The Roots of Civility III: The Gifts of Disagreement and Political Culture

by Ron Mock

Disagreement as part of God’s providence

So far I’ve argued that God’s providence makes it possible for everyone to have means to meet their needs, but does not just hand it to us. This is by design, because so much that is beautiful and meaningful about human life comes from the interaction of morally responsible human beings.

This is true even though the cost of leaving things to humans is lots of human suffering.

We know all-too-keenly how human cooperative effort can be exceptionally difficult and unreliable. We are all finite and make mistakes. We are all sinners and sometimes act out of selfishness, anger, fear, and even pointless pettiness. None of us agree about everything with anybody – we seem to be practically driven to disagree.

All this disagreement makes things hard. We stall progress on important projects, and sometimes even destroy progress already made, with our disagreeableness.

Sometimes we respond by trying to eliminate the disagreement. We drive out minority views, or we suppress their voices. If that doesn’t squelch the opposition, we divide our groups. States secede. Denominations divide. Congregations split, spouses divorce, kids leave home and never come back.

It’s no wonder that we are tempted to avoid disagreements. Relatively benign ones can frustrate progress, interfering with our access to God’s providence. Dangerous disagreements can ruin our lives, or even end them.

Nevertheless, disagreements are themselves part of God’s providential design. They are gifts.

How can this be? How can disagreement -- the very thing that so often accompanies disaster -- be the gift of a loving God?

Try to imagine a world without disagreement. You learn to walk, a brand new toddler, and get into the garbage. You find a used razor blade, and wonder what it tastes like. You start to put it in your mouth. “Good luck,” says your father.

When your first grade teacher asks you to recite the alphabet, and you say “that’s too hard!”, what if he agrees with you? “You’re right. No one should make you learn this.”

Somehow you survive until you’re nine, and you decide to take the car for a spin. “Suit yourself,” says your mother.

Still defying the odds, you are still alive at 16. You feel like driving 80 miles per hour around the corner next to the grade school. The police officer… why would we even have police in a world that always avoids disagreement?

I am absolutely certain the only reason you are alive today is you have encountered a nearly constant flow of disagreement. People who (thought they) knew better than you, told you so, over and over, for your own good. And it mostly worked (even though you can probably point to cases when it didn’t).

Disagreement is not only for your own good. The nine year old, and the teenager, are endangering others with their uncontested driving. Would you prefer having killed someone on the road, rather than having faced the disagreement of parents and police?

Did you remember to thank the officer the last time you were ticketed? I didn’t. I should write some thank you notes.

Disagreements are seldom purely beneficial. Some disagreeableness is, as we have already acknowledged, destructive. But according to Mark Juergensmeyer, Gandhi would advise us never to assume disagreement is useless. There is always something valuable we can learn, even from our most disreputable opponent.[1] Sometimes the opponent will give us an angle on fundamental truths we’d never recognized. Other times we will learn little more than how others feel about our actions. But even the smallest such lesson can help us love others more effectively, and avoid blocking their path to the divine providence they need.

There is no way for a human being to see everything from other people’s point of view without disagreement. Most truths we cannot discover on our own. Even for the many discoveries we might make on our own, we cannot know if we have discovered them accurately unless someone brings us God’s gift of disagreement to test our data, assumptions, and logic.

Political Culture: An intangible (but still real) part of God’s providence

But this is a hard gospel: a lifelong journey into a constant headwind of disagreement is what God wants for us.

Fortunately, our loving omnipotent God anticipated how difficult it would be for fallen humans who depend on disagreement to survive, grow, and progress as individuals and civilizations. So God extended Providence to two more intangible bundles: governments and political cultures.

By “governments” I mean the institutions, systems and structures humans create to enforce order, make laws, collect resources, and deliver services for a state. States are entities with an effective monopoly on coercive force in a defined territory.

We know God is concerned with governments. The Bible describes, especially in the book of Judges, how God designed and implemented a minimalist government for Judges-era Israel, centered on self-governing towns and villages run by elders from various families. At the national level there were no standing institutions. When action was needed at a national level, God called a judge to take the lead until the crisis passed. The judge might raise an army if necessary to defend the nation or restore order, but its tenure was also short-term, and would disband entirely when no longer needed.

Note how quickly I can describe the formal institutions in this governmental system: intermittent judges, and local governance by elders. There was no national capital, no national legislature, no chief executive. There were judges but they didn’t constitute a permanent court, nor did they have a formal office. They were emergent leaders, who gained a following reminiscent of a modern internet influencer: they got the attention of others, earned their trust, and emerged as leaders only because enough of their countrymen decided they were worth following. The judges we read about in Judges won that following because others recognized God had chosen them.

This was never a formal process. The various judges – Samson, Deborah, Gideon, and the others, finishing with Samuel – did not run for office, and were not appointed by anyone. They earned recognition from others in a variety of ways. There was no constitution laying out the process for selecting judges. It was all informal. The system, with the slenderest structural skeleton imaginable, was almost entirely a matter of political culture. Israelites expected emergent leader judges, understood there might be various ways God could demonstrate who was chosen, and relied on norms and expectations embedded in their culture to know who (including a woman) might be a judge, why the judge might gather an army, in answer to what call warriors might agree to serve, how long the army would endure, when the soldiers were free to go home, etc.

A political scientist might say ancient Israel’s political system was 2% government and 98% political culture.

The balance between formal government structures and informal political culture can differ from polity to polity. In I Samuel 8, we read about the culmination of Israelites’ increasing dissatisfaction with the super-libertarian government God had set up for them. They demanded a monarchy so they could be like the other nations. They wanted stronger military might than they could muster under judges, but the immediate cause of their dissatisfaction was Samuel’s corrupt sons, who were treating the judgeship as hereditary (which it was not) and using their position to extract bribes. A monarchy, they believed, would give them someone to prevent such corruption.

Also, as the last chapters of the book of Judges recount, there were episodes of graphic immorality and violence in Judges Israel, in periods when there were no judges and a critical mass of the population ignored God’s sovereignty over them.

These seem like pretty good reasons to have a formal governmental structure. God saw things differently. To God, the request for a king was a rejection of God’s direct relationship and rule over each individual Israelite. God went along with the request, but not without complaining to Samuel at length.

God predicted the new monarchy would not only expand the formal structures of government in Israel, it would dramatically change the nation’s political culture. Israelites would have to learn subservience to a higher human authority. They’d have to get used to taxation, and standing armies, and conscription of their young people into the king’s service. And most troubling of all, Israelites would be tempted to become more like the surrounding nations in their religion, coming to rely on chariots and horses for their safety at the expense of some of their closeness to God.

As the rest of the story of God’s relationship to Israel unfolds, we see God working both sides of the political system in Israel. God communicates both blessings and rebukes to the monarchs, sometimes directly, but often through the informal role of the prophet recognized in Israelite political culture. God has Samuel anoint Saul to be the first king, thus instituting the formal monarchy itself. But when Saul goes astray, God has the elderly Samuel anoint David to be Saul’s eventual successor. But David emerges as the new leader by earning popularity the old-fashioned informal way, by word of mouth among the people. Thereafter the dynamics of government in Israel involve the interaction of the formal processes of dynastic succession with the informal processes of emergent leadership – and God works in both arenas to provide what Israel needs, against constant interference arising from the pride and venality of the humans involved.

If it’s true that the resources we need to thrive are provided by God, then the Bible teaches us that both formal governments and informal political cultures are part of God’s providence. And we need to be stewards of both -- a concept we will explore further in The Roots of Civility IV.

[1] Mark Juergensmeyer, Gandhi’s Way (1984)