Interview: Anne Snyder of Breaking Ground and Comment Magazine
Dear Friends,
We are just returning from a wonderful week in Italy celebrating our tenth wedding anniversary. We’ll be returning soon to our regularly scheduled programming, but today we have something special to share with you: an interview with Anne Snyder. Anne Snyder is the editor-in-chief of Comment magazine. As we discuss in the interview, she also oversees Breaking Ground, a collaborative project that will be familiar to our readers. You can read more about Anne here.
As you can see, Anne is involved in a range of organizations and efforts. I especially wanted to talk with her about Breaking Ground, which has provided Anne with a unique perch from which to think about, track and act as this pandemic has unfolded. I thought we might be able to learn something from Anne’s unfolding endeavor. Enjoy this interview.
Yours,
Michael & Melissa
Michael: Tell me a bit about why you started Breaking Ground.
Anne: When Covid-19 reached North American shores in early 2020, I – like everyone else - was scrambling to make sense of a chaotic and rapidly changing context. There was no shortage of information in the pandemic’s early days, but the immediacy of the crisis and resulting survival mode yielded media interpretations characterized more by short-term need and projection than anything attending systematically to the potential remaking moment at hand. I was craving moral vision – a trustworthy contextualizing of the now, a bold illumination of a different tomorrow – but none of the usual suspects seemed to be providing it.
My annunciation moment occurred in that surreal, Before-and-After week of March 16, 2020. I was driving home with thoughts and worries flitting all about this gathering pandemic storm, when a discomfiting sense of responsibility settled in and focused the brain: I was not to continue leadership as normal (at that point I’d been Editor-in-Chief of Comment a little over six months); I needed to accelerate toward the crisis and assert something generative in its midst. I didn’t know exactly what this would look like, but I had three instincts that felt trustworthy enough to guide the creative process: (1) Whatever was going to be built would have to be institutionally collaborative – to forestall the social fragmentation pandemics historically incur, and to model the power of unity amidst plurality in the face of a common foe; (2) Whatever writing was going to be involved (and I knew there would be writing – I am in the magazine business, after all!) would need to be a careful blend of humble and hopeful, personal and systemic, confessional and critical; and (3) This would be an effort of seeing our society as clearly as we could, less an evaluation of the American Christian community in all its raw exposure, though, yes, I was certainly interested in testing the agility of the church – and the feedback loop of Christian social thought and action therein – to respond effectively in the face of widespread suffering and uncertainty.
So Breaking Ground somewhat breathlessly found its way to public oxygen six weeks later: funders responded with enthusiasm, I found the inimitable Susannah Black and discovered her ache to be the yin to the yang of mine, 20+ institutions of different sectors and theological traditions signed on to support us, my own institution, Cardus, generously provided all the infrastructure a nascent platform needed to perform. And then a few more crises hit: George Floyd was killed, protests and civil unrest began, a vicious American election season started to heat up, the beginnings of conspiracies were beginning to gain uncommon ground. And so we – our team, the writers we were able to recruit, the doers we wanted to celebrate, the institutional partners that supported the effort writ large – navigated as best we could to track a news-heavy year with historical perspective, wisdom, hope and a translucent heart.
One year later, we find ourselves stewarding a body of work that serves as a morally probing record of a historic time, and was, as we hear from our readers and writers, a gently provocative conversation partner amid a cascade of ground-shifting events.
Michael: It really is an incredible body of work that you, Susannah and your teams shepherded over the course of the year. What did you learn from it? What surprised you?
Anne: I had originally hoped that the platform’s invitation to reimagine the future across all sectors would be embraced with zest and vision. This turned out to be optimistic: I naively ignored the realities of domestic strain and an unknown ending that dulls the human capacity to invent. My original hopes for cultural impact have been humbled by the need for patience and the “slow is real” realities of institutional (to say nothing of societal!) change. A digital platform, however artful and discerning, is hard-pressed to subvert longstanding cultural habits, nor is the virtual interface a sufficiently powerful tool of intervention when broader forces are charging forth with a vengeance.
Out of 102 original pieces published, Joel Halldorf’s essay, A Tale of Two Evangelicalisms, was our top-performing piece. Other top-performing pieces –Exodus by Katherine Boyle, A Politics Worse than Death by you, Sir Wear!, and How to be White by Phil Christman seem to show a hunger for cultural discontent to be named and thoroughly excavated – less anything generative of a positive future. At the same time, I’ve been surprised by a general wariness around engaging serious personal reflection around death, despite the mortality that shocked American sunshine.
Some other lessons: It turns out that artistry matters: both visuals and writing style. There was consistent intrigue around Breaking Ground’s grace and artistic beauty; we were repeatedly thanked for keeping a light touch on the Christianity animating the platform’s many different reflections.
Readers have been hungry for a way to think through contentious issues: a way granted with cognitive logic and steps, a way granted by example of conversation and debate, a way granted by different WAYS all animated by the same love.
The American church is deeply divided, yanked along by crass cultural currents rather than our Lord’s ways and means. You see heretical loads of fear and an acute lack of patience. We ourselves were unclear at times as to whether we should speak to the church or to our larger society. I often wondered whether Breaking Ground’s Both/And ambivalence as an editorial team was more harmful than expanding.
How long can crisis sustain a moral reckoning? We began noticing a drop-off in reader engagement starting in February 2021. Covid-fatigue is real. A virtual interface attempting to build an identifiable community of conscience can only go so far.
It turns out that a regularly deep discernment of key questions and being clear on the overarching normative goods that we as a Christian platform are FOR, can, perhaps counterintuitively, help a platform stay timely. We were able to be wise yet current, patient yet in touch with the emotions around any given week’s drama. Familiarity with deep waters, it turns out, can touch and inform the surface.
In sum, I do think that Breaking Ground has modeled something worth nurturing. Naming and defining what that something is has turned out to be a bit of an enigmatic challenge. Surprise, surprise: The creation of “new wineskins” might not fit the categories we already know! But character goes a long way toward defining the DNA of anything new and uncharted, and thus far, the character of both our community and content is defined by the following: a humility and even-handedness in considering the nuances of a given issue; a rigorous commitment to cultivating an original CHRISTIAN imagination, less one shrunk by the self-centered ideologies ruling our day; an artful personalism and even confessional posture before thorny issues that too often tempt a strategy of blame and scapegoating; a mirror to an uncommonly wide array of perspectives from across the Christian and American experience in these contested times. Most significant is Breaking Ground’s creation of a network of 20 faith-based institutions from Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States, one which is becoming a warm archipelago eager to continue investing in one another for mutual benefit and the building of a new field of Christian humanism for the 21st century – beyond crisis’ hour.