The Big Sort

by Bill Bishop

  "Postmodern" is how emerging church members describe their movement. The fight between the Social Gospel of Walter Rauschenbusch and Eugene Carson Blake and the evangelism of the great nineteenth-century Fundamentalist Dwight Moody and his descendants had been a modernist struggle. To cope with the nation's change from rural to urban, from an agricultural to an industrial society, the earlier religious movements had taken opposing positions. The two sides each had dominated for a time, and then, Musick explained, "just when the Evangelicals are really copping a good head of steam, that's when there is a birth of another shift. And the emerging church is the result, the church emerging as a response to Evangelicalism not working for groups of people."

  Mike Cosper is a minister with Sojourn. He grew up in a Southern Baptist community in southern Indiana. His home church was so focused on fulfilling the Great Commission that, for Cosper, it sacrificed any sense of community. "You're very focused on the mission," Cosper said, describing the rigid, hierarchical demands of mainline Evangelicalism, "and the mission is lived out through the structure. But the structure destroys community. The whole point of Christian life, the whole point of church, is community, and that's weblike." The modern church, whether Social Gospel or Fundamentalist, pursued truth; the emerging church seeks mystery.

  Cosper moved to the Highlands neighborhood on the edge of downtown Louisville, a dense community of old houses, coffee shops, and restaurants. He met other young people who had left more fundamentalist churches. They opened an art gallery, Asian's How—named for the place where the great lion in C. S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia was killed. "The idea of the art gallery was for it to be a way of building relationships with people who wouldn't walk into the front door of a church, a way to connect with them," Cosper explained. The art gallery led to concerts and to a series of small gatherings. "Our strategy was to meet in homes, in community groups," Cosper recalled. "We would come together. There was time to reflect, more of an open atmosphere of just sharing life." The idea was to build a church that was part of the city and the neighborhood—something very different from the island community of the megachurch. Sojourn meets in one of the most Democratic-leaning areas of Louisville, yet Cosper and the other ministers are decidedly apolitical. "The reality of fundamentalism is that if I come out guns blazing with my politics, you are going to come out guns blazing back," Cosper said over a cup of coffee at a Bardstown Road café. "Somebody is going to lose. And I don't want Christianity to lose. The question of politics is not what God wants. The question of politics is how do we live together, recognizing that other people are different from me."

  For most people these days, the question of politics certainly isn't this one: how do people with vastly different beliefs and backgrounds learn to live together? In the first four national elections of this century, the questions have been how best to isolate voters with sophisticated target marketing—a strategy endorsed and financially supported by both the Republican establishment and Democratic bloggers—and how to demonize the other side in order to gain, at best, a teetering advantage in the House of Representatives, Senate, or White House. Politics has become the enemy of Cosper's idea of community.

  Lessons from Robbers Cave: The Contact Hypothesis

  One of the tenets of democratic faith has been that direct, face-to-face contact between groups on different sides of an issue defines a self-governing people. Alexander Hamilton wrote that a "jarring of parties" was essential for government. Deliberation among ideological opposites was what made a country democratic. "It's hardly possible to overstate the value, in the present state of human improvement, of placing human beings in contact with other persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar," the democratic philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote in 1848. "Such communication has always been, and is peculiarly in the present age, one of the primary sources of progress."2

  Research conducted during World War II appeared to support the belief that understanding and tolerance stemmed from contact among groups that were otherwise isolated. The demands of battle would sometimes force an otherwise racially segregated U.S. Army to integrate on the field. Researchers found that white soldiers who had fought alongside black troops held more positive racial attitudes than whites who hadn't. Similarly, as white merchant marines took more voyages with black sailors, the racial attitudes of whites grew more tolerant.3 These findings supported a belief that prejudice resulted from ignorance and ignorance was the result of a lack of contact. If people could only get to know each other, went the theory, groups would see that they shared a common humanity. In the 1950s, followers of the "human relations movement" had an "almost mystical faith in 'getting to know one another'as a solvent of racial tensions."4 They believed that simple contact between groups would work to reduce racial prejudice. It was a way of thinking so prevalent at the time that it became part of the reasoning used by the U.S. Supreme Court to desegregate public schools in 1954.5

  When social psychologists began to study what happened when groups came in contact, however, the findings pointed to something less than the democratic ideal. People do gravitate toward others with similar opinions and ways of life, and they tend to minimize the differences within the groups to which they belong. For instance, my Democratic Travis Heights neighbors in Austin see much more uniformity in opinion within the precinct than there really is. At the same time, people maximize the differences between groups. Travis Heights exaggerates the (already large) differences between this neighborhood and, say, Amarillo. Thus, when two groups think of each other, they define themselves as "us" and "them." People enhance their social identities by viewing their own groups positively and seeing other groups negatively. This is how they derive a sense of themselves. It's the way teams coalesce, companies build identities, and political parties maintain loyalties. The price of identity is that despite what the human relations movement had hoped, differences aren't diminished when groups come together. Instead, as social psychologists found, differences are exacerbated.

  In 1954, Muzafer Sherif selected twenty-two boys for an experiment in group interaction.6 The boys were alike in all measurable ways. They all came from middle-class homes; Sherif even picked boys with similar IQs. The social psychologist arbitrarily divided the boys into two groups. Separate buses picked up the boys and drove them to a two-hundred-acre Boy Scout camp surrounded by Oklahoma's Robbers Cave State Park, where they were put in different camps. The two groups instinctively developed group identities: one group spontaneously began calling themselves the Rattlers, while the other adopted the moniker the Eagles. The two groups gradually became aware of each other, and the knowledge that another pack of boys was camped at Robbers Cave immediately created tension. One of the Eagles referred to the Rattlers as "nigger campers" only after hearing the Rattlers playing at a distant ball field.

  Boys from both groups asked Sherif's staff to set up competitions between the Rattlers and Eagles. (Sherif himself watched the experiment disguised as a camp janitor.) The researchers set up a series of contests, but even before the games began, the Rattlers and Eagles fell into conflict. When they first met, the boys razzed each other and sang derogatory songs. As the competitions (ball games, tugs of war, treasure hunts) proceeded, relations between the two camps deteriorated. The Eagles burned the Rattlers' flag. The staff had to prevent fights at the mess hall. One night, the Rattlers raided the Eagles' camp, dumping over beds and ripping down mosquito netting.

  The Robbers Cave experiment taught Sherif that two groups placed in competition would devolve into discrimination and conflict. But subsequent experiments showed that the mere act of division was enough to trigger prejudice. Researchers found that there didn't have to be any discernible dissimilarity between groups for "us" versus "them" conflict to arise. People adopted group identifications with only the flimsiest of pretexts. In the late 1960s, social psychologist Henri Tajfel divided schoolboys from a suburb of Bristol, England, in
to two groups.7 Tajfel made the divisions randomly, but he told the boys he had based the groupings on real differences. In one case, he asked the fourteen- and fifteen-year-old boys to estimate how many dots appeared on a screen. The boys were told that some people consistently overestimate the number of dots, while others underestimate the number. Tajfel told the boys that overestimators had been placed in one group and underestimators in another. (In another iteration of the experiment, the boys were asked whether they preferred paintings by Wassily Kandinsky or Paul Klee, both identified only as "foreign painters." The boys were then placed in a Klee group or a Kandinsky group.) The groupings were totally arbitrary, but to the boys, the groups, nonsensical as they were, became sources of social identity. When they were then asked to assign monetary rewards and penalties, they discriminated. Klee group members gave other Klee group members more money and Kandinsky group members less. A boy gained no individual advantage by favoring others in his group, but he did so anyway. Tajfel's experiment worked time and again. The simple fact of assigning people to groups led to discrimination—even when the division had been based on totally meaningless criteria. There didn't need to be a history of conflict or an ongoing struggle to set off intergroup hostility. They discriminated simply because the division existed.*

  The "Kumbaya" philosophy of the human relations movement—we would all get along if we just got to know one another—wasn't wrong. Knowing about other groups did reduce prejudice and increase tolerance, just as the World War II battlefield studies had shown. But simply putting two groups together didn't result in mutual respect. It often had just the opposite effect. Placing groups together around a campfire (or in a school auditorium, city hall, or any of a thousand forums put on by strife-torn communities) without taking some very specific precautions would likely result in increased tension and discrimination.

  Back in Oklahoma, Sherif reversed his experiment at Robbers Cave just as it was becoming a real-life version of Lord of the Flies. The psychologist shifted the rules of engagement between the Rattlers and Eagles. His research team introduced a number of tasks requiring them to pool their efforts against a common enemy. As the two sides had to cooperate to bring a movie to the camp or to unplug the parks stopped-up water supply, relations between the groups changed. Instead of fighting, they began collaborating. When they faced a common problem, contact between the groups both reduced conflict and prejudice and increased tolerance and cooperation.

  Social psychologists took the results from these experiments and devised the "contact hypothesis." Not all contact between groups helped reduce prejudice, psychologist Gordon Allport concluded in the mid-1950s. Based on the research into group relations, Allport described a number of conditions that were necessary to bring opposing groups constructively together. First, the social psychologist wrote, the groups had to see themselves as equals. Second, meetings between the groups should take place as a regular pursuit of an ordinary and shared goal. And above all, Allport wrote, meetings should "avoid artificiality." It was best, Allport wrote, if the groups worked as a team, since "the deeper and more genuine the association, the greater its effect."8

  Discussion between groups with different opinions or beliefs was more difficult than the democratic theorists had realized. Contact between adverse groups could bring greater understanding and tolerance, but there was a lot working against such an outcome. When members of the same group discovered that they disagreed about something, the instinct was to come together, to talk about their differences. Friendship within the group might be strained by the dispute, but at least there would usually be discussion. When the disagreement occurred between members of different groups, however, the typical reaction was avoidance and silence. Opposites didn't attract; they repelled. Some social psychologists described opposing groups as believing they had different "essences." According to Dale Miller and Deborah Prentice, an argument between groups "is perceived as reflecting deep, immutable, group-based differences ... People tend to be less optimistic that a difference can be resolved when it occurs between people from different groups."9

  Hearing the Other Side

  Americans like to talk about politics. According to University of Pennsylvania political scientist Diana Mutz, compared with others around the world, they are above average in the frequency with which their conversations stray into politics.10 Americans talk politics more than the circumspect British or those living in the tidy republic of Singapore. But they are less likely to discuss politics than the Poles, Swedes, Greeks, or Israelis (the most politically conversant of all). If Americans are slightly above average when it comes to talking about politics, Mutz found that when it comes to talking about politics with those who might disagree with their opinions, Americans are exceptionally reluctant. In a comparison of citizens from twelve countries, Americans are the least likely to discuss politics with someone holding a different view. They love other people's confrontations in sports brawls, on badgering cable news shows, and on "you're fired" reality TV. But they avoid political confrontations personally—more so than people in any other country in this study. Despite institutionalized patter about diversity and free speech, Mutz found that only 23 percent of Americans report having regular discussions with people who disagree with them politically.

  Education is presumed to nurture an appreciation of diversity: the more schooling, the greater the respect for works of literature and art, different cultures, and various types of music. Certainly, well-educated Americans see themselves as worldly, nuanced, and comfortable with difference. Education also should make us curious about—even eager to hear—different political points of view. But it doesn't. The more educated Americans become—and the richer—the less likely they are to discuss politics with those who have different points of view, Mutz wrote. Americans who are poor and nonwhite are more likely than those who are rich and white to be exposed to political disagreement. In the United States today, people who haven't graduated from high school have the most diverse groups of political discussion mates. Those who have suffered through graduate school have the most homogeneous political lives.11

  The Polarization of Deliberation

  Many Americans have choices in how they live, where they settle, what news they read, and whom they associate with. But that increasing opportunity to choose has had the perverse effect of decreasing contrary political discussion. There have been attempts to reintroduce debate and deliberation into American politics, to revive the face-to-face democracy of the town meeting. Political scientist James Fishkin has been tireless in running "deliberative polls," where groups of citizens are brought together for a day to learn about and discuss a public issue. He and his colleague Bruce Ackerman have even proposed a national holiday called Deliberation Day, a time before each national election when every citizen would receive a small stipend for attending a political discussion led by trained volunteers within a neighborhood. In the best tradition of American democracy, Deliberation Day would make voting truly an informed choice, as citizens would learn about the issues of the day and then debate with others across boundaries of social and political division.12

  But what would happen on a real Deliberation Day in the segmented, isolated, and like-minded communities created by the Big Sort? In 2005, David Schkade and Cass Sunstein recruited sixty-three Colorado citizens ages twenty to seventy-five, half from Boulder and half from Colorado Springs.13 In 2004, 67 percent of the people in Boulder County had voted for John Kerry. In the same election, 67 percent of the people in El Paso County (Colorado Springs) had voted for George W. Bush. Schkade and Sunstein screened participants—in order to pick liberals from Boulder and conservatives from Colorado Springs—and then measured the individual opinions of these citizens about three issues: global warming, gay marriage, and affirmative action. True to form, the Boulder citizens were initially more liberal on these issues than the participants from Colorado Springs. Schkade and Sunstein then divided the citizens from the two cities into batches of six—mak
ing ten groups, five from each city. The groups were then asked to discuss the three issues, to deliberate, and then to come to a consensus on the same questions each participant had been asked individually.

  The results were not encouraging for those who look to rational community discussion as an antidote to polarization. The ten groups discussed the three issues and came to a consensus in twenty-five out of thirty cases. In nineteen of these twenty-five cases, however, the consensus opinion of the group was more extreme than the prediscussion opinions of the individuals in the group. The Boulder groups' consensus opinions were more liberal than the opinions they had expressed as individuals. The Colorado Springs groups' opinions were more conservative.* As the law of group polarization would predict, each like-minded collection of people became extreme after discussion. Moreover, the differences within the groups narrowed. Discussion didn't spark freethinking. Instead, each homogeneous community concluded its deliberations with greater conformity. People who were already like-minded grew more alike.

  Before the discussion, Schkade and Sunstein wrote, "there was considerable overlap between many individuals in the two different cities. After deliberation, the overlap was much smaller." The participants' initial beliefs had been amplified by their exposure to like-minded others, and they had grown more polarized after only two hours of discussion.14