Posted on: 27th November 2025

You're biased!

I wonder if someone has said this to you at some point in your life. When it’s been said to me I have taken it as a put down or insult and usually as a negative comment on my opinion. The person who said it, of course, is not biased at all, or maybe it’s a clash of their bias with my bias? The truth of the matter is the we are all biased and we can learn a lot if we are humble enough to recognize it. We are biased because of the way we have been nurtured in our families, the influence of our ethnic, national culture, even church culture, and there are courses out there on unconscious bias which can help to spot it.

Brian Maclaren* has identified sixteen biases amongst which are some of the following:
Confirmation bias - meaning how well does a new idea fit in with what I know
Comfort or complacency bias - I prefer to not have my comfort disturbed
Certainty bias - we would rather lean to what we think is certain even if it’s wrong, rather than accept uncertainty
Cleverness bias - our brains work overtime to protect us against deceptions that we become persistently skeptical and cynical dismissing good or encouraging points of view as naïve, especially if they are different from our point of view.
Conservative/Liberal bias -this can be seen both politically and the way we lean in our approach to life

Is God biased?
A number of years ago Davis Shepherd (Former Anglican Bishop of Liverpool) wrote a book entitled Bias to the Poor in which he states God’s call for the church to be prophetic in expressing solidarity with these communities.  More recently at the Hook lecture in Leeds, John Kuhrt with reference to the poor spoke about the church being Prophet or Provider. There is much in Scripture which speaks of God’s bias to the poor but are there other biases that God speaks of?

Perhaps the clearest and obvious examples of God’s bias, spoken by Jesus, are in the Beatitudes.
God’s blessing and bias is towards the poor in spirit, those that mourn, the meek, those that hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, those who are persecuted because of righteousness, those who are insulted etc. 
Maybe we can align our own bias more fully with these.  Let’s also ‘think of others more highly than ourselves’, not necessarily throwing ‘the baby out with the bathwater’, regarding our assessment of ourselves and our bias but being open to embracing a wider, deeper and fuller view, with the greatest bias of them all, that of Love.

                                                                                                                       Paul Lancaster (Hope for the Nations) 

*Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations: Biases at work in all of us. Brian Mclaren