At this point in his life, Collis, who has made his mark as one of the preeminent scholars on the First Amendment, who has authored well-respected books on the power of belief and who lives his faith 24/7, ties all three of those hats—professor, author and God-fearing individual—together by urging us to live in amity and accord.
In other words, peace.
“At the heart of our First Amendment freedoms is the idea that people with very different religious and other beliefs can thrive alongside one another in the same society,” he tells Freedom.
Saying it, of course, is one thing. Living it is quite another. For a nation of some 346,650,415 opinions—many of them passionately held and wildly differing from one to the next—“thriving alongside one another in the same society” can become a tall order.
“As soon as we can realize how little we know about almost every topic, it should change our approach to everything.”
Enter Collis’ new book, Habits of a Peacemaker, which offers an olive branch of wisdom and reassurance that peace is possible, and makes clear that peace begins as understanding between individuals, graduating next, hopefully, to peace between nations throughout the world. “I didn’t write this book purporting to be the world’s greatest peacemaker,” he says. “These are lessons I learned from talking to people who are really excellent at these habits.”
Those habits well-learned could be the cavalry coming to the rescue of an increasingly polarized world, where chances are that any conversation can be a powder keg threatening to explode into its own mini-World War III.
It’s a simple enough formula: If you know all there is to know, you also know that anyone who disagrees with you is a fool. The problem is when the person arguing with you also knows all there is to know and thinks you’re a fool. And, since it’s impossible to win an argument with a fool, you both lose.
That’s why the very first step—and Collis lists 10—in building a bridge between yourself and a person with a diametrically opposite stance on some contentious subject is humility. No matter if the person you’re dealing with is so passionate about the subject under discussion that they’re drooling on your carpet. No matter that you have DNA evidence they are not only wrong but also ugly. The end result of your dialogue is not to reduce your interlocutor to a sniveling propitiating wreck in the face of your superior intellect.
“I put humility first because it undergirds everything else,” Collis says. “As soon as we can realize how little we know about almost every topic, it should change our approach to everything.”
Collis reasons thus because, contrary to the fashion of the times, conversation is not a blood sport. “Even if you walk away understanding how someone with whom you vehemently disagree reached that conclusion,” he says, “that, to me, is a productive conversation. You come to understand them better, even if you disagree with them.”
Now, doesn’t that sound easier on the blood pressure?
This past fall, Collis decided to take his peacemaking habits for a test drive, inviting some of the world’s leading thinkers on free speech to converse on one stage on the emotion-fraught, religion-laced subject of campus unrest, with himself as moderator and potential referee.
“I was frustrated when the campus protests were happening because everybody just immediately jumped to whatever tribe they were part of and started spouting opinions with almost no information about what was actually happening on the ground. So I wanted to bring these folks together to show how much you really need to know and understand in order to talk about it in a healthy way.”
The respected scholars taking their seats at the University of Texas—hailing from the US, Canada and Australia—had no clue they were guinea pigs. They all had strong opinions, all had airtight arguments in their corner and all were expecting to be treated like the thought leaders they were in their respective spheres.
“They had a hard time wrapping their heads around [the format] because each of them is used to being the keynote speaker,” Collis explained. “And I kept telling them, ‘No, you’re just going to have a conversation.’ And they were really struggling to capture that idea.”
Collis was well aware that the end result could be catastrophic. But for a full hour, the scholars actually did as they were told: They talked, disagreed, disagreed some more and talked some more, but did it all in a civil tone, which heightened their understanding of each other’s positions. It also likely offered the students in the audience what Collis had aimed for: living proof that you don’t know a topic (no matter how obvious it seems to you) until you fully listen and understand the other person’s position on it, too.
With understanding comes peace.
According to Collis, there’s more of that commodity around than we think—especially in the area that tolls through his life like a bell: religion and religious freedom.
“I don’t think we realize how unique the peace is that we enjoy in the United States: We are the most religiously diverse country in the history of humanity, yet we live alongside one another mostly in peace. That peace is rare historically and it’s even rarer in the world today. It comes from robust religious freedom.”
Habits of a Peacemaker is at once Steven T. Collis’ validation of that unique brand of peace and an owner’s manual on how to embrace the diversity that is its strength and foundation—a diversity not only of religions and cultures but individual points of view as well.
And Steven T. Collis himself sets an example—as author, teacher and person of faith—of how to restore today’s minefield of rancor to the marketplace of ideas and freedoms it was always meant to be.
