by Jacob Alan Cook
Among those who study and work with conflict, a hopeful and constructive edge has emerged under the banner of “conflict transformation.” To be fair, practitioners have been continuously sharpening the transformational edge over the last several decades, but their work has generally occurred outside the awareness of US American seminaries and churches.[1] This developing field’s pivotal, fundamental insight is: Conflict is an everyday, everywhere phenomenon that holds not only destructive but creative potential. Not every conflict is an intractable level 5, even if key players can access neither the skills nor the structures to engage with confidence.[2] Conflict first appears in the form of problems to solve and disagreements about (a) where we hope to go, (b) which path to take to get there, or (c) how to distribute our resources along the way. With social worlds as diverse as ours, we should not be surprised by the commonplaceness of such disputes.
Not only is conflict normal, but as Ellen Ott Marshall has convincingly argued, it is also normative in the church for at least two fundamental reasons. First, “Christians should be in conflict with one another because the Christian faith is a dynamic, historical development.”[3] Second, the church is comprised of individuals called together from a wide variety of contexts and patterns of formation with a shared calling to follow Jesus and cultivate the beloved community.[4] Since the world itself is a dynamic, historical development, our goals and pathways as Christians and church communities are not always clear, hence we practice discerning faithful postures and strategies together. Why should we idealize conflict prevention or limit our imaginations to merely managing or resolving it in such a community? In a community bound together by the very Spirit of God, we are free to contemplate the creative potential of healthy conflict for deepening social bonds and facilitating positive transformation.
Over the last ten years, US Americans have witnessed many churches and denominations sorting ideologically—a culture-wars trend that accelerated in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic—and this process can have alienating, chilling, and other negative effects on dissenting members.[5] While there is a rising sense of shared identity in many places of worship, when congregants do take up peace and justice values, they more regularly engage in, avoid, or otherwise feel the heat of conflict with beloved others who disagree. And the outcomes of this conflict strike many of us as entirely beyond our control. Among the predictable behaviors of persons in polarized environments that curtail positive results from tough conversations are splitting or social sorting into discrete affinity groups in which “any encounter with different opinions or perspectives is viewed in win/lose terms” and disregarding “any information that does not support one’s ‘position.’”[6] Often enough, these dynamics in a society backflow into smaller-scale relationships like families and congregations.
At a time when there seems to be more than enough conflict to go around, we are at risk for either withdrawing to avoid the risks and discomfort of open conflict or venting our moral energy through strong feelings about media accounts, and by generating our own accounts via social media, of adaptive challenges that we cannot (or will not) actively engage rather than putting that energy to creative use. But if we are ever to fulfill the call to become a thermostat in society and not merely thermometer, we must tune ourselves to be the instruments of peace and experiment with skills and structures that can accurately read and make good use of the conflict in our systems. In this article, I will present a posture and some strategies that could lead us in this direction, with a special focus on diffusing polarized, us-versus-them dynamics, starting with the self.
Shifting Postures toward the Self and Others
There is little wonder, however, that many are distressed when they (we!) register conflict within our local congregations. Theological systems tend to assume we are, or at least ought to be, on the same page as our fellow church members. And if we share core faith commitments (already a live question in our churches), it is reasonable to suppose that our moral values would align—what values in the first place, how we define them, and which ones take priority. So, one may be caught off guard by conflict among those with whom they presume to share so much, disappointed by conflict oriented around (d) values—the fourth kind of conflict in the list that I started in the first paragraph.[7] Amplifying this sensibility, recent US American Christianity has been suffused with Evangelical Worldview Theory (EWT), which presents “worldviews” as the cognitive frameworks that shape the way people understand, interpret, and respond emotionally and morally to life’s most important questions.[8] EWT proponents claim there is a fundamental difference between an all-encompassing moral world- and life-view grounded in the Bible versus one grounded in other assumptions. This theory inspires subscribers to fill out their life-organizing theoretical system (or at least to imagine that it could be filled out with well-reasoned details) and channels their critical-thinking energies into evaluating others’ worldviews accordingly. So, it fuels simplified naming, antagonistic framing, and thought policing to persist on the straight and narrow path, as in “the biblical worldview” versus “cultural Marxism.”
While EWT emerged and has flourished within fundamentalist circles—passing unquestioned because it claims to be grounded in the Bible, understood via the prevailing “plain-sense” hermeneutics—some progressives exhibit a similar tendency. The moment someone starts talking—in the church hallway, around the family dinner table at holidays, online—we sort the incoming data according to expected patterns. In a sense, we “profile” other each other based on what we know about their position on specific social issues or who they voted for, predicting how they appear as ideological objects in our mental landscape. In any case, a worldview-oriented posture presumes that all true Christians (which the worldview-er takes to imply “like myself”) agree about most or all things, thus engendering dismay about dissenting coreligionists. As thoughts give way to actions, we may objectify these “opponents” (even family and friends) in terms of our own ideals as so many others who are wrong and whose lives would benefit from being re-ordered according to our own perspective. Here we find the smoldering embers of polarization and coercion.
But individuals’ social and cognitive lives—including the thinking and feeling structures that fuel our moral judgments and actions—are vastly more complex than worldview thinking allows. Reflecting on the “othering” of misconceived Muslims in the wake of the September 11 attacks as well as the targeting of “Western values” by terrorist groups, Amartya Sen identified this simplistic thinking about human identities as “the miniaturization of people.”[9] This term describes the human tendency to oversimplify her or his neighbor by seeing only a single identity and to project an enlarged sense of oneself and one’s people in singular terms, distorting and misunderstanding everyone involved. The homogeneity of many Western churches lends to the sort of singular thinking and partisan politics that create incredible polarities within “Christian” communities. One might simply understand their identity as “I am a Christian, and nothing else matters,” but to overidentify oneself and likeminded others with Christ risks both self-deception and an evasion of the living One who calls us into deeper repentance and all manner of truth. Moreover, when a person is living into a solid self-story directed toward making a difference based on their worldview, self-evaluation and thus perceived growth normally occur within that worldview and without considerable reflection upon or adjustment to it.[10] In other words, few highly generative people actively examine where their worldview may, in itself, entail some unreflective, less reasonable, and possibly problematic ideas.
If we are to depolarize our conversations and our communities, I submit that we must examine and eschew the dynamics that drive us to conceive of ourselves as faithful adherents to discrete, singular, coherent worldviews that necessarily set us in tension, if not open conflict, with all “others.” So, I turn now to offer some research about and practicable strategies to experiment with pluralizing our sense of self.
Strategy One: Pluralizing the Self-Concept[11]
Current social-scientific research suggests people actually, unconsciously process their daily experiences of life through a bundle of selves. Psychologist Hazel Markus, in many co-authored works since the late 1970s, theorizes “self-schemas” to illuminate how “individuals attune themselves to their significant social contexts, . . . provid[ing] solutions to important existential questions such as who am I, what should I be doing, and how do I relate to others.”[12] These self-representations range from personality traits and characteristics, like self as “a good student” or “conscientious,” to sociocultural contexts, including “specific collectives in addition to the nation of origin, such as the family or workgroup, as well as contexts defined by gender, ethnicity, race, religion, profession, social class, birth cohort, and sexual orientation.”[13] Markus and company use the term “working self-concept” to refer to that set of self-schemas which is presently active and operating and thus lending “structure and coherence to the individual’s self-relevant experience.”[14] In their research, they could use a person’s self-schemas to predict how easily one would judge self-relevant information, retrieve evidence for those judgments, forecast their own future behavior based on their self-concept, and resist feedback to the contrary.[15]
When a person is committed to a certain way of seeing themselves, including in polarized and singular ways, they will strive for “completeness,” and tension will build within them while they perceive themselves to be “incomplete.” What they do with such tension depends heavily on their character, which includes coping and defense mechanisms. To this end, “symbolic self-completion theory” describes the tendency to seek symbolic routes to validating one’s self-concept, including: doubling down on describing themselves as complete, attempting to enlist others to affirm that one is, in fact, who they say they are, being unwilling or unable to admit to transgressions of the ideal self, and relying on external signs and symbols to bolster this self-image.[16] This is true of any conception of the self, not only singular ones. But add into this mix the strength of one’s commitment to certain ideal selves—for instance, the lofty ideal self of one’s real or imagined faith community or otherwise the tidy, heroic self of one’s personal myth—and we have a recipe for self-deception, social sorting, and ill-informed conflict with others perceived to be opponents.
Social-scientific research also suggests that singular concepts of self are particularly brittle because all opposition feels like an attack on one’s whole self, yet persons who understand their self to be plural (i.e., “have a complex self-concept”) demonstrate an improved ability to integrate or otherwise weather self-critical information. “Failure in a single self-domain does not imply failure in all domains. Complexity thus permits maintenance of positive self-esteem despite specific failures.”[17] Criticism is then perceivable not as an attack on the singular, core identity we believe ourselves to be (my true self, my total worldview) but as addressed to a specific element or tension within our confident, plural self-concept.
One exercise for exploring plural selfhood that has proven useful both in private reflection and as priming small group conversations starts with some time to identify numerous salient parts of one’s self-concept and social location that likely inform how one sees the world—and perhaps differently than those who identify differently. Whether starting with a visual organizer like a “power flower”[18] or an identity-focused word cloud or simply generating a list, participants tend to do their best work when provided with a clear example or, at very least, prompts for specific categories to consider (from personality traits and important relationships to aggregate and voluntary social groups). While this exercise can be edifying on its own, it can be quite effective when used to prime either further reflection or conversation about what influences our moral convictions on specific issues. Did our parents participate in antiwar demonstrations? Has my experience as a US citizen precluded me from reflecting much on the experience of immigrants? A more content-rich framework can be found in the “four dimensions of moral agency” offered by ethicists Glen Stassen and David Gushee in their beloved textbook Kingdom Ethics.[19] For example, they list perceptions of what is a “threat” as a key variable in our “ways of seeing,” as in differing understandings of what is at risk when we consider more accommodating immigration policies.
Many Christians in the West have been formed toward the expectation of integrity, of a settled fit within one’s story and values system, such that identifying oneself with Christianity would come with a full deck of values and positions. Without the experience of being brought up short, we may proceed in just this way, imagining maturity as greater conformity to what we already know is true. Identity mapping can prime us to explore the complex ways we see, feel, and reason about issues. In other words, once we crack open the possibility of internal complexity, we can direct our conscious attention and reflection on other aspects of or moral lives—not just intuitions, but also fixtures of our way of seeing, loyalties and practices, ways we hope to apply reason.
Strategy Two: Cataloging Competing Values
In the early 2000s, a team of researchers working in various psychological fields, with Jonathan Haidt emerging as their leading public voice, began publishing their data-based endeavor to identify basic, innate “moral foundations” that could be recognized to varying degrees across diverse human populations.[20] Their earliest research offered five candidates for human moral intuitions, which Haidt described as something like “moral taste buds.”[21] Their list has since grown to eight, possibly nine candidates: care (which is related to empathy), equality (of treatment, outcomes, etc.), proportionality (meaning: “intuitions about individuals getting rewarded in proportion to their merit or contribution”), loyalty, authority (“including deference to prestigious authority figures and respect for traditions”), purity, liberty, honor (especially defense of one’s family reputation), and perhaps ownership (namely, respect for property).[22]
The metaphor of taste can help us understand this list as somewhat neutral and descriptive, even as we may immediately register affinity for only some of these values. We may enjoy any number of the basic flavors (salty, sweet, bitter, sour, and savory)—and we may wonder why “spicy” does not count—but we can readily tell when flavors turn us off or even when some we like separately do not go well together. “Taste” can also help us understand how cooking and eating with certain people in particular places might impact what we prefer or crave or dislike and even imagine accommodating those with different tastes or dietary needs. We can recognize these values in our own moral thoughts and feelings, and this recognition can prime us to understand and connect with others’ values and interests even if they do not match our own.
Because these values are intuitions in the first place, we are often unaware and otherwise unwilling to acknowledge that our own moral sensibilities sometimes clash with each other within ourselves. But picturing these tastes together as a proposed set of values can help us imagine why they might coalesce or contradict, generating a moral paradox when considering specific issues or events. Sometimes an awareness of inner conflict emerges in a conversation when we state a position that surprises even ourselves, perhaps attempting to resonate with something a friend has said. Other times we may push back too hard on a colleague not only because we value some other commitment more highly but also because we are horrified to find some part of ourselves resonating with an opposing view.
One exercise for exploration could begin with some kind of review of Haidt and company’s proposed list of moral foundations, whether in a brief summary, filling out an online questionnaire,[23] or even watching Haidt’s TED Talk on moral foundations and political partisanship.[24] With such a list in hand and introduced, I have often invited congregational leaders and laypersons alike to consider their own moral tastes, in the first place, and then to reflect on the story around Jesus’ healing of the man born blind in John 19 in small groups. Many biblical stories lend themselves to an analysis of the values in play, including as an attempt to empathize with particular characters within the stories and thereby better understand the matter of the text and a multiplicity of interpretations. John 19 is an exceptionally interesting story example because it explores a conflict unfolding among several distinct parties, who lead with different priorities: Jesus’ disciples inquiring after the man’s purity and family honor, as related to the merit (proportionality) of his affliction, Jesus himself offering care, some neighbors leading the healed man to their religious authorities for answers, some Pharisees disparaging the purity of both Jesus and the healed man (and ultimately expelling the latter for questioning their authority), not to mention the possible conflict among these same values within the healed man and his parents. The strong sense of differing moral intuitions here can enable a small group to explore possible resonances with each character’s intuitions or possible motivations within their own moral centers. One could even assign roles within the small group, asking each person to try empathizing with a specific character or group.
Other values-oriented group exercises could prompt reflection and conversation on how the same set of values apply, in general or within ourselves, to particular issues or events. We can reflect on our affinities with this list to grow in self-understanding, which can enable better self-management when engaging others. When turning to engage others, lower weight exercises include practicing self-management while listening to a podcast with an opposing view and exercising curiosity about what values the speaker expresses (or suppresses). Heavier weight exercises would carry the same commitments into a live conversation with someone who holds an opposing view. “Deliberative dialogue” is an example of a specific, structured style of conversation that focuses on how specific values yield different positions on particular issues, generating conversations around not two opposing views but at least three or four different value-laden possibilities.[25]
Conclusion
“There was a time when the church was very powerful,” wrote Martin Luther King Jr. from Birmingham city jail to local white clergy who had been critical of the direct-action campaign there. “It was during that period that the early Christians rejoiced when they were deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was the thermostat that transformed the mores of society.”[26] We may wonder about King’s reading of history—and feel concerned about the current power of some Christians (namely nationalists)[27] to transform 21st-century American mores—yet affirm his insight that people of faith could do better than merely reading and reflecting the societal temperature. The posture and strategies outlined above can create openings for us to grasp and come to terms with a plural selfhood, exploring how this reality shapes our thinking and feeling—in actuality, even if this typically occurs without our conscious awareness. Reflecting on this inner diversity can help us become aware of our triggers and our affordances, enabling us to better manage ourselves when the heat rises in a conversation, share honestly and vulnerably from our own formative experiences, and make the most of moments when some aspect of ourselves does resonate with “others.”
Jacob Alan Cook is an ordained Baptist minister and assistant professor of Christian ethics at Eastern Mennonite Seminary. He directs EMS’s Doctor of Ministry in Peacemaking and Social Change Program and co-directs the Shalom Collaboratory, which offers training programs for theologically informed conflict transformation skills.
[1] John Paul Lederach has been a pioneer in this field, co-founding the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding at Eastern Mennonite University and teaching in the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. His published works include Reconcile: Conflict Transformation for Ordinary Christians (1999; repr., Herald Press, 2014), and The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace (Oxford University Press, 2005).
[2] This is a reference to Speed Leas’s classic five-level model of conflict, helpfully summarized and illustrated in David R. Brubaker, When the Center Does Not Hold: Leading in an Age of Polarization (Fortress, 2019), 5–7.
[3] Ellen Ott Marshall, Introduction to Christian Ethics: Conflict, Faith, and Human Life (WJK Books, 2018), 9.
[4] I understand the “beloved community” to be a modern-day re-conception of the biblical “kingdom of God” image. See Jacob L. Goodson, Brad Elliott Stone, and Philip Rudolph Kuehnert, Building Beloved Community in a Wounded World (Cascade Books, 2022), ch. 4.
[5] Top-line analysis from the “Exploring the Pandemic Impacts on Congregations” project reports that “Alignment with personal beliefs and values is the top reason new attenders choose their church. Sixty-three percent cited ideological and cultural alignment as a primary draw—outpacing denominational ties, location, programming, or online accessibility.” http://www.covidreligionresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/This-Place-Means-Everything-to-Me-Key-Findings-from-a-National-Survey-of-Church-Attenders-in-Post-Pandemic-United-States.pdf.
[6] Brubaker, 8.
[7] Kazu Haga further defines these four kinds of conflict (mutually exclusive, pathway, distributive, and values) in Healing Resistance: A Radically Different Response to Harm (Parallax Press, 2016), ch. 6.
[8] For more on Evangelical Worldview Theory, see Jacob Alan Cook, “A New Fundamentalism Rising: The Southern Baptist Battle against the CRT ‘Worldview,’” Journal of American Culture 47, no. 1 (2024): 41–49; and Jacob Alan Cook, Worldview Theory, Whiteness, and the Future of Evangelical Faith (Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2021).
[9] Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (W. W. Norton & Company, 2007), xvi.
[10] Dan P. McAdams, The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By, rev. ed. (Oxford University Press, 2013), 136–39 and 217–18.
[11] For more on the significance and usefulness of a plural self-concept for people of faith summarized only briefly in this section, see Jacob Alan Cook, “Believers’ Baptism as an Ongoing Practice of Constellating Identities: Historical and Theological Insights after the Radical Reformation’s 500th Year,” Journal of European Baptist Studies 25, no. 1 (2025): 121–29; and Cook, Worldview Theory, ch. 2.
[12] Tiffany N. Brannon, Hazel Rose Markus, and Valerie Jones Taylor, “‘Two Souls, Two Thoughts,’ Two Self-Schemas: Double Consciousness Can Have Positive Academic Consequences for African Americans,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 108, no. 4 (2015): 587.
[13] Hazel Rose Markus and Shinobu Kitayama, “Cultures and Selves: A Cycle of Mutual Constitution,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 5, no. 4 (July 2010): 423.
[14] Hazel Rose Markus and Paula Nurius, “Possible Selves,” American Psychologist 41, no. 9 (September 1986): 955.
[15] Karen Farchaus Stein and Hazel Rose Markus, “The Role of the Self in Behavioural Change,” Journal of Psychotherapy Integration 6, no. 4 (December 1996): 351.
[16] Hazel Rose Markus and Elissa Wurf (“The Dynamic Self-Concept: A Social Psychological Perspective,” Annual Review of Psychology 38, no. 1 [February 1987]: 322) contextualize this theory within their plural self-concept, citing Robert A. Wicklund and Peter M. Gollwitzer, Symbolic Self-Completion (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1982).
[17] Drew Westen, “The Cognitive Self and the Psychological Self: Can We Put Our Selves Together?,” Psychological Inquiry 3, no. 1 (1992): 4. See also Patricia W. Linville, “Self-Complexity and Affective Extremity: Don’t Put All of Your Eggs in One Cognitive Basket,” Social Cognition 3, no. 1 (1985): 94–120.
[18] The “power flower” is attributed to Rick Arnold et al., Educating for a Change (Between the Lines, 1991), but is now widely adapted and used. Find an example worksheet and a helpful reflection on this exercise at the University of Central Florida’s Teaching Online Pedagogical Repository at http://topr.online.ucf.edu/the-power-flower-an-inclusion-and-diversity-activity/.
[19] David P. Gushee and Glen H. Stassen, Kingdom Ethics, 2nd ed. (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2016), ch. 9.
[20] Jonathan Haidt and Craig Joseph, “Intuitive Ethics: How Innately Prepared Intuitions Generate Culturally Variable Virtues.” Daedalus 133, no. 4 (2004): 55–66.
[21] Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon Books, 2012), ch. 6.
[22] Find an up-to-date list with definitions, data, and findings on this research project’s website at http://www.MoralFoundations.org.
[23] Haidt and company operate a questionnaire based on the five of the types at http://www.YourMorals.org.
[24] Jonathan Haidt, “The Moral Roots of Liberals and Conservatives,” TED Talks, March 2008, 18:22, http://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_the_moral_roots_of_liberals_and_conservatives.
[25] The Charles F. Kettering Foundation has long been a champion of “deliberative dialogue” to strengthen our capacities to enact democracy, and many universities and other organizations host institutes to practice with this method, with Martín Carcasson’s work at Colorado State University’s Center for public deliberation (http://cpd.colostate.edu) as a leading example. My colleague, Canon Dr. Josh Ritter, is an experienced practitioner of public deliberation, and I am grateful for many conversations with him about deliberation and this article’s themes.
[26] Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” April 16, 1963.
[27] I am reluctant to use the term “Christian nationalism” uncritically and generally prefer David Gushee’s analysis of the underlying problem as “authoritarian reactionary Christianity” in Defending Democracy from Its Christian Enemies (Eerdmans, 2023), ch. 3.
