well, it’s my job. That’s part of it. Um, you know, I think the heart of my calling is, um, is a response to our particular cultural moment. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t find this moment in history and our lives. That covers the span of it as anything other than confusing it just things don’t make sense, and the pace of change is happening so quickly, and things that we used to take for granted just are no longer either present or that can be relied upon. And so the heart of what I do is to try to find clarity on the other side of confusion. And I figure if I can do that for myself because I’m as confused as anyone that, um, it might be useful for others. So when I wrote Culture Wars over 30 years ago, um, the social sciences were, um, convinced that most of the conflict that exists in in modern nation states was a conflict of political economy. It’s a conflict. And I would say that that’s largely. It was largely true. It was the conflict between business interests and the interests of labor unions, between managers and owners of, um, of companies and, and wage earners. And there was it was largely a class distinction. But in the 1970s, 1980s, um, it was becoming clear that a lot of the conflict that was being written about in newspapers and reported upon in the evening news, um, was about abortion, it was about church state issues. It was about funding for controversial art. And the lines of division were not lining up with is simply a simple class division. It was simply no longer making sense. And, um, and then, I mean, this story could go on. I’m not going to give you the super long version of it, but it was clear to me that something else was going on and that the divisions were ultimately about culture and cultural authority. And at the heart of culture are our visions of the good visions of what it means to live a good life, to have a good society, to build toward a good society. And that’s how we find meaning in life. But in all of these controversies were latent but fundamentally different ideas of what constituted a good life, a good society, of what justice looks like, of what freedom means, of what is tolerable and intolerable. And so in the late 1980s, I began to explore this and came up with this argument that, in fact, what was uniting all of these discrete issues that seemed to be just completely separate from one another, was a struggle through the dominant institutions of American society, a struggle to define the meaning of America, that it was all woven together. The first 15 years after publishing the book Culture Wars, I did battle with my colleagues in the social sciences and political science and sociology and elsewhere, who all said uniformly, there is no culture war. Um, Um, and we, we had these wonderful, very serious, um, arguments about it and, um, but 15, about 15 years later, um, the opposition to the idea diminished. And at this point, no one would argue that there is no culture war. And in fact, it’s only gotten worse. It’s intensified. So since I published the book, um, I’ve continued to be involved in this research, um, among other things, and have tracked the evolution of the culture wars, um, and tried to track its, its consequences. Now, culture Wars was about polarization. It was about the differences, the fragmentation and polarization that happens within our public culture. I decided in this case to look at the the other side of the coin Instead of the pluribus of E pluribus unum, the plurality, the differences, right. And how those have evolved to create this massive cleavage in our public life. I wanted to look at the crisis of democracy through the concept of the unum, the social glue that the what, what what provides cohesiveness in our nation and how that is evolved from the time of our founding and where we are today. Is there anything left of that social glue? I’ll end with this at the end of the day. Um. Democracy. Uh, and the great democratic revolutions of Western Europe and North America were the offspring of a great intellectual revolution called the enlightenment. So American democracy is an offspring of the enlightenment that had happened in America, what I call the hybrid enlightenment. The question that the book tries to address is, how does an enlightenment era institution founded in the late 18th century, how does this institution survive and thrive in a post-enlightenment culture? We don’t know. So we were. So the book was an attempt to explore this historically carefully. And um, and I’ve come up with some, some answers, but, um, it’s not a pretty picture.

But we’re going to dig into that in just a second. But before that, uh, Bill would love to hear from you. You have been a practitioner, um, for many years. A public servant in a variety of spaces, and just drawing on your perspective as someone who’s been so involved in civic life. First as a business leader, but then as a mayor as well as a governor. How has how have the cultural forces that James described played out in civic life from your point of view?

First of all, welcome in James. It’s fun to have. James and I have been friends for 20 years or something, but I should tell you this story. So his book To Change the World, he used the term faithful Presence, and I later went on and did credit him with using that as the title of a book that I wrote. And, um, I was talking right after the book came out with a lot of you would know the name Tim Keller, a pastor from New York, and was talking to Tim, and he said, I am so glad that somebody is covering this subject who is not as smart as James. And I said, thanks, I guess. So you’ll get a little of that flavor tonight. But let’s go back to James’s point. He just made like in terms of what we just saw. I mean, we just went through an election and this election, supposedly, if you looked at what a people voting on the number one thing came up the economy, right? That’s what everybody said. Their vote was based primarily around inflation issues or other issues. Okay. But interestingly, if you look at what people actually practice, the Trump campaign ran 5 to 1 over an issue on culture, over an issue on the economy. It was an issue. If you watched any football game, you saw the subject. There’s an issue about trans and paying for folks in prison to get sex changes, etc. they decided, and it ends with, uh, she’s for they them, he’s for you line that they thought this works. And if you can tell if you want to know if something’s working in politics, see how often somebody runs that and they ended up running that 5 to 1. And so the folks who say, well, the culture wars passed us and changed aren’t really seeing what’s happening on the ground.

So it’s always good to kind of define terms. I mean, your book is entitled Democracy and Solidarity, and you have claimed the democracy or argued that democracy is in crisis. And the root cause of this is a decline in solidarity or a fracturing of it. So what do you mean by solidarity and why is it so importa

So I’ll begin with the concept of the unum one out of many. What is that makes us one as a nation? Most of the discussion about our unity, the cohesiveness, the glue that binds us together, um, centers around the concept of consensus. And it’s mainly about consensus over Her. The Constitution. The rule of law. Things like that. Well, this isn’t always been the case. Um, but the problem with the word consensus, it’s an important concept, but it’s a limited concept. The concept of consensus presupposes a kind of rational engagement with certain kinds of issues that we can rationally achieve through argument, an agreement kind of consensus, but it overemphasizing the cerebral dimensions of how we come together. The fact of the matter is that most social groups, most societies, are not held together by what they rationally agree over. They’re drawn together and held together by all sorts of other things, like love. Okay. A family stays together not because they have a rational agreement, but because they care about each other, right? And not just that they groups hold together because they’ve suffered together, or they’re in a situation where they understand that something is at stake, shared. They may disagree on every issue imaginable, but they recognize that something is at stake, as they did, for example, in World War Two, when when the achievements of Western civilization seem to be at stake. And we came together racially, ethnically, in so many different ways, politically, economically to defeat an enemy. So the concept of solidarity is a more capacious concept, but it gets at the multidimensional ways in which a society comes together and is held together, not simply the rational. Ways of through rational argument.

Let me ask you. I mean, I think one of the issues today is you talk about the the Unum part. Um, is do people really believe in the idea that, uh, in order to, you know, we the people, in order to form a more perfect union? I think there’s a lot of sense of, like, this isn’t about forming a more perfect union with people who disagree with us. It’s about obliterating the other side. And you are quoting statistics. I think the other one I’ve heard you quote in the past is 20% of the population is okay with physical harm being done to people on the other side. Which is, I mean, one out of every five people. That’s incredible. Right? So I guess the question, James, would be in a world where people don’t even see union because the other side is not just wrong, they’re wrong for bad reasons. How do we, How do we get people to get the idea of union with people who we disagree with, of putting that forefront?

Well, that’s a great question. And that probably moves us quicker than we want to toward a solution. Yeah, we’ll be done in three minutes.

We can. We promised all these people a solution.

That’s right. Well. Every social institution, every society, every group, including families, churches, synagogues, um, every social gathering requires some minimal amount of of solidarity or of agreement of some sort or another. Otherwise, institutions are not or they’re utterly dysfunctional. You have to have some minimal agreements. And I use that. And again, not just a rational sense, but in a broader sense And what we have in our culture. War is a certain kind of solidarity on one side and a solidarity on the other side. And that’s the solidarity of opposing sides is in part made possible in opposition to the other side. In other words, we come together in opposition to an enemy. This is why the Cold War was so important for so many decades. It brought the nation together across our political and economic differences, because we had a common enemy in the Soviet Union. I remember Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in response to the book Culture War, said, we’re going to miss the Soviet Union because the solidarity that was generated within the nation. Um, and our opposition to the Soviet Union was turned inward now. And so, as we saw in this election, so much of the Republican Party and the mobilization of the Republican Party wasn’t so much in agreement about principles. It was simply opposition to the other side. And likewise on the other side, opposition to Trump and to all that he represented. So there is solidarity. The problem is it’s generated in opposition to what are perceived as the enemy. It’s not a solidarity that transcends those differences. Um, that’s the big problem.

Well, let me ask you about that, James, because you have used the word nihilism to describe the end result of that dynamic. And you’ve argued that often, um, perhaps particularly people of faith get very focused on what you would call perhaps relatively minor culture war issues, where, as you’ve said, the real enemy is a nihilistic logic. Why is nihilism the real enemy.

In first define nihilism?

How much time do you have?

10 seconds.

Okay. Well, so, yes, um, toward the end of the book, I argue that in spite of the deep cleavages that we have in our culture and our political culture and our public culture, irreconcilable differences, these are differences that go all the way down in spite of those differences and cleavages. A new common culture is in fact emerging underneath it all, and it is a culture of nihilism and at the heart. Well, and I’m going to back up, I’m going to say something, and then I’m going to back up and explain.

You should be in politics. This really works well in politics.

Yeah, right. And Cherie’s right. The real enemy isn’t the other side. It’s the nihilism that insinuates itself within all of the public institutions of of public life. And I can illustrate that in a minute. But at the heart of the word nihilism is annihilation. This is what cancel culture is all about. It is about discrediting, delegitimizing, simply eliminating. I have colleagues who will say the nation would be better off if the other side would simply disappear. They shouldn’t even be granted citizenship. They don’t deserve it. And you hear this on both sides. So. But annihilation. Um, actually. And that kind of nihilism is what is called active nihilism. And active nihilism is plays out on both sides. And it’s rooted in what everyone has heard here tonight as identity politics. Identity politics is a form of solidarity making, but it operates on narratives of injury. Look what those people have done to us. Look what those people are doing to our country. These narratives are stories of injury, fuel and ethics, of revenge. And the problem with identity politics and the ethics of revenge is that you can never give up that grievance, because to give up that grievance is to give up your identity. And so these stories of woundedness are told and repeated and lived again and again and again, but again, it ultimately leads to this kind of ethic of revenge. We need to get these people. And so part of what’s happened in our democracy is that we are no longer even trying to explain why our positions are the best positions. Democracy, in a way, has devolved into what I would call the competing will to power. It’s just about gaining power at the expense of the other side. It’s a strong dynamic in our party politics, especially at the national level. But you’ll even see it seeping down into local politics. And I can promise you, it also plays out within the major institutions of American life, not least the institution I inhabit. Higher education.

So, Bill, it’s the actual can prove the possible. And it’s always encouraging to hear from people who have actually managed to achieve a thing. Your book, Faithful Presence, articulates an approach to the political or public engagement that’s very different than the nihilistic. It is personal. It is relational. It’s about human dignity and coalition building. How when you were in public office, how did you manage to take principled stands that could be controversial without succumbing to a nihilistic will to power, as James describes?

Let me back up. And it’s all kind of depends on your view of what’s government supposed to be about and what’s it there for? And so I’d even back up further and say, um, the brilliance of our founders in the Constitution and how they designed it. Um, and they weren’t perfect people and they weren’t, as some people at heavy believe, all devout Christians, but they did have this sense of, uh, this combined sense of, I think this out of the Judeo-Christian view of the world. Both men are both created in the image of God, and they’re fallen in perfect people. And so they designed a system. I think that was incredibly brilliant that had those checks and balances in place. And so what I always try to remember is like, what’s my role supposed to be in this? Um, I would have loved to have just said, I’m the governor, we’re going to do this. But you had a legislature and you had a judicial branch, and and you have to see those as good things. Okay. And so and then you have to say, well, if I really do think I’m called here to serve, what does serving look like in this particular case, and actually found being in office like an incredible privilege because the leverage for change you had, uh, if you started with those principles, like the checks and balances are frustrating, but they’re good. Number one and number two, I’m called to serve here. What does serving actually look like in this situation? What does that look like. That kind of ended up being a pretty good roadmap.

Could I respond as well? So when Bill’s term as governor came to an end, we had a long talk, met in Washington and walked for miles around the city. And one of the things that he said that really struck me, he said, you know, being governor was the best job of my life. He said, Chrissy and I worked together day by day to solve problems. And I mention this because I want to draw a distinction. And there are two kinds of politics. There’s the politics of solving problems. It’s a kind of pragmatic politics, and that’s really what democratic politics should be about. Our politics, through the culture war, has become a symbolic politics. It’s all about making grand statements. It’s it’s about position taking. Um, it’s about, um, uh, drawing lines, um, um, between friends and enemies and, um, and leveraging the resentments of those you’re leading against the other side. So Bill and Christy practiced the politics of of problem solving. Um, we’ve lost a lot of that. Um, especially again at the national level. There’s another point I would make very quickly. In my view, I don’t think we have two parties. I know it appears that way, and the election would seem to suggest that. I think we have four parties in America. There’s the utopian left and there’s the pragmatic left of center. There’s a pragmatic conservative party, and then there’s the utopian conservative party. And the utopian versions dominate our politics today. They are the ones who practice the symbolic politics of the culture war, which is oftentimes we just gotta burn it down. Part of the recovery is moving back toward a pragmatic politics of caring for people, of solving problems that we all have.

So I think it’s time to start talking about what we can do. And James, one of the things you have argued for is a renewed moral imagination in which you called a reconstituted humanism. What is a reconstituted humanism? What does it look like and where would we even start?

Well, a reconstituted humanism is is part of a larger kind of project. Democracy before it is anything else. Before it is a party system, before it’s elections, before it’s a whole range of of political institutions. Democracy is an ethical ideal. It’s an ethical ideal. And it was at the time of the founding for the reconstitution of public life that would expand the reach of freedom and equality and tolerance for more and more and more people. And so the argument toward a more perfect union was about the expansion of freedom, the expansion of equality, and so on. Um, so a reconstituted humanism begins with a recognition, again in the context of a symbolic politics, that underneath the abstractions that we use in our political discourse, underneath those abstractions, are real human beings who struggle to make it day by day, struggle to keep their marriages together, to keep families together, to make a living. Um, and A recognizes that we are not simply defined by one identity marker. We are complex in our humanity. We are sons and daughters, husbands, wives, workers, um, Believers, and we need to recover the complexity of human beings. And we need to do that not through a humanism that washes out our differences, but a humanism that acknowledges the differences that define us in our plurality as Americans.

So a question for both of you. We can start with you, James, is whether such a reconstituted humanism and renewed moral imagination is even possible in the world of social media. And to back up from that a second, just to give a little context. Most of us, so much of our communication takes place through social media, and yet misinformation and inaccuracy spreads six times more quickly on social media than than something that is true and accurate. There is, it seems like a bias within the medium itself towards the snarky, the sensational of the malicious, the the dramatic. How can one build trust and solidarity when so much of our communication is through a medium that encourages malice and misinformation?

Cherie when you have the answer to that, we’re going to make a giant leap forward. It’s like a post-truth world. Um, cannot produce a vibrant democracy. It’s a contradiction in terms. Social media didn’t create the culture war, but it has exacerbated the conflict. No question about it. And what you end up with is a public discourse that uses words that uses language. That uses symbols to further divide us. Why? Because fear mobilizes. Fear is what gets us to the polls. And it mobilizes. Mobilizes us behind certain agendas. So it’s. It’s. I don’t know. I don’t know what else to say. It’s we’ve got a big problem, in part because what’s behind the use of social media are very large, powerful institutions that incentivize the very discourse that is tearing us apart. And we need a thoughtful and bold and courageous leadership that’s capable of addressing this in ways that allows a certain kind of freedom, but within a framework that, um, that affirms what matters to this nation. Most importantly. And we don’t have that kind of leadership right now. My colleague, a former colleague, he used to be at the University of Virginia, but he’s now at NYU. Jonathan Height has, um, has made a very bold effort in that direction. And I encourage all of you to read his book. Um, but it’s just the start. Hopefully it’s a pebble that will turn into a boulder.

Yeah. Several comments. Number one, you’re right that the whole social media world is driven on what they call the outrage industrial complex. Like that’s how it flows. But we should also say this. Realize that’s that’s the world we live in. And it’s not going to change if you want. Again, look for evidence. Look at these campaigns. So, you know, Kamala Harris goes on a podcast. She calls me daddy. Rather than go on 60 minutes and, uh, Trump goes on Joe Rogan’s show, that’s where folks like that. That’s going to influence things more than CBS, ABC, NBC, etc.. Okay, that’s where we live in. Here’s the best antidote I have is this, um, when Jesus talks to the church, he says, you’re supposed to be salt and light. And he says, you know, if the meat goes bad, it’s not the meat’s fault. So it’s those of us who call us, call ourselves people of faith. It’s our fault. We’re the salt. We’re the salt that’s supposed to keep the meat from going bad. If it goes bad, it’s again, it’s not the meat’s fault. The the disturbing reality that I saw when I was in office was this Christians who were called to be different. That’s kind of if you want to sum up the sermon on the Mount and give me two words, it’s be different. Okay. And the Christians were no different than anyone else. As a matter of fact, we’re maybe worse in terms of spreading rumors. Passing on unfounded stuff. And most importantly of, you know, not loving your enemy at all. I mean, literally, the hatred that I saw come out of people that kind of were like me, people of faith was the most discouraging thing while I was in office. And so if you’re asking, say, what’s going to start to change it? I think it’s us saying, what’s it look like to again to steal James’s title, that I’ve a word that I’ve already sown. What’s a what’s it look like for us to have a faithful presence in the place we are? And I don’t know anything else right now that I can point to. That gives me a lot of hope.

And the theology of faithful presence is a theology of incarnation. It’s about being the hands and feet and body of Christ in this broken world. I mean, that’s within a Christian frame. Um, and I believe, frankly, that while I develop that concept within a Christian theological frame. When I was invited to speak at the Harvard MIT faculty seminar about to change the World, they asked, can nonbelievers practice faithful presence? And I said, frankly, um, maybe not in exactly the same way as Christians would think about it. But in terms of the practices, many nonbelievers practice it more faithfully than than Christians.

So here’s a disturbing example of that. Three years ago, I saw a poll. This is about, you know, people thinking about running for president. And this election just happened. I saw a poll of these are Republican primary voters. And they asked them, there’s a long list of adjectives, rank one through 20, what you’re looking for in a candidate. The first one, again, these are Republican primary voters. The first adjective was Christian, okay. The second was fighter the the last of 20. The last of 20 was humble. Okay. God says, I mean, Scripture is clearly like for God is opposed to the proud, but gives grace to the humble. Like Peter says that John says that it’s our call to humility is clear. And yet here are the folks that are most engaged in the political process who are saying, I want a Christian, but I don’t really want them to be a Christian.

In just a moment, we’re going to turn to questions from the audience, which will be kicked off by Will Norton, who’s the headmaster at Saint Paul. But before we do that, James, I want to go back to an earlier book of yours to change the world. And one of the arguments you made in that book was that the key actor in history is not the individual, but the network, the community of people. There are many networks here tonight and many Communities. In thinking through how we address some of the challenges you’ve laid out. What can the networks of people who are represented here or elsewhere do to address them?

Well, I think this is in fact the key. Um, this is this is absolutely the key. In response to the kind of dehumanization that we find in, in so many of our institutions. Not least our politics is, um, the argument that I make is that cultures, um, change not because of the heroic individual, the great military person, or the great genius or the great moral leader. Um, the most important agent in history is the network, and the and the network is simply a community. And it doesn’t take a lot of people to change the world. But when you have overlapping networks of leaders from different spheres business, philanthropy, um, uh, religious communities, uh, education, um, and the like coming together in common cause leaders who have access to resources when you have overlapping networks of leaders coming together in common cause worlds change. And this is demonstrated again and again and again through history. We tend to focus on the Martin Luther’s or the Martin Luther King’s. But it wasn’t Martin Luther, it was his Augustinian, um, monastery. It wasn’t Martin Luther King. It was the network of pastors. Um, and the Southern Christian Leadership Fellowship. It was the NAACP. Coming together in common cause, um, this is, uh, it seems to me difficult at the national level, but it is absolutely viable in cities and towns where democracy, it seems to me, and even at the state level. But democracy is viable in, in and in these political units in ways that’s far more difficult at the national level. But if you bring together leaders from different spheres in a community like Nashville coming together in common cause to address a common problem, the world will change. We’ve been piloting some of this stuff, um, and the institute that I run, and some of the results are just remarkable.

I do, and James have been making this point for a long time, and I see it now. Politics is downstream of culture, okay. And we have a politics of grievance because we have a culture of grievance. And what you’re talking about is how do we begin to start changing that?

James and Bill, thank you so much. I think Will Norton from Saint Paul is going to kick us off with the first question.

Thank you all so much. And thank you, William and the NBA team for hosting us. And thank you, Sherry, and the sponsors for bringing us all together. As we listen to all this, it seems like abstinence from the social media and the in the smartphone is, is is one of the things that is important to that to our Being a healthy and truth founded individuals. We’re a lot from a various institutions of schools, and Montgomery Bell Academy and Saint Paul Christian Academy predominantly represented here. As you all see communities and the best application at a practical level, and I loved your your reflections on the importance of faith and salt and in light. And as two leaders to steel, David Brooks, who was here to steal a quote from him in their second mountain season of life, where both of you have.

Just called us old.

That is not the case. Crown of splendor over there with wisdom, but with with that, you know that you you’re able to prioritize the most important things as as people who have accomplished so much within your various spheres. Practically speaking. Within school communities. Within families. What comes up for you? Of what? What does that look like that coming together for? In meaningful ways. Um, you know, in a in a pragmatic way. Uh, I think abstinence is one of the. From the cell phone was one of the things that, uh, you know, that I certainly see because the self reverberating silos of, of all the agendas are can can become an idol within that. Um, so what do you all see that playing out at the practical level for? And what advice would you give to two education institutions of how to play that out in, in really positive ways?

Uh, I could give a lot better answer of my wife wasn’t here to call me on being whether I’m real or not, but I’ll talk about this. She talked about institutions. Okay. I think there’s a couple of remedies I talked one about earlier about the church being the church. The second, and this is a great call for those of you in various institutions, is we have to go back to a, a country that understands the basic American civics. And by this, how does the Constitution work? And people think, well, this division we have today is new. But think about when the founders were writing. It was North versus south, slave versus free states, industrial versus agriculture urban. It was folks who thought we should, you know, have pay off the national debt from the war versus people that said, no, let the states bet. There were incredible differences. Okay. And our Constitution, I think, is actually part of the answer of what can get us out of this. People don’t like it when you say this, because compromise has become a bad word in politics. But I think the subtext of the whole Constitution is compromise. And when you hear somebody say, in an elected office, I will never give an inch. I think they’re promising not to do their job because we live in a country. Whether you like it or not, that’s pretty evenly divided. You might not think that because we live and work and worship and play with people that think like we do, but the results show it’s pretty evenly divided. And what happens is somebody wins an election and they say, we won and they pull the steering wheel really hard that way until they hit the guardrail. And then as a reaction, usually the the country says, wow, that’s way too much of that. Pull it back the other way. And instead of figuring out how do we find something that can be kind of a lasting majority, folks pull it back over until it hits the other rail. The Constitution was designed to protect the minority parties in our country, and we don’t like that. We think we won. We should get what we want, but that’s just not going to be the way that we solve the problems long term again and go back to the genius of the Constitution. It was designed with big disagreements in mind and with a way to have a more lasting agreement. But that means recognizing that, to borrow a phrase of my political mentor, Howard Baker, you always have to remember the other side might be right, which back to my Christian allergy. There’s an element of grace in that, right? Realizing, like, I mess up everything, so I might just not be exactly right about what I think on this issue.

So. That’s exactly right. Um, again, I’m an egghead, so I think in abstractions, but I for me, I hear that question and I translate it into this. How do you reconstruct a deconstructed culture? And I like to cite T.S. Eliot in an essay he wrote just before World War two.

James, I just so I want to be clear. Deconstructed means all the moorings have been taken away. The institutions that we’ve relied on for foundations are gone.

Yeah. That’s right. And I’m going to explain a little bit in a second. But but Eliot wrote you have to grow the grass that will feed the sheep, that will grow the wool that will then be woven into a new garment, a new civilization. What that means for me, in a more practical vein, and that aligns with what you’ve said, is we need to recognize that part of the corruption of our civic sphere is that we have lost track of the inherent goods that those that multiple institutions that constitute our society should be pursuing higher education. Close to my heart. I love what I do, but higher education is has become a political institution rather than an educational institution. It is defined by certain kinds of ideologies and ideological contests, um, rather than sort of, um, pursuing the inherent goods of higher learning. We see this in churches. Um, institutions that exist to worship God, that relative uses the worldly powers, in fact, become politicized and subsumed by politics. And we see this in philanthropy. We see it in every single institution. Politicization is is ubiquitous. If we can recover sort of the inherent goods that that institutions should be following. We’re going to be getting back to a framework in which we can, um, in a way, humanize. Um.

Thank you for that. Uh, we want to hear your questions, and we’ve got a microphone there in the middle of. So if you’d like to ask some, you can line up. Uh, we do have some guidelines for them. We’d love them to, uh, to be brief, to be civil and to be a question. Uh, the first one.

I heard the figure that, uh, $80 billion was spent on advertising in the elections this year. And it seems that that $80 billion was spent on turning the wheel left or right. And it’s within the interest of the media to keep this thing going left and right. What do we do?

Well, just very briefly, I think the media is one of those institutions that has substituted politics for the inherent goods of, of sort of public information, public, um, inquiry. You know, Christopher Lasch, a well-known historian, um, now past uh, from the seen once wrote that democracy may not be the most efficient form of government, but it’s the most educational. And when journalism does its job, it’s educating people and it’s educating them, um, to the best of their ability without political prejudice. It’s digging deep into issues, and the public learns and they become better citizens through that.

Here’s where I start with this. You have to realize that the media are not going to solve this problem to to the point you just made. It’s not in their interest. Okay. If you remember, there’s a famous quote back in the 2016 race when President Trump first started taking off and a guy named Les Moonves, who was then the head of CBS, said he might not be good for the country, but he’s damn good for CBS because of the interest that was engendered. And they’re not. I mean, political parties are not going to solve the problem. That’s not going to be the answer. So you just have to realize that and say, I’m not going to wait for the media to clear this up for me. That’s not their job. Again, I come back to say that’s the communities that James is talking about, particularly the one I address, is that’s the community of faithful people in the country who have a chance to change that conversation. The political parties aren’t going to do it in the media aren’t going to do it. That’s just not their job.

Doctor Hunter, your book is written to a broad audience, but we’re in a Christian context here, so I’m posing this as a way for you to respond to a Christian audience. Um, if I cited Ephesians six, we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers. We would recognize that there are entities at work, not just the social and intellectual streams that are affecting this problem. There’s in the New Testament we have several imperatives of do not resist evil. And there’s about as many imperatives do resist Satan. Have at that, however you want to address that for Christians living in a democracy.

Well, look, I think there’s real evil in the world. Um, but for the Christian, it’s it’s not just what we do to resist evil. It’s how we do it and how we do it constrains what we do. As my friend Don Flo has said. It’s God’s will in God’s way so, so often. And I think in in the experience that Bill described of his, um, his own political leadership, we find that, to quote another passage, or this one from Romans. Christians are conforming to the patterns of this world. They think, well, look, this is just democracy. We just we just do what everyone else does. Um, and we do it in the name of God, but in ways that are driven oftentimes by narratives of woundedness And injury and grievance and revenge. Um. Culture. And again, sorry. Sorry for being a little bit abstract and academic, but this is important. There are cultural logics at play in the world, and cultural logics are not logics of truth and error. This is why I find it almost funny when the Washington Post or the New York Times catalogs the list of lies that Donald Trump has made. Which his supporters could care less about. Right. Cultural logics are not about truth or error. Cultural logics are about meaning and meaning making. This is why you can find conspiracy theories on the left and on the right proliferating in our world. And they seem incomprehensible to someone like me or to someone like you. But at the end of the day, conspiracy theories survive because they are about meaning making in a world that is confused and confusing and that that that provides no meaning and purpose in life. So at the end of the day, cultural logics are ultimately logics of necessity. And what I mean by that is that cultural logics create a picture of the world in which we cannot imagine operating any other way. And so resisting. The pressures to conform to the patterns of this world, which I believe are increasingly nihilistic, uh, requires, um, you know, a self-consciousness, a thoughtfulness and a serious kind of, of engagement with the requirements of the gospel. Because it’s there you find not only the evil that we should resist, but also how we should resist it. And they are constrained. By the requirements of love. And we cannot get away from that.

You know, it’s interesting. I was having a conversation with one time with another person in elected office. Um, and they were not a person of faith. And they were talking, they said it must make things much easier, uh, to be a Christian because you can just know whatever happens, you know, it’s God’s will. And in the end, everything’s going to be okay. And I said, well, try being in politics and loving your enemy and then see how easy that is. And then even more, you know, James, when you talk about wisdom and he’s talking about the wisdom that’s from above, we all go to places where we we pray for our past, our our leaders to have wisdom. And James goes with the wisdom that’s from above is pure, peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits. Now think about your last political conversation. Pure. Peaceable. Gentle. Open. I mean, mine aren’t. Okay. I mean, I say this, I’m lecturing myself to what we’re talking about. The the the things that we’ve taken on. It’s such a high calling. But again, I think the world is dying to see pictures of mercy and justice together. They’re dying to see that. And we actually have that.

Thank both of you.

I’m not sure you get to ask a question.

Yes, I do. Uh, thank both of you for tonight. Local pastor teach moral leadership. Um, doctor Hunter, I am intrigued by your comment that we don’t have two political parties in America. We have four utopian left, pragmatic left, pragmatic right and utopian right. I would add a fifth that we have centrists, and they might be center left, center right, but they’re centrists. I think Bill Haslam was successful in Tennessee because he was a part of the pragmatic. Right. Um, my question is, what does the future have in store? Because I think one of the problems is we have multiple views of America and what it is and what it’s supposed to be. We have a primary system that rewards the utopian left and the utopian right. And so people that are part of the pragmatic left or pragmatic right no longer feel like they have a lane. And based on what you just said, rapid secularization plays a big role in this. But my question is, what does the future hold for people that would be a part of the pragmatic left or right? Because there’s a lot of despair out there about, um, what what role will they be able to play in in the future?

Well, I’ll just come right to the point. The center left, center right is the center. Um, the utopian left and the utopian right, in my opinion, have given up on the American project. The center is not the the arithmetic mean of the people in America and their political opinions. The center, the political center is the conversation. It’s the commitment to a reasonable, rational, sensible, uh, political discourse about the problems and challenges that this nation faces and the willingness to roll up sleeves and to address those. You can find that kind of commitment more in local settings, in cities, towns, even states much harder to find it. And part of the problem is that it’s not just that the the utopian left and the utopian right have now framed the the public discourse at the national level. Those kinds of extremes and that kind of extremism in our discourse seeps into local politics. So I think what we need is a renewal of the center, not again, as a kind of bland, mediocre arithmetic mean of what everyone in America thinks. But in fact, a revitalization of a serious and substantive discourse toward extending. The highest ideals upon which this nation was founded and and right now. I mean, it’s important to recognize that where there is no solidarity, because, again, all institutions, every nation requires some minimal set of agreements if we don’t have it. If we don’t have that solidarity organically generated, it will be imposed. Coercively. Authoritarianism is the attempt to impose solidarity where no solidarity exists. And that’s why there is this kind of authoritarian impulse within the utopian left and right in particular. But we’re also seeing that within. Within nations. In Western Europe and abroad. Um, is this a this is a scary moment. And if the United States could lead in this way, it would be leading in these in these substantive, constructive ways. And we would, I think, recover, um, the center by marginalizing those. Who call for political violence, who call for authoritarian solutions to the problems that we face. It’s slow, it’s long, it’s hard, it’s messy, but it’s democracy.

Thank you to this panel. This is amazing to get to hear such thought provoking commentary tonight. My name is Spencer Patton. My question is for Governor Haslam. The political landscape in Tennessee changed dramatically during your tenure, with Republicans making gains in the state legislature that hadn’t been seen since reconstruction. And so I wonder how that particularly influenced your time as governor, and what advice you might give to others in the future. As we think about political discourse in dealing with the state legislature in its current position. How was that for you in your time?

Yeah, this kind of it’s Tennessee is such a red state now, this is hard to imagine, but I was actually the first governor in history outside of reconstruction, Republican governor to have Republican majorities in the legislature. And we went from I went from being the first all of a sudden, these supermajorities to these super duper majorities. And somewhere in here, the the speaker of the House that I got to serve with Beth Harwell’s here, and we’ve talked a couple of times about what that transition looked like, but it was a the what happened in Tennessee was the folks whose parents and grandparents had been rural Democrats became very conservative Republicans as the culture changed primarily over culture issues. Okay. And then secondly, and this is interesting, a lot of people thought with all the folks that had moved into Tennessee, all these people are moving from California and New Jersey and Chicago. Our state’s going to change. And my experience was actually the most conservative people in our state, typically were folks who had moved from somewhere else because they were like, I left there for that reason. So you had both of those things coming together for cultural reasons, rural Democrats becoming Republicans, and then these folks who moved in. So it was a rapidly changing deal, and it’s changed even I’ve been out of office for five and a half years now, and it’s changed even more in that five and a half years than it did in the eight years that I was there.

Well, speaking, is one of those blue state transplants. Thank you, Governor Haslam, for your hospitality. It’s great to be here. My question is for doctor Hunter and his question about race. Um, early on, you mentioned that our sources of solidarity are often either post or pre ideological. They don’t have to do necessarily with explicit consensus, but more with sort of basic things that we share in common. And you gave an example of the family sharing love, sharing stakes. Um, but of course another thing that a family usually shares is genetic material. They’re related to each other. Um, and this gives me pause and trouble because race is such a powerful vector for identity politics. And I would include in that those on the right, of course, that adopt a kind of white racialism, but also, and maybe even more troublingly those on the left to sort of put forward an ideological program of some kind of counterbalanced racism. So my question for you is what are the sources, in your view, of American solidarity that can outweigh things like race as a cohesive force in our politics?

It’s a great question. And um, as a historical sociologist, um, the longest parts of my work are historical and character. And so I, I work through this kind of material and. Um, identity politics is not new to the present moment. Uh, identity politics existed in the 19th century for women, for African Americans. Um, for the indigenous tribes of North America. And, um. But identity politics. Up until the present moment was all oriented. All of it was oriented toward enfranchisement. Our identity politics. Is not about enfranchisement. It’s about division. Okay. So, um. Or at least its net effect. It may not be intended that way, but its net effect tends to be, um, uh, toward fragmentation. And again, not kind of national unity. Um, I brought this up because it’s, uh, I was going to give an illustration of, uh, solidarity from, uh, Du Bois, The Soul of Black Folks, which I’ve been teaching, uh, this semester. But, uh, Du Bois Dubois is writing about this ongoing, um, uh, separation. He calls it the veil that black people are living behind. And so I tell the story in this book, and I’ll try to be very brief that, um, the end of this international slave trade, uh, happened around 1808, and there were about a million and a half slaves, and there was a maybe eight, uh, slave states by the 18, um, late 1850s, there were 4 million slaves. Um, and the number of slave states had expanded to 12. Um, there was a long culture war, 30 years culture war called abolition that led up to the Civil War. Uh, Roger Taney, who was the Supreme Court justice, Sitting Supreme Court justice, wrote the majority opinion in the Dred Scott case, and what he’s trying to do is to impose solidarity using the office of the Supreme Court to generate solidarity on the question of race. Well, how did that work out? Three years later, we’re at war. What did war do? Well, the Emancipation Proclamation, the winning of the war by the North, was again an imposition of solidarity. Coercively. 13th, 14th, 15th amendment, all in the effort to establish by law solidarity on the issue of equal humanity. The problem is that in trying to use law to do the work of culture Precisely because law can’t do the work of culture. The culture of unequal humanity, um, continued. When you when you when you have a situation like this where culture hasn’t worked it through at the same time as law, you end up doing workarounds. And the workarounds were called Jim Crow lynching, code noir redlining, which remained in place for the better part of a century. And it was in this context that Du Bois is writing that the veil still exists for all of the legal freedoms. You know, there are, um, there’s an absence of freedom, right? So we see the same thing today. Now with abortion, the Supreme Court imposed a consensus, a solidarity on the issue in 73. It was overturned in the last several years through the Trump administration, through through the Supreme Court, during the periods where Roe was dominant. The pro-life movement looked for workarounds. Now that Roe has been overturned, the pro-choice movement is doing the same thing looking for workarounds. Law cannot do the work of culture. And part of the problem with law is that when you have a law that ends the international slave trade, when you have the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, when you have the civil rights laws, people get complacent. They say, okay, our work is done. Check that box. When in fact the work of culture, of learning to love your neighbor, to live with your neighbor, to care for your neighbor, to be, um, your neighbor’s keeper. Your brother’s keeper. That’s an ongoing work. And it’s slow work. It’s hard work, but it’s the work that has to happen. And it’s precisely the absence of that work that I see a critical race theory emerging, because at the sense of living behind the veil is still there in so many respects.

We’ll take one last question, and then Sam Funk is going to close this out.

And sorry, obviously we’re at MBA and Saint Paul is involved. And so we obviously a lot of us probably have young people in our life. Um, and they’re young people are the future. Um, how do you do you feel like do you have any practical advice for educating the young people in our life on, um, what got us to this moment and how to, um, kind of go forward, how to to. To, um, instill some of these kind of values and ideas, um, in their lives.

I think the question was how to help the young folks in our life go forward in the current climate. Is that okay? I’d say two things that would come to mind really quick. Number one, I would this is I don’t mean to sound hokey, but the fundamentals of civics and understanding how the Constitution works in our country really is important. Okay. How it’s supposed to work. That’s number one. Number two, I’d say this I think it’s really important to teach young people how difficult and complex issues are. When we try to tell folks, that’s really simple. You know, the whole saying, for every problem there’s a obvious and simple answer that is wrong. You know, and I think it was, you know, uh, Burke that talked about, you know, be careful when you’re operating on institutions because an error here, I operate like you’re operating on your father because if you mess up here, the consequences are huge. The example I give all the time is I’m was one that we were at. One of the things you could do as governor, they have a dinner at the white House and all the governors and the whole cabinet and vice president. Everybody are there, and it’s a big deal. And no matter who you’re sitting next to it, somebody pretty interesting. And I’m sitting next to somebody. This is Obama’s last year, somebody that was a long time Democrat operative worked for Obama very I won’t say his name, but very high ranking. And I just said, I’m curious, what do you know now that you wish you’d known eight years ago? And he goes, oh, that’s really easy. I wish I’d known how hard this stuff is, he said. I wouldn’t have been nearly as hard on George W Bush as I was. Don’t get me wrong, I think he was wrong on a lot of issues. I disagree, but I just didn’t know how hard this stuff is. And there’s always a good argument on the other side. And I think that’s a good thing to teach our young people is this. This stuff’s not easy. I mean, I can’t tell you how many times when I was in the governor’s office, I’d think, oh, that’s simple. And the more I dug in, the harder it was to make a decision. And so that’s not that’s that’s that shouldn’t be frustrating to our children. That should be enlightening to know that knowing the complexities of issues are really important.

I want to echo that I spent a chunk of this afternoon in Kevin Van Sant’s history class middle school history class. I had a blast. It was so much fun, and those kids are so lucky to have him as a as a teacher. And as we talked during the class, but especially after the class, he said almost the same words as you, Bill, he said he said a big part of my goal is to tell, to teach these kids just how complicated things are and to delve into the complications of life and of issues is one way of being anti utopian. Um, it’s just not easy to sort these kinds of, of things out. And so um, and utopianism, by the way, is not just a future kind of perfection. It’s also plays out as nostalgia for a world that can never be recovered again. Right. And they’re technological versions of utopia. They’re political versions of utopia. It’s much more complicated. And what’s good about that is that the implicit lesson of understanding, of teaching kids how complicated life is, what is implied in that is that there’s a there’s a tragic nature to human life, to to social life. We want to live by ideals, but things don’t always work out the way we hope, the way we want, and we have to come to terms with that precisely because it’s complicated.

Sam, bring us home and close us out.

Good evening. I’m Sam Funk, and I know I’m standing between you and going home tonight, so I will be brief. Thank you all both for that great discussion. And I want to thank everybody for being here, for being a part of this discussion. And one thing I want to touch on is what you all just finish with, which is life is complicated. There are lots of big issues that we grapple with, and frankly, that’s why Trinity Forum exists. That’s why we’re here. We want to thank you all for being here. These events don’t just happen, but they happen because we gather together, folks in Nashville who want to grapple with big, complicated issues. So tonight, I have an opportunity for you. On your table is a card that looks like this. On the back of it are two QR codes. The first QR code is how you join the Trinity Forum society, and that’s the group that we all are a member of. And that will get you access to several things, including invitations to events like this are quarterly readings. There are some for sale outside, but you’ll get them each quarter. The ones available here tonight include Martin Luther King letter from a Birmingham Jail, City of God, The Federalist Papers, and Democracy in America. You also get an email, a daily curated email of what we’re reading, some great articles that you might want to dive into. Um, all of that’s available if you join the Trinity Forum society. But also tonight, I feel like I’m a game show host for a special event tonight. We will give you a copy of Doctor Hunter’s book if you join the Trinity Forum Society tonight. So again. Qr code, very simple to do that. Next to that is a second QR code. And that’s really we’re asking for support for what we do. We are a nonprofit 501 C3. We exist through the generosity of lots and lots of donors. You’ve seen tonight lots of families and foundations and people came together to make this event possible. But the larger work of the Trinity Forum relies heavily on donations from individuals. And so we would we would ask you to consider, particularly as we end the year, consider being supporters, consider being donors of the Trinity Forum. And that second QR code is an opportunity to do that. If you have questions about what we do, how we do it, why we do it. See me. See Sri. We’ve got several volunteers in the room as well. So come see us. We’d love to tell you more about what we’re doing. I’m local. Give Thornton’s local. And at any time you’re curious about why we do this and how we do it. We love to connect with you, to tell you more. So again, I just thank you for that. Lastly, I’d love to end with a word of thanks. And there’s lots of people to thank. Um, first our volunteers. Um, again, this wouldn’t happen, but for MBA in Saint Paul and Langhorne Coleman and Leila Scoggin at Saint Paul, they have done Herculean work. They do it every time and just thank them. Um, we’ve also got Lindsey Nichols. I believe Ashley Omar and Amy Richardson are three of our other volunteers. Our photographer tonight is Dayton Gray. Our AV folks are Barry McAllister and Hunter wool run wool wool wine. Um, tonight’s event is recorded. It will be on YouTube in the next few days or early next week, so check out our YouTube page. It also contains all of the events we’ve done in Nashville, and really all the events we’ve done across the country. There are hundreds of events on there. It’s all free to you. Um, we also have, um, our Instagram handle and our Twitter, although I think it’s now called X. I think I’m dating myself at Twitter. It’s at Trinity Forum. So it asks you to follow along with those. And again, just thank you for being here. Again, another hand for Bill and for James. Thank you both. And good evening and have a good evening. Thank you.