The Price of One More Question

Recently, a video of fish raining from the sky in Georgia went viral on social media. If you were discerning enough, you could tell the video was AI-generated and not real. But what's unnerving is that if you did a quick Google search about it, the AI summary told you that this story was, in fact, real. Which means quite a few people formed an opinion after listening to an AI summary say an AI-generated video was real. Click here to see it for yourself.

I think this indicates something even scarier: most people are too comfortable not knowing things.

I'm convinced that one of the keys to aging well and growing as a person is curiosity. Curiosity is the ultimate gateway to growth. The problem is that curiosity usually costs you something.

To be fair, the cost is usually quite low. It can be as simple as a few Google searches (and often beyond the AI summary at the top) or a call to a friend who might know something you don't. Or, it could mean a deeper study or a new book you need to buy (and then take the time to read). At a minimum, it means you sit in the dissonance a bit longer and refuse to move on until you find a deeper resolution. 

Which is why most of us just ignore our curious thoughts.

I've tried to make it a habit of mine not to let myself off the hook when I have a curious thought. So when my daughter recently asked me where Caesar salad comes from (we both love them), I knew I needed to look it up rather than settle for not knowing. The answer surprised us both. It turns out three countries are involved (an Italian man immigrated to the United States and then ran a restaurant in Mexico). Knowing this fun fact makes the salad taste even better now.

This past Sunday, we had a group discussion after I preached a message on the Mimetic Theory of atonement. We call it "Double Take," and we spend an hour in a question-and-response time for people to engage with the morning's content together in community. Someone made the observation that there is a crack happening with this current administration and that he was thankful that more people would see it and hopefully change their minds. While I appreciated his hopefulness, I'm not sure I shared his optimism. That's because I'm not convinced everyone is seeing the cracks.

As one example in which there are many, our administration has dramatically tried to shape the reporting on the deaths of soldiers and civilians in Iran, even going so far as to reassign the people who were tracking civilian casualties to other jobs. Personally, I can't imagine a world in which I don't have a million follow-up questions to that, along with an equally long list of concerns. As a quote attributed to Aldous Huxley observes, “The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.”

Curiosity is what shows us that things are not as they often seem. It's what alerts us to cracks showing. And yet we are often content with how things seem. That's because it's easier to accept a given narrative than to look under the hood and see if something else is going on. The danger for Christians is that our Western evangelical culture is filled with narratives that often don't deliver.

Those of us who have asked one question too many have often discovered that there's no turning back. It's often an invitation into a liminal space where you can no longer stay where you are, and you don't exactly know where you're headed yet. You can't unsee things you've seen, especially when they look way more truthful than what you believed before. Numerous times in my life, my curiosity has led me down a road that has cost me something significant.

I remember changing my mind and committing to following Jesus through nonviolence only to realize that this would get me labeled naive (and often dismissed) by many fellow Christians. I remember changing my mind and realizing that there is nothing inherent in the LGBTQ+ community that prohibits the fruit of the Spirit from emerging beautifully in their lives. That insight got me uninvited from a lot of spaces and firmly earned me the liberal label. I remember being honest enough with myself to acknowledge that my view of hell did not seem remotely consistent with a God of love or a God that looked like Jesus. Changing my mind on that topic has meant that many Christians wonder whether I am even a Christian anymore.

Perhaps the most challenging application of curiosity of all is to pursue curiosity when it may prove ourselves wrong. I can't tell you how many times I suspected I might have a uniquely brilliant angle for a sermon or book, only to find that, as I asked more questions, the answers didn't lead me where I wanted them to go. In these situations, it's far easier to stop asking the questions and maintain some version of what you want to believe. It's the same thing that happens when we're in a conversation with someone, and they tell us something we are unaware of that contradicts something we just said. Most of us want desperately to lean out in those moments and move on with our opinions and views intact. But growth happens when we are willing to get curious.

Admittedly, I think curiosity does have its limits. If someone tells me why it's justified to dehumanize another person, I'm not infinitely curious as to their rationale about it. I would want to understand why their current thinking makes the most sense to them, and I would be interested in seeing whether they are curious about other ways of thinking. But at the end of the day, you cannot make someone want to be curious any more than you can make someone fall in love.

But I've found that interesting things happen with curious people. They tend to attract other curious people and arouse suspicion among non-curious people. That's because curious people ask potentially awkward or uncomfortable questions and regularly change their minds. It's why we refer to a slippery slope. There's no guarantee of which road curiosity will lead you down. And sometimes, you won't even see the new insights coming.

But curious people are drawn to other curious people because curiosity can be contagious for those who are interested. Some of my favorite conversations with friends happen when I benefit from their curiosity and feel empowered to be more curious myself afterward. Or as the TikTok channel called Keep the Meter Running constantly shows us, every person you meet has something interesting about them if you're curious enough. 

I still get asked, from time to time, whether I'm actually a Christian. I've stopped finding the question offensive. I suppose it's a fair thing to wonder, given what I no longer believe. But what I've noticed is that the people asking it are rarely curious about the answer.

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Photo by Yishen Ji on Unsplash