Coherence, Meaning, and Understanding 1

Making sense of our world

When I began my scholarly exploration of the entanglement of American evangelicals’ faith and politics, I came across an explanatory framework that I’ve come to lean on as a way to help understand so much of what happens in the world around me: we seek coherence, meaning, and understanding.

We seek all three. I suppose they can be classified as a status or a state of being but what they are is a goal, something we seek in order to create a sense of calm or peace in our inward parts. Coherence is how we try to reduce dissonance in our minds, when two ideas or thoughts collide and may hold equal footing. For example, our candidate of choice says or does something that we may think is out-of-bounds. How do we reconcile this and bring my coherence back into alignment? We seek meaning and understanding in order to find a way to transcend ourselves and our surroundings. We are looking for a narrative or story that helps us make sense of the world. We are seeking (always seeking) these three things to bring our minds into a stasis or a state of equilibrium, where balance is achieved.

The process I go through in my mind to find this kind of stasis is uniquely mine based on the myriad of cognitive schemes I’ve compiled in my life. But that does not mean the place I end up in is some kind of random, subjective Tom-land. I’ve come to realize that my seeking does have a purpose and direction. In 1979 I found such a peaceful resting place in the God of the Bible. I was sitting in Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris and I was overwhelmed by God’s presence, becoming convinced of God’s reality. My life since that point was to seek out that reality and use it to make sense of the world around me, to find coherence, meaning, and understanding.

In the Positionality section of my dissertation I tried to foreground who I am and why I approach the topic in the way I did: “I write as a convinced Christian who has spent a great deal of his adult life working out what it means to follow Jesus in the often-confusing arena of American culture. Such convincement includes acceptance of the Christian account of God, Jesus, atonement, salvation, and what A. Wright (2012) calls, ‘… the most powerful and comprehensive account of the ontological structures of the ultimate order-of-things currently available to us’ (2012, p. 4).”

As noted above, the process of seeking and finding coherence, meaning, and understanding leans heavily on the mental models our minds assemble to make our cognitive processing easier. As one writer noted, we are cognitive misers. We don’t like to think hard. This is not necessarily a bug but a feature. As evolutionary psychologists have shown, being misers (and relying heavily on our mental models) enables us to rapidly process innumerable inputs and proceed in a fashion which keeps us safe and secure. Today it helps me safely navigate a crowded and busy four-way intersection when I’m driving. Or to have conversations with complete strangers. My mind takes in all the inputs, sorts them into buckets of meaningful and not-meaningful information, and allows me to proceed, whether driving safely through the intersection or further engaging in conversation with the stranger.

My mental models are made up of previous experience in four-way intersections. My models predict - or at least assume - that certain drivers will wait their turn at the four-way, letting those cars that arrived before them proceed first. My model is disrupted when a car violates that understanding and fails to “take their turn.” My defensive driving model is prepared for this and brakes. My self-righteous model grumbles about “selfish drivers” or “people who drive that brand of car with out-of-state plates.” My gracious model wonders whether they have a family emergency which distracted them. These all layer and fire rapidly.

The fact that we are cognitive misers is a good thing - mostly - in this situation because thinking through all the inputs would cause me to clog up the intersection and probably make me unable to drive. However, it can also be a problem in the judgement I make about those other drivers. The coherence, meaning, and understanding I’ve reached about the way to treat others can then speak into the model I used to judge others and tweak it ever so slightly, hopefully moving me towards a stance of graciousness and calm the next time someone doesn’t take their turn.

In his letter to the church in Rome (the Book of Romans in the New Testament) Paul encourages us to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. The full passage assumes that our minds readily conform to the culture’s patterns and that God’s patterns are different. This requires my mind to be altered, tweaked, to more align to God’s will or what is good, pleasing, and perfect.

This state of shifting my models to what is good, pleasing, and perfect aligns with finding coherence, meaning, and understanding. Natural law moral theory suggests I know what is right and good, as do all people, as the world was created by God who is by nature good, pleasing, and perfect. Of course this does not mean I practice what is good, pleasing, and perfect. My mental models which govern my actions and attitudes are corrupted by a fallen world. I accept non-God inputs all the time as explanatory frameworks. These can be from the news I consume to the politicians I support to the social media influencers I follow. Heck it could be from my second-grade teacher whose ideas about the world are still rattling around in my consciousness.

The fact is that I have buckets and buckets of these models, most of which need altering, transforming, or emptying. The reason I went down this path in my research was because I wanted to explore more deeply the inner workings or cognitive schemes of people - in this case American evangelicals - and how that influences how they live out the religion they practice. The actual process for shifting or altering the models is more complicated and needs treatment in another essay as does a fuller treatment of lived religion.

Stay tuned.