Your Son Got in Trouble at School: A Case Study of Tribalism

Tribalism, like the words “fundamentalist,” “nationalist,” and now “empathy,” is tottering on the edge of uselessness. Nobody knows what it means anymore. When someone says they reject tribalism, what they’re usually saying is that they choose to believe or do certain things independent of what influential people in their demographic group are believing or doing. There are lots of people who reject tribalism in this sense; they are, in fact, a growing tribe.

Disputes over tribalism, at least online, are usually proxy wars over the relative goodness or badness of a given tribe. For example, if you’re a Republican, the editors of The Atlantic probably would welcome an essay from you on how you reject tribalism and choose to hold Donald Trump accountable for actions you find wrong. The editors of The Atlantic would probably not, on the other hand, welcome an essay from you on how something that Trump did that was broadly unpopular was actually good or wise.

Both of these imaginary essays are rejections of tribalistic thinking, but the real issue here is that Trump is, to the editors of The Atlantic, an absolute moral evil. Tribalism is only useful if it distances one from absolute more evils.

This sounds cynical. But I do believe that Christian wisdom rubs against this kind of tribalism. In my book Digital Liturgies, I offered three characteristics of Christian thinking, one of which is “careful.” Christian thinking is careful not to outsource its tasks to partisan memberships. In other words, don’t ignore your conscience or Scripture just because your friends are doing it or the people sounding the alarm about it happen to be enemies.

But there is a flip side to this. It’s not good to ignore real evil for the sake of friendship or camaraderie. But it’s also not good to quickly abandon friendship and loyalties simply at the first sign of trouble. In Psalm 15, David writes:

O Lord, who shall sojourn in your tent?
Who shall dwell on your holy hill?

He who walks blamelessly and does what is right
and speaks truth in his heart;
who does not slander with his tongue
and does no evil to his neighbor,
nor takes up a reproach against his friend;

Alongside speaking truth and doing good, David puts the refusal to “take up a reproach against” ones friend. This is a form of good tribalism. The Bible does not take love lightly; “A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for adversity” (Prov. 17:17). In the digital age, we follow and “Like” at our leisure, and sometimes we feel something like friendship with pictures and usernames. Yet we can leave these relationships just as easily we made them. The Bible says this is a deceptive liturgy of the Internet. Friendship and love are not moods that we can or should snap out of.

So what does that mean for tribalism? What does good tribalism look like? Where do love and truth-telling intersect? My answer comes in the form of this scenario.

One day, you get a note from school. Your son’s teacher has made allegations of bad behavior against him—not just breaking rules, but the kind of behavior that requires character maintenance.

Upon reading the note, you immediately ask your son about this. He emphatically denies the allegations. His version of the story is very different: not completely absolving him of foolishness, perhaps, but certainly not the moral failure the teacher has alleged. He has a plausible enough explanation as to why his teacher would believe differently. Your son, meanwhile, is generally trustworthy, though not perfectly.

At this point, you have three distinct options open to you. These are three different forms of “tribalism.”

Option #1: Take up the reproach.

In this option, your embarrassment over the allegations and your desire for the teacher to think well of your parenting rise up above all other motivations. You push aside the plausible denials of your son and immediately choose to believe the teacher. As far as you’re concerned, the mere appearance of wrongdoing is enough to justify siding with the teacher and meting out punishment.

At play here is the desire inside you to be well thought of by the teacher. You trust the teacher implicitly, but it’s not really about trust. It’s about trying to keep the peace between you and someone whose opinion matters.

Option 2: Tribal Deflection

In this option, you resent the note. You decide immediately that your son could not have done this. You think the note is probably evidence of bias against your son. In this option, your loyalty to your son and desire for him to be well thought of rise up above all other motivations.

What’s more, you know that if you concede anything to this teacher, the odds are good she will feel in control of your son and likely try to find more to accuse him of. A teacher like this should not be gratified by even the slightest admission. After all, even if your son is at fault somehow, his character won’t be helped by giving into the demands of a controlling, biased teacher.

Option 3: Truth-Telling

The simplest option to describe is the most complicated one to actually do. In this scenario, you take the teacher’s allegations seriously. Yet you give your son a chance to explain himself, listening carefully to his version and considering, against logic and previous experience, how likely it is. Then, you report this version back to the teacher. You let her know that his response was emphatic and that you want to the truth to get out. So you ask if there is anything else you should know: Other people who saw, for example, or perhaps something that would become evident if the allegations were true.

This scenario leaves all outcomes possible. You might become convinced your son is guilty. You might become convinced the teacher is incorrect. You might become convinced it’s his word and against hers and there’s simply not enough evidence in either direction to bring down a heavy hammer against your son. In any event, you feel the weight of trying to love your son enough to believe the best but also confront the worst. You also feel the weight of giving credence to a trusted figure, but an awareness that even good people can get something wrong (or, in a moment of weakness, even lie).

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Which option is the best?

Most people would probably say option #3. The first option is a failure to love your son enough to take his words seriously. The second option is a failure to love your son enough to take his capacity for sin seriously. When you lay them out like this, it becomes evident which option honors both truth and tribe.

This gives a clue as to how we should relate our desire for truth to our desire for community, for a tribe. A tribe, after all, is at its realest a community of people to whom we owe the debts of love. When that tribe comes under fire, our first instinct ought not to be to save our own skin by ditching as fast as we can.

In the social media era, too many people view themselves as de facto journalists, where even friendships and memberships are little more than “sources” we can leverage for our own personal brand. I’ve seen too many people become distrustful too quickly of friends and teachers that have a proven track record of faithfulness. Why? Because the digital ecosystem is constantly pressing on them. Yes, your friends and mentors are capable of evil. But love creates a natural risk of association. To love anyone at all is to become vulnerable to the beloved’s choices. There is no love without this risk.

But there is also, of course, an ambient unwillingness to admit any accusation against the group we consider our own. There is a fear that if we acknowledge our sins then our enemies will win. The risks of humility are real, too, and the water in our political culture has a poison that will not take that risk. Every single day we are told that whatever sin, whatever absurdity, whatever compromise our side might be engaged in is nothing compared to what The Other Side is doing. Don’t you want to win? Don’t you want to save your kids and your church and your country from The Other Side?

This, too, is a failure to love. I fail to love my children when I cannot countenance an accusation against them. I fail to love my children when I cannot bring myself to look their fallenness in the eye. What I am loving in that moment is not my children but myself. I am loving my own reflection in them. The glistening image of my own sense of self is too precious to risk sullying. This is what tribal deflection is. It fails to love your party, your philosophy, your institution, and your cause, enough to help it toward truth and integrity.

“And ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath, but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.” (Eph. 6:4) Nurture and admonition. Tenderness and discipline. Loyalty and truth-telling. The alternative? Wrath. And don’t we have enough of that?