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John Inazu on Learning to Disagree

January 29, 2025
January Series, Calvin University

Speaking at the January Series at Calvin University on Wed., Jan. 22, author, lawyer, and law professor John Inazu explored life’s unexpected twists, qualities to cultivate for good communication, and the rule of law.

Law wasn’t an early interest for him, explained Inazu, who said he began studying engineering in order to take advantage of a good scholarship, but eventually realized that subject wasn’t a good fit for him. Looking for any course of study that wasn’t engineering, he eventually landed in law, he said, though he admits he didn’t study as hard as he should have during his years in law school. Once he began to actually practice law, however, he found that he enjoyed it and was good at it, he said.

After landing a position on the legal team at the Pentagon and working there for several years, Inazu said, he decided he needed a slower, less intense career, and chose to complete his doctorate and teach law in a university setting. “It’s been an amazing fit for a number of reasons,” he said. Inazu noted that the three core elements of being a professor are teaching, research, and service – which he described as being “the administrative stuff”. His years at the Pentagon prepared him for bureaucracy, he explained, and the teaching and research are “mostly joy.”

Shirley Hoogstra, who moderated the interview-style presentation, responded, “That is such a good story – and it’s also real evidence of how God leads one in their career, isn’t it?”

Inazu agreed, noting how hard it can be to predict where you’re going to go in your career. Opportunities come up; decisions are made in various circumstances; and when we look back at our journey, we realize we’re not in control but that God is faithful in his guidance.

Hoogstra noted that something she tells young people is that she wished she had worried less in her younger years. “You worry so much that you’ve got to get it right, or make the best choices, or do the next thing. [Instead] I think I would pray more, and risk more, and worry less.”

Reflecting on how he came to write his latest book, Learning to Disagree, Inazu said he frequently found himself in situations that needed discernment on this subject. “As a Christian who teaches at a non-Christian university, there are tensions in my university setting. There are also tensions in my church setting, with people distrustful of higher education. As someone who’s a Japanese American, there are complicated dynamics of race to navigate. As a military officer influenced by a pacifist theologian [Henri Nouwen], there are challenges there. . . . [There are also] lots of differences and different communities where I’m having not only to think about [navigating disagreement] abstractly but also to live it out in real relationships. And then this book became an opportunity to talk about both of those together,” explained Inazu.

In the book, Inazu discusses skills and qualities we can cultivate to improve communications and engage differences. One of those is empathy, the effort to try to put yourself into someone else’s shoes and understand how they see things in a different way than you do. There are limits to our understanding, he acknowledged, but we need to try. 

One case he discusses with students, he said, is about cannibalism on the high seas, where a stranded crew was running out of food to survive. Situations like that raise profound questions about punishment, culpabilities, levels of involvement, and levels of punishment, he explained. Inazu said he encourages his students to really think about what they would do in such a situation, starving on a boat with no rescue in sight.

Empathy shouldn’t necessarily change our minds on deeply held convictions, he said, but it can broaden our perspective to see why someone might act or think the way they do. “It doesn’t mean we never judge or never punish, but it does caution us [against] a rush to judgment or a sense that we know better or would do better in a situation,” said Inazu.

Inazu suggested that a presumption of good faith – that we both have good intentions in mind – used to be common but has been lost in recent years, almost to the point where we accuse people who think differently than we do of lying or malice. Empathy tries to reverse that.

Another skill Inazu explores in his book is compromise. Hoogstra pointed out that in today’s society, compromise can be seen as a negative, “selling out” or giving up on our convictions. However, in creating and applying law, we can’t all get what we want, so we need to learn to compromise to create the best solution possible for the most people.

There are some cases where compromise is not possible, such as a policy on whether or not pets are allowed on airplanes. Pet owners may really want their service or companion animal with them, but people with severe allergies could be put at risk by the presence of animals on the plane. Airlines are forced to make a choice that means some are satisfied and some are not. 

In other cases, there are compromises possible, and no one will be very satisfied, but they can accept the solution presented or continue to look for better solutions. 

The role of law, courts, lawyers, and judges, said Inazu, is to help us settle our disputes. The system is imperfect and flawed, he acknowledged, but we need to recognize that it’s a lot better than the alternative of street violence, chaos, or anarchy, where, in almost every case, the people who are most vulnerable have the most to lose. We can be skeptical of the legal system, but we also know that we need one.

He suggested that pardons like those that both President Biden and President Trump have recently granted have a negative effect overall on the rule of law. “Whatever you think about a party or candidate, collectively over the past [several] administrations the office of the presidency has effectively consolidated power through the use of executive orders, and now pardons, and both parties [are] responsible for this. . . . When your people are in power, you love having consolidated power, and when it’s the other people, you think it’s evil and terrible. But the system collectively has been a one-way ratchet to give the White House more power than it was meant to have, and that’s bad for democracy.”

As Christians, we can recognize that courts and law are human attempts at justice that will inevitably fall short. We will continue hurting and harming, and we’ll be victims and perpetrators of injustice, and we’ll try to figure it out, said Inazu, but injustices will never be fully reconciled in this world. Judges make the best decisions they can, but it won’t erase the pain or the harm done. All we have left at that point are grace, forgiveness, and hope – and those are powerful and worth living for.

Other qualities and skills Inazu recommended include striving to see people as people and not as problems; recognizing that laws on religion need to protect the rights not only of Christians but also of Muslims, Jews, atheists, and others to practice their faith or non-belief; and remembering that while we can love and serve our country, as Christians we shouldn’t blur our allegiances. Inazu explained, “My ultimate allegiances are elsewhere, and I want to keep my civic allegiances in their proper place.”

When it comes to government regulation, Inazu suggested that Christians can tend to rely too much on government protections for what they want to do. Churches need to be able to set membership boundaries and choose leaders, and the law needs to protect that. At the same time, he said, we don’t always need access to the public square, like saying a prayer before a government meeting or setting up monuments in public spaces.

We often see people – especially historic figures – as either heroes or villains, Inazu explained, but when we forget the complexities of humanity, we make things too simple. There are very few pure heroes and pure villains. For example, Inazu said, the main architects for the Japanese internment during World War II were Franklin Roosevelt and Earl Warren, whom many think of today as champions of civil liberties. That doesn’t mean they didn’t do good things, but history can be complicated and we can let it be that way, he suggested.

Inazu’s grandparents, he said, were included in the Japanese internment and lost everything. Inazu grew up hearing stories from that time, but his perspective on the hardships experienced by his father’s parents and many others, he said, changed when he visited the internment camp where his father was born and he better understood the human and generational costs involved.

Toward the end of his grandmother’s life, Inazu said, he interviewed her about the internment. “She talked about how painful that was; she never forgot about the experience – and yet she also was so grateful to this country and was so proud to be an American citizen, and ultimately was able to forgive the country for what it had done to her and her life,” he explained. 

Her example and those of others who suffered greatly and were able to forgive, Inazu said, inspired him to see that if they could forgive, surely he can forgive the smaller hurts and annoyances of day-to-day life. “The call to enact forgiveness in big and small ways is part of what lets us go on as humans,” he concluded.