There is No Spoon: Christian Boundary Maintenance
http://johnwhawthorne.com/2013/11/25/there-is-no-spoon-christian-boundary-maintenance/
by John W. Hawthorne
November 25, 2013
I have been fascinated with the idea of social networks since taking a great course in grad school when social network analysis was just beginning. In some ways, the question of who’s in and who’s out is a connecting thread that runs across my career.
My dissertation was on people who regularly attend church but never join (I saw them as boundary poachers, although the findings proved more complicated than that). I used network analysis to study three congregations and their relationship patterns in the early 90's (but I didn’t pay enough attention to bridging capital — more [on that] later).
Perhaps that research is what led me to be so critical of the effort we put into maintaining boundaries. I distinctly remember hearing a Focus on the Family broadcast telling of a group of school children playing at a newly constructed playground. Well-intentioned psychologists, it was argued, believed that they didn't want to limit the children's sense of adventure and so didn’t put fences around the school yard. The children, not knowing where the edges were, huddled anxiously in a clump being afraid to venture out. The chagrined psychologists had fences put up and then the children played happily in their new playground.
Parenthetically, I once put my university library staff along with the psych department to work to locate the original source [of this study]. It appears to be apocryphal though regularly repeated in blogs, sermons, and parenting articles. (A google scholar search just now came up pretty empty.)
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| Trafalgar Square, London, England |
Anyway, when I heard the report I knew what was wrong. They were looking in the wrong direction for meaning. It’s not at the edges but at the center. I suggested to a friend (as I have repeated for years) that the solution isn’t to focus on the fences but the build a monolith in the center of the playground and tell the children they can play where ever they want as long as they can see the statue. The picture of Trafalgar square is as close as I’ve come to capturing what I had in mind.
The same ideas apply to Christian identity. If we spend all our time exploring the edges that separate us from others, we’re investing in creating and maintaining boundaries that function to that end. If this boundary weakens, we have to go and repair it right away like a rancher keeping the cattle in.
Instead, we can rest in the New Testament image of the Shepherd who knows His sheep and walks in their midst. They listen for him and move when he moves.
But we keep trying to build fences. I think this is a normal sociological process. We like to be with people like us. So we spend our energies creating points of separation that keep the outsiders out (and the insiders in). It’s an effective form of social control and identity marking, but it is a far cry from the outreach of the Gospel.
Spend just a few days reading Facebook or Twitter and you’ll see this in operation. We find things about which to be offended: how dare you say Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas? Women can teach Sunday School but not preach (there was a great blog but I lost it). We have church trials surrounding a Methodist minister who officiated at his gay son’s wedding. We separate the Wesleyans from the Calvinists. We separate over science and faith. Don’t get me started on the Christians engaged in political fights on Facebook, calling each other out for not being True Christians.
In my Spirituality, Faith, and Justice class Thursday night, we were discussing the role of narrative in the pursuit of justice and the common good. This combined readings from Michael Sandel’s Justice and Walter Brueggemann’s Journey to the Common Good. Attending to story can bind us together. The real task, paraphrasing Brueggemann, is to reconstruct community in such a way as not not privilege one group over another but validate all stories.
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| The Strength of Weak Ties, by Mark Grannovetter |
I was attempting to illustrate this by drawing on the distinction between "bonding social capital" and "bridging social capital." In that context, I returned to a classic piece of modern sociology — Mark Grannovetter’s The Strength of Weak Ties. Grannovetter argued that tightly bonded groups are good for social support but bad at building connections. For that, we need weak ties — the acquaintanceships that tell us about job prospects or allow information to be tested against reality.
The tightest relationships are not the most powerful when
we need to broaden our reach within the organization.
For a quick explanation, check out this link from Information Week (where I got the graphic). The implication of the graph is that the energy in a strong tie group is expended inward. This provides a clear sense of who is in and who is out. The energy of a weak tie group is always expended outward — one never knows which of the surrounding circles is the source of potential contacts or information.
In the context of the class discussion, I was attempting to connect this to my prior work on millenials. One of the reasons they are concerned about the church is because they’ve maintained connections through social media with a diverse group of folks from different spheres of their lives. In short, they live in a weak-tie world.
This weekend Zach Hoag filled in on Zack Hunt’s blog (Zack has a cute new baby, but I’m a little biased about smart and beautiful babies since my granddaughter was born). Hoag wrote about the false fronts that are involved in our never-ending search for niceness. We stay away from the real messiness of the world because we’re maintaining face. Erving Goffman was a pioneer in exploring the ways in which we manage cues and props to create and maintain impressions. Boundary maintenance is another outcome of the same process.
One can find people who are less concerned about boundaries. Jonathan Fitzgerald wrote a profile of Nadia Bolz-Weber in the Daily Beast that defies membership in a single group (while acknowledging the danger of creating yet another Christian celebrity). In any case, Bolz-Weber fits a weak-ties model of social capital.
When I was talking to my class last week explaining the notion of social networks, I was struck by a new insight.... The notion of inside and outside are fictions. They’re helpful fictions and we find them comfortable. But they are fictions nonetheless.
I felt compelled to start quoting The Matrix (I’d already done a riff on Life of Brian). I found myself thinking of the boy Neo meets when he visits the Prophet. The boy can bend a spoon with his mind. Then Neo is told “There is no spoon“.
That made me think again about the Weak Ties diagram. The notion that we have all these little circles we’re part of isn’t true. It’s one big circle. And we’re all part of it.
God’s circle is bigger than we imagine and is not bounded by time or space much less by simple distinctions on who gets to preach or who gets to marry or who reads which science books.
What would happen if the evangelical church caught a vision of the bigger circle and the ways in which our stories are being co-written with each of us as influencers in every other story. Yes, I really liked the Day of the Doctors! What if all the energy we expend on separateness was spent building linkages to those different than ourselves?
It’s a great narrative — a storyline that starts at creation and runs throughout history to the restoration of that creation on earth as it is in heaven.
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| Bruegel the Elder, the Tower of Babel, Genesis 11 |
Ripping Down Towers of Babel
http://johnwhawthorne.com/2014/02/17/ripping-down-towers-of-babel/
by John W. Hawthorne
February 17, 2014
The picture [above] is Bruegel the Elder’s take on the Genesis 11 story of the Tower of Babel. In the scripture, we’re told that there was only one language and the people came together to build a city with a great tower that would reach to the heavens. In response, the LORD comes down to check it out and confuses their languages and scatters the people across the nations.
I’m not a biblical scholar — I’m a sociologist. So my first inclination is to treat this story as a cosmological allegory of “why the people down the road don’t talk like us”. It’s the kind of story that fits within an oral tradition explaining to children why things are the way they are.
But I did do some quick internet research and was pleased to find this entry from the Oxford Bible Studies Online. I was pleased for several reasons. First, the author is Brent Strawn from Candler Seminary at Emory and I’ve been friends with his father and brother for several years. Second, because the piece also used the Bruegel painting as illustration. And Third, because Brent’s analysis is directly applicable to the issue of religious group boundaries I’ve been exploring for several months.
Brent suggests that there are two interpretations of why the tower was a problem. One option is that it has something to do with pride. Building a huge edifice would let everyone know that these were cool people who had things together. He goes on to say that this chapter stands in stark contrast to the calling of Abram; there it is God who does great things through people. The second option Brent explores is the role of fear. They needed the city to protect them from being scattered across the earth (as was God’s plan). The “hunkering down” as he calls it, is in resistance to the world as they found it [and are discovering it].
As I said, I’ve been reflecting on the ways in which evangelical groups build artifices to separate those on the inside from those on the outside (for samples, see here and here). And I’ve come to a useful image that helps explain the process.
We tore down the Tower of Babel and then used the self same
bricks to build enclaves of our own desiring.
And we did it for the same two reasons that the Tower was
built in the first place: Pride and Fear.
Pride
Pride comes in when we attract hordes of followers to show that we are right. Zack Hoag has consistently exposed the ways in which the evangelical church (both conservative and progressive) have been seduced by the culture of celebrity. I am not immune. I want page views, retweets, Facebook likes, and recognition. I want people to tell each other about my writing. I want to have access to publishing empires that turns a lecture series into a book and a set of DVDs.
Pride comes in when we attract hordes of followers to show that we are right. Zack Hoag has consistently exposed the ways in which the evangelical church (both conservative and progressive) have been seduced by the culture of celebrity. I am not immune. I want page views, retweets, Facebook likes, and recognition. I want people to tell each other about my writing. I want to have access to publishing empires that turns a lecture series into a book and a set of DVDs.
We build our enclaves because it allows us to sit inside our secure walls and lob critiques at those walled enclaves down the block. We hope that doing so will prove how smart we are, how right we are, how close to God we are. Especially if we can demonstrate that by comparison to those wrong-headed folks next door.
Rachel Held Evans posted a great piece today discussing what it feels like to be on the receiving end of the critiques lobbed over the wall. It’s a story of hurt and misunderstanding, of false accusation and presumption. But it also contains some deep introspection to make sure that parallel assumptions don’t result about other groups.
I’ve been reading Christena Cleveland’s Disunity in Christ. It’s a wonderful book (not surprisingly, it’s chock full of good social psychology!). I’m only partway through, but already the implications are powerful. We find comfort and identity through our groups within our walls. But that very comfort and identification contributes to our misreading and misunderstanding the other groups. Our pride causes us to overstate our own position and not really listen to others.
Fear
Fear
If pride makes us overstate our correctness, fear calls us to demonize all opposition even if we can’t name them. We build our walls so high that we don’t know what’s out there. We just know it can’t be good because it’s not what we have in here.
This post was prompted by one shared by Peter Enns over the weekend. It was about a conference announcement about a regional meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society. The brochure is titled “The Liberal Seepage into the Evangelical Culture” and shows a scary wolf in sheep’s clothing. I’ll let the word “seepage” go for now (sounds like a medical problem). But the very identification of “evangelical culture” as a thing is the very essence of wall-building. See, THEY are infiltrating into the space WE have created for ourselves. Even if our concerns about them are based on irrationality and exaggeration.
In the words of Elmer Fudd, "Be afwaid. Be vewy afwaid."
In the words of Elmer Fudd, "Be afwaid. Be vewy afwaid."
Fear take us to funny places. It makes it easy to do things or say things about brothers and sisters we would not otherwise do or say. Because somebody has to. Otherwise, how would we protect the walls from intruders? Don’t you know what the stakes are?
Neither Pride Nor Fear
Christians aren’t motivated by pride. Christians aren’t directed by fear.
We are following in the way of the Christ who sacrificed his status and position to inaugurate a new way of living through death on the cross and launching of a Kingdom at hand. We have an assurance running throughout scripture that we are not alone but have the very God of the universe with us.
What happens if we tear down our walls? I’m still working on this but I think we find that we are able to engage those around us. [We may find] reasonable people who ask interesting questions, who have fascinating life stories, who have real struggles. In short, we find them to be people created in the image of God. People who, if we take Matthew 25 seriously, are both representatives of Christ and perhaps unaware Kingdom-builders (“When did we do that?”).
In short, trusting Christ and his Kingdom journey means that we don’t need walls and boundaries. Because God is already at work building the Kingdom. We’re just along for the ride to offer water when asked.
I’m also reading Prodigal Christianity by David Fitch and Geoff Holsclaw. Their writing both resonates with my thinking and makes me feel like they’ve already said it better. The central thesis of their book is the God went into the Far Country (where we live) and we are called to do likewise.
Going into the Far Country requires trust in God and deep courage. In that way it becomes a matter of testimony to the Greater Story of which we are all apart.
As Mr. Reagan said to Mr. Gorbachev [re the Iron Curtain of Berlin, East Germany], "Tear Down Those Walls!"
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How Social Networks Can Harness
the Power of Weak Ties
http://www.dashe.com/blog/social-learning/power-weak-ties/
by
May 11, 2013
While everyone seems to be expounding with great awe about the speed of change on the internet – especially the uptake of social media technologies like Facebook – it is interesting to note that there are really two factors being discussed:
1) The social networking technology
2) The human dynamics related to social networking
The technology hype is natural. The power of tools like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Yammer, are pretty astounding. These tools give us a way to connect with people faster and more easily than ever before.
A lot of the Social Media Mavens, however, are really ranting, not about the technology, but about the human dynamics related to social networking. These dynamics have been around for thousands of years, and have been written about extensively for decades – like in this 1973 article by Mark Granvotter in the American Journal of Sociology, The Strength of Weak Ties.
If we separate the human aspect of social networking from the technology, we can learn a lot more about the power of networks – not just from today’s pundits, but from many years of sociological research on the topic.
For example, Harvard professor Andrew McAfee sums up the Strength of Weak Ties theory nicely, describing how acquaintances with whom we are less familiar are more likely to tell us things we don’t already know:
… People we don’t know all that well are hugely valuable in our work. They’re sources of novelty and innovation (because they know quite different things than we do) and bridges to other social networks (because they know quite different people than we do).
This implies that digital social tools aimed at facilitating our professional lives might not want to focus too much on helping us stay in touch and work with our closest colleagues. Instead, they might want to help us build, maintain, and exploit a large network of weak ties.
After reading this, I started thinking about this new LinkedIn utility I recently installed. Initially it seemed like a fairly useless novelty, but I realized that there may be some value in it after all. If we apply the ‘weak ties’ theory, we might be able to spot people in our network who are both:
a) Loosely tied to us (i.e., people with whom we don’t share too many connections)
b) Themselves near the edge of a cluster, with links to one or more other clusters.
Here’s how a typical LinkedIn network might look:
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| Your weak ties are smaller circles, not at the center of a cluster |
I heard more support for the Weak Ties theory while attending a Knowledge Management conference in 2005. At the conference, a representative from Raytheon Corporation spoke about a study they had conducted among their vast employee population. By taking inventory of employees’ “connections” (this was still a novel concept in 2005), they found that people had grouped into natural clusters.
The clustering of employee groups was not the surprising thing. The real discovery came when they posed problems for various employees to solve. They found that the employees near the edge of a cluster were more effective at problem-solving than those in the middle of a cluster.
Why? Because the people on the edge were more likely to be connected to other network clusters, and therefore had access to information that was not available to people who were “buried” at the middle of a cluster.
Why? Because the people on the edge were more likely to be connected to other network clusters, and therefore had access to information that was not available to people who were “buried” at the middle of a cluster.
Learning and development professionals should remember the Weak Ties theory when designing social learning systems. It’s not enough for people within functional areas (clusters) to connect. The real challenge, and value, is to find tools and processes that help people connect and think “outside the cluster.”
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