The “guide into compliance” language is unsettling

How people acquire beliefs, hold beliefs, and change beliefs.

I’ve written before that once I’m 80% sure of an idea, it’s worth writing about. Today’s email barely meets this threshold. It’s first draft thinking about what makes the “guiding into compliance” language unsettling. Feedback welcome.

One of the recommendations in the Committee 8 Majority Report, forwarded as communication to Synod 2024, recommends that “the individual must diligently work toward resolving their confessional difficulty.” 

Basically, you need to change your mind. You need to get from not thinking something in the confessions is true to thinking something in the confessions is true. And the proscribed way for this to happen is with the guidance of an assembly.

The challenge is this: some things in the confessions are not the kind of things people can change their minds about.

Knowledge-based beliefs vs. affect-based beliefs

There are, very broadly (and maybe simplistically), two kinds of beliefs.

1. Knowledge-based beliefs are of the kind where you come to see something as true when you understand how it fits within an overall conceptual network that you might implicitly or explicitly already accept. For example, office-bearers who sign confessional-difficulty gravamen must undertake the work of examining and revising their beliefs about what “unchastity” might mean, in order to get their beliefs in line with Synod 2022’s definition of the word. If you think or aren’t sure it includes same-sex sex, then you need to change what you think by locating this word in a different conceptual framework. You need to change your mind within a defined time period.

2. Affect-based beliefs are based on emotions, feelings, and other non-cognitive sources—the kind of thing we might refer to as “gut feel” or even “instinct.” For example, these beliefs might include a preference for Culver’s over Chick-fil-A; a strong hatred of wind chimes (a belief I hold); or your willingness to die to save your child. It might even include disgust at the thought of same-sex sex. Your beliefs on these matters don’t depend on their coherence within a conceptual framework, so changing your mind about such things doesn’t involve locating them into a new conceptual framework, either. In fact, these are things you probably could not change your mind about.

There’s a great deal written about both kinds of beliefs, but a useful summary of affect-based beliefs in particular is found in a paper by Thomas D. Griffin and Stellan Ohlsson:

“Affective beliefs seem to face an 'all or nothing' dilemma, where the most probable outcome is a lack of belief revision. Issues of motivation and conceptual structure make it unlikely that affect-based beliefs will be revised following the comprehension of a coherent conceptual framework.”

And:

“Self-reported willingness to change a belief reflects belief-specific epistemological values that should affect the motivations relevant to belief revision. Thus, it is noteworthy that participants reported being rather unwilling to change their affect-based beliefs, even if presented with sound conflicting evidence, but relatively willing to change knowledge-based beliefs.”

If that’s true, that’s going to be a big problem at Synod 2024.

Both sides hold affect-based beliefs

In our current moment in the CRC, it’s tempting for each side to claim knowledge-based beliefs and accuse the other side of holding affect-based beliefs.

However, my (very tentative) contention is that individual and group positions on matters of human sexuality function, to a great degree, as a form of authentic self-expression. They signal identity and help people make sense of meaning on both sides. For many on the right and the left, beliefs about human sexuality are affect-based beliefs more than they are knowledge-beliefs.

From the way the conversation has gone since 2016, it seems this way.

Nicolas Parot and Eric Mandelbaum write:

“For beliefs with which we self-identify, rational updating – for example, apportioning and weighing evidence – is not the prevailing norm. People accept and reject information not to maintain epistemic coherence as much as to buttress their sense of self…. When it comes to information gathering, people tend to engage in selective exposure of information. They seek out information that is concordant with their beliefs, and avoid information that is discordant with them… True believers of any stripe are apt to discount disconfirming evidence because of the crushing effects evidence would have on their way of life.”

What this means for confessional-difficulty gravamina

The gravamina process assumes a world where humans are mainly thinking things who acquire knowledge-based beliefs, hold those beliefs so long as they cohere with a certain conceptual framework, and can revise those beliefs when new information allows for or forces a change. It’s a world where people who file confessional-difficulty gravamina can be, in the language of Committee 8’s Majority Report, “guided into compliance.” Within this framework, it would make sense that such work could be framed as pastoral and loving.

But that’s not at all how many on the left who undergo this “guiding” will experience it. That’s because many on the left, just like many on the right, hold affect-based beliefs. A process that asks them to change their mind about the definition of unchastity is like changing my mind about wind chimes. It’s a confusion of categories.

I don’t have a good solution to the dilemma. An easy way out is to require a change in belief and provide a deadline. That recommendation will probably be proposed at Synod 2024, and it will probably pass. But I don’t think that’s the right way.

Institutions need to define their boundaries. The right is correct that the Christian Reformed Church ought to define its boundaries, too. That’s the job of Synod. And it makes good sense for those boundaries to be the confessions.

But such boundary-definitions need to take a more accurate account of how real people with real beliefs acquire those beliefs and hold them, and how they change beliefs (or when they can’t, why not). The current conversation isn’t doing this.

Thanks for reading,

Kent