A review of Don't Talk About Politics: How to Change 21st Century Minds by Sarah Stein Lubrano.
Every year or two I read a book that goes straight into the "everybody should read this" pile. This is one of them.
Stein Lubrano's thesis is a hard one for a lover of ideas to swallow: minds change, not through arguments, but through actions and relationships, and through the infrastructure that makes both possible.
Arguments and debates almost never do the job. She has the receipts. Caroline Le Pennec and Vincent Pons tracked 56 televised debates across 31 elections and found no evidence that debates helped undecided voters decide or flipped anyone who had already chosen. In another study, participants handed counter-evidence updated their beliefs about who invented the light bulb but barely budged on politics. When your beliefs are welded to your identity, changing your mind means changing who you are. Nobody does that because a stranger posted a good point.
So what works? Friendship, for one. Daniel DellaPosta's research found that having even one gay friend changed people's views on gay marriage, which helped drive the fastest civil-rights opinion shift on record.
Action, for another. Kristin Laurin found that people opposed a plastic-bottle ban right up until the ban became inevitable, then supported it, some even revising their memories of ever having opposed it. We act our way into believing far more often than we believe our way into acting.
And underneath both sits social infrastructure. Who are your neighbors? How easy is it to meet them? Can you join a club — and are there clubs left to join? Libraries, parks, churches, co-ops: these are the third places where different lives brush up against each other, but they have been gutted by decades of privatization. Rebuilding them is political work, even when nobody is talking about politics.
Reading it, I kept thinking that this is the political version of James K. A. Smith's Desiring the Kingdom and You Are What You Love. Smith argues that our practices and loves shape us before our thoughts do. Lubrano has written the same argument for the polis instead of the pew. Which is why I couldn't stop reading the book as a pastor. Formation—political or spiritual—happens at the intersection of relationships, actions, and ideas. Discipleship looks like tables, meals, shared work, and the slow accumulation of friendship with people whose lives don't look like yours. Throwing ideas at people and hoping is neither politics nor discipleship.
The book also has me rethinking where I put my words. I hand hours of free labor to Meta in exchange for convenience and "audience." Stein Lubrano's chapter on infrastructure—written in the shadow of Musk's Twitter purchase—makes the stakes plain: whoever owns the pipes decides what it's possible to think.
Mostly, though, the book left me with a double conviction. Proud of The Table, because a church where people with different lives cooperate as equals, week after week, is the exact social infrastructure she says democracy needs. And convicted by how anemic my life outside the church has become. I want to join a book club. I want to know my block. Lubrano convinced me those are political acts.
She puts it this way: "Simply put, if you want to change people's minds, you must change their lives." That'll preach.
