Learning to Disagree / John Inazu

For the Life of the World / Yale Center for Faith & Culture

Genuine disagreement is vanishingly rare. But to disagree with careful listening, empathy, respect, and independent thinking—it’s an essential part of life in a pluralistic democratic society.

In this episode, legal scholar and author John Inazu joins Evan Rosa to talk about his new book, Learning to Disagree: The Surprising Path to Navigating Differences with Empathy and Respect. He’s the Sally D. Danforth Distinguished Professor of Law and Religion at Washington University in St. Louis.

Together they discuss the challenge of disagreeing well in contemporary life, replete with the depersonalization of social media; the difference between certainty and confidence; what it means to think for oneself, freely and independently; the virtue of humility in civil discourse; the prospect for political dissent and civil disobedience; how to pursue the truth in a culture of principled pluralism; and practical steps toward empathic and respectful disagreement.

About John Inazu

John Inazu is the Sally D. Danforth Distinguished Professor of Law and Religion at Washington University in St. Louis. He teaches criminal law, law and religion, and various First Amendment courses. He writes and speaks frequently about pluralism, assembly, free speech, religious freedom, and other issues. John has written three books—including Learning to Disagree: The Surprising Path to Navigating Differences with Empathy and Respect (Zondervan, 2024) and *Liberty’s Refuge: The Forgotten Freedom of Assembly* (Yale, 2012)—and has published opinion pieces in the Washington Post, Atlantic, Chicago Tribune, LA Times, USA Today, Newsweek, and CNN. He is also the founder of the Carver Project and the Legal Vocation Fellowship and is a senior fellow with Interfaith America.

Show Notes

• "Yeah? Well, you know, that's just like uh, your opinion, man."
• Get a copy of Learning to Disagree: The Surprising Path to Navigating Differences with Empathy and Respect (https://www.jinazu.com/learning-to-disagree)
• Disagreement around civility and civil discourse particularly
• Identifying and naming disagreement
• Practical limits of human relationship as a reality of disagreement
• Why you picked up learning to disagree, disagreement in particular? And why is it important to you? What drew you now to make a comment about disagreement?
• Liberty’s Refuge: The Forgotten Freedom of Assembly (https://www.jinazu.com/libertys-refuge)
• Right of Assembly in the first amendment and what it means in groups - Madison and factions (Federalist 10?)
• Confident Pluralism: Surviving and Thriving Through Deep Difference (https://www.jinazu.com/confident-pluralism)
• Constitutional law
• The First Amendment as what secures the ability to disagree - Freedom of Religion and Freedom of Speech
• “One is, even if that was part of the, original focus, like any ongoing tradition, it can be lost or ignored. And so there's this sense in which each new generation needs to understand and appreciate it for intrinsic reasons and not just because they read it in a book.”
• Individual thinking but the reality of not doing anything individually as we are involved in embodied human relationships
• What starting points are there? You begin with empathy, what other starting points do you like to introduce to help people understand where you’re trying to take people with this?
• Complexity and compromise and recognizing that compromise isn’t always possible
• Humility in competing visions of truth and what is best for the world; no good or bad, just different persuasions
• A desire for certainty which fear and laziness underline
• I wonder if you could speak a little bit more to the legal background and why you think that is so helpful and so instructive for going through this framework of learning to disagree?
• “Maybe only prudentially in order to try to defeat it, but the work of understanding the other side's argument in the best light possible is itself a work of empathy that allows you to step into the headspace of the opponent a little bit and allows you to see why someone who is not dumb or is not You know, completely outside of society might actually think differently.”
• Supreme Court and difficult, political decisions
• Applying the approaches that are taught in law schools in every day life
• Three branches of government and checks and balances
• Loss of human relationships with colleagues in Congress and the increase of them in the Supreme Court
• Political dissent and political dissidents
• When to disagree?
• Protests, assemblies, and activism
• The privilege of dissent in the United States
• Social pressures, social stigma, and the confidence and responsibility to dissent
• How to cultivate respect for the one who you disagree with?
• Love your enemies and the Christian calling for interpersonal relationship with the person you disagree with; there is no guarantee of reciprocity
• Question of belief, right belief and orthodoxy
• Differences matter, especially in theological conversation, but that doesn’t mean we should rest in certainty
• Learning and granting grace to ourselves and one another
• Lesslie Newbigin - confidence not certainty
• How do we cultivate that ability to stay in the middle of it? To hold the tension, being able to live in the complexity, stay invested that the conversation happens without getting disillusioned or apathetic?
• The differences between Preaching and Persuasion
• How you recommended, what they can do today in the disagreements they find themselves in? What they can do at the level of mindset and what they can try to implement?
• Disagreement is something you have to practice and to know that mistakes will be made
• Let conversations linger and take time and happen over multiple meetings - making the commitment to be together and be in conversation
• Building trust in disagreeing well - acknowledging the relational
• Don’t start with family; practice with others initially
• “But regardless of sort of the relationship that you start with, go in with a full tank, right? don't don't go in when you yourself are like, impatient or exhausted or hungry, because you should go in kind of anticipating that there'll be some challenges to this. And if you can, on the front end say, you know what, in this conversation, I'm probably going to hear something that is going to offend me or annoy me.”
• Friends who disagree and the importance of friendship
• Mixing the serious with the playful and the mundane
• Friendship as an important element of discourse and disagreement

Production Notes

• This podcast featured John Inazu
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Alexa Rollow & Kacie Barrett
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give