Alec Ward | Me and Kim Davis

Talking Backward | Why is it so difficult to engage with fanatics?

By Alec Ward 09/08/15 11:19pm

One of last week’s top national news stories, still unfolding as of yesterday, concerns the jailing and subsequent release of Kim Davis, the elected clerk of Rowan County, Kentucky, for defying a federal writ ordering her to resume issuing marriage licenses. Davis had been refusing to issue any licenses since the Supreme Court announced its decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, mandating that states issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. The court has ruled that her refusal constitutes a violation of the right to marriage affirmed in Obergefell.

My guess is that most Penn students who saw or followed the story attribute Davis’s choice to sacrifice her freedom rather than license same-sex marriages to some combination of backwardness, prejudice and bigotry. Viewed this way, the clerk’s decision comes across as idiotic and mean-spirited. They’re not wrong, but this isn’t the whole picture.

Kim Davis is a religious fanatic. She is a devout member of the Apostolic Christian Church which, according to its website, is “based on a literal interpretation of the Bible, which is recognized as God-inspired, infallible, and inerrant.” This means that Kim Davis believes — among other things — that every word of the vivid and detailed doomsday prophecy contained in the Book of Revelation will come to pass. Her husband has said that, failing release by other means, she believes that God will free her from prison and take her into heaven during the Rapture, which she believes to be imminent. Kim Davis’s epistemology rejects science, the evidence of her own senses and the entire intellectual and cultural legacy of the Enlightenment when any of them conflict with a literal interpretation of Scripture. She believes that if she were to obey the court, God would condemn her soul to eternal torture and damnation. From her point of view, with her beliefs, her choice is absolutely rational.

This is an epistemology so different to mine and to that of (I presume) most Penn students, that it is very difficult to engage with. What would I do, for example, if Kim Davis showed up in my ethics recitation? Lacking basically any epistemological common ground, could I have a productive argument with her? Could I find a way to convince her that blocking same-sex marriages is not the right thing to do, or even to consider that possibility? Could she convince me? Could there be any result other than stalemate and impasse and frustration? I doubt it.

And so I would be tempted, in the wake of this failure, to dismiss her as a kook, a bigot, a right-wing religious nut-job. I would tell myself that the failure to engage was her fault, not mine. I would cheer as she was marched off to jail.

Dismissing fanatics, however, is not nearly as interesting or productive as trying to get inside their heads. Fanaticism like Kim Davis’s has been, time and time again, a driving force in world history. Two thousand and fifteen years ago, another fanatic chose to scorn a judge and face the worst contempt-of-court punishment the Roman empire could devise rather than renounce his own ministry — and he changed the world forever. Fanaticism has deposed kings and toppled empires; built great cities and destroyed them. It has flummoxed great minds and repelled great armies. It has shaped the present that we all inhabit in ways far too numerous to list.

It is the failure to understand the functioning of minds that are nothing like ours which has been the hobgoblin of so many attempts to put theories developed in the halls and classrooms of universities into practice in the real world. We assume everyone thinks like us because we haven’t trained ourselves to think in any other way.

This isn’t a problem with a nice, neat, elegant solution I can propose in the last paragraph — I’m not really sure what to suggest except that when we judge harshly the Kim Davises of the world, we ought perhaps to judge ourselves harshly as well for failing to understand them. When we send them to jail or drop bombs on them from a F-35, we should perhaps feel some twinge of disappointment that we didn’t know what else to do.

ALEC WARD is a College junior from Washington, D.C., studying history. His email address is alecward@sas.upenn.edu. Follow him on Twitter @TalkBackWard. “Talking Backward” usually appears every other Wednesday.

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