Finer Filtering

Do you have trouble understanding the positions other people take? Do you find it difficult to see the reasoning behind decisions they make? Of special difficulty is the realm of moral decision making.

What are people thinking?!?!

Better, how are they thinking?

It has to do with the filters that people use. In The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion Jonathan Haidt examines three filters that aid people in moral decision making.*

The first filter is personal autonomy. Can I do this thing that I would like to do without hurting or causing harm? We might consider this the Enlightenment Filter. It centers around personal freedom and self-determination. The filter allows any behavior that does not cause harm to another and that affirms personal autonomy.

In America this is not only the primary filter, for many it is the only filter for moral behavior.

Haidt identifies two others.

A second filter is community. How does this thing I want to do impact the lives of others around me? Does this help my family? Does this help my neighborhood? Does this help my country? This filter limits my personal freedom by considering more important the effect my actions have on those around me.

A third filter is God. How does this thing I want to do impact the glory of God (my words not Haidt’s)? How does it exhibit love toward God? Does it defer to the wisdom of God over my own personal desires and wishes?

You may note that most other cultures use filters two and three to a greater extent than Americans do, although the “God filter” is not always the Triune God.

There are two significant impacts of this analogy.

First, as American Christians we need to use filter two (community) and three (God) intentionally in our decision making generally and in our moral decision making specifically. In a sense this is nothing new; we have long been taught to love God above all things and our neighbors as ourselves. It may not be new, but it certainly will not be automatic. Our American culture does not buttress such an approach. You will have to work at employing and balancing all three filters.

Second, as Christian Americans this will give you an insight in understanding how other people arrive at what seem like (often) outlandish conclusions about moral behavior. It is not that people are not thinking through things, they are just using fewer filters with which to do it.** David Brooks in Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America from the Culture of Contempt makes this same sort of distinction offering that some people are not less moral, they just have fewer morals. From this point of view much of the moral direction of our nation makes perfect sense if you are using just the one filter. As a Christian then you can engage your neighbor in conversation not with disgust or disdain or contempt, but with the understanding that they are using primarily just the one filter. You can acknowledge the rationality of such a behavior while introducing the additional filters.

Ultimately, this is a key and significant strategy for witnessing: engage people where they are and then lead them to where Jesus invites them.

*Trust me, I am skimming the surface of Haidt’s work and certainly not doing justice to it. The same is true of the reference to Brooks.

** Well, we should acknowledge that there probably isn’t as much thinking going on as there could be.