When a snake slithers out from the nondescript foliage in the woods, your entire body responds to the sudden fear of the snake. This fight-or-flight response is an Amygdala Hijack*. Your heart rate and blood pressure increase, causing you to breathe more quickly, forcing oxygen through your body toward your muscle groups. This could lead to a sudden cold/clammy sensation marked by goosebumps. Your pupils have dilated so that you can see better in your environment, and your sympathetic nervous system may begin to dampen your body’s response to pain while you get to a place of safety. Thank God for these innate mechanisms in the body that are hardwired for survival!

However, the same area of the brain responsible for survival can also be triggered when someone disagrees with us. We have all had it happen at one time or another. You are presenting an idea that you feel is well-thought-out, and, in response, someone enters an objection to your idea. The objection doesn’t have to be forceful. It doesn’t have to be disagreeable. It could be a constructive push-back to our idea, but when we quickly process the objection, our lower brain instantly engages in a defensive response, and a fight, flight or freeze reaction follows. Think of it like a command-center red alert with sirens, flashing red lights, and doors crashing down to barricade against potential threats.

Are you in any danger? Are you going to die? Of course not! Yet, those survival mechanisms are activated, and, in turn, the rational part of your brain shuts down. This is why you have likely heard the statement during an argument: “You cannot be reasoned with!” While not always the case, this is often a result of defensive/offensive reactions to disagreement triggered in the brain.

The Additional Element of Attachment

Another feature that makes being disagreed with very difficult is that we also experience an emotional attachment to our ideas and beliefs. As emotional beings, we become invested in our personal opinions and systems of belief. This is why, after the initial fight, flight, or freeze reactions to disagreement occur, we can be charged with “taking everything personally.” We are still not thinking rationally but emotionally. We take disagreements as an attack on our person, not just our ideas.

We have all been guilty of this, and if we have been on the receiving side, we can admit that we recoil from the sudden intensity of the response we receive. Unfortunately, this is when cool heads fail to prevail. From these situations, relationships are damaged, fights ensue, and feelings get hurt.

Introducing the Echo Chamber

As if the brain processes and emotional attachments to ideas were not enough, an additional layer of danger is integral to our struggles to navigate disagreement: the echo chamber. The echo chamber concept is simple. We surround ourselves with those who love what we say, always agree with us, and only serve as our “amen” corner.

Culturally, this has become the catalyst behind the death of civility and the death of our academic standards. Theologically, it is the primary catalyst behind the death of discourse. If you disagree with me, you must be attacking me personally. As such, I will respond with ad hominem attacks on your character (label you anti-Semitic or a myriad of other attacks) or engage in the illogical fallacy of ad absurdum (write someone’s ideas off by using absurd examples to make people laugh at the ideas rather than engage them) to avoid any honest discourse.

With the advent of social media and its likes, shares, and public followings, the amen corner has become easier to facilitate. The greatest among us cannot deny how easy it is to become addicted to the dopamine hits of digital success. With that comes an emotional attachment to success, and while we welcome the amens, shares, and likes, we are quick to resist anything that disagrees with our content because it becomes, in our view, an attack on our brand or platforms. To some degree, it’s the Country of the Blind. Pluck your eyes out because we want nothing your vision can offer. I will submit that an echo chamber blinds individuals from seeing themselves and, championed by their amen corner, can quickly come to lead others just as blind as themselves.

Fellow Minister and Brother in the Kingdom

Those in the echo chamber are often the quickest to proclaim they are NOT in an echo chamber. Yet, when their relationships are probed, it quickly becomes evident how resistant they are to those willing to “push back” on their ideas, beliefs, and opinions. While I am not perfect, I INTENTIONALLY ensure that I have several friends who can disagree with me, challenge my ideas, and even feel free to say, “I don’t agree with you.”

To be clear, I am NOT open to the voices of men who operate from the shadows of victimhood and self-pronounced marginalization whose motives are undergirded by a continual drip-drip of bitterness, hurt, and anger at systems and practices around them. I have ZERO tolerance or ear for those who walk in academic hubris, professing themselves to be wise when, as fools, they love to meddle, fight, and bicker as they champion deconstructive missives.

Recently, with a good friend, I challenged something he had said with a spirit of honest inquiry. I believe he was contextually wrong regarding the use of scripture he had discussed and that the premise behind it, while good, needs to find an alternative approach since it plays into a common misconception often touted among us. Guess what? He didn’t ignore me, chastise me, cut me off, or get angry. He and I have a relationship that refuses the “amen corner.” Recently, thinking I was on to something good, he responded with an accurate yet contradictory text. My response was, “Good observation,” and I quickly incorporated the knowledge and allowed it to change my belief on the specific topic.

I am not special, nor am I beating myself on the back to proclaim my goodness. I still need to work on being disagreed with or hearing resistance to my opinions or ideas. I don’t like to be wrong, but if I only surround myself with those who will amen me, I am in danger of becoming blind to myself!

There is a kind of hubris when we release podcasts, post blog articles, or weigh in publicly on theological topics, and we NEVER believe we could be wrong, biased, or incomplete in what we have released. Because there are so many echoes in koinonia, disagreements often end up in group texts that disparage who is wrong but never address the person who was wrong. Why? Many times, this is because the person who is wrong would never engage with pushback, even though I believe those engaging in the group text are wrong ALL THE TIME.

*Thanks to Kimberly Holland, a freelance writer from Birmingham, AL, for this phrase “Amydala HiJack.”