DC DISPATCH: Poisoned by Grievance

“On a scale of 1 to 10, how faithful would you say you are in terms of religion?”

The first thing to know is that high profile Congressional hearings aren’t places where an august body deliberates. 

But you know that already. You know such hearings are opportunities for senators to grandstand and score points with an audience watching at home.

That is what Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) was doing on Tuesday when he asked Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson invasive questions about her faith at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, including “On a scale of 1 to 10, how faithful would you say you are in terms of religion?” These questions were unrelated to her ability to serve as a Supreme Court justice, the ostensible point of the hearing, but were instead a form of retaliation for what Graham felt was unfair treatment of Justice Amy Coney Barrett during her hearing to become a federal appellate judge in 2017. At that hearing Senator Feinstein asked a series of questions about Judge Barrett’s faith, after which she remarked, “The dogma lives loudly within you.”

Graham knows this is irrelevant. He even said, “I am convinced that whatever faith you have—and how often you go to church—will not affect your ability to be fair. . . . And I just hope in the future that we can all accept that and the judge I felt was treated very very poorly, so I just wanted to get that out” [sic].

Since Graham used his limited time to raise an unrelated complaint about how another judge was treated five years ago, we should ask why. I think the answer is because the audience Graham was speaking to has become poisoned by grievance. 

For the religious base of the GOP, Senator Feinstein’s questioning of Barrett is a proof case for why it is appropriate to feel under attack. These anxieties are key in mobilizing the base, and by referring to them Graham can trigger defensiveness and passion. They are his go-to tactic for raising money and setting the narrative in the national media. 

There is a racist Great Replacement theory that triggers the same kind of defensiveness by positing that white people are under attack and are going to be replaced by Black and brown people. By pointing to a high profile example of “religious bigotry” Graham can invoke similar feelings of threat among his largely white conservative Christian base without giving in to the same racist tropes.

We can see the same kind of grievance mindset in the People’s Convoy which is (still, somehow?) protesting in my home of Washington D.C. Their tactics are strange (driving slowly and honking) and their goals fairly opaque after vaccine and mask mandates have fallen. But they remain motivated by a free floating sense of grievance. “To them,” as one reporter put it, “it’s about taking back a country they feel no longer represents them.”

While I think the problem is more prevalent on the right, a similar repeating turn to grievance can be seen on the left as well. The worst excesses of campus “cancel culture” may fall into this category (FIRE provides some good examples, even though individual cases may be more or less defensible). In all of these cases there exists a fear that one’s identity is under attack and that one’s community may not survive—and this causes people to behave poorly and violently at times.

So what can we do about it?

I’d urge us all to take a deep breath and consider two things, particularly when politicians or partisans are trying to get us riled up.

First, remember that partisans on the other side of an issue can disagree deeply without being an existential threat to us or our community. A response of fear and anxiety about the news makes sense sometimes. But it isn’t healthy to remain scared and anxious all of the time. Apocalyptic thinking isn’t helpful, even about issues that touch on deeply important civil and human rights. 

If we fail to bear this in mind, we risk feeding a mindset that is dangerous and can encourage violence. When we feel like our survival is at stake, we can forget our better impulses toward empathy, kindness, and honesty. This is of course how Christians ought to live, following Christ’s example even when we are under attack. Check out Over Zero’s work on violence prevention for some excellent resources on this.

Second, I’d urge us all to think a little less about language and a little more about pragmatics. Judge Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed, both in 2017 to the federal appellate bench and in 2020 to the Supreme Court. Graham did not need to ask invasive questions of Judge Jackson: His side won. In my work, we do not need to respond in force to every racist comment of a local Republican official. Rather, we need to focus on making sure that enough polling places are open for Black people in their county to vote freely.

Language is important and threats can be real. But no one is served by a politics that focuses on grievance rather than one that focuses on results, even when the pragmatic results that we seek differ.

Judge Jackson will probably be confirmed. She handled Senator Graham’s disrespectful questioning with grace. More than that, she is very qualified and will serve on the court well. But until the incentives change for people like Senator Graham, they will keep feeding our defensiveness—and our politics will continue to be poisoned by grievance.

Greg Williams works in digital politics at Faith in Public Life (although opinions are his own). You can yell at him on Twitter @gwilliamsster but he’d prefer if you were kind.