The honour of listening

March 28, 2025

My dear brothers and sisters, take note of this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry, because human anger does not produce the righteousness that God desires.

 Why is it so hard to listen at times? Not just to hear, although that is a necessary first step, but to deeply listen?

 The sting of this brief passage from James 1:19-20 arises from the fact that most of us recognise our own tendencies in it—how much easier we find it to speak than to listen.

 Listening can be difficult enough in personal relationships. In families it’s often not a shortage of opportunity to hear that’s the problem. What is often missing, if you’re anything like me, is a will-to-listen.

 Listening seems to require something more from us than speaking. Perhaps it threatens to dislodge a way of seeing in which we’re invested. Maybe it implicitly questions a feeling whose embers I am happy keeping warm.

Neither justice nor love are reducible to mere listening; but neither justice nor love are possible without it.

 Similarly, to make efforts toward reconciliation, or even to show appropriate respect, requires more than listening. But respect and reconciliation both require no less.

Given that listening is, in itself, not materially costly, and given that it is, on one level, a doing ‘nothing’, a ceasing to speak, one might think it could be an easy step. 

But collectively, politically, perhaps even more than in in individual relationships, it seems to be one of the hardest tasks of all, judging by the ways we all avoid it. We habitually, almost constitutionally find ways not to listen. 

I am thinking here of a broad way in which this is true of all contemporary politics, and also a more specific way in which non-Indigenous Australian politics has over time avoided deep listening to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. 

The broader dynamic of avoiding listening to those outside of our camp is a larger phenomenon—encompassing social, political and informational dynamics—than we have space to consider here.[i]

But, in the Australian case (and this pattern has some parallels in other countries with settler colonial histories) these newer forces that mitigate against listening are latecomers relative to pre-existing habits. 

The 'good old days' of the pre-social media public sphere and the two-party system also comprised a space of non-listening to Indigenous Australians, perhaps even more so. 

Having just had the privilege of being part of a team teaching a large survey unit on Indigenous history in Australia at ACU (under Trawloolway woman, historian and theologian, Naomi Wolfe) I’ve been caused to reflect on the way this tendency has developed over a long period of time taking many guises. It’s much older than the 2023 'No' vote, but it does help contextualise it.

Neither justice nor love are reducible to mere listening; but neither justice nor love are possible without it.

I would like to offer a brief typology of at least five different ways non-Indigenous Australians (like me) have avoided listening. 

1)     1)  During colonial expansion, they often rendered Indigenous peoples as enemies and outsiders

 In the times and places where dispossession took especially rapid, aggressive, and violent forms on the Australian frontier—say Tasmania in the 1830s, Bathurst in the 1820s, the Queensland interior in the 1860s-90s—listening was precluded from the start because Aboriginal peoples were rendered at once as alien, as threatening, and in popular racist discourses as inferior.

 2)    They sought to act on their behalf for their ‘good’, assuming a parent-child relationship

 More surprising and complex, perhaps, was the way that the white Christian humanitarians who opposed such violence and established “protection” regimes ended up building something more pernicious than the outright violence they sought to ‘protect’ people from.

 From mission stations to child removal, and in the educative efforts in between, the humanitarian enterprise as a whole was about acting ‘for’—on behalf of—Indigenous peoples in a kind of assumed parental-guardian power. In the name of ‘protection’ police, missionaries and civil servants alike could exercise arbitrary and draconian power completely at odds with the Westminster system of law. The very basis of this kind of relationship was that there was not a political equality to be observed; they imagined it was ‘superior’ looking after ‘inferior’.

 Logically then, political dialogue among equals was not invited by such humanitarians (although Aboriginal leaders nonetheless asserted it, as in the Cummeragunja walk off and many other episodes). White helpers were characteristically busy doing things “about” Aboriginal people, but in their busyness, they were generally not listening.

 3)    They looked the other way and blocked their ears

 For a very long period of the twentieth century, as anthropologist W E H Stanner famously noted, white Australians simply ignored Aboriginal history. This ‘Great Australian Silence’ as he memorably termed it, was on one level, as the term suggests, an absence of speech. But in a larger sense, it was once again an absence of listening.

 4)    They applauded Indigenous inclusion but did not engage them as equal interlocutors in political speech

 One example is the way non-Indigenous Australians have often memorialized Aboriginal political leaders decades after they were active without engaging the substance of their political thought in its context. Yorta Yorta man Sir Doug Nicholls, a pastor as well as political leader and sportsman is known as the first Aboriginal person to be a state governor and to be knighted. He has an AFL round named in his honour, and street in Victoria. Similarly, Neville Bonner is celebrated and remembered as Australia’s first Indigenous federal parliamentarian. In Queensland his name is given to river ferries, bridges and buildings. In Canberra the scene is similar. Yet how many non-Indigenous Australians will have heard, let alone have deeply listened to, their views on constitutional recognition of Aboriginal peoples, the best forms of political representation and policy priorities?

 5)    They rhetorically pitted listening as a (false) alternative to real “action”

 In late 2024, in my home state of Queensland, the newly elected state government made it a priority—without community consultation—to axe the recently commenced ‘Truth Telling’ Commission. There was no phone call, no conversation with leaders involved. The new government and Premier, it seemed, were not willing to listen to those making the case for listening. The Premier’s defence was, and still is, that his government will instead of truth-telling  be committed to achieving real outcomes for Aboriginal peoples, such as making homes more affordable. Like others before him, Crisafulli pits 'mere talk' against real action, notwithstanding the fact that one of the core issues is a long history of action taken without listening.[ii]

The disrespect felt by Indigenous communities—not to mention their disappointment—is difficult to quantify, but is noteworthy and likely to last for a long time.

 Listening, it seems, is costly.

And not listening even more so.

 ‘deprive someone of honor or respect’

We have just marked seventeen years since Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s apology to survivors of the Stolen Generation policies. I wonder whether we have found it easier, as non-Indigenous people, to say ‘sorry’ than to listen. And I can’t help but think our historic unwillingness to listen limits our capacity to turn sorry into more than words.

 The case for better and more listening amounts to more than mere pragmatism, more than a matter of ‘how to be effective’ (although it is no less than that).

 As I’ve reflected on James’ urging of us to be quick to listen and slow to speak, it’s dawned on me that his call for us to listen arises from something very deep, something constitutive of who we are in ourselves, and in relation to one other and God.

 In James’ letter, listening is part of a more general posture of humility and reverence. The reverence he depicts is directed toward God, perhaps unsurprisingly. But more striking and unexpected, perhaps, is the way he calls for humility and reverence before fellow humans. James consistently calls for a respect afforded to fellow humans in all their created dignity over and against the judgements and hierarchies with which we are tempted to categorise people.

 For example, in chapter 2, with a penetrating critique of churches, applicable to almost all human social groups, James preaches against treating visibly wealthy people better than those who aren’t.

 My brothers and sisters, believers in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ must not show favoritism. Suppose a man comes into your meeting wearing a gold ring and fine clothes, and a poor man in filthy old clothes also comes in. If you show special attention to the man wearing fine clothes and say, ‘Here’s a good seat for you,’ but say to the poor man, ‘You stand there’ or ‘Sit on the floor by my feet,’ have you not discriminated among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts? (2:1-4, NRSVA)

The problem (in part) is positioning yourself as judge and thus ‘discriminating’ or making ‘distinctions’ between people. Rather than being impartial, we elevate some, and mentally put others down. Who are we, asks James, to set ourselves up as judges, and to make such distinctions? When we act in that way, we are engaged in an immoral kind of thinking and relating (διαλογισμῶν πονηρῶν lit. evil dialogue) (2:4).

But we get a clue to something even deeper in the next few verses in James. 

James attacks the very temptation to view wealthy people highly at all. In a way that comes close to anticipating Marxian thought, he suggests we elevate the wealthy against our own interest, against the realities of how they treat us and others. He asks, isn’t it the rich who actually ‘oppress you’ (2:6)?  And, by contrast, we miss the truly elevated status of the poor. Isn’t it the poor whom God has chosen to be rich in faith and inherit the kingdom (2:5)?

Thus, when we show partiality, when we rank people by status or wealth (and presumably any other arbitrary or worldly rankings, such as imagined racial hierarchies) we ‘dishonour’ those we rank lower than ourselves. Dishonour is the key word. In the original Greek language it is atimazō, which means (according to an authoritative lexicon) to ‘deprive someone of honor or respect’.[iii]

The problem is this: there is in each person a dignity warranting honour and respect, but we fail to give it.

This wider view of honour and dishonour forms the backdrop against which to understand the call to listen. Listening is a way of honouring others. This is not flattery, but a providing of an honour that is due. Listening not merely a prudent act, designed to effect diplomatic ends. It is an expression of our neighbour’s worthiness.

James makes it clear in chapter 3 that it is a problem that our speech regularly impugns those who have been made in the likeness of God. ‘No one can tame the tongue,’ he says. ‘It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse those who are made in the likeness of God.’ (3:8-9) 

If the way we speak needs to be appropriate to our neighbour’s status as one made in the likeness of God, then surely, so too the way we listen. 

Dr. Mike Thompson is a historian, researcher, and writer with a PhD in History from the University of Sydney and an MDiv from SMBC/AUT. 

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