One boat, many oars,

Synchronicity, please

A friend who spent a career in journalism and ministry wrote to say he could have shortened his master’s thesis on atonement theory to a single line from my last essay: The cross was not a payment; it was a jailbreak. I’ve been turning that comment over, because it points at something bigger than atonement theory. The line named something he already knew, both as a journalist and a pastor, but hadn’t heard put that way. That’s a sign an idea isn’t a new argument at all: It’s an old recognition, awaiting new words.

The last essay, “The Debt We Stopped Sharing,” traced how a Christian understanding of salvation as shared liberation — Christus Victor, the early church’s dominant view for over a thousand years — got slowly displaced by a legal, individual one: Your sins as a private debt, settled on your own account. And it argued that the same substitution happened in miniature in twentieth-century America, as Frances Perkins’ public architecture built on shared risk gave way to one built on personal responsibility and individual ledgers.

To expand the point, what I didn’t say is that this isn’t a peculiarly Christian insight being lost. It shows up, independently, almost everywhere people have thought seriously about what a human being is. It’s what my favorite mindfulness authority, Jon Kabat-Zinn, means when he says: One room, many doors.

Mahayana Buddhism refuses to let liberation be private. The bodhisattva vow holds that a person who reaches the edge of enlightenment turns back rather than walks through alone, choosing to remain until all beings are freed together. Nobody really gets out until everybody does. The Dalai Lama has spent decades trying to get that idea into circulation without requiring anyone to accept Buddhist metaphysics first, which is why he keeps reducing it to four words: Kindness is my religion. Strip away the doctrine and what’s left is something anyone can grasp without being argued into it.

Desmond Tutu did something similar, and did it as policy rather than sermon. Ubuntu — a person is a person through other persons — says that the self doesn’t exist prior to relationship; it’s made by it. When Tutu chaired South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he built its entire process on that premise instead of a legal courtroom-ish one. The TRC didn’t weigh individual guilt against individual punishment. It worked to restore people to relationship, on the theory that a nation coming out of apartheid needed binding more than it needed a ledger. I am struck by how tightly Tutu’s view fits the United States today.

Judaism’s covenant at Sinai was made with a people, not a collection of souls, and its prophetic tradition returns again and again to a people’s collective obligation to the widow, the orphan, and the stranger. Confucian thought goes further still — the self is relational from the start, constituted by family and duty, so there’s no individual ledger to argue away in the first place.

And it’s sitting in our own founding, if we bother to look. E pluribus unum — out of many, one — was proposed for the Great Seal in 1776 by Franklin, Jefferson, and Adams, and it’s been passed hand to hand on our currency ever since, mostly unread and unnoticed, which is exactly how a good communal idea is supposed to travel. Franklin put the same thought more bluntly at the signing of the Declaration: We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately. The Preamble to the Constitution names “We the People” as its acting subject and “the general welfare,” not the private one, as a purpose. Washington’s Farewell Address calls the unity of a self-governing people the main pillar of their independence, and warns what factions do to a republic that forgets it. None of this came from Christian doctrine. It came substantially from Rome — from Cicero’s res publica (the public affair, root of the word republic). The instinct isn’t a sectarian one. It’s closer to a human default that a great many traditions arrived at separately, and that a great many forces have worked, separately, to talk us out of.

I hope this is not an argument. The individualist ledger-logic we’ve absorbed isn’t a position anyone consciously holds and could be talked out of. It’s water. It’s air. Most people inherited it the way you inherit an accent, and they’ll defend it the way you defend an accent, without knowing they’re doing it. You don’t out-argue an accent. You change what people hear spoken around them until a different one sounds native.

That is the only real strategy that can work, and it’s already visible in one place: Pope Leo doesn’t win migrants a hearing through triumph in a policy debate. He wins it by being seen on Lampedusa, an Italian island near Tunisia, first stop for many seeking sanctuary in Europe. He wins it by being seen, repeatedly, looking at a stranger and expressing welcome. Because of this, people perhaps start looking at migrants a little differently too, without knowing exactly when it happened. That is the whole mechanism. Not persuasion. Permeation.

Which is what I think this country needs now, more than another policy argument or another election. It needs the communal understanding of our lives together back in its air and its water — in what gets preached on Sunday, what gets said in a classroom, what a person half-notices scrolling past on their phone, what gets modeled in the ordinary friction of neighbors who disagree and stay neighbors anyway. Not a doctrine anyone has to sign onto. A way of seeing, repeated by enough people, in enough places, until it’s simply what’s there. A boat’s crew doesn’t debate whether to row together. They just do, because everyone already knows what happens if they don’t.

One boat, many oars. That’s not a slogan so much as a description of the reality we need make central to American life again.

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A note on method: I come to these essays with a passion and a skill acquired as an opinion journalist. I am not a scholar. My professional work demanded doing a deep dive into a subject quickly, writing accurately, and moving on. I try to bring that skill to this effort. My goal is communal, not individual: Putting new ideas in circulation and recirculating old ones, all important to the future of this imperfect, wounded nation we call home.