What happens when Either/Or Thinking to the neglect of Both/And Thinking, gets backed by God?
There’s a pattern that shows up across religions, politics, and organizations—anywhere belief and power combine. Something complex and deeply human gets simplified into a choice. Not just a preference, but the right choice. Once that happens, everything on the other side of that choice doesn’t simply appear different. It begins to look wrong. Then dangerous. Eventually immoral, or even sub-human. When systems begin tightening in that way, history suggests we should pay attention.
Before going further, it’s worth acknowledging something that often gets lost in conversations about polarities: Either/Or Thinking is indispensable. Many of our most important systems depend on it. A surgeon must decide whether to operate or not. A judge must decide whether someone is guilty or not guilty. A pilot must decide whether to abort a landing or continue it. In situations where safety, responsibility, and accountability are on the line, Either/Or Thinking is not a problem. It is a necessity.
The difficulty begins when the same type of thinking is applied to tensions that are not problems to solve but polarities to live with over time.
Religion is filled with those tensions.
If you look closely at what allows a religious tradition to remain healthy across generations, the question is not whether it holds the “right beliefs.” Every tradition believes it does. The deeper question is whether the tradition can remain in relationship with the tensions that live inside it without feeling compelled to resolve them into a single answer.
Barry Johnson and Roy Oswald observed this in Eight Keys to Thriving Congregations, where they describe recurring tensions inside congregational life that cannot be solved once and for all but must be navigated continually. Thriving congregations learn to work productively with polarities such as Tradition AND Innovation, Inreach AND Outreach, and Call AND Duty. When one pole dominates to the neglect of the other, congregations predictably drift into rigidity or fragmentation. When both are honored and leveraged over time, communities remain grounded while still able to grow.
Seen through that lens, religious life is less a single paradox than a field of interdependent polarities.
Love AND Responsibility.
Certainty AND Discovery.
Authority AND Freedom.
Tradition AND Agency.
Justice AND Mercy.
Belief AND Experience.
Transcendence AND Immanence.
Identity AND Unity.
Science AND Spirituality.
Stability AND Evolution.
It happened to come out to ten when I listed them, which makes the metaphor of polarity “commandments” tempting. But these behave less like rules and more like energy dynamics that shape the life of a tradition.
Rules tell people what to do. Polarities describe conditions we live inside.
Breathing works because Inhaling AND Exhaling are interdependent. The moment someone attempts to choose between them, the system stops working. Religion operates with similar dynamics. When traditions remain attentive to both poles of their tensions, something stabilizes. When one side becomes elevated to the neglect of its interdependent partner, pressure begins to build elsewhere in the system.
That shift rarely begins with bad intentions. It often starts with something genuinely valuable.
Certainty offers coherence and identity. Authority provides structure and continuity. Stability grounds communities in shared meaning. Each of these poles carries real value. The difficulty emerges when one pole becomes absolute.
However…Certainty to the neglect of Discovery stops learning and starts defending.
Authority to the neglect of Freedom stops serving and starts controlling.
Justice to the neglect of Mercy stops restoring and starts punishing.
Identity to the neglect of Unity stops connecting and starts dividing.
Stability to the neglect of Evolution stops grounding a tradition and instead prevents it from responding to what is emerging.And there is the reverse of each of these.
Discovery to the neglect of Certainty dissolves shared meaning and leaves communities without anchors.
Freedom to the neglect of Authority removes structure and makes sustained coordination difficult.
Mercy to the neglect of Justice abandons accountability and erodes trust in the community.
Unity to the neglect of Identity suppresses difference and eventually drives uniqueness underground.
Evolution to the neglect of Stability discards hard-earned wisdom and leaves traditions constantly reinventing themselves.
When tensions begin pulling systems toward one pole or the other, something else often disappears along the way. The Greater Purpose that originally held the poles together begins to fade from view. Instead of serving the purpose, the system begins defending a position.
Remembering the Greater Purpose can reorient the tension.
In the case of religion, that purpose is often expressed in its simplest form as Love. Justice AND
Mercy exist in service of Love. Identity AND Unity exist in service of Love. Authority AND Freedom exist in service of Love. Stability AND Evolution exist in service of Love.
Love isn’t some type if third thing in the tension relationship – it’s the result of the upsides of both poles. In the Inhale And Exhale example for human beings, the GPS is “Maintaining Life.” That’s a result of getting oxygen from the Inhale pole And getting rid of carbon dioxide from the Exhale pole.
EXAMPLE:
“I don’t want to suffocate from lack of oxygen – I support INHALING!”
“Yeah, well guess what? I don’t want to die from too much carbon dioxide – I support EXHALING!”
GPS that keeps a line of sight for points of view in the conversation:
“Let’s remember something we call agree on – we want to maintain life!”
Without a shared purpose – each pole and it’s respective fear and value function as distinct Greater Purposes. While there is a truth to each, both truths are partial. They do not take into consideration the dynamic energy between the poles that both contribute to a more complete picture and a more sustainable outcome. Seeing how the two points of view contribute to both a shared purpose, despite pole preferences in the tension, becomes something we can live with and learn from, together. When that greater purpose outcome disappears, it becomes easier for the two poles to begin hardening into opposing camps.
Healthy systems learn to live inside the tension and continually return to the purpose that connects the poles. They leverage both over time rather than wasting time and energy and destroying relationships trying to eliminate one of them.
Let’s bring this theory discussion back into our religious context. Think about what happens when the existing human bias toward Either/Or thinking selects a pole and it becomes framed not merely as important but as divinely sanctioned. First, the system shifts from holding a tension to protecting that “divinely right” position. Taken to extremes disagreement ceases to be interpretation or dialogue. It’s disobedience. You are no longer debating an idea. You are confronting something presented as unquestionable. Taken further, you are either with us or against us. And, when you’re against “us” and “our divine right” you don’t have to look too far into the history books to see the self-righteous indignation in some of the most heinous acts humans inflict on other humans.
The pattern does not belong to any single religion or time period. It appears anywhere a system becomes convinced that one side of a tension is the only legitimate one. Once that conviction takes hold, everything else must either conform or be pushed outside the system.
Part of what makes religion particularly complex is that it does not revolve around only one polarity. It operates within what we call a “Multarity” — a constellation of interdependent polarities that all tend to situate simultaneously in support of a shared purpose. Adjust one tension and others respond. Increase emphasis on Authority and pressure around Freedom increases. Strengthen Identity and the strain between Identity AND Unity becomes more visible. Lock down Certainty and the relationship between Certainty AND Discovery narrows. These movements do not occur independently. They move together because the system itself is interconnected.
Two foundational polarities help illuminate this dynamic.
The first is Justice AND Mercy. Healthy systems recognize that all are loved AND all are accountable — no exceptions. Justice without Mercy becomes cruelty. Mercy without Justice becomes permissiveness.
The second is Part AND Whole. Individuals must be honored for their uniqueness, yet communities must also sustain unity and belonging. Identity without Unity fractures the community. Unity without Identity suppresses the individuals who compose it.
These ethical and cultural polarities quietly shape whether religious communities become life-giving or destructive.
This is one reason Taoist philosophy has always felt less like a competing belief system and more like a stabilizing influence. Rather than arguing for one pole or another, Taoist wisdom tends to question the impulse to make anything absolute. When something hardens into a final answer—“this is it”—the Tao invites us to hold that conclusion more lightly. Not because truth is unimportant, but because the way we hold truth affects the systems we participate in.
Holding something lightly does not mean abandoning conviction. It means sustaining Conviction AND Curiosity. It means exercising Authority AND Accountability. It means caring deeply about Identity AND Unity without assuming that protecting identity requires rejecting everyone outside it.
That posture does not eliminate tension. Instead, it allows the tension to remain alive and productive.
The absence of that capacity creates a pattern that becomes easy to recognize. One pole receives increasing emphasis. The other begins to fade. Over time the imbalance becomes normalized and eventually justified. The story becomes simple: this is the right way. Once that story settles in, questioning becomes more difficult and sometimes dangerous.
You can observe the same pattern across other domains of life as well—in politics, in institutions, and increasingly in the systems we are building around artificial intelligence.
Different domains, but a remarkably similar pattern: power concentrates, certainty increases, questioning declines, and the system becomes more rigid just as the complexity surrounding it increases.
Which brings us back to something both simple and difficult.
The issue is not whether we lean toward one pole or another. Every system does that at times.
The question is whether we notice the lean before it hardens into something that can no longer accommodate its counterpart.
Once that hardening happens, the polarity disappears and a position takes its place.
Positions defended in the name of God have shaped some of the most painful chapters of human history.
Religion will continue to play a powerful role in shaping identity, meaning, and community. The more relevant question is whether difference must inevitably become a threat. That outcome depends less on doctrine than on capacity—the capacity to hold Conviction AND Openness, the capacity to exercise Authority AND Accountability, and the capacity to honor Identity AND Unity at the same time.
When that capacity exists, differences do not disappear. They remain real and sometimes uncomfortable. Yet people remain in relationship across those differences rather than needing to eliminate them.
That may be the most reliable sign of healthy religious expression.
Not whether a tradition claims truth, but whether it can recognize that truth is larger than any single perspective and still choose relationship with those who see things differently.
When that capacity disappears, the tightening does not remain confined to religion.
It spreads outward through the systems around it.
And when that happens, it is rarely only religion that begins to struggle.
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