Tim Shriver

Kate Bowler: There are a lot of ways to decide that someone is not our kind of person. Maybe they vote differently. Maybe they believe something we find completely baffling. Maybe they’re the relative whose name comes up before Thanksgiving and then everyone starts negotiating the seating chart. We are just one away from the midterm elections here in the United States, and I don’t know about you, but I am tired. Tired of the outrage and the ultra-certainty, tired of the endless political texts? No, really, please, please lose my number. But I also don’t want to pretend that our differences don’t matter. They do enormously. So I’ve been wondering, what does it actually mean to treat someone with dignity when we really, really disagree with them? Is there a way to hold on to our convictions without being overcome with contempt? I’m Kate Bowler, and this is Everything Happens. So today’s conversation is a very special one. We recorded it live in Durham, North Carolina during our annual fall event. And I was joined by my dear friend, Tim Shriver. Tim has served as the chairman of the Special Olympics for over 30 years. He comes from a family with a pretty extraordinary history of public service. And he has spent much of his life asking what it would take to build a world where everyone is treated as though they matter. Tim is not interested in dignity as just like a nice concept. He wants to know what it looks like at our dinner tables, in our disagreements, with our communities, and yeah, in our politics. We talk about people who taught him what dignity means, the surprising joy of trying to change the world, and what it might take to find our way back to each other. Here’s my conversation with Tim Shriver. Tim one of my favorite things about being your friend is that you have such an unusually enormous family tree and family context that you have to wrap your brain around to get a sense of the magnitude of your encounter, especially with public service. Public service is basically the family business. Your mother, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, founded the Special Olympics. Your father, Sergeant Shriver founded the Peace Corps.
Tim Shriver: Yeah, and we have a Peace Corps One volunteer here from the Philippines. Well, I don’t know where she is. Stand up. Wave. There she is, on this day in 1961, she left the United States to go teach English in the Philippines as part of President Kennedy’s campaign to bring peace to the world. Beautiful. Thank you.
Kate Bowler: I mean, between an attorney general, a senator, a president, when you were little, I know that just public service was an enormous part of your family ecology. And I wonder how it shaped you early on about what life is for.
Tim Shriver: You know, I was raised in a family that was full of action and full of excitement and full of drama and full of purpose, faith, confidence in the United States as an experiment in the world, believing in peace, wanting to end poverty, all those great things. And of course, interrupted, you know, by enormously painful moments as well. But, you know, I think it was… You know, one of the things my parents were very good at was they made the work of trying to change the world fun, joyful. In the early 1960s, there were almost a quarter of a million, well, about 200,000 people in institutions in the 1960s in the United States locked up for life, gone, disappeared, moms, dads give up their children at birth, move on, the doctors would say, let this child be raised by people who can care for them and you go back to caring for the rest of your children and so on. So you have 200,000 people removed, excluded, humiliated. So she was experimenting with, well, how could we prove, guess what we wanted to prove? That they have dignity. They have dignity, they’re human beings. These are human beings, these are children. As they have mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, like she had a sister. But her big experiment when I was a kid was to have swimming races and kickball games and pony rides and. So I grew up thinking that trying to end exclusion for people with intellectual disability was running races. So it never felt like we were laboring in some burdensome or guilt-filled world of problems and social responsibility. I always felt, same thing with the Peace Corps. My dad would have Peace Corps volunteers over to the house on Saturday and they’d have dozens of them and they’d come and we’d have cookouts and people would be talking about the languages they were learning in West Africa and Latin America and in the Pacific and everybody was full of excitement and I thought it was so exciting. So these were, this was a way of seeing changing the world as a joyful enterprise, even though it was operating with a great deal of pain and injustice in the backdrop.
Kate Bowler: That’s such a lovely encouragement to be, just to be the host you’re not sure you can be. Just to invite people over with low stakes and I know my parents always loved having international students over or just people that we wouldn’t normally meet and one thing I always love about your stories is it always includes like, and then there was Mother Teresa and also like 12 friends of someone named Bob and like…I think the randomness of that, I mean, it’s also just because you have this, this deep love of the open table and open door.
Tim Shriver: Yeah. Well, I think it’s, you know, I think people still hunger for that. You know, there are now whole organizations trying to help us get back to the table together. There are whole movements. Wait a second, let’s meet again. Let’s not tell Uncle Bobby can’t come for Thanksgiving. Let’s see if we can tolerate him. Uncle George, next time I use that example. No, but I mean, look, there’s this, there’s Paul that’s come over the country, this fear of each other, this tension we have that it feels too much to come to the table. But that’s a relatively recent phenomenon. It’s very inhuman in my view. We’re not set up to be hateful towards one another. We’re a country that has always tried, not always successfully, but tried to model this sense of community and open door. My parents were very good at that, and I think people are hungry for it. I don’t think we’ve lost it. I think it’s just we’re a little wounded right now, and we’re needing a little bit of strength to re-energize that part of us that is hungry for connection.
Kate Bowler: It’s so, it’s just so comforting, like thinking about dinner tables and like when things are made personal, just it’s like the stakes go up and they go down at the same time. And I thought that was such a beautiful part of your story in playing games in your own backyard that becomes the foundation of the Special Olympics. And, and it also being even more personal as, as a story fundamentally about, about your aunt and I would love it if you would tell us about it.
Tim Shriver: Yeah, so my mom was one of nine children, my grandparents had nine kids, and the boys are the well-known ones, Jack and Bobby and Teddy, who served in, you know, presidency and attorney general in the United States Senate, all three of them. The women were less well- known, but what almost no one knew, at least during the most public phase of their life, 50s, 60s, 70s, and so on, was that my mom grew up with a sister who had an intellectual disability. And my grandparents, when she was born in the early 1920s, were told to put her in an institution, and they decided to keep her at home. Which I think was the most important decision they made in their lives, my view. Bias, but it’s my view, because that meant that all these boys and girls grew up with a sister who the world didn’t like, didn’t know, like, or understand. Rosemary never went to school. She never went to a birthday party. She never had friends over. She never a job. She had only rejection. And yet, those boys and my mom thought she was fantastic, loved her. She couldn’t answer the questions the same way the others did, but they always made accommodation. My mom and she raced together in sailboat races during the summer. So they knew something was wrong, not with Rosemary, but with the world. Big difference, you know, as one mom said, who had a child with special needs, I wouldn’t change my son for the world, but I would change the world for my son. So all of those kids grew up at some level with a kind of a genetic almost inbuilt, fierceness about wanting to change the world for people who are not seen. So this woman, Rosemary Kennedy, who no one, I mean, you could find a picture, I suppose, but it won’t come up on any of the glamor shots, probably had more influence on American public life than any other human being, at least from the point of view of our family’s role in it. President Kennedy, when he was elected, passed the first legislation supporting work funding for research, funding for community-based care, funding for mental health services and so on, in honor of his sister. Senator Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, helped close the institutions at Willowbrook and other places because he was fiercely infuriated, by the way, in which people were being treated like animals in these places. It was horrific, you know, just disastrous. Senator Kennedy and my uncle Teddy Kennedy, for his whole life, on health care and access to support. You know, so all of this work, at some level, I think they were all trying to live up to what their sister, who never wrote a book, never gave a speech, never won an award, never got invited to a fancy ball or those kind of things after she was a young girl, you know, but in her silence and in her suffering, shaped our family.
Kate Bowler: It is so incredible to think back. I’m just thinking as a historian of like pivotal moments and disability rights as being a public story with just such a hidden undercurrent of a private hope and sorrow.
Tim Shriver: I was reading in your book, one of the scenes you describe in there is your, I guess, counselor who retired and became Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, and this guy performs in A Christmas Carol and in the final scenes he himself is weeping with the transformation. You know, if you remember, maybe you all know it, but Scroog is angry and crusty and tight and bitter and he softens up finally in the end. But you know, people often miss, in that play, who changes? Scrooge. It’s a little boy with a disability. It’s Tiny Tim. Tiny Tim is at that table, and Tiny Tim says, God bless you, one and all. I think it’s a line, if I’m not mistaken. And we don’t notice it, because he seems like such a sidelight, but it was that little boy that Dickens chose to make into the catalyst for this enormous transformation, this moment, like this aha moment where people all of a sudden go, mm, oh my God, I got it wrong. So that community still remains often hidden, tragically mistreated still, made fun of by people in great positions of power. I mean, really? I mean, do you have to have that much power to humiliate people who are just trying to get their little slice of human dignity out of the world? So, we continue to be their students.
Kate Bowler: But we want to be the helpers, like we imagine ourselves as someone who are like, look for the helpers. And then the people were supposedly helping have this very obnoxious habit of dramatically transforming us. When did you realize that we had the equation backward?
Tim Shriver: That’s a good question. I’m not sure there was a moment, but I mean, when I was at five years old at the summer camp, what I knew was that I had a partner, and my mother wrote about me, and at the time, very famous magazine called the Saturday Evening Post, my partner was Wendell. And she said, my son is not very good at anything and he’s not very fast, but Wendell treats him very nicely. I’m like, he’s…Oh, no. Sweetheart of a mom, right? I mean, it’s right there in print.
Kate Bowler: I wish we had a pull-down screen right now where we could just look at it.
Tim Shriver: She could have just said it to someone instead of writing it in a magazine, but anyway. Special Olympics movement though. I think I learned that very early on, you know, all you have to do is look I mean, I’m guessing some of you have either been to a volunteer at a local Special Olympics event in your lives, but you know if I were like a Special Olympics thing in the airport people will come up to me So Special Olympics I I did that when I was in high school or I did now or I’m a volunteer I got to tell you I get back more than I gave I got back people say it all the time It’s just almost by habit or by rote. So I started to inquire, what is it you get back? That’s a question.
Kate Bowler: Well, yeah, such a costly love is so strange. It should just be math, right? You give and then you have less because that’s how subtraction works.
Tim Shriver: I mean, the best way I have of describing it is imagine a race. If you were to imagine, can I stand up?
Kate Bowler: All yours.
Tim Shriver: Okay, so imagine where this is a track and you guys are in a, oh, there’s a light over there, okay, is bleachers at the high school here, Durham Regional High School. And it’s a Saturday morning, and you’ve got your Starbucks or your iPad or whatever you’ve got. And there’s this Special Olympics event going on here in front of you. You came out because someone said you should come out and watch, right? You with me? A hundred meter dash is going to be run here in front of you. And you see the six athletes go over here and line up like this, right? One, two, three, four, five, six. And the track is going like this. And they’re 12 years old. And if boys or girls, you pick. Just imagine, make a little eye contact with the athlete who’s down here. Just, imagine the athlete looks up and sees you and he or she, has down syndrome, and so in your unconscious, here’s part of the narrative. I wonder what it was like for her mom when she was born, I wonder what the doctor said. And then, oof, you know that the daycare center didn’t want her because they didn’t have a program and the school suggests that she go down to a different school that was a little further away from home. And there was no dentist. And she’s never been to a birthday party. And she doesn’t speak as clearly as you do or your children do. And there she is, or he is, okay? So imagine. The gun goes off. And you start to cheer, all right? Should we try this? Okay, okay, wait, wait wait wait, wait, right, right. Okay, so you’re gonna cheer, but I want you to cheer for this athlete by name, okay? Okay, I want to use your name. Okay, this athlete has your name, boy or girl, 12 years old. Okay, so I’m going to pretend I’m doing this. Not part of the plan, but here we are. And when I get past Kate, that’s going to be the finish line. But you’re going to cheer like you mean it. You have to work. You’re like, this is important that this athlete wins. By name, okay? So if your name is Bob, you cheer for Bob. You got it? Okay. On your marks, get set, go!
Kate Bowler: Yay!
Tim Shriver: Okay. You came in fourth.
Tim Shriver: So my guess is you have probably rarely cheered or bragged about coming in fourth. What happens to many of us, I’ll speak for myself now, I won’t speak for any of you, is that in watching that athlete, you’ve watched a little bit of yourself become healed. Because the athlete’s asking you to see that little part of you. That’s a little bit scared, feels a little left out, doesn’t know if you matter, worried that you don’t fit in, wondering what your future holds, wondering if anybody will ever care about you, she just made it safe to be free of all that even if it was just for a second. So people come back over and over and over to these events, I believe, because it’s almost a ritual of healing for all of us. And the minister is the athlete. That’s the way I guess I put it. That’s a long answer to a question as to what we get back. I’m sure there’s many others, but yeah. I didn’t hear you cheer Kate.
Kate Bowler: I was so worried I would scream my own name into the mic that they’d be like, okay, I get it. This is already too much about you. It’s so refreshing, because one of the things, Duke basketball coach, John Scheyer, is just a fantastic human being, amazing leader, wonderful friend. We are always in disagreement about one thing, which is, I don’t know why we’re friends, because I, Kate Bowler, do not believe in winning. And I just always feel like there’s some kind of power theater about adjudication of winning and losing. And what you’ve demonstrated has such an undoing of what then it means to win.
Tim Shriver: Well, I think it has a lot of undoing about what it means to compete. I think when we think of competition as a zero sum game, winners and losers, it’s always stressful. It’s always anxiety producing, because even if you win six times, you’re going to lose the seventh time you’re a loser, but if you think of competition as, you know, the, your, your opponent is the person designed to bring out the best in you. The person who’s gonna allow you to find a part of yourself that you couldn’t find if you didn’t know that you could win, you could do a little better, a little faster, then the competition actually becomes a chance for your own development, right? And if the other people are in your field, and you actually believe in them too, I mean, John Scheyer may not believe that, you know, UNC is good, I don’t know.
Kate Bowler: We do not.
Tim Shriver: Yeah, but it’s it’s actually I mean in great athletes will will say this I mean look at Simone Biles at the Paris Olympics when she came in second. Everybody was so disappointed and she was cheering for the woman who defeated her and she said at the end. We’re in the same business together. She won. I got to give her her props. We’re we both go through the same kind of challenges. So I think when we think of competition we we often think of it in the wrong way. Special Olympics athletes think of at the right way. They think of it as a chance to show the world what I can do. One mom said to me, Kate, years ago, my daughter, she was talking about her daughter, who was a Special Olympics athlete, taught me the definition of excellence. She said, excellence is always defined by doing your best. It’s a different way of looking at competition. And politics has become cancerous, in my view, in part because we’ve come to define the only outcome that’s worthy is winning. And once that happens, people lose their conscience, they lose their cause, they lose their heart, they start to sacrifice everything at the god of winning. And you get a bad structure, yeah, yeah. You know, it’s no fun to lose in politics. I’ve never run for political office. I know it’s not fun to lose. I’m not suggesting one should try. But one should, one should try to hold onto what matters, right? Their integrity, my integrity. I mean, these men and women who are running for office right now are sitting in meetings tonight where political advisors are coming in and saying, you gotta compromise on something you believe in. Every single major candidate is being told that tonight, I promise you. And the candidates that say, no, I’m not gonna compromise, I’m gonna call her a name, I am not gonna call him, I’m now gonna run that ad that says that she’s a this or he’s a that. Those candidates are holding on to the heart of the country and whether they win or lose, we should be thanking them. Regardless of which party they’re in.
Kate Bowler: You have been really honing in on a way of speaking about this ability to hold, hold this piece of integrity between us, regardless of sides, winning and losing, polarization. And you’ve really, you’ve really pinpointed the heart of this work around dignity. I would love to hear why that word creates so much possibility.
Tim Shriver: Well, we started this project thinking we could find ways to depolarize or reduce the hatred in our own country. We would make it blunt. Dignity surfaced as a powerful concept. Everyone in this room has inherent dignity. Nobody’s better than anybody else. And nothing I can say or anyone else can say, your husband, your wife, your kids, your boss, nothing anybody can do can take away your dignity. So that’s foundational, and even the United States is founded, at least on the premise, I mean, we’ve got a little ways to go to fulfill it, but they were all created equal, right? They don’t use the word dignity, but equality. Given to us by our Creator. So it’s inherent even in the political documents, not just in religious documents. So the question we asked is how are we doing about treating each other with dignity? And Americans, we polled this then this past year. We asked this question, we put this on the poll, and I was like, I don’t know if we should put that in the poll. Do you think in our country, people should treat each other with dignity, yes or no?
Kate Bowler: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, boy. Oh no.
Tim Shriver: Okay, but so I was yeah, what did you know? So take a guess. So what do you think? Just the thing. So yes. Yes. 50% 20% 80%? What do you think? What do you think?
Kate Bowler: Let’s do an applause-o-meter.
Tim Shriver: How many think 30 or below? There’s some, okay. 50ish? 60? 70? This is what you think the poll said. 90? Okay, you guys cheated, you cheated.
Kate Bowler: They’re the nicest people!
Tim Shriver: They are the nicest people, but they pull the people, this is a random sample of Americans, 94% say yes. Oh, that’s good. I like that. That’s fantastic.
Kate Bowler: Yeah, that’s a good sign.
Tim Shriver: It’s a really good sign. Then if you ask them, do you feel like people treat you with dignity? 31%. So we call that the dignity gap. That’s the gap between how we feel and what we aspire to. That’s a giant gap. But I would call that, that’s the starving hunger of our country. We wanna live here, we believed we should live here. We wanna be people who live here for others and we’re stuck down here. Which if you ask me, so this is the gap we wanna in our little organization try to help close.
Kate Bowler: But uh, I think that sounds incredible for people I agree with. I think I find it so natural to want to ascribe dignity to people who I don’t believe are committing active harm. So how do we think about this apart from our desire to ascribe righteousness to others?
Tim Shriver: So if you disagree with someone, you think they should…?
Kate Bowler: Have less. A little bit, yes. I mean, spiritually, they can have all of it, but maybe on an outer layer, less.
Tim Shriver: Okay, all right, okay, here’s why that’s so important, because you’re being honest and funny, but honest too. Contempt is a pain reliever. If you and I agree that anybody that wants open borders is a vile human trying to destroy the country, and I say they’re vile and you say they are worse than vile, and I say, you’re right, Kate. We’re bonding, and the fear we have of people that want, it could be a border wall or open, but it doesn’t matter, the fear that we share of them is now strengthened between us, and we feel better. It’s just like taking a Tylenol or something else. The pain goes down. Pain relievers are okay until you get addicted. When you get addicted, you’re checking your phone right now to see if the president did something if you can’t stand him, or to see if some Democrat did something if you can’t stand them, you are rushing home and turning the news on as soon as you get in the house to check out what those horrible people did. Not to get information, honestly. Most of the partisan news we watch is not in the information business. They’re in the devotional anger business.
Kate Bowler: Did you say devotional anger?
Tim Shriver: Devotional anger to try to addict us to being hateful towards other people. That’s the, I’m not making this up, by the way. This is common knowledge. So it whips us into this constant state of hostility, but it eases our pain and fear because it bonds us to other people who feel the same way we do. Just watch Fox if you don’t like it for two nights or three nights in a row, MS Now if you don’t like that watch it and watch and try to imagine the people that are watching it and getting “Oh, that’s so great.” You probably can’t tolerate it. So this contempt is not actually a self-righteous act. It’s just a way that politics has a prying us apart and making us fearful and then making us need more of it, my view. So dignity is actually an act of resistance. So when you get in the company of someone you don’t like.
Kate Bowler: Tonight. Obviously, welcome to this confrontation.
Tim Shriver: Yeah, I would invite you to think, can I state my position, the policies, the facts, all the things about the person’s opinion that I don’t like without humiliating the person? So when you get in the company of someone you don’t agree with, if you harbor the hope that you can change their mind, you have a much better chance if you treat them with dignity.
Kate Bowler: But contempt is so expedient, I mean…The other day, I was driving and I saw a bumper sticker, and then immediately, I was pretty sure I understood what they watch, maybe what they listen to, if they have a gun in the car, and I was like, this is super efficient. My job is done. Slowing down and staying in a place where, because for you, the point is not agreement. This is a deeper kind of work.
Tim Shriver: That’s right. It’s the hope that, you know, there’s a lot of people looking for spiritual but not religious, a lot of people looking for places to find happiness, to find meaning, to find purpose, maybe all of us. One way to do that is to separate your political or your opinions about people’s beliefs from the capacity to treat them with dignity. Because what you can get with dignity in the way of connection, safety within yourself. I was talking to you before, Kate, about this brilliant woman, Etty Hillesum, who died during World War II at Auschwitz. And she writes from within the camps, she says, I’ll get the quote close, in the end, I think she writes, dear God, we have one moral duty, moral duty to reclaim larger and larger places of peace within ourselves. Now, that’s not a spiritual duty. She calls it a moral duty. So to the extent you have strong moral conviction about where the country ought to go, and I hope you do, Etty would argue that your job, your first job, is to make sure that you have claimed within yourself larger and larger areas of peace so that you can bring more peace to the world. Now, you may want to do that by saying that open borders are a crime or that the border wall is a crime. We’re not debating the policy issue. But to debate the policy issues is different than to demonize the person. So we have now this perception that the more contemptuous you are, the more belonging you get in your own group, and the more likely your side is to prevail. That’s just not true. It’s just. Not. True. Contempt backfires. It destroys you, and it destroys other people. And we’ve been in this contempt cycle now for five or ten years depending on how you count, maybe even a little bit more and we either get out of it with leaders who help us get out of it or ourselves. We start to like, we have this campaign to be a dignity voter. What’s a dignity voter? A dignity voter is someone who writes to their congressional candidate, senate candidate, gubernatorial candidate, mayor, first selectman, county council, and says how do you plan to treat people if you win? Just ask the question. All of a sudden, candidates will go, oh, this is something people care about. How do I treat people? Is an important issue, not just whatever taxes or school funds or police department budgets or other things that are very important, by the way. But we’re not gonna solve these problems if we don’t solve the contempt problem.
Kate Bowler: I think one thing that really worries me is maybe 15 years ago there was like one person in your family where you’re like Maybe just don’t bring up this yeah topic. Yeah, but now it feels like one-third of our family system feel emotionally chaotic in some kind of way, and it starts to feel easier and easier to write people off, to only either hyper-personalize or, how do we know how close to the, sometimes burning hot embers of somebody else’s topics that we should venture close to?
Tim Shriver: Well, if you think, most people don’t want to talk politics because they’re afraid of what other people are going to think of them. So let’s just imagine I want to build a border wall and you want open borders. And I’m in a room with 10 people like you and only me. I don’t wanna talk about it. Why? Because you guys are all gonna hate me. Not because you’re gonna disagree with me.
Kate Bowler: I see. Yeah.
Tim Shriver: You’re all gonna hate me. If I say to you, we should build a border wall because I get my reasons, you guys are going to think I’m a bad human. So we’ve created this barrier to connection. I mean, you can’t even have the conversation because hatred is so likely to be the currency which is returned to me when I say something. And here’s the irony, Kate. On these big issues, immigration, gun rights, reproductive rights. 70 to 80% of Americans actually agree on these issues. But if you look at the news or you hear the politicians, they’re catering to the extremes, why? They get paid, they get famous, and they get elected. The more contemptuous, I’ve heard half a dozen senators and more than that, a dozen governors tell me this face to face. When I put out snark, I get more likes, the likes get me on the television, the television gets me contributions. Formula. I put out dignity, it’s the opposite. That’s because we are all clicking on the snark and we’re not clicking on dignity. That is up to us. We can’t blame them. If they make money and get famous because we’re making them famous by clicking on snark, that’s on us. So we all have a shot here. In an age of snark. I got into this coming from the Special Olympics movement. You know you have ambassadors of tenderness and light and goodness, and then you turn on the TV and you’re like, wait a minute, we can choose something different, right? We don’t have to watch that. Turn it off. Don’t be uninformed, but turn it off, you know, you have three things that they say are breaking news right now. It’s not breaking news. I promise you. It’s now breaking news, you’re going to get three tomorrow before you wake up. They’re not breaking news. They’re designed to hook you. You’ll get the news. So turn it off. I mean, until we get something that’s decent, find an outlet where you can find reasonable people having good conversations. I’m all for information. Journalists are our treasure in our country. But this is not journalism. This is a different thing. This is division written large, and it’s killing our kids, literally. You know, we asked people on that poll, what would make you change? And the highest reason was for our kids.
Kate Bowler: And I think it’s such a powerful thing you’re saying, because even recently I was just looking at the numbers that a sociologist here at Duke, Mark Chaves, had put out about the direction of this country and particularly about how congregations are processing this political news. And one of the findings, and this was new to me, it seems intuitive when you hear it, but it was just kind of new to the polls, but that the language of politics has now eclipsed the language of faith, so that people when they think that they’re just trying to speak Christianly, they’re actually just thinking and speaking politically.
Tim Shriver: Yeah, that’s right.
Kate Bowler: And how horrifying that is for us to need to fundamentally recover a language of soul, of wholeness, of the Divine, of God’s unending love. And I just really like that your dignity points directly at a story of our God-given goodness.
Tim Shriver: Well, you know, it’s ironic, Kate, because we’ve attracted now several very conservative and very progressive faith-based leaders, and we’re going to try to launch in the next couple of months something we’re gonna call Faith and Dignity. So you have faith in the Ten Commandments, or you have faith in Torah, or faith in the Koran, or in the Gospel, or St. Paul, or whatever, all these different things. And those often lead us to moral positions. On, or in political positions, on what we should do about homelessness or what we should do about income inequality or whatever, you know, all these different things. But I think it’s worth remembering that the first moral exhortation is to treat people like they’re made in the image and likeness of God.
Kate Bowler: Yes. Yes.
Tim Shriver: I mean that’s like a big thing. Yeah. I mean can you imagine this guy who wrote Genesis, we don’t know if it’s a man or a woman. Just imagine the person sitting down. I don’t what, I’m not a biblical scholar, but 400 or 500 years before Christ. And someone says, let’s get the origin story right. And he says, okay, God created in the beginning of light, that good. That’s good, light, that’s good. That’s what God creates it. And He writes, it was good. And just imagine, like, the hand of God moving within this writer. Because many of us believe this to be inspired text, right? And then the creepy crawly things, and the dome, and the water, good. Good. And then God created male and female. Something had to feel like, it’s like God. An image of God. We’re in the image of God we were created. Male and female, and they are very good! Put the pen down, bam! That’s inspired. That’s before the apple and the snake and the this and the that. It’s good. You know, and these beautiful texts, Jeremiah, you are my delight. Jesus, you’re the light of the world. I mean, I, you know, like, put that on your mirror. So when you wake up in the morning, just be reminded. God is crazy about you. I mean never made anybody like you. Or the Republican you can’t stand. You’re the Democrat you can’t stand. God is crazy about them too. So I think we don’t have to compromise our beliefs, right? Like open borders, closed borders, whatever it is. It doesn’t matter. Work for those things. But there’s a way to do this without hate. And wouldn’t that be a great thing for our faith traditions to teach us instead of sending us out of the pews to go into a holy war with Baptists or Mennonites or Catholics or Jews or Muslims or Evangelicals? Like let’s have a fight between the Evangelicals and the Lutherans. Oh great! That’s what Jesus came to the earth to do. I mean, really, what are the chances that he’s like thrilled by that? He’s just like oh, baby, this is gonna be great! Come on. I mean, it’s so it’s crazy that we’ve lost the thread. I think anyway, that’s what I think.
Kate Bowler: And my favorite part about you is you want us to judge ourselves, which I actually really appreciate. In the Dignity Index, which, I really encourage people to look up, it’s got a wonderful rating system where you can think about your own language and ask yourself, where do you fall on the list of joyful ever-loving-goodness and peace and butterflies to raging contempt?
Tim Shriver: You have a homework assignment, dignity.us. You just click on the dignity index when you get there, and it’ll show you this index. This score goes from one to eight, and if it’s a one, they need to be killed. That’s the language of war. That’s when people go to war, they say, the drop-down box says, you’re not human, you no longer deserve to live, I’m gonna kill you. A two is just vicious hatred, disgust. A three is…What I’d call disdain. Moral superiority a four is like at the top of the contempt scale just superiority. A five is like, you know, you’re a listener. A Six you start to use curious language. Tell me more. I want to hear more about your point of view. Seven has humility. Kate I I hear you, that you can’t stand people of the other political party, I’m sure I have something to learn about why that’s justifiable. Tell Me More. That’s seven language. Instead of, you fool, Kate, you know? How could you possibly be so bullheaded and with all your learning and education to be so full of hate? Now, what am I doing? I’m using like three language to try to talk her out of three language. As one woman said to me, I don’t know what to tell you, I hate hateful people. So this is how contempt works. It operates in disguise. It always operates in the disguise of self-righteous anger. So the scale helps you see it. And once you see, it operates a little less effectively. This is your assignment. Just look at it. It’ll take you literally less than two minutes to learn it. It’s intuitive. You’ll learn it quite quickly, very quickly. And then last time you talk politics, look on the scale and score yourself. So, one is bad. Eight is good. Eight is love your enemies. Guess what the average American self-score is when talking politics? It’s about two and a half.
Kate Bowler: Really?
Tim Shriver: Two and a half. Somewhere between disgust and hatred and disdain. But nobody thinks they’re being contemptuous. We’re only using that language, because they’re contemptuous. And before you know it, we’re all ratcheting down. And all we think of is that the other side is ratchetting down, but we don’t see ourselves falling with them. And that’s what we’re trying to see if we can flip a switch and invite people.
Kate Bowler: This is such a beautiful and horrifying, truly beautiful and horrifying challenge for this political season.
Tim Shriver: Yeah, well, this is a good time.
Kate Bowler: It feels like faithfulness. It feels, like, a story of who we might become. It feels the appropriate, deepest kind of spiritual challenge to be on this journey toward becoming the kind of person that this world needs. Can we give a round of applause for our absolutely spectacular Tim Shriver? Tim, amazing. Amazing! It’s easy to talk about dignity in the abstract. Like, of course, everyone deserves dignity. Of course, we should treat each other with respect. And then someone says something completely insane on Facebook, and then suddenly our principles are getting a very thorough stress test. But actual dignity? Is asking us to practice something harder than being nice, to remember that another person’s humanity is not something we get to grant or withhold, even when we’re angry, even when disagree, and even when the stakes are really, really real, and especially in a week like this one. So, for those of us heading into the next few days feeling anxious and angry and disillusioned, or some delightful combination of all three, here’s a blessing. A blessing for becoming the kind of people this world needs. May we be curious instead of contemptuous. May we be loving instead of disdainful. May we give away despairing hearts for hopeful ones. May we realize and help this world know that we belong to one another. Friends, thank you so much for listening and for being the kind of people who can keep our hearts soft. Come find me on Instagram at Kate C. Bowler. Or you can watch more of our conversations just like this one on YouTube. And hey, we’ve even put together a little playlist for hopeful conversations like this one ahead of a bananas political season, and I will link it in the show notes. And if this conversation made you think of someone, maybe especially someone who is also thinking through, struggling to understand other people, maybe just send it their way. And there’s no pressure to agree about everything afterward. Everything Happened Studios is made possible by the generous support of Lilly Endowment. And a huge thank you to the work of my amazing team, Jess Ritchie, Harriet Putman, Anne Herring, Hailie Durrett, Megan Crunkleton, and Katherine Smith. This is Everything Happens with me, Kate Bowler.