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| Hello, fellow wayfarers … How to deal with the “conflict entrepreneurs” in your life … Why red states keep voting for abortion (and weed) … What if denominations were Enneagram types? … A Buckeye State Desert Island Bookshelf … This is this week’s Moore to the Point.
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How to Combat the Conflict Entrepreneurs
An episode of my podcast must have hit a chord with many of you, because countless people have brought up one section of my conversation with Amanda Ripley—the part in which she talks about “conflict
entrepreneurs.”
Whether in business, families, or the church, scores of people have identified this exact phenomenon in their own lives. For many, the question is: “So how do we confront conflict entrepreneurialism without becoming conflict entrepreneurs ourselves?”
First, a reminder of the definition. In
her book High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out, Ripley notes, “One way to prevent high conflict is to learn to recognize the conflict entrepreneurs in your orbit.” These are people for whom keeping those around them in a state of high conflict is the goal itself.
Ripley offers some advice for finding who, if any, are the conflict
entrepreneurs around you. “Notice who delights in each new plot twist of a feud. Who is quick to validate every lament and to articulate wrongs no one else has ever thought of? We all know people like this, and it’s important to keep them at a safe distance.”
In an article on foreign policy obstacles of the moment (which I first saw referenced on Jonathan V. Last’s excellent Substack), Peter Singer and Josh Baughman report on the way that the Chinese government is counting on “cognitive warfare” against the West. The primary arena for this sort of battle for the minds is, of course, social media.
One of the ways the Chinese Communist Party seeks to do this—like Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian Russian regime—is through a “trolling strategy,” in which the goal is to “‘fuel the flames’ of existing biases and manipulate emotional psychology to influence and deepen a desired narrative.” Social media works perfectly for such a strategy, because once emotions are roiled a few times, the algorithms will take care of the rest—giving a person more and more of that.
Do Chinese autocrats really care what sort of body image the teenage girl in
your church youth group has? Not on its own terms, of course. What they care about, though, is a demoralized and psychically crippled American population—and that’s one way to get there. The point is not usually the end-result policies (though sometimes it clearly is; both Russia and China have an interest in seeing NATO fall apart or Ukraine surrender). Usually the point is the conflict itself.
The conflict entrepreneurs in your church foyer or at your family reunion don’t have sophisticated tactics or strategies like this, of course. Often, they don’t even consciously reflect on the fact that they are fueling conflict. They just
know that they are bored or lifeless without it.
Often, the motives for such conflict-marketing include envy. Think of the lyrics of the Lee Ann Womack song “I’ll Think of a Reason Later”:
Inside her head may lay all the answers
For curin’ diseases from baldness to cancer
Salt of the earth and a real good dancer
I’ll think of a reason later.
The Gospels give us multiple examples of the conflict entrepreneur dynamic. The Herodians and the Pharisees, for example, asked Jesus about whether paying taxes to Caesar was lawful or not. This was not a debate over tax policy. They wished “to trap him in his talk” (Mark 12:13, ESV).
If Jesus had said to pay taxes, he would have been charged with heresy—with saying that the throne of David should remain vacant and be filled not with, as God commands, an offspring of the line of Judah but
with the puppet of a foreign empire. If he had said to not pay taxes, he would have been accused of seeking to overthrow the Roman government. The point was not the issue. The issue was a means to the conflict itself.
Jesus, of course, recognized all this. That’s why he handed them back their coin, noting Caesar’s face on it, in a way that dismissed the imperial pretentions to godhood. In the same way, Jesus recognized that the same people were attacking John the Baptist for fasting and abstinence from alcohol while blasting Jesus for feasting and drinking wine. He compared it to children taunting one another with a kindergarten song:
“We played the pipe for you and you did not dance; we sang a dirge, and you did not cry” (Luke 7:32).
The uproar that greeted the apostle Paul in Ephesus was, from the crowd, about a synthesis of Ephesian nationalism and Artemis religion. But behind all of that goddess-and-country talk was a much more concrete motive—keeping the silversmiths and the tourism board in business (Acts 17:21–41).
Discerning things like this requires the wisdom to be able to tell the difference between genuine healthy conflict and conflict entrepreneurship. That’s a wisdom we often lack. Sometimes we assume that appeasing those with a list of complaints will make them less unhappy. That’s true—unless the unhappiness is the goal, and the complaints are just how to get there.
That means that, in order to take on the conflict entrepreneurs, we need to know when there should be conflict. Jesus sometimes walks away from a conflict. Sometimes he reframes it.
Sometimes he hits it head-on. Conflict entrepreneurs, though—like a few actual entrepreneurs—want a monopoly. They want to engineer conflict while counting on the “normal people” feeling “divisive” or “ununified” if they don’t get absorbed into the cycle.
Every golden calf in the Bible is an exercise in unity. Everyone’s dancing in concert. Everyone’s singing in unison. The Israelites don’t have to leave to go to Jerusalem—they can stay put and not go on with the difficult journey. That’s a kind of unity. It’s the kind of unity, though, that disintegrates. Sometimes unity means asking who’s being hurt and
whose voices aren’t loud enough to be heard.
That requires the people who don’t like conflict being the ones who lead it when it’s necessary. General Dwight Eisenhower defeated Hitler not in spite of the fact that he hated war but because of it. An allied commander who was just enlivened by carnage for the sake of carnage could never have planned D-Day.
In a religious context I was once in, I heard myself complaining to a friend, “I feel like we have a two-party system here—Dumb as Hell, and Hell.” I was exaggerating, of course, but the point was that, in every system, evil succeeds because good people assume the conflict entrepreneurs will become embarrassed by their actions, and so we just politely pretend the situation isn’t there until then.
That’s not how shamelessness works. Sometimes people—not the pugilists or the warhorses—get to unity and to peace by standing up and saying, “What you’re doing is not
in step with the gospel, and it ends now.”
If that prospect is thrilling to you, step back. If you dread it, step forward. Conflict entrepreneurs can only succeed where there are conflict customers. We will always, this side of the eschaton, have conflict entrepreneurs. We can resolve, however, to invest elsewhere.
The Rise of the Whole-Choice, Pro-Choice Movement
This past week, citizens in Ohio voted by referendum to enshrine the right to abortion as a constitutional guarantee in their state. Many commentators have noted the phenomenon, time after time since the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade, of “ruby-red” states voting “pro-choice”—Kansas, Kentucky, Ohio, and beyond.
Look at The Washington Post exit polls on the ballot measure. Fifty-four percent of over-65 voters voted against the abortion measure, while voters ages 45 to 64 voted in favor of the measure with 53 percent. Those ages 30 to 44 voted for it with a jaw-dropping 69 percent of the vote. But even that is nothing compared to voters ages 18 to 29, who voted in favor with a stunning 82 percent of the vote.
Could we even get 82 percent for a resolution that we generally (no pun intended) like George Washington? I doubt it.
There are several reasons for that. As I’ve argued here and elsewhere, the pro-life movement (of which I am a part and have been for all of my adult life) has erred dramatically in allowing itself—in reality or in perception—to be hitched to a movement that is both
ethically inconsistent with human dignity and that is deeply unpopular with the very demographic who will be making these decisions in the future. A pro-life court victory means very little if it results in a pro-choice consensus in the country.
But I think there’s another factor at work here too.
For many
years, many of us have advocated for a “whole life, pro-life” view. This view argues for a consistent ethic of life—protection for mothers in crisis, prenatal and parental leave interventions, concern for the poor, help for the elderly, action on behalf of foster children and their families, and so on. Some extend this “whole life” ethic to an opposition to capital punishment. I don’t, but I can see why they would think this is inconsistent. This is, I believe, morally and ethically right—whatever its popularity or lack thereof.
What I think few people saw coming, though, is the mirror image of that view. Maybe call it the
“whole choice, pro-choice” view. That is the kind of abortion rights support that isn’t dependent on a progressive feminist right–based argument, but is instead adopted as one vice among a whole set of vices.
As Ohio voters were making impossible restrictions on abortion, they were also voting to make marijuana use legal. This is not some adoption of libertarian views of social liberalism with fiscal conservatism. In fact, it’s in many ways the reverse of that.
There is a segment of the population that can support abortion legality, gambling, premarital sexual activity, and pornography usage, right along with Christian nationalist ideas, white identity politics, and a social Darwinist view of economics for the out-group paired with a social democratic view of economics for the in-group.
As I’ve mentioned here before, historian Daniel K. Williams is right to see how the rising tide of “unchurched Protestants” is affecting American culture. These are people, he notes, who keep all the dogmatism of religion—right along with a very loud Christian identity—but who are disconnected from the community of faith itself, resulting in—among other things—a bleak view of human nature. That bleakness shows up both in mistrust of other people and, often, in a lack of moral expectations for themselves.
“When people leave church, they retain the moralism—at least insofar as it pertains to other people—but lose the sense of self-sacrifice and trust in others,” Williams wrote. “They keep their bible, their gun, their pro-life pin, and their MAGA hat, but also pick up a condom and a marijuana joint and lose whatever willingness they had to care for other people in community.”
This is one reason a sort of virtue-based conservatism is almost invisible in these times, replacing “values voters” with those who chant “Let’s Go Brandon” right along with their Jesus footprints memes on Facebook.
If a previous generation could drive around the country with an “I Vote Values” bus, maybe we could easily see a “I Vote Vice” bus doing the same thing, with the kind of Barstool Sports voters who identify strength with coarsening.
That sort of “whole-choice, pro-choice” view isn’t because such people are moving Left but because they are moving so far Right that human dignity sounds like self-righteous moralizing by “elites.” When that is combined with younger generations who really are moving Left, there is a daunting task for those of us who are pro-life. It’s one reason I expect that, in my lifetime, both political partisan “tribes” in America will be “pro-choice” on abortion, just getting there from different directions.
That reality offers a challenge for those of who believe a pro-life, whole-life vision is good, true, and beautiful
to persuade, to articulate, and, most of all, to demonstrate in lives lived and people loved—the vision of a different way forward.
If Denominations Were Enneagram Types
Pentecostalism when it goes bad does not do so in half measures, that’s true. But when it is good—as I believe most Pentecostal Christians and churches are—it brings a needed emphasis to the entire body of Christ. We need both freedom and order, both spontaneity and ritual, both individual and community, both cognitive and experiential—all of it.
Maybe if denominations were Enneagram types, Baptists would be ones, Mennonites twos, Methodists threes, Eastern Orthodox fours, Presbyterians fives, Catholics sixes when not in power and eights when they are, and Anglicans nines. If so, maybe Pentecostals would be the type seven—enthusiastic, hopeful, active.
Those are all top-of-my-head caricatures, of course, but the point is—just as with personalities and gifts—we need at least something from all of them. And all of them have blind spots and shadow sides that need the others to keep in balance.
We might not all be Reformed, but we all need reform. We might not all be Catholic, but we need catholicity. We might not all be Holiness, but we all need holiness. We might not all be Methodist, but we all need methods. We might not all be Pentecostal, but we all need Pentecost.
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The Desert Island Bookshelf
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Every other week, I
share a list of books that one of you says you’d want to have on hand if you were stranded on a deserted island. This week’s submission comes from reader Erin Clancy from Cincinnati:
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Quote of the Moment
“It has always been true that a chief reason for the alienation of one generation from another lies in their different understanding of what constitutes the past.”
—Lionel Trilling, Freud and the Crisis of Our Culture
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Currently Reading (or Re-Reading)
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Cixin Liu, The Three-Body Problem (Tor) Lauren and Michael McAfee, Beyond Our Control: Let Go of Unmet Expectations, Overcome Anxiety, and Discover Intimacy with God (Thomas Nelson) Matthew T. Martens, Reforming Criminal Justice: A Christian Proposal (Crossway) Henri J. M. Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming (Doubleday)
Currently Watching
Some of you know that my favorite sitcom of all time was, and is, Frasier. I have seen every episode so many times as to, I am quite sure, have every line memorized. So, of course, with Paramount+ launching a new version, I had to watch it.
No, it’s not nearly as good, but how could it be? Still, it is comforting to see a familiar face and to hear “Tossed Salads and Scrambled Eggs” again.
Currently Listening
My son Samuel is a fan of the band Hunny—and so I
listened to some of their stuff. I realized I was too old for this music when it dawned on me that the song “ring in ur ear” refers to an earring rather than to tinnitus.
Not my thing but, then again, my teenage concert experiences were Amy Grant and Petra, so I realize I am not in
the band’s target demographic.
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Join Us at Christianity Today
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Ask a Question or Say Hello
The Russell Moore Show podcast includes a section where we grapple with the questions you might have about life, the gospel, relationships, work, the church, spirituality, the future, a moral dilemma you’re facing, or whatever. You can send your questions to questions@russellmoore.com. I’ll never use your name—unless you tell me to—and will come up with a groan-inducing pun of a pseudonym for you.
And, of course, I would love to hear from you about anything. Send me an email at questions@russellmoore.com if you have any questions or
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Onward,
Russell Moore
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Russell Moore
Editor in Chief
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P.S. You can support the continued work of Christianity Today and the PUBLIC THEOLOGY PROJECT by subscribing to CT magazine.
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| Join Russell Moore in thinking through the important questions of the day, along with book and music recommendations he has found formative.
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