Abstract
In Seeking Good Debate: Religion, Science, and Conflict in American Public Life, Michael Evans sets out to understand American public debate about a set of controversial social issues in which religious and scientific elites make competing claims of expertise, issues with implications for social policy and the deployment of government and private resources: the nature of human origins, stem cell research, environmental policy, and the origins of homosexuality. This is relatively well-travelled terrain, and yet Evans brings a fresh perspective in his argument that there is nothing inherently controversial about any of these issues. Moreover, he argues there is no reason that we should understand conflict between these and similar issues to be anchored within inherently opposing approaches by religious and scientific authorities.
Instead, he argues, the reason that we have repeated public controversy over issues like these has far less to do with the relationship between religion and science than it does with the structure of public debate. To support this argument, Evans builds a large, original dataset containing thousands of articles from both national and regional newspapers over a 10-year period (1997 to 2007) and interviews 62 “ordinary Americans” to gain insight about how news coverage of these issues shapes popular opinion.
Evans seeks to address a variety of theoretical traditions and perspectives in sociology, political science, and related disciplines, all of which take for granted that “good” public debate is important for the functioning of a democratic society and all of which understand “good” debate as deliberative. That is, a good debate is one in which participants encounter and engage one another with arguments, ideas, and claims with the purpose of increasing mutual understanding. This understanding is informed by several strands of contemporary social theory, most notably by the work of Jürgen Habermas. In this larger tradition, the media is one locus of public debate, but it is not the only one, with face-to-face encounters mattering a great deal as well, in settings ranging from the informal (discussing politics with one’s friends over dinner or drinks) to the associational (a church or civic group that fosters regular discussion forums on matters of public concern) and political (conversations at local party organizing meetings and related events).
This is a smart and thought-provoking book that nevertheless leaves some key analytical choices underspecified. One area in which this is most noticeable is the unproblematic equation of “media coverage” with “public debate.” In light of the broader understanding of the meaning of public debate just outlined, the author could have done more to specify the analytical and substantive importance of media as a context for debate vis-à-vis other realms in which debate occurs and to justify the choice of engaging in such a media-focused account. While no one would deny the importance of mass media in a late-modern society for shaping the public’s substantive beliefs and policy preferences, a consideration of what is lost by lacking data on other contexts of “encounter” and “engagement” would have strengthened the analysis.
A second area that remains underspecified is the strengths, as well as the pitfalls, of using computer-driven software to count mentions of various persons—along with the analytical decision to treat these individuals as spokespersons for various positions in the debates over specific issues. This leads in not a few cases to results that need quite a bit of interpretation to make sense—for example, on page 29, in Table 1, we find that George W. Bush was a “spokesperson” in the human origins debate, along with Charles Darwin, Clarence Darrow, William Jennings Bryan, and Galileo Galilei, among others. Evans defends his choice to frame the analysis this way by arguing that living representatives are invoking the names of dead representatives to carry on contemporary debates (p. 30). This makes sense. But it also serves to obfuscate who the contemporary representatives are. Who is doing the invoking of Darwin and Galileo? What organizations and networks are these contemporary representatives affiliated with, and what material, political, and ideal interests do they represent?
These questions are answered by focusingon a few exemplary cases of living representatives—for example, Jerry Falwell, George W. Bush, and Richard Dawkins. In discussing them in more detail, Evans makes it clear that they are not seeking good debate—that is, they are not trying to encounter other speakers and engage with them in order to develop greater mutual understanding. Rather, these speakers enter the arena with a prefabricated and solidified position, and their public statements are aimed at persuading others that their position is correct and dissuading others from listening to alternative views: they are crusaders. The inclusion of Bush is no accident, for part of Evans’s thesis is that sometimes the crusader is not crusading for religion or science, but for some other agenda entirely. One is left wondering, though, how typical the crusader approach is and whether the other contemporary representatives who invoke past figures to support their current claims are operating as crusaders or not. The way the data are coded and presented, it is impossible to tell.