The eCrozier

Malcolm Gladwell wrote a significant piece in a recent New Yorker called Sacred and Profane: How Not To Negotiate with Believers. In it he describes how U.S. government negotiators totally botched ending the armed standoff with the Branch Davidian group nearly 21 years ago in Waco, Texas. You may remember that the Branch Davidians are an offshoot of the Seventh Day Adventist Church, one that’s even more apocalyptic and millennialist in their theology than the parent church. The standoff ended in tragedy with over 70 people, including 25 children, consumed in a fire caused when 400 canisters of CS gas shot into the compound came into contact with oil lanterns.

I don’t wish debate the U.S. government’s actions or whether they were right to have laid siege to the Mt Carmel compound. That’s for another time. What I find most interesting here is how one group, in this case the FBI, can so completely misunderstand another group like the Branch Davidians. The FBI assumed they were dealing with a typical hostage negotiation, such as when a robber holds hostages in a failed bank heist. So, “we’ll send in some food if you let four of the hostages go,” was the script for how the FBI approached this case. But they were dealing with people who had strong religious beliefs. The Branch Davidians held convictions that made complete sense to them, but they could only be understood as rational within the context of their theology. The FBI had a different rationality and they profoundly and tragically misinterpreted the deep beliefs the Branch Davidians held.

The U.S. government has made similar repeated failures throughout recent history, especially in its dealings with Muslim religion and culture. U.S. government rationality assumes that all grievances, threats, or concerns are based solely on social, political, or economic desires and therefore can be negotiated. But people who hold deep religious beliefs won’t negotiate them away no matter what “deal” they’re offered.

As we enter even further into a post-Christian, polyreligious culture, we followers of Jesus would do well to learn this. This doesn’t mean that all religious beliefs are equally true. Everyone can have her/his own religious beliefs, but not everyone can have her/his own truth. Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. We should never shrink back from that faith conviction. And yet, how we stand with that conviction in the midst of wildly different religious beliefs matters. It matters, and this may come as a surprise to some people, for how effective we will be in our evangelistic witness to other people.

We’ll never convince those who have different religious beliefs about the truth of our witness through the barrel of a gun, the coercion of political power, or by majority legislation mandating or forbidding certain behavior. Those won’t lead people to change their religious convictions. The Crusades of the Middle Ages, the Puritan’s coercive laws in early America, and the more recent efforts in some jurisdictions to ban Sharia Law all failed to change the target population’s beliefs. The truth we bear and are also called to share can only be conveyed through sacrificial love, grace, and mercy. After all, that’s how Jesus embodied eternal truth, so it ought to be how we do it as well.

+Scott