Enjoy this except from Chapter One of Dawson Church’s new book, Spiritual Intelligence.
Anthony Ray Hinton spent 30 years on death row for crimes he did not commit. He was accused of two murders and a nonfatal shooting in Birmingham, Alabama in 1985.
The prosecutor had a history of racial bias. He pressed charges despite the fact that Hinton was working in a locked factory 15 miles away at the time and a polygraph test administered by the police had exonerated him.
Much of Hinton’s time in jail was spent in solitary confinement. The cell was five feet by seven feet and he was only allowed a single hour of exercise per day.
Yet he became a trusted friend of everyone he had contact with, from other inmates to the death row prison guards.
For more than 15 years, lawyers from the Equal Justice Initiative asked that Hinton’s case be reexamined, but Alabama’s attorney general declined to do so, ignoring the entreaties of even his guards.
Eventually, Hinton’s case reached the US Supreme Court. The justices overturned his conviction unanimously. His first words, as he walked out of the Jefferson County Jail, were, “The sun does shine.”
In a later interview, Hinton said: “One does not know the value of freedom until it is taken away. People run out of the rain. I run into the rain…I am so grateful for every drop. Just to feel it on my face.”
Later, reporter Scott Pelley interviewed Hinton on the TV show 60 Minutes. Pelley asked Hinton whether he was angry at the many Alabama officials who had kept him in jail for three decades despite ample evidence of his innocence. Hinton replied that he forgave them all. Pelley persisted, saying, “But they took 30 years of your life—how can you not be angry?”
Hinton responded: “If I’m angry and unforgiving, they will have taken the rest of my life.”
In another interview, Hinton is quoted as saying: “The world didn’t give you your joy, and the world can’t take it away. You can let people come into your life and destroy it, but I refuse to let anyone take my joy. I wake up in the morning and I don’t need anyone to make me laugh. I’m going to laugh on my own, because I have been blessed to see another day, and when you’re blessed to see another day, that should automatically give you joy.”
Looking back at the changes his ordeal had produced, Hinton said, “My faith got stronger.”
Your Inheritance from Your Ancestors
What was it about Anthony Ray Hinton that gave him the power of forgiveness? The gift of joy? The ability to rise above his circumstances? Greater faith in response to injustice?
There are people who suffer trivial wounds and slights yet nurture their grievances for decades. They remain consumed by anger the rest of their lives and die holding their bitterness close.
Others, like Anthony Ray Hinton, suffer the most extreme cruelty, yet have the power to liberate themselves from its aftereffects. What is the difference between the two?
Spiritual Intelligence.
Spiritual Intelligence is what connects your individual human consciousness with a consciousness greater than yourself. It makes the difference between living a life rooted in the past, clinging to bygone resentments, and setting yourself free to enjoy the gifts of the present.
What sets these two experiences apart? The answer lies in the way Homo sapiens evolved. Our brains, genes, hormones, and neurotransmitters have been shaped by millions of years of experience. Spiritual Intelligence can only be understood in the context of that history.
You are here today, thanks to your ancestors. They did something that resulted in you existing: They survived.
They might have been amazingly wonderful people. They might have been horrifically bad people. They may have had extraordinary gifts, skills, and abilities. They may have been dull and boring. They may have been people of little talent, intellect, or ability—but all of them accomplished one thing.
They survived long enough to produce offspring. They passed their genes along to the next generation. The next generation—good, bad, or indifferent—also did that one essential thing. They survived.
Rinse and repeat this process for thousands of generations and here you are. You are the result of the survival skills of thousands of earlier humans.
Your ancestors survived partly because of their physical skills and dexterity. Nature rewarded those who were physically fit. Imagination and wisdom helped—“Let’s take the tribe back to that valley where we found those delicious sweet potatoes.”
But they survived primarily because they were good at one or more of four skills: fight, flight, freeze, or connect.
Connecting means socializing successfully. When danger threatens, you can call on your friends to come to your aid. Sheer brute physical strength is great in a fight or for running away. Freezing—staying so still the enemy doesn’t notice you or leaves you for dead—was a last resort, but it could also work to keep you alive.
Whether it was intellectual cunning, physical strength, or social skill, your ancestors passed these genetic and epigenetic characteristics to the next generation, selecting for those that were most useful for survival. A bigger brain was one of these advantages.
Most species evolve slowly over the course of thousands of generations by natural selection and random genetic mutation. Before early humanoids grew big brains, they also evolved slowly.
Mammals evolved from reptilian ancestors more than 178 million years ago. That’s over 100 million years before the extinction of the dinosaurs. It took another 50 million years after the extinction, give or take, for the first primates to evolve. A variety of early hominid species began to appear in the fossil record about 10 million years ago.
The earliest examples of our species, Homo sapiens, date from less than 300,000 years ago. But we’ve taken evolution on a wild ride since then, as the human brain has reshaped the world.
