Pluralism, Particularity, and Possibility
The inaugural Pluralism Lecture at Duke University
Last week, I was honored to deliver the inaugural Pluralism Lecture at Duke University. I used the opportunity to reflect on some of the lessons I learned at Duke and some of the ways that I hope Duke can maintain its pluralistic and educational aspirations in the midst of mounting challenges to higher education.
I am grateful to Dean Luke Powery for the invitation to kick off this annual lecture series. I am providing a written version of my lecture below, and you can find a video of the lecture and my dialogue with Dean Powery at the end of this post.
I first set foot in this building thirty-two years ago, when Maya Angelou spoke at the convocation for my freshman class in the fall of 1993. I took the bus over from my freshman dorm Pegram, grabbed dinner in what was then called The Pits, and nervously began my college experience sitting somewhere in the same pews where you are now. Dr. Angelou asked us to be not just consumers but participants during our time at Duke. As she put it then: “take responsibility of the time you take up and the space you occupy.”
Tonight, I want to explore with you the challenges and opportunities that come from taking Dr. Angelou’s charge seriously. When you shift from being passive consumers to engaged participants, you will pay more attention to how you can contribute to the aspirations of this university. This is true not only for students but also for faculty, staff, and administrators. I take it that one of Duke’s aspirations, which this new lecture series recognizes, is to be the kind of place that models and cultivates the pluralism necessary to sustain the democratic fabric of our country.
Pluralism is a word with many meanings, so let me give you two definitions I will use tonight. First, pluralism refers to the fact of difference, or the reality that we live in a diverse society. Second, pluralism describes one way that we can respond to that difference.
Let’s start with pluralism as the fact of difference. We live in a society deeply divided over things that matter. We disagree over the meaning of human flourishing, the purpose of our country, and what makes a just world. These differences are real, they are deep, and they are not going away. Descriptively, we live in a pluralistic society.
The second definition of pluralism is a political and cultural response to our differences. It’s what I have elsewhere called confident pluralism: we learn to live with the differences we don’t like, and more importantly, with the people around us who embody those differences.
Confident pluralism requires humility, patience, and tolerance as we navigate our differences. It encourages persuasion rather than coercion in our efforts to convince others why we have the better argument. Confident pluralism is difficult, messy, and imperfect. It is also far better than the alternative. We can rightly critique the many imperfections and injustices in our country and its leaders and still be grateful that we do not resolve our differences with street violence.
I have spent the past decade advocating for the importance of confident pluralism. But I did not have this understanding when I first arrived at Duke. Tonight, I would like to retrace part of my journey toward confident pluralism. I want to suggest that recognizing our firmly held convictions can help us navigate the deep differences in our pluralistic society. I’ll frame my path toward confident pluralism around three themes: particularity, purpose, and perseverance.
Particularity
Let me start with particularity. My story begins, fittingly for this lecture, in the basement of Duke Chapel. As a college sophomore, I joined an interfaith council of undergraduate representatives from various campus ministries: Protestant, Catholic, Jewish and Muslim, plus a smattering of other groups.
Our interfaith council was well-intentioned but a little naïve. We all wanted civility, community, and good service projects. But our Saturday morning meetings never led us to really know one another—we never learned each other’s stories. Instead, we stretched our shared experience of Maya Angelou and Duke basketball into an assumed consensus that never engaged our disagreements about the nature of God, what it means to be a good person, or what happens when you die.
One of the reasons we fell short was a lack of commitment to particularity. Most of us entered the interfaith conversation searching for solidarity instead of exploring our differences. Lacking the tools and vocabulary for genuine interfaith engagement, we looked instead for the lowest common denominator across our faith traditions but made little effort to understand how our differences affected how we saw the world.
If I’m honest, my nineteen-year-old self may have had a little too much particularity. I was sure that my beliefs were correct, and by extension, I was sure that many of those around me were wrong. Confidence in one’s faith is not itself a bad thing. But at the time, I lacked the resources to share my own firmly held commitments while also inviting others to share theirs.
This early interfaith experience taught me the importance of particularity in relationships that bridge difference. Our differences matter, and we should not pretend otherwise. But engaging authentically and graciously across differences also means seeking as much as possible to learn why others believe differently. That is the work of empathy. When we commit to this work, we can see how our beliefs and traditions diverge, but we can also discover meaningful common ground—perhaps even more meaningful than basketball. We can discover that you don’t have to agree about the nature of God to serve meals at a soup kitchen, or share the same politics to care for hurting neighbors recovering from a hurricane. We can discover that we are all works in progress, we are all fighting our own battles, and we all have blind spots.
Some of us will navigate relationships across differences on our own, but most of us will encounter them through institutions like Duke University. And this brings me to my second point: we engage best across our particularities when we know the purpose of our engagement.
Purpose
The last few years have seen an uptick of college and university initiatives promoting “dialogue across difference.” Many of these well-intended efforts offer time-constrained opportunities to meet and talk with someone different from you. But these seldom lead to long-term trust or genuine understanding. Structured dialogue turns out to be very unlike the real world in which we actually encounter differences. People don’t usually learn to empathize with one another through dialogue alone—we learn by forming relationships with others committed to a shared endeavor. We build meaningful relationships by working toward endeavors that unites us across our differences. And that requires a sense of purpose.
I learned about the importance of purpose from an unlikely pairing: Stanley Hauerwas and the United States Air Force. I attended Duke on an ROTC scholarship and stayed for law school before serving four years as an Air Force attorney at the Pentagon. My military service was sandwiched between classes with Hauerwas—a longtime member of the Duke Divinity faculty and a well-known pacifist.
You can imagine that the collision of these influences in my life was not easy to navigate. There is much that I admire about the military, but its emphasis on patriotism and force did not sit easily with someone reading books like Resident Aliens and The Peaceable Kingdom.
Still, Hauerwas and the military both taught me the importance of purpose: knowing why you are in a particular place and time, with a particular group of people, attempting to do a particular thing. From Hauerwas and related thinkers like Alasdair MacIntyre, I learned that values and virtues unfold within social practices oriented toward specific ends. Purpose brings clarity and coherence to our shared human activities.
Purpose also constrains. It sets the boundaries of acceptable disagreement in any human activity—it sets the limits of pluralism. If a company’s purpose is making widgets, its directors may not demand that it make music. If a country’s purpose is to advance democracy, its leaders should not promote lawlessness or deny due process. If a university’s purpose is to educate, its trustees should not tolerate sophistry.
In the military, I experienced how clarity of purpose unifies by distinguishing relevant differences from irrelevant ones. During basic training, when it was time to scale a wall, nobody cared who you voted for or whether you believed in God. They cared whether you could help them get over the wall. Later, while serving on active duty, my mission to support my fellow servicemembers was similarly clear.
Purpose brings clarity of mission and sets the boundaries of disagreement. Absent purpose, the loudest voices prevail and fear and anxiety triumph over wisdom and judgment. But clarity around purpose can also invite opportunities to learn from differences of perspective and belief. When you know your purpose, you know your boundaries and you know yourself.
I wonder whether Duke University knows its purpose. How, for example, do Duke’s pluralistic and educational aspirations fit within its complicated landscape of investments, athletics, and medical care? How does Duke maintain its purpose across its many stakeholders who want it to be many different things? My hope is that amidst these competing pressures, Duke can model a kind of confident pluralism—that it can be the kind of university whose classrooms, laboratories, and faculty lounges welcome progressives and conservatives, religious believers and atheists, Trump voters and Harris supporters—all of whom are themselves committed to a common educational experience. Our country desperately needs such places, and institutions that can name their purpose and therefore the boundaries of their disagreement will be best positioned to become them.
Perseverance
The third and final lesson of my journey toward confident pluralism is perseverance. I owe this lesson to many friends, but tonight I’ll focus on one of them, Eboo Patel. Eboo is a Muslim American who founded an organization called Interfaith America, which focuses on navigating religious difference and pluralism across various sectors including higher education. Eboo often observes that elite universities excel at teaching students various identity markers that contribute to diversity in our society—except when it comes to religious differences. But our religious differences underlie some of humanity’s deepest and most profound conflicts. How, Eboo asks, can someone be considered an educated citizen of a country founded on principles of religious freedom and toleration without a basic understanding of our religious differences and why they matter? And not just the visually obvious differences of religious attire that make for a good website picture or Instagram post, but the deeper, often incommensurable differences over dietary requirements, worship and prayer, and beliefs about gender and sexuality.
Once we surface our actual differences, we’ll need to muddle through learning how to engage with one another across unfamiliar and perhaps even off-putting practices. Eboo and I have muddled through different customs, language norms, and prayer practices. We have learned that friendship across difference requires perseverance. And in our perseverance we have also discovered a great deal of common ground and shared experience: we have taught together, written together, laughed together—we have even been protested together. We have also learned that we have similar dispositions—Eboo likes to joke that it’s a good thing we were born in this century; our bookish instincts would not have lasted long in a hunter-gatherer or warrior culture.
Most of the time my religious differences with Eboo do not arise in contentious ways. Many interfaith friendships require greater perseverance. Shared meals where one person’s religion requires eating food that another’s religion finds unclean. Conferences where one faith requires gender segregation and another strives for gender equality. Partnerships between progressive and conservative believers with different views about the meaning of marriage. These kinds of differences require forbearance, empathy, and forgiveness.
Forgiveness may be the most difficult part of perseverance. Our ability to forgive depends on our ability to see ourselves in need of forgiveness and able to be forgiven. If you think you have never wronged another person, it will be hard to persuade you to forgive the imperfect people who wrong you. On the other hand, if you see yourself as tainted to the point of being unforgivable, you may be unsure of why extending forgiveness to someone else would even matter. For Christians, the Gospel names both the reality of our fallenness and the surety of our forgiveness. As my friend Tim Keller put it, “We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope.”
That kind of forgiveness plays out in big and small ways, in ordinary friendships and extraordinary injustices. We will need it to persevere in our relationships across difference, where we are going to keep misunderstanding and hurting each other. Come to think of it, that’s true not only of our relationships across difference—its true of all our relationships. We can choose to keep our ledgers and exact vengeance whenever we are wronged. Or we can choose to forgive.
My time at Duke began with Maya Angelou. It ended with Jimmy Carter. In his words to our graduating class, President Carter drew from the Apostle Paul and urged us to commit our lives to things unseen: justice, truth, compassion, service, and love. In our deeply divided society, we will argue about the meaning of these words and how best to accomplish them. But we can commit to charity and generosity in the way that we argue. We don’t always get to choose our differences, but we can choose how we respond to them.
Possibility
In that spirit, let me leave you with one final word: possibility. Institutions like Duke confront serious challenges in today’s landscape of higher education. But I would like to believe that Duke at its core remains a place where teachers and students are engaged in a shared effort to learn together. That it is a place of slow reading and even slower thinking. Unlike the fast-paced world into which most students are headed, I’d like to think that Duke is a place that can lower the stakes and lengthen the conversations.
As I look out at all of you tonight, I’m reminded that pluralism isn’t just a theory—it’s embodied in the people we meet, the friendships we form, and the institutions that shape us. It’s in the courage to hold firm to our own convictions while making room for others to hold theirs. It’s in the purpose that binds us across our differences and the perseverance that carries us when understanding and patience run thin. In a world where our deep differences are not going away—where the fact of pluralism increasingly demands a generous and hopeful response rather than a fearful or self-interested one—my hope is that you will choose to join in this difficult, necessary work—with particularity, purpose, and perseverance.
The best compliment I can give is to say that I pray each day I increasingly embody what you have described here in my role at Lutheran South.
Love this John... and what great timing to share these lessons and frameworks for engaging with others with the young adults in our lives, about to head off to college!