Jim Nantz Kicks Off “Faith & Values” Series!

Jim Nantz Kicks Off “Faith & Values” Series!
by
September 09, 2024

Legendary CBS sports broadcaster Jim Nantz will be our special guest on Wednesday night at 6:15 to kick off our fall series “Faith, Values, and the Public Square.”  Jim and I will talk about his many accomplishments in sports broadcasting, his close relationship with President George H. W. Bush, September 11th, the need for civility, and how sports can unite a divided world.  If you have never heard Jim speak before, you should certainly come.  This will be a very special evening at Woodmont and one you don’t want to miss!  Jim is a Charlotte native, played golf at the University of Houston, and has now worked for CBS since the early 1980s.  He now lives here in Nashville.  He just called his 39th Masters Tournament this past April.

With a presidential election now in full swing, a primary reason we do these special series is to encourage dialogue, education, and civility in a hostile culture.  In his book Morality, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks expressed his deep concern about the death of civility in Western culture.  Not only has this become a secular problem in political dialogue and the public square, but also a big problem among believers of the same faith tradition.  “Civility is more than good manners.  It is a recognition that violent speech leads to violent deeds; that listening respectfully to your opponent is a necessary part of the politics of a free society; and that liberal democracy, predicated as it is on the dignity of diversity, must keep the peace between contending groups by honoring us all equally, in both our diversity and our commonalities.”

Sacks was intentionally specific about the fundamental reasons why civility has declined so rapidly in our culture.  First, we have seen a deepening sense of individualism that has grown in Western culture ever since the 1960s. We have moved further and further away from the civic mindset of the greatest generation who returned from the war and invested in social capital.  Second, we now have the internet which has permanently altered the way that we acquire information.  We are living in an age of information overload, and much of the information is inaccurate or not grounded in facts.  Third, and perhaps most significantly, we are experiencing the un-civilizing impact of social media, often described as the disinhibition effect, which according to Sacks is a “cacophony of noise in place of true communication.”  It is often anonymous, invisible, asynchronous, unregulated, and not face-to-face.  People will type and post things they would never say face-to-face to another person.  One outrageous remark results in another.  The more outrageous the comment, the more views and “likes” it gets.  Fourth, we are experiencing a significant divide in our culture between the “somewheres” and the “anywheres.”  This is the growing gap between the haves and have-nots, coastal elites and small-towners, those who benefit from the new economy and those who get left behind and deeply resent it.  This divide is real and creates serious resentment.

All of these factors have contributed to our cultural decline of civility.  It seems like one of the great challenges for Christians and people of all faith traditions is to try to lead our culture out of the wilderness and back to a place where we respect each other’s humanity and differences.  Sadly, Christians often embody the same division, hostility, and disunity as the rest of the culture, a far cry from Christ’s final prayer in Gethsemane that “all would be one so that the world would believe” (John 17).  This is one of the great challenges of our day.  Will people of faith rise to meet it?

Sacks offered three “principles of civility” that he believed would go a long way in making this problem better.  First, for there to be justice, all sides must be heard.  Our legal system should always seek to honor this.  Second, truth on earth cannot aspire to be truth as it is in heaven.  All truth on earth represents a perspective, and there are multiple perspectives.  Everybody’s life, experience, and worldview is different.  Third, the alternative to argument is violence, which is why argument and conversation must never cease.  We have all seen what happens when it does.  When civility dissipates, a new world of problems will arise.  The goal in returning to civility is not to change somebody else’s mind, but to build healthier relationships, foster community, learn from each other, and have meaningful dialogue in a culture that has resorted to echo chambers of the like-minded.

Don’t miss this great fall series!

– Clay

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