← Outrage Overload: Rethinking politics, division, and media
Outrage Overload: Rethinking politics, division, and media
88. The Cost of Purity and the Power of Pluralism – Allison K. Ralph
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This podcast is part of the democracy group.
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Welcome to Outrage Overload, a science podcast
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about outrage and lowering the temperature. This is episode 88.
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So once you start using a metaphor, you get sort of stuck in it. So once you start using a phrase like the body of Christ or the body of community becomes ubiquitous in the way that it is. Like it's so common we don't actually hear it anymore. Then you also start tagging on all these other phrases like that person is a. Is a cancer on society. What do you do with a cancer? You cut it out. That actually turns into social policy. And we can see the ways that that happens in the here and now based on those ancient metaphors.
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We are seeing social movements both on the political left and right undergoing what is called social purification, becoming less and less tolerant of any kind of internal difference. Real durable power doesn't look like a mushy middle where everyone agrees for the sake of politeness. It looks like a messy, high friction coalition where people with different priorities and backgrounds choose to stand together. True unity is found in the integration of differences, not the erasure of them. Purity might feel like a shield, but in practice it functions as a cage, one that grows smaller and more restrictive every day. And that's we're going to talk about on this episode of the Outrage Overload podcast. I'm your host, David Beckmeyer, and our guest today has spent their entire career studying the intellectual structures of that drive this outcome.
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I'm Alison Ralph. I run Cohesion Strategy, a consultancy that supports nonprofits and funders in developing and implementing pluralistic solutions. I'm also a PhD in church history and early Christian history.
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Allison Ralph brings the rare blend of hard academic rigor and deep strategic experience, working with philanthropic and civic leaders to actually reshape the systems where outrage thrives. She's going to explain why groups that are too focused on purification end up with immediate specific wins, but lose the necessary coalition for long term victories. She also breaks down why the greatest tactical advantage for pro democracy work won't come from massive grants, but from a widespread movement of individual investment. Stick with us for a conversation that will expand your understanding of belonging and division and uncover the untapped possibilities for lasting structural change.
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Alison Ralph, thank you so much for making time for our program.
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Happy to be here, David. Thanks for having me.
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So we were talking a little bit. Yeah, you're welcome. We were talking a little bit before we started recording about your journey and that sounds pretty fascinating. So tell us a little bit about how you end up at COHESION strategy.
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I happen to grow up atheist in the Bible Belt. I grew up in, in Northeast Florida. It's very culturally Southern, very much the Bible Belt. And I just happen not to believe. Unfortunately for me, that became very quickly a situation in which I was severely bullied. It wasn't just other students that were engaging in that bullying behavior. It was also teachers and administrators who knew that I was different and treated me differently. Um, I probably would have dropped out of high school except that I got out of that high school in, into an art school the next town over. But what did happen is that I became really an angry atheist. I was furious about what was happening to me in that situation. I felt it was frankly hypocritical that folks were running around. This was the, the mid-90s. So we're talking the WWJD bracelets. If anybody out there remembers those they stand for, what would Jesus do? So they were wearing WWJD paraphernalia while treating me and other kids who are different in, in ways that I'm pretty sure Jesus would not have behaved. So I got really interested in trying to figure out, frankly, what is wrong with all of the Christian people in particular and religious people in general, because my interactions with those folks had been so bad. So I was doing religion and history in college and I had an advisor tell me, hey, you should go to Cambridge. I'm like, hello, I grew up on a farm, Cambridge, really? And he said, no, really, you should go. So I was interested in history of Christianity, history of justification of violence. I was like, oh, I'm going to write a paper on Augustine of Hippo, who's known for just war theory. So I, I write off my application to Cambridge University to the history faculty, and I received an acceptance letter from the Divinity Facult Tea, which was not what I was expecting, but you know, again, Florida farm girl, not going to say no to that. So off I go to Cambridge University in England, the one way plane ticket, and I meet my classmates on the first day and they are a nun, a priest and an Anglican seminarian. Like, okay, if there is a God, they are laughing at me so hard right now. This is ridiculous. So since then, and that was 20 years ago now, I have been living and working in communities of faith. I went on to get my PhD, as I said in, in early Christian history at the Catholic University of America. I am not Catholic people, still not Christian after all this time, but it's been the most amazing journey. Then I ended up at the Aspen Institute in what became the Religion and Society program promoting religious pluralism in the U.S. and then when I left two years ago, I found a cohesion strategy to continue this work of reducing this cultural conflict around religion and reducing cultural conflict around all our other values, ideological differences to, to support and develop a pluralistic society.
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Interesting. So I, I know with, or at least from what I can tell, reading about cohesion strategy, belonging and maybe lack of belonging even bigger. Talk to us a little bit about that and what you found in your research of how that kind of accelerates some of these issues for sure.
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So as I said, I, I got into trying to understand the issue of belonging because I didn't feel like I, I belonged. I was made to feel like I didn't belong. So again, I was trying to figure out, I try to understand how do we get to this point of, of justifying treating another human person in this way. Find completely abhorrent. And when you, when you dive back into that historical world. So I'm talking about the period of, between about 2, 240 to about 360, and that's the period where the Roman Empire is at one of its largest points. We're at the very end of the period of the persecutions. The Christian communities are growing and there's no canon yet. There's no set canon of books. So some of the communities have some books, some have others. Everybody's confused about what they're supposed to be doing. And there's arguments starting now over, well, are you connected to Christ because of your, you know, the line of bishops? Are you connected to Christ because of access to the divine directly in a prophetic, personal kind of way? Or there's people are just arguing over this stuff already. And then Constantine converts and now the emperor cares about your internecine disputes about whether you think Jesus is, you know, fully human. And now the emperor is able to enforce exiling the bishop's decisions about who they're going to exile, who they're going to kick out, who they're going to say is a heretic or not a heretic. And now whatever the emperor believes also has an influence on the church. Well, is the emperor of this theological persuasion or that theological persuasion and now who is a heretic? Changes based on day to day according to the government position. So there's all of this boiling, roiling confusion and contestation and all this kind of stuff going on in the early church. And that is the basis for how the Christian communities in that time are trying to figure out who is it safe to be with Again, how do we figure out who, who we are and who they are and how we communicate or not with them? And of course, this is all in the like what we might use the words like, what is the good society? They're trying to figure out how God has told them to live and to do and to be in the world. Well, we're still trying to do that, regardless of our religious persuasion. What is the good society? What are we supposed to be doing here? How are we supposed to be treating each other? So in that late antique setting, one of the most common frames for how we talk about who we are is by using what we call the metaphor of the body. So you have, everybody who's listening today has heard this metaphor, I guarantee you, but you probably really not thought about it as a metaphor. So you've possibly heard it as the body of Christ, which is the language that the apostle Paul used in many of his letters when he's talking about the Christian community. And if you've ever heard the phrase head of state or the body politic, that's the way that Romans and Greeks talked about the human community. And that frame, the social body turns out to have all different kinds of associated, like extra metaphors. Once you start talking in the frame of a metaphor, like, oh, we are one body. If you are, if one member is hurt, we are all hurt, then it turns out all of those metaphors for belonging are really impactful, and all of those metaphors for exclusion are really impactful. So if you say that person over there is a heretic, they're a cancer in the body, what do you do with them? You cut them out, you excommunicate them or exile them or kill them. That's. Those metaphors have a real impact and that we still see those metaphors as impactful today. If you remember in way back in 2015, 10 years ago, when then candidate Donald Trump was talking about Mexicans as disease, he did not just say Mexican, Mexicans are immigrating and carrying diseases into the U.S. what he said was Mexicans are disease. What do you do? What is the policy outcome? You close off the border because the body of the body politic is under attack. Those metaphors about belonging and who is safe and who is part of us are still the most powerful metaphors for belonging, inclusion and, and exclusion that I have ever come across.
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Yeah, that's powerful stuff. You know, I want to talk about something that is something that comes up on, on the show a lot. It's come up since sort of day one, after all the episodes we've done of this idea of sort of productive dialogue. I think you use another term, productive conflict. And I think this is where we've been trying to talk about a message for a long time that we're not really talking about sort of everybody getting along in some way, Kumbaya kind of way. We're talking about disagreeing better a lot of times and, and becoming more comfortable with those disagreements, which is just, you know, not something we're sort of trained
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to do these days.
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So. So tell, tell us about that a little bit.
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Yeah. Oh my gosh. So one of the, the taglines that I use sometimes is expand what's possible. Because if we are, are not able to include in our us folks who are different from us, every time we exclude someone or some way of thinking, we reduce the available possibilities for us. It just shrinks down our world smaller and smaller and smaller. If you are expanding that community, it makes what is possible for that community bigger. And I'm going to tag this back into the stuff around belonging again. There is, I was just talking about the social body. One of the ways that, that we think about the social body is by being very protective of its purity. So in both the left and the right, social movements have become, undergone what's called social purification, where the movements have become less and less tolerant of difference, certain kinds of difference. And I'm going to give you one example. In the field of climate care and the, in the climate reduction, climate change reduction force, there have been. So it's become, for a number of reasons that set of folks has become affiliated with the progressive left and I would argue to its detriment because there are many folks and conservative movements, often conservative for religious reasons, conservative Catholics, theologically conservative Catholics and evangelicals who look at the world around them as God's creation and love it and want to protect it. And if folks who are interested in climate change prevention or policy that, that is going to address that issue and you, and you're not able to get there with the coalition that you have, there is a whole group of other folks here. There's a, there's a whole encyclical, it just hit 50 years anniversary, the Laudato Si for Catholics. There's a whole movement of, of theologically socially conservative Catholics who give a damn about creation and want to preserve it and protect it. Same thing for, for evangelicals. If climate folks or environmental protection folks want to get done, there are groups ready to work with them. Evangelicals sometimes come at it from a right to Life standpoint because pollution kills kids. That's a heck of a coalition. You know, is there going to be conflict in those groups? Yes, there will. Is it worth working through that in order to get to some kind of real change? In my opinion, yes, it is.
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Yeah. I've always felt that was a space that was always so confusing to me that there wasn't a broader coalition. Because I mean, I know even today some pretty, you know, hardcore right leaning folks that 100% like want clean water, they want outdoor, clean outdoor, outdoor spaces to go to. They want, you know, clean air and all this kind of stuff. And like you say there's so much missed opportunity there for. But that brings me to a second thing I want to talk about a little bit. I mean, we throw around words like, like pluralism and you know, a pluralistic environment and that sounds good in the abstract, but sometimes like we don't really realize in concrete terms what that really means.
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Right.
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I mean this means you're, you're in a room with people that you're probably going to have disagreements with and, and you know, and that's like something that sort of, in certain contexts, certainly, but it used to be kind of the norm. Right. That was like just the way things worked. But now it's like, no, we want, you know, we want this conformity. We want, you know, even a word like unity. Sometimes people think that what we're going to, what we want to do there is bring everyone to the same place in this room. And we might want to bring them to the same place on certain things. Like you were saying, maybe a outcome or maybe, maybe some, some shared value. But there's this idea and then you start thinking, people start accusing you of, oh, you just want to push me to some mushy middle and this kind of stuff. And you know, can, can you maybe we just can put some meat on the bones of what we mean by, by pluralism a little bit too in a very concrete kind of way.
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Absolutely. I love this question. Yeah, I, when I say pluralism, I do not mean a mushy metal. I do not mean that anyone lets go of their values or their, their religious beliefs or their ideals of the good society. And, and because of that, I also do not mean that we're talking about Kumbaya. That does not exist. I do not believe on, in, in heaven on earth. We are not going to arrive there. And in fact, in my opinion, the push to create a utopia on earth is one of the most dangerous things that you could do in a Society that's, you know, that is communism is, is the ideal society, is meant to be the ideal society. And it is not. It's not. And I, and I'm, I'm very clear about that because my grandparents, my American grandparents and the Midwest were American communists. They believed in the ideal. They really believed. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. That's pretty beautiful. Does it work? No, it does not. And you will destroy the most beautiful things around us if you try to put it in place. So any of that utopian crap. I'm not. That's not what I mean when I say pluralism. It's not. What I mean is that we actually have to figure out how to live with each other. That the. Those kids that I grew up with are going to have to figure out how to live with me and that I am going to have to figure out how to live with them. That's what that means. And that is hard. It means that you are with people all the time who are saying to you, your idea of the good society is wrong. And that gets. I'm going to go back, keep going back to that belonging thing and the. That social body thing. Because humans need of human, Human survival. Humans survive because we are connected to communities. And when we feel othered, when we feel cut out of a comm. Of a community because we feel that somebody else feels that we're not living the good society or pushing towards the good society, then that pushes us fight or flight mode. And that pushes us into shame and rage and vitriol and promotion of political violence and social violence. That's how the early Christians got to civil war and many other things. And that is what's happening to us right now. So all of that, all of that stuff about it. Do we need to get into productive conflict? Yes. And the possibilities, if you can get in it and stay in it and hang on for the ride. There is so much more that is possible than if we get stuck in our little bubbles. And the downside is that it's hard. Like a lot.
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Yeah, yeah. It seems like that is powerful. I know you're involved in sort of the funding side and how that works, and you're even looking out some new work there as well. So tell us a little bit about, like one thing I've talked about with others kind of around the coffee table kind of idea. Not necessarily on the show as much, but you know that, you know, we talk about all these ideas, but if you think about the purveyors of Sort of the outrage and the division, you know, it's not, not a fair fight. Like they have billions of dollars for every million that are 10,000 or something that the sort of bridging, bridging world has. So, so I think it's really important that you have to at some point say in order for this to happen there has to be funding. So talk to us a little bit
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about that for sure. Oh goodness. So there is, let me say a little bit about what my connection to funding spaces. I am not a funder and I've worked. One of the things that I was doing at Aspen was co leading and then leading a, a funder affinity group. That's a group where funders get together and, and around a certain, a particular shared issue. Because of that, I've also spent a fair amount of time at other funding, philanthropy serving organization organizations which are the, the conveners of funders. So I spent lots of time in those kinds of spaces and I was sort of watching all of this, you know, how are funders responding to the bridging movement? Bridging became particularly interesting in 2016, after the election, in 2016, 17, after the, that election cycle and over the last decade there's been a big shift in how many funders are interested in bridging work per se and in other sandboxes in the same playground. Whether that's the sort of religious, different stuff that I was doing or structural reform in the pro democracy space or civic engagement, you know, deliberative democracy, all these different sorts of related, somewhat related areas, which is great. The number of organizations in those pro democracy philanthropy serving organizations has certainly grown in the last decade and I'm not sure they're keeping up. And given, as you say, the intense challenges from organization, from funding, we're funding different ways of thinking and I'm specifically not saying the other side saying different ways of thinking about what is the common good is to take that value judgment out of it. So there's a big challenge there. Plus the independent sector itself is under attack for particular viewpoints. Some parts of the independent sector are under attack from the current administration for holding particular viewpoints. And so all of that is creating challenges around who's going to lean in in terms of funders and who is going to back off. And we've seen some funders do both, you know, or pick, pick a lane. So all of it is very fluid right now. And I don't know in, in terms of the funding, I don't, I don't know whether big Funders are going to be enough. And, and we were, we were talking a little earlier about the, the communications challenge. We were saying, you know, like why how hard it is to get folks to, to say yes, this is useful to me, this is powerful to me doing this work. Yeah, it might be hard, but it's really has, has good outcomes is that, I don't know, this is me spitballing, but I feel like there needs to be a movement of individuals who see this type of work as personally helpful to them and something they are personally willing to invest in and that where we cannot as a, as a bridging field, as a pro democracy, part of the wider pro democracy field, rely on big funders. I don't think we're going to make it unless the Bridgers can figure out how to say, you know what, this is worth it. It really is. I promise, I promise you. It's personally transformative. It really is.
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So yeah. So looking forward, you know, what are you seeing in the field right now? What developments? What emergency emerging practices give you some reason for optimism?
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Well, you know, personally I do, I do think change is possible. I am, I am a hope oriented person. I look around right now, I know it's easy to doom scroll and when I look around at the space, you know, as a few months ago, as of a few months ago there were more than 10,000 pro democracy organizations active in the U.S. there are more than 500 members in the Listen First Coalition. There is an active group of funders in the that specifically fund bridging work and pro pluralistic work. There's an active group of funders that are, that are doing pro democracy work and that's pretty incredible. So we are here in this particular moment where we're having some real challenges about how do we live with each other and some administration, some challenges with the administration about again, the emperor at the moment cares about some of these issues and is and is getting in in ways that have not been typical for the American democratic experience experiment. And we are set up pretty well right now. There are that are, there are folks who are already stepping in to do the block and tackle work, to do the bridging work and the belonging work and all of this stuff because there's a different, there are so many different roles to be played in this mom, to bring us back together, back into a society not where we're not going to have our conflicts, but where we work through our conflicts in a more productive way. We can really figure out how to live with each other. Where we're not afraid to go out on the street because we're afraid of being shot or we're afraid of being discriminated against because of our faith or the color of our skin or whatever that issue is, which is where we are right now. We don't need to be here. There's so many of us. How we do in this really amazing work. So for those of y' all out there listening, your bridging is not your thing. I feel it. Tag in somewhere else. Pick a place, do a thing and, and, and lean in and do something. And the other thing I'll say about if bridging feels too hard. This is a great line from John, John A. Powell, who runs the Othering and Belonging Institute, where somebody was talking to him and who said, well, I can't. I can't talk to that guy. He's. He's the devil incarnate. And, and John just looked at him and went, maybe don't start with the devil. Start with somebody closer to home. And I just think that's so, that's so brilliant. You don't have to fix. You don't have to bridge every difference. Bridge is something that's meaningful to you in some, some little way. Take a, Take a step.
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Yeah, I love it. I've heard this term, sort of adjacency used. Right, Right. Instead of. We're always looking at, in our mind, we pick the person that's the, the most. The opposite of us. Right. And we're going to go fix Uncle John or whatever. Right. Maybe don't start with Uncle John.
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Maybe not that guy.
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Yeah, maybe.
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Right. You know.
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Well, Allison, Ralph, thank you so much for making time for our program. I really appreciate it.
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Thank you, David. It's been a joy to be with you. I'm. I'm looking forward to hearing more.
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That is it for this episode of
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the Outrage Overload podcast.
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For links to everything we talked about on this episode, go to outrageoverload.net Outrage
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Overload is a Connors Institute podcast.
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The Connors Institute for Nonpartisan Research and Civic Engagement at Shippensburg University works to disseminate high quality nonpartisan information to the American public around issues of societal well being, democracy promotion and news literacy. If you found this episode valuable, please share it or leave a review.
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It really helps.
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Thanks for listening and I'll catch you next time.
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Significant.