Radical Tolerance

Some fragmented thoughts on the countercultural teaching of Paulo Freire, a remarkable dialogue in Iran, the Last Supper, and my upcoming ordination

Thursday, March 28
Grand Rapids, Mich.

My friend Austin Channing Brown posted about the Brazilian writer Paulo Freire’s book Pedagogy of the Oppressed the other day. It’s a wise, humane, and convicting book, and Austin’s comments reminded me that I hadn’t returned to Freire’s wisdom in many years.

As I re-read Freire’s writing, I realized that he articulated things that I’ve not been able to put into words. There is so much righteous fury right now—a noble, stirring outcry for real justice and true peace in so many parts of the life of this aching world. Yet again and again, I’ve struggled with both the nature and tenor of much of the discourse, which can be dehumanizing even as it seeks to name and shame dehumanization. 

Freire uses dehumanization as an umbrella term to explain violence and oppression. In the face of dehumanization, he insists that the only way forward is humanization—in other words, a radical and countercultural love that is both candid and compassionate. After all, as he writes, “there are neither utter ignoramuses nor perfect sages; there are only people who are attempting, together, to learn more than they now know.” We’re all human. 

In Freire’s view, no “side” has a monopoly on reactionary behavior or narrow sectarianism. On both sides, the sectarian “feels threatened if [their] truth is questioned. Thus, each considers anything that is not ‘his’ truth a lie,” he writes. “As the journalist Marcio Moreira Alves once told me, ‘They both suffer from an absence of doubt.’” 

A poster by Túlio Carapiá and Clara Cerqueira, from “To Hope: 100 Years of Paulo Freire,” an exhibition organized by the Tricontinental Institute of Social Research

Instead of certainty, Freire believes that the truly radical person “is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world unveiled. This person is not afraid to meet the people or to enter into dialogue with them. This person does not consider himself or herself the proprietor of history or of all people, or the liberator of the oppressed; but he or she does commit... to fight at their side.” 

To fight wisely, though, does not mean to employ the oppressor’s tactics. It’s all too easy, Freire argues, to “fall into using slogans, communiques, monologues, and instructions,” instead of choosing “dialogue, reflection, and communication.” Nor does liberation mean reversing roles, such that victims of injustice, or their allies,  dehumanize the oppressor: “If the goal of the oppressed is to become fully human, they will not achieve their goal by merely reversing the terms of the contradiction, by simply changing poles.”

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Paulo Freire was born in 1921 into a middle-class Brazilian family that, during the Great Depression and then after his father’s death, slid deeper and deeper into poverty. During adolescence, he felt what he called “a real and concrete hunger that had no specific date of departure”—a personal experience of poverty that gave him a lifelong compassion for the suffering. 

Though he went on to study law and pass the bar, Freire devoted himself to the education of the poor. In the early 1960s, he devised a method of teaching the illiterate to read in six weeks. His reward for his innovation: imprisonment by a right-wing regime in Brazil that saw Freire’s work as subversive.

Paulo Freire in 1977. Photo by Slobodan Dimitrov

His opponents were right: Freire’s work is subversive—and empowering. He perceived society from the perspective of an educator. Early on, he realized the shortcomings of the “banking” model of education, which supposes that a teacher bestows upon the student a set of knowledge. “Teaching is not a simple transmission,” he writes, “to be memorized by students mechanically.” 

This is something we still struggle to understand, both within and beyond the classroom. Instead, we act as if, to be good and virtuous, one must have the right knowledge, say the right words, and make the right arguments. If only the unenlightened would acquire that knowledge and say those words and make those arguments, then they too could be good and virtuous. We see it, too, in the constant creation of new shibboleths—use this word, and you will have demonstrated that you are sufficiently virtuous; post this meme, and you will have proved yourself to be on the side of justice.

Even when the knowledge is good, there’s something dehumanizing and “characteristic of the ideology of oppression” about such thinking, Freire writes. In that hierarchy, “knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing.” 

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Though Freire is best remembered as a professor and political activist, his spirituality was subtly yet intricately woven into his work. In the 1940s, he and his first wife, Elsa, became active in the Catholic Action movement in Brazil, which was especially active in rural education and poverty alleviation. Later in his life, he spent years working with the World Council of Churches.

Five years before his death in 1997, Freire wrote Pedagogy of Hope. Reflecting on all that had happened in the world in the four-plus decades since the publication of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he made explicit what was subtly woven throughout his earlier work: “I do not understand human existence, and the struggle needed to improve it, apart from hope and dream.” To his understanding, hope isn’t just positive thinking or good feeling; it is active movement and faithful struggle. “Hope,” he writes, “demands an anchoring in practice.... There is no hope in sheer hopefulness. The hoped-for is not attained by dint of raw hoping. Just to hope is to hope in vain.” 

What surprised me in re-reading Freire was his deep patience with human foibles. Perhaps, in my younger days, his bold ideas so dazzled me that I failed to recognize his incisive analysis of the failures of his political allies. For instance, he reflects on his experience in Chile in the early 1970s, where the political left and center fragmented in the last days of the Allende government. “Only a radical politics,” he writes, “could ever have won the battle for a democracy that could stand up to the power and virulence of the Right.” 

Here, he takes what was, for me, an unexpected turn: By “radical,” Freire doesn’t mean “pure” or “hardline.” He laments the lack of solidarity and hospitality. “Instead, there was only sectarianism and intolerance—the rejection of differences,” he says. “Tolerance was not what it ought to be: the revolutionary virtue that consists in a peaceful coexistence with those who are different, in order to wage a better fight against the adversaries.”

Tolerance: a word so noxious to so many self-described revolutionaries, a term tantamount to moral compromise— Freire encourages and even celebrates tolerance. The word appears nowhere in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Yet in Pedagogy of Hope, he uplifts it. As if anticipating critics, he carefully distinguishes it from “connivance”—in other words, a willful acceptance of wrongdoing. For Freire, tolerance is crucial because every learner is partway through a process of becoming.

Freire is an educator writing to educators, and if he is dogmatic about anything, it’s his conviction that good teachers must respect their students as and where they are, for the sake of fostering loving and patient dialogue: “The more tolerant, the more open and forthright, the more critical, the more curious and humble they become, the more authentically they will take up the practice of teaching.”

A poster by Glabia Soraia Andrade Silva, from “To Hope: 100 Years of Paulo Freire”

Even then, so much of what he has to say has broad application, particularly when we notice how so many on social media are now self-appointed educators, ready on any given day to lecture the unenlightened on global geopolitics, public health, economic policy, and (checks today’s notes) container shipping. 

Tolerance, openness, forthrightness, critical thinking, curiosity, humility—these are virtues to which I’d hope most of us aspire. Here’s the big challenge for me: As easy as it might be to point fingers at others, I still need to grow in these areas myself. 

Freire offers wise counsel to everyone who is trying to be more just, more loving—more fully human.  The cultivation of these virtues isn’t easy. He consistently names how messy the process of rehumanization will be. Those who are fighting oppression will mimic the oppressor. All of us will make mistakes. We will see other human beings as things and objects, not persons and beloveds. 

Yet still we must have hope, and still we must dream, and still we must act, even if we do so imperfectly. As I re-read Freire, I felt as if he was summoning us to something that he rarely named explicitly himself: grace.

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What I’m Reading: One theme in Paulo Freire’s writing is dialogue as an expression of love. One can’t have true dialogue without love—love that listens, that makes space, that seeks to understand. I don’t know if it’s serendipity or providence—depends on one’s theological posture, I suppose—but as I was working on this week’s newsletter, I happened upon the journalist Amy Frykholm’s account in The Christian Century of her trip last year to Iran. 

Frykholm was there to observe the latest installment of a decades-long dialogue between Canadian Mennonite leaders and Iranian Shi’a scholars. “While the two groups attempt, from such different backgrounds and traditions, to clarify what each means by authority or scripture or revelation or justice or spirituality, the forces of politics and propaganda howl unmercifully overhead,” she writes. “Each dialogue, whether in Canada or Iran, feels like a tiny miracle of existence. Even to be in the same room at the same time is an extreme feat.” 

I don’t wish to give away what Frykholm observed or learned—it’s best experienced in the unfolding of her narrative—but I’m not spoiling anything by saying that the holy work of relationship can feel painfully slow. While such dialogue is deeply encouraging, it’s also sobering—and so countercultural in our age of instant gratification. 

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“Dialogue is kebab around a table,” a young Iranian scholar named Hamed Shah Rafati says in Frykholm’s piece. “Without kebab, there is no dialogue.” 

Rafati’s wry observation reminded me of my favorite aspect of the Gospel accounts of Jesus’s ministry. While we might fixate on the healings and the miracles, because they’re just so extraordinary, peppered throughout are stories about Jesus sitting down for meals not just with his friends but also with his sparring partners and adversaries. And while smartphone revolutionaries incessantly cite the one instance of Jesus flipping tables, the uncomfortable truth is that, according to the biblical accounts, Jesus sat at many more tables than he overturned. 

“The Last Supper,” Church of Debra Berhan Selassie, Gondar, Ethiopia. Detail from a photograph by Bernard Gagnon

“Do this in remembrance of me,” Jesus said at that most famous of suppers, after breaking the bread and distributing it among his disciples. The bread, though, has been degraded and waferized, this act of remembrance ritualized and decontextualized. In becoming transactional and even rote, what have we lost? What if the remembrance was about not just the consumption of a piece of bread but also the messiness of gathering for a family meal?

The summer after I graduated from seminary, some friends and I led a retreat at the Farminary. For dinner one night, we sat out under the branches of the cherry trees, the table laden with leftovers from our previous meals as well as a leg of lamb that we had imperfectly roasted over the fire. Partway through the meal, we interrupted the conversations and we sprang a surprise on the retreat participants: We were going to do communion right then and there.

We came from so many different places, carrying with us so many different burdens, and most of us weren’t sure where we were going. As we passed the bread around the table, tearing off chunks and handing them to our neighbor with a word of blessing, we also found unlikely belonging and holy sanctuary.

On this Maundy Thursday, as we remember the Last Supper, that’s my wish for you too: Even as you sit at tables where you wonder whether you belong, I hope and pray that you’ll be surprised by belonging, encouraged by grace, and emboldened by love.

“The Last Supper,” an 18th century icon from the Monastery of Saints Sergius and Bacchus, in Maloula, Syria

Please keep me in your thoughts and prayers too. Ordination happens in nine days. You are most welcome to join us on Saturday, April 6, at 11 a.m. at Old First Reformed Church in Brooklyn, N.Y., either in-person or via the Interwebs. (I’ll share the livestream link in next week’s newsletter.) I will also be preaching at Old First on Sunday the 7th, also at 11 a.m. All are welcome!

All my best,
Jeff