Facts, Narratives, and Falsity

The differences between facts and narratives matter

Coach Kennedy praying on October 16, 2015

Distinguishing between facts and narratives is increasingly important in today’s world of disbelief and distrust. Facts are discrete and truthful descriptions of the world. Narratives combine facts in particular ways to advance stories or accounts intended to persuade.

Lawyers get paid to build narratives out of facts. And judges also create narratives—it’s common for majority and dissenting opinions to offer starkly contrasting accounts of the relevant facts. Unfortunately, narratives can also obscure facts.

In the News

This past June, the Supreme Court issued its decision in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, a case involving prayer by a high school football coach on the fifty-yard line of a public high school. Coach Kennedy was back in the news last week after the Seattle Times reported he had chosen the conservative speaking circuit over returning to football. Coach Kennedy disputes that characterization.

I may write about the constitutional dimensions of Kennedy v. Bremerton in a later post, but for now, I am most interested in a disagreement over the facts surrounding Coach Kennedy’s prayers. Writing for the majority, Justice Gorsuch asserted that Kennedy “offered his prayers quietly while his students were otherwise occupied” after three games in October 2015. Gorsuch noted that Kennedy was disciplined by the school for his prayers after those games.

Justice Sotomayor’s dissent challenged the majority’s characterization:

To the degree the Court portrays petitioner Joseph Kennedy’s prayers as private and quiet, it misconstrues the facts. The record reveals that Kennedy had a longstanding practice of conducting demonstrative prayers on the 50-yard line of the football field. Kennedy consistently invited others to join his prayers and for years led student athletes in prayer at the same time and location.

Sotomayor also noted that “the Court ignores this history.” She took the unusual step of including pictures of some of Coach Kennedy’s prayers in her dissent, including the image at the top of this post.

Commentators quickly condemned Gorsuch’s characterization of the prayers. Writing in The Nation, Elie Mystal accused Gorsuch of lying. In Vox, Ian Millhiser contended that Gorsuch gave “a bizarre misrepresentation of the case’s facts” in a piece titled “The Supreme Court hands the religious right a big victory by lying about the facts of a case.” And Dave Zirin, in The Nation, characterized the majority’s opinion as “riddled with lies.”

In my Head

The Kennedy majority and dissent, and the commentary that followed, illustrate the relationship between facts and narratives, especially the importance of distinguishing between them. Consider three different questions:

1. Did Coach Kennedy pray quietly and without his players after three games in October 2015?

2. Should the three games in October 2015 be the relevant focus for the constitutional question before the Court?

3. Should a football coach (who is a public school employee in a position of authority) be constitutionally permitted to lead optional prayer after the conclusion of football games?

The questions above are different kinds of questions:

• Question 1 is mostly a factual question. The adverb “quietly” is more descriptive than factual, and unless there’s evidence that Kennedy was shouting or otherwise boisterous, its accuracy is probably subject to persuasive arguments in either direction.

• Question 2 is a normative and constitutional question about the relevant narrative frame. There’s a reasonable debate over the answer to this question. Gorsuch asserts that the District Court found that the “sole reason” for Kennedy’s suspension related to his actions after the three October games. Sotomayor pushes for a broader context that includes more games.

• Question 3 is a constitutional question. It depends in part on the answers to Questions 1 and 2, but it also depends on many other factors (including existing law, analogies to precedent, and those sorts of things).

I would have expected arguments about Questions 2 and 3, especially in cases argued before the Supreme Court. Instead, the majority and dissent argue over Question 1, and at least some of the commentators fixate on that argument.

For his part, Gorsuch could have acknowledged that the broader history of Kennedy’s prayers may well have created pressure on his players even if Gorsuch did not find that pressure constitutionally dispositive. Instead, Gorsuch writes:

There is no indication in the record that anyone expressed any coercion concerns to the District about the quiet, postgame prayers that Mr. Kennedy asked to continue and that led to his suspension. Nor is there any record evidence that students felt pressured to participate in these prayers. To the contrary, and as we have seen, not a single Bremerton student joined Mr. Kennedy’s quiet prayers following the three October 2015 games for which he was disciplined.

This may be factually accurate, but it ignores the possibility that prayers from a person in authority might pressure students whose playing time and reputations depend in part on that person.

Justice Sotomayor seems to obfuscate even more. In her view, the relevant narrative frame was not the three October games but Kennedy’s actions over a period of years. Instead of simply explaining why this broader narrative mattered to Kennedy’s free speech and free exercise challenges, Sotomayor asserts that the majority “misconstrues the facts” in describing the prayers as “private and quiet.”

Then she includes the photo at the top of this post and writes:

Even on the Court’s myopic framing of the facts, at two of the three games on which the Court focuses, players witnessed student peers from the other team and other authority figures surrounding Kennedy and joining him in prayer.

Sotomayor concludes that “The coercive pressures inherent in such a situation are obvious.” But are they? It’s plausible that seeing one’s coach pray with players from the opposing team creates coercive pressure. But the coercion under these circumstances is neither “inherent” nor “obvious.” And judging from some of the commentary surrounding this case, not everyone seems to have realized that the players in the picture were from the opposing team rather than Kennedy’s own players.

It’s likely that both the majority and the dissent can defend their answers to Question 1. And they are using those answers to support different narrative frames that inform their answers to Question 2. That hardly justifies charges from commentators that Gorsuch is lying. The difference matters. It’s one thing to critique a Justice for shoddy legal reasoning; it’s quite another to accuse a Justice of lying about the record.

In the World

One of the reasons we should all work harder to distinguish between facts and narratives is that an alarming number of our fellow citizens appear to be rejecting basic facts. I flagged this phenomenon in a 2020 book review:

Our national political discourse increasingly fractures not only over contestable facts but also over indisputable ones: whether Wayfair or a Washington pizzeria are engaged in human trafficking (they are not); whether Michael Brown said “Hands up, don’t shoot” in Ferguson, Missouri (he did not); whether a missile hit the Pentagon on September 11, 2001 (it did not); whether President Trump lies (he does).

My review covered what ended up being Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’ final book, Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times. I had the pleasure of interacting with Rabbi Sacks on several occasions, including when we were both speakers at a Faith Angle Forum in 2015. He was gracious in all of our interactions. And he was an exceptionally clear writer.

In Morality, Rabbi Sacks warns our politics increasingly convey:

. . . that the other side is less than fully human, that its supporters are not part of the same moral community as us, that somehow their sensibilities are alien and threatening, as if they were not the opposition within a political arena, but the enemy, full stop.

Sacks attributes this problem to a number of factors, one of which is losing a shared sense of reality. All of this is exacerbated by the absence of reliable gatekeepers or validators in the online world. As Sacks observes, “The internet has not yet developed a reliable ethic of truth.”

We desperately need an ethic of truth, and Coach Kennedy’s case illustrates some of what’s at stake. Last week’s Seattle Times article flagged two other factual disputes beyond the nature of his prayer: whether the school district “fired” Coach Kennedy, and whether he even wants the job anymore. Commentators once again leveled accusations of lies. Based on what I’ve read so far, it’s possible that there were gross misrepresentations as to whether Kennedy had indeed been fired, and if that’s the case, these discrepancies should be challenged. But critics of the Justices undermine their own credibility when they call out “lies” that turn out not to be lies (like Mystal and Zirin accusing Gorsuch of lying in his assertion that Kennedy’s own players were “otherwise occupied”).

In a fractured and pluralistic society, an ethic of truth will not tell us what the right narratives are. But it can at least help us focus on the difference between fact and falsity—if we are all willing to police the factual assertions of our own side with greater rigor and our ideological opponents with greater charity.