ICYMI: David Brooks at the Cathedral

New York Times columnist David Brooks returned to the Cathedral recently to talk about his journey to faith,

You can watch the whole talk with Dean Randy Hollerith, but here are some highlights:

I think the biggest surprise for me is that faith to me doesn’t feel like belief, because belief implies you possess something. Faith to me feels like a yearning, a longing, a desire for something, a desire for the infinite of which we are all apart.

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We’ve just become sadder and meaner. And so there are a lot of big stories you can tell about why that’s happened: Social media, political polarization, economic inequality, and I think they all have a piece of the truth. But the one I focused on was, I don’t think for a couple generations we have taught each other how to perform the basic social skills of life. Morality can seem like this big lofty thing, but basically it’s being considerate toward each other in the complex circumstances of life. How to listen well, how to sit with somebody who’s grieving, how to be a great conversationalist, even in something small, like how to get out of a, a conversation gracefully. … Tese are basic skills, and the apex skill is the ability to make other people’s feel seen, heard, and know that’s how you honor their dignity.

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One of the problems in our politics is it has become a religion for a lot of people, that if you leave people naked and alone, if you leave people with a sense of existential anxiety, they’re gonna seek some form of social therapy, which will fill their void. And politics gives you the illusion that you’re gonna get what you get from religion or community. It gives you the illusion that you’re on a team, you’re a member of a community team, red team, blue team, but you’re not in a community. You’re not serving each other. You’re just hating the same people.

It gives you the illusion of righteous action, but you’re not sitting with a widow or serving the poor. You’re just indignant on Twitter. And so politics is this form a failed form of social therapy, which gives you the illusion you’re gonna solve your loneliness and your anger and your isolation, but it just winds you in a period of culture war.

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In my view, what we’re having is a big fight over what sort of communal culture we want to have. And so the social justice movements, which people call wokeism, that was a version of community, it was a moral story about community redemption. MAGA is a version of community; it’s a moral story about national redemption. And these two stories contradict each other.

And in my view, they’re both flawed in very serious ways. But so I think what you see in America right now is us trying to gravitate towards some different form of community. And so I, I just look at the American history and that we tend to come outta them. We tend to eventually settle on a solution that’s amenable, but it’s just super rough to get there.