learning to disagree: a conversation with john inazu
the surprising path to navigating difference with empathy and respect
I met
for the first time in the Fall of 2022. I had recently joined the staff at Interfaith America, where he is a Senior Fellow. Among many things, John was in the middle of a project that convened a cohort of influential evangelical (and evangelical-adjacent) leaders seeking to help American Christians live faithfully and neighborly in a world they can’t control. I was fortunate enough to be assigned to the project.This wasn’t the first time I’d heard of John though—in fact, I was very familiar with his work. I had read his well-known text, Confident Pluralism (UChicago Press, 2016) several years prior. It was the clearest explanation of what constructive pluralism might look like for Christians that I had ever heard. More recently, John also co-edited a collection of essays with the late Tim Keller titled Uncommon Ground: Living Faithfully in a World of Difference (Thomas Nelson, 2020), which includes a wide array of voices including Lecrae, Tish Harrison Warren, Bishop Claude Richard Alexander, Kristen Deede Johnson, and more.
John’s latest book, Learning to Disagree: The Surprising Path to Navigating Difference with Empathy and Respect, releases next week. The text draws from John's experiences teaching law to show how it is possible to disagree about hard issues. By finding nuance in some of today’s most divisive issues and taking time to learn how the other side thinks, John gives readers ideas and tools to navigate the differences and disagreements they encounter in their everyday lives without sacrificing their own convictions. For more on John’s work, subscribe to his Substack:
.Below are a few excerpts from my conversation with John, which will be released in audio format next Tuesday.
John Inazu is the Sally D. Danforth Distinguished Professor of Law and Religion at Washington University in St. Louis. His next book, Learning to Disagree: The Surprising Path to Navigating Differences with Empathy and Respect, will be published by Zondervan in Spring 2024. He is also the author of Liberty’s Refuge: The Forgotten Freedom of Assembly (Yale University Press, 2012) and Confident Pluralism: Surviving and Thriving Through Deep Difference (University of Chicago Press, 2016), and co-editor (with Tim Keller) of Uncommon Ground: Living Faithfully in a World of Difference (Thomas Nelson, 2020).
Inazu is the founder of The Carver Project and the Legal Vocation Fellowship and a Senior Fellow at Interfaith America and the Trinity Forum. He holds a B.S.E. and J.D. from Duke University and a Ph.D. in political science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Amar: In our work together, I know you as “John Inazu, the Senior Fellow,” or “John, the religious scholar,” but this book very much feels like “John Inazu, the law professor who's talking to his students.” This book seems to speak across the many audiences you hold, but also is written in a voice that I don't think I've heard you write in. I'm curious how much of this was intentional.
John: In the classroom particularly, I am trying to model what it's like to teach students—and it's a complicated dance. Part of what I say in the book is how hard teaching is.
There's no sense in which teaching is pulling out old, crusty notes and just reading the lecture you wrote twenty years ago. For me—and for I think most good teachers—it is a kind of engagement that recognizes, regardless of the material, that the people in front of you are there together for the first time. They're encountering new ideas. A good teacher recognizes that, because of their diverse perspectives and different knowledge bases, this is an exciting time each day.
I think the audience question for this book is also very important. I think people who know me (and know a lot of my more academic writing) will recognize a lot of Alasdair MacIntyre and the philosophical frameworks under the hood of this book. But none of it rises to the top of the text.
This book is meant to demonstrate, illustrate, and model a kind of engagement without any academic name-dropping. It is meant for both students and people who will never go to law school but want a window into the experience of what it's like to wrestle with some of these hard questions and concepts. I hope readers will think about how to apply this to their own life in their neighborhood, at their workplace, or the Thanksgiving dinner table.
Amar: You have this great section about law and violence, and you explain that the law is violent because it is ultimately enforced with violence. This is America as it is, but I wonder if it's America as it should be. What do you make of this relationship between the law and the citizen that's upheld through violence rather than benevolence?
John: This is such an important point that I make to all of my law students. For anyone who's considering law school or thinking about being a lawyer, I would urge you to read an article by the late Robert M. Cover titled “Violence and the Word.” The depth of what's there I think is very compelling. It covers this basic thesis that the law is workable and enforceable because it ultimately rests on the threat or use of violence.
You could call it coercion, but at the end of the day somebody's going to enforce the law with a weapon that puts you in jail or severely harms or kills you if you don't comply. The law holds together because—in contrast to the Hobbesian state of nature—we've all allegedly agreed to some social contract that puts us under the shared jurisdiction of something called “the law” and something called “authority.” And it works or it doesn't.
One of the points I make in the book is that most of the time, most of us want a law-ordered society. The alternative—and there are examples of the alternative in different places of the world—is quite scary.
But when you get a law-ordered society, you get a society that is ordered by the threat or use of coercion and violence. And that's pretty heavy when you are training to be a practitioner in that use or threat of violence.
Amar: You write in the book, “What is fair and reasonable, it turns out, has a lot to do with our own experiences and sense of the world.” I'm curious how you view the role of formation in learning to disagree and in this work of navigating differences with empathy and respect.
John: Your question is another MacIntyrean point, right? How we are formed and how we are habituated depends upon the context we are in and the liturgies, practices, and habits present there. It neither happens in a vacuum or instantaneously. In other words, formation only happens in particular communities and over time.
Of course, we are being formed by lots of different influences at any given time, and some of them might conflict with one another; but the question to ask is: What are my primary formative communities and how do I know that they're forming me? Formation is deeply dependent upon the lived practices you engage in with other people over time.
I hope that some of the examples and stories I tell in Learning to Disagree are examples of a process of formation or a glimpse into how formation happens.
This goes back to your question earlier about audience. I think there is a broad audience of people who are not going to law school who should think about this book as a way of gleaning some lessons by peering under the hood of the law school experience and trying to apply it to their own lives.
And then there's another audience which is people in law school (or heading to law school). To those people, I would say read this book and then do law school through the lens of this book because this will be helpful to you not just as a law student but also as a human being.
Amar: You have this great line early in the book where you say, “I am amazed at the things that people say when they think everyone listening is just like them.”
You frame this in the context of passing as part of the in-group—whether that's being Japanese in a predominantly white space or a Christian in a space that is not defined exclusively as a religious space, or a conservative but not in the same sense or practice that your neighbors or fellow congregants might assume.
What does this mean for navigating differences in a deeply plural society where we're trying to navigate differences with empathy and respect rather than minimizing those differences?
John: The point I try to make in the book along these lines is that regardless of whether we are in a homogenous space or not, we would do well to use care with our words—especially our humor, caricatures, and shortcuts—when we're talking about other people, other human beings, other image bearers.
Some people feel a freedom in private spaces to crack crude and mean jokes, use stereotypes, and lump together people into categories that don't really fit actual human beings. But when this happens over time, it becomes very dissonant with being asked to present in public spaces with more restraint and care. One of the points I try to make here is—without driving yourself crazy or being your own word police—it would be better for your own mental health if you were more consistent in how you talked about other people and the jokes that you made.
As I point out in the book, this is not just directed in one partisan way. This happens in any majority or homogenous situation where I can hear or experience people just berating the other side in a very inhumane way. That’s the kind of thing that I'm trying to push back against within the pluralistic Learning to Disagree worldview.