Essay Series: "Bridging Boundaries: Solidarity across Deep Difference in a Divided Age"

Polarization, conflict, and violence—both enacted and threatened—are a growing concern and have become a disturbing reality in recent years. Both scholars and journalists have documented the cases and causes of increasing tensions in the U.S. and elsewhere. There is also important attention to forms of solidarity and resistance to hegemonic violence and oppression. 

In addition to this important work, there is a need to articulate how solidarity, mutual concern, resistance, and repair may be formed not only within but also across lines of deep difference. Sociologists of altruism, morality, and social solidarity have much to offer in this regard.

In forthcoming issues of the newsletter, and on our website, we are excited to present original essays and excerpts of existing work to address the topic, Bridging Boundaries: Solidarity across Deep Difference in a Divided Age. We will introduce these short essays in our newsletter, with a link to read the entire essay (around 1,000 words) on the website, so as to keep the newsletter short and the essays accessible to all. We trust you'll find them insightful, informative, and useful. Also, please let us know if you want to submit something for the newsletter and website. Just email me and the AMSS communications committee at [email protected].

Kerby Goff
AMSS Newsletter Committee

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Spring 2024 Newsletter

Ethical Democracy, Bridging Differences, and Four Modes of Social Reflexivity
By: Wes Markofski

Reflecting on the ethical and interpersonal demands of democracy, Jane Addams once remarked that we must mix “on the thronged and common road where all must turn out for one another and at least see the sizeof one another’s burdens,” lest “we grow contemptuous of our fellows . . . and not only tremendously circumscribe our range of life, but limit the scope of our ethics” (Addams 2002 [1902]:7–8).

What Addams observed, empirical studies of democracy and grassroots organizing have also demonstrated. Social reflexivity and bridging social capital are essential to achieve ethical democracy’s elusive dream of liberty and justice for all—a diverse and open society “in which all share and to which all contribute” (Dewey 1988 [1939]: 229).

Drawing on the classical American pragmatist tradition ofJane Addams and John Dewey, sociologist Paul Lichterman first developed the concept of social reflexivity to help explain why some religious groups were able to build two-way bridges across difference while others struggled to do so(Lichterman 2005:15,45,52– 55; Lichterman and Reed 2015). In Lichterman’s conceptualization, groups practice social reflexivity when they “welcome reflective talk about [their] concrete relationships in the wider world” (Lichterman 2005:15). “By engaging in that reflective talk,” Lichterman found, “groups can open up possibilities for bridges across social differences” (Lichterman 2005:45). Lichterman’s concept of social reflexivity calls attention to how group customs and communication can help or hinder efforts to establish relatively durable ties across social differences—or what is known as “bridging social capital” in the literature on democracy and public life (Lichterman 2005:42–52; Putnam 1993, 2000).

Beyond the focus on groups, I expand Lichterman’s understanding to define social reflexivity more broadly as people’s capacity to think and interact flexibly and self-critically in relation to diverse social others and situations (Lichterman 2005; Markofski 2019). This expanded definition is in keeping with Addams andDewey’s original vision and offers significant payoffs in our ability to describe and analyze how efforts to bridge social differences, and thereby advance ethical democracy, relate systematically to different types of socially reflexive practice across so­cial groups and situations (e.g., Dewey 1988 [1927]:147; Addams 2002 [1902]; Markofski 2023).

In my book, Good News for Common Goods: MulticulturalEvangelicalism and Ethical Democracy in America (2023, OUP), I analyze reflexive practices through ethnographic research across a wide variety of multicultural evangel­ical groups, organizations, and settings in Portland, LosAngeles, Atlanta, and Boston, I observed evidence of four distinct modes of social reflexivity being practiced by actors across different types of difference: namely, seg­mented reflexivity, transposable reflexivity ,deep reflexivity, and frozen reflex­ivity. Individuals and groups practice segmented reflexivity when they think and interact flexibly and self-critically with respect to one type of social dif­ference but not others.Segmented reflexivity is reflexivity restricted to one domain. In contrast to segmented reflexivity, individuals and groups prac­tice transposable reflexivity when they think and interact flexibly and self-critically across multiple types of social difference. Transposable reflexivity is reflexivity across domains. Individuals and groups practice frozen reflexivity when they think and interact self-critically, but partially and inflexibly, with respect to identities, groups, settings, or traditions with which they are in­volved. Frozen reflexivity is self-critical, but truncated and at times dogmatic. In contrast to frozen reflexivity, individuals and groups practice deep reflex­ivity when they demonstrate iterative capacity for flexible and self-critical thought and action across difference whilst recognizing the inescapably par­tial and fallible nature of their efforts. Deep reflexivity is reliably recursive and fallibilist; it seeks understanding whilst recognizing the impossibility of a perfect fusion of horizons even amidst genuine encounter (Gadamer 2013).

Though emerging from research on multicultural evangelicals, these concepts offer a potentially generalizable framework applicable to other groups and settings.Let me provide a few examples.

The multicultural evangelicals I studied recognized, for example, that ethical democracy is impossible without support for religious, cultural, and political pluralism. In Oregon, multicultural evangelicals participate in ecumenical, transpartisan political advocacy to advance anti-poverty, health care, and environmental protection legislation. In Portland, multicultural evangelicals help lead secular and multi faith asset-based community development initiatives, participate in interfaith dialogues across deep religious and political divides, and organize massive public service collaborations to support local public schools and neighborhoods.
They also recognized that ethical democracy is impossible without racial justice. InLos Angeles, multicultural evangelicals fight environmental racism in low-income Hispanic neighborhoods as part of racially and religiously diverse coalitions of grassroots democratic community organizers. In Atlanta, multicultural evangelicals live and work alongside residents of low-income majority Black neighborhoods to close the racial wealth and opportunity gap through Black homeownership, quality affordable housing, job creation, educational programming, and political advocacy.

These multicultural evangelicals also recognized that ethical democracy is impossible without economic justice and opportunity. In Boston, multicultural evangelicals participate in community organizing and development work as intentional residents of low-income neighborhoods while creating “economic discipleship”resources to mobilize economic redistribution and justice advocacy. In LosAngeles, multicultural evangelical residents of low-income Black and brown neighborhoods organize for educational, environmental, and economic justice and opportunity in their communities.  

Importantly, without these groups of evangelicals practicing social reflexivity, none of these endeavors would have been possible.  
Any person or group can practice social reflexivity and bridge building across difference, even if their reasons for doing so are not always the same. Multicultural evangelical practices of intellectual humility and social reflex­ivity are authorized by particularistic religious beliefs rooted in Christian scripture. But, this is not a problem for ethical democracy.

Unlike varieties of religious or secular fundamentalism, pragmatic post-secular pluralism recognizes the legitimacy of diverse sec­ular and religious motivations and modes of public discourse and political engagement.My book offers examples of what a pragmatic post-secular pluralist approach to ethical democracy and the pursuit of common goods amidst deep difference and disagreement can look like in practice, how we can mix “on the common road,”“see the size of one another’s burdens,” and expand the “scope of our ethics.”

This essay is excerpted with permission from the Oxford University Press book, Good News for Common Goods: Multicultural Evangelicalism and Ethical Democracy in America (Markofski 2023) and the OUP Blog essay“Multicultural Evangelicalism: What is it and Why Should Anyone Care?”

References
Addams, Jane.  (2002[1902]). Democracy and Social Ethics. Urbana:University of Illinois Press.
Dewey, John.  (1988 [1939]).  “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us.” Vol.14 of John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925-1953.  Boydston, J.A.  (Ed.). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
———.  (1988 [1927]).  The Public and its Problems. Vol. 2 of John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925-1953.  Boydston, J.A.  (Ed.). Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. (2013). Truth and Method. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Lichterman, Paul.  (2005). Elusive Togetherness: Church Groups Trying to Bridge America’s Divisions. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Lichterman, Paul and Reed,Isaac.  (2015).  “Theory and Contrastive Explanation in Ethnography.”  Sociological Methods Research 44(4):585-635.
Markofski, Wes. (2023). Good News for Common Goods: Multicultural Evangelicalism and Ethical Democracy in America. New York: OxfordUniversity Press.
———.  (May 27, 2023). “Multicultural Evangelicalism: What is it and Why Should Anyone Care?”  OUP Blog. 
———. (2019).  “Reflexive Evangelicalism.” Political Power andSocial Theory 36: 47-74.   
Putnam, Robert. (1993). Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
———.  (2000).Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.  New York, NY: Simon and Schuster.