Tag: Oberlin College

The White Man’s Burden

Published on by D. G. Hart12 Comments

With all the talk of intersectionality and white privilege, it now turns out that white men themselves can play the victim card. We too are oppressed and marginalized as Pete Enns recently discovered:

White male privilege really is a thing, I never see it from the outside in, and I was never challenged to critique white male privilege as an expression of my faith. Rather, it was allowed to fit far too comfortably with my faith.

Not being an oppressed person puts me at a disadvantage. I rarely need to cry out as the psalmists do about being treated with injustice, prejudice, with violence. I don’t need to worry about being pulled over by uniformed protectors of the public. There are many more places I can go and things I can do because I am part of the dominant culture.

And I don’t worry about my competence or value being questioned because of my gender. I am the default, the norm. I do the judging.

An iteration of the Christian faith that doesn’t see the problem here, really see it, is its own refutation.

But here come some complications when men of privilege grasp for the ring of oppression:

Was the fact that Pete was a victim of white male domination at WTS its own form of oppression? On the scales of social justice this instance of maltreatment (according to some) does not itself rise to the level of what people of color have experienced. But Pete needs to see that white male privilege only goes so far when it collides with other white men with privilege. Ten years ago the Psalms would have made total sense of Pete’s experience.

But that raises a question about using as expressions of lament the prayers of kings, which is much of the OT Psalter. Should a victim of oppression really appeal to a prayer from an officer who according to social justice warriors is inherently oppressive? After all, the left has taught us that the wealthy and powerful are chief among the perpetrators of injustice. So how do you sing the songs of lament of the wealthy and powerful, like kings as opposed to the oppressed people (who haven’t left much of a paper trail)?

One last wrinkle: can a white Christian man really appeal to the text of Hebrews even if that is his academic specialty? Isn’t this a form of cultural appropriation? If Oberlin College students have taught us about authentic tacos in the cafeteria, and if Pete wants to approve the arguments that currently fuel the politics of identity, hasn’t he gone to the wrong place if he turns to the Psalms? Wouldn’t T.S. Eliot be a better fit for a white Christian man if he were — hypothetically of course — to experience oppression?

The gods of social justice are a demanding bunch. Call on them at your peril if your complexion is pink or ruddy.

Biblical Appropriation

Published on by D. G. Hart30 Comments

If Oberlin College students may complain about inauthentic renditions of ethnic recipes, may not Christians complain about less than complete appeals to the Bible (fake proof texting)? For instance, here is Michael B. Curry, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, on what obligates his communion to welcome LGBT ect. persons:

I’ve said it publicly in a variety of contexts, that as a church, as the Episcopal Church, we really have wrestled with how do we take seriously what Jesus was talking about. He was quoting the prophets, but when he said “my house will be called a house of prayer for all people,” and part of that quote is from Isaiah 56, it’s there in that vision of the temple where there are no outcasts in the temple. Remember that Jesus is pointing back to the eunuch, the foreigner, categories of people who, by part of the law, were excluded from worship in the temple, but are now included. My house should be called a house of prayer for all people.

And so how do we live that? How do we live that house of prayer for all people? Or to take it another step, how do we, as a community, take seriously when St. Paul in Galatians says all who have been baptized into Christ, and put on Christ, and there is no more Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female, but all are one in Christ—how do we live into that? And so as I’ve said on other occasions, part of how we’ve lived into that is by recognizing in our community all who have been baptized, whether they’re gay, straight, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, rich, poor, Republican, Democrat—you know, just roll out the list.

Do liberal Protestants really buy this? Do people who have gone to college, done a graduate degree, have professional jobs, and read the New York Times, all the while maintaining a church membership, really believe this argument is the slightest bit plausible? And they worry about fake news! This is like saying the United States is committed to equality for all people, extending to equal access to marriage, simply by invoking the Declaration of Independence and not paying a whiff of attention to the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. You simply look into revered documents to justify whatever you believe (or more likely want).

But what if the Bishop had to pay as much attention to other passages of Scripture?

If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, pyes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. (Luke 14:26-27)

What if Bishop Curry wanted to create a church that encouraged hatred within families? Of course, that sounds kind of silly. But the Bible does have troubling bits (think the whole Old Testament). If you want to invoke the Bible and Jesus, you really do need to pay attention to everything. And if you find stuff there that you don’t like, then maybe you need to reject it all rather than just take the parts that are agreeable.

I mean, we have learned to dispense with the Confederacy. So when will those committed to social justice learn to abandon a book that in roughly 2 percent of its contents supports their convictions? Heck, even Russia has elections.

And mainliners are supposed to be the smart Christians in the room?

Wheaton College: For Christ, His Kingdom, and Islam?

Published on by D. G. Hart46 Comments

Thanks to John Fea I now know about a graduate of Wheaton College, Aaron Griffith, who thinks that Dr. Larcyia Hawkins is simply doing what the institution’s founder, Charles Blanshard, would do (WWCBD?):

With this history in mind, Hawkins’s activism on behalf of Muslims begins to look a lot less like an aberration and more in keeping with the original vision of the college. The antebellum evangelical tradition Hawkins drew upon was one primarily concerned with upholding human dignity and advocating for those on the margins. Muslims facing discrimination and threats of violence in present-day American life surely fit that description.

In 1842, Jonathan Blanchard preached a sermon on slavery before a church synod in Cincinnati. Over eight pages, he presented forceful arguments against slaveholding Christians, pointing out flaws in their Biblical exegesis and showing how “the property-holding of men is the worst conceivable form, and the last possible degree of oppression.”

During his sermon, Blanchard spent two short paragraphs in the sermon talking about the doctrine of God, where he argued that “Whatever leads men to regard Jehovah as something different from what he is, prevents their acting towards him as they ought.” It was clear from these few lines that Blanchard saw theological precision as an important good.

But Blanchard was not especially worried about muddled theology in and of itself. Instead he argued that slavery corrupted “true religion.” Failure to love one’s neighbor or denounce oppression was the real theological problem.

Hawkins, with her stress on “embodied solidarity” with her Muslim neighbors, would have found herself in good company in 1842. She drew not on liberal theology, secularized notions of human rights or shared American identity, but on a robust evangelical tradition of the biblical call to advocate on behalf of people made in the image of God.

So what happened to Wheaton? According to Griffith who follows John Schmalzbauer, it’s fundamentalism’s fault:

In the early 20th century, dancing, card playing, and theater attendance replaced slavery and mistreatment of Indians as Wheaton’s moral bugaboos. Focus on the fundamentals unfortunately meant that social concerns were often swept aside, and, as religion scholar John Schmalzbauer has shown, fundamentalists tied to Wheaton propounded their own brands of Christian bigotry (in this case anti-Semitism).

Schmalzbauer alleged anti-Semitism was part of Wheaton’s past (even though the dots were pretty disconnected):

In 2010 I returned to campus to deal with some of these ghosts. In a lecture series commemorating Wheaton’s 150th anniversary, I lamented the history of Protestant bigotry in my native Twin Cities, focusing on two fundamentalist firebrands. Together, they led journalist Carey McWilliams to declare Minneapolis the “capital of anti-Semitism in the United States.” Welcoming the paramilitary Silver Shirts to the First Baptist Church (“Why Shiver at the Sight of a Shirt?”), William Bell Riley actively promoted the Protocols of the Elders of Zion throughout the Upper Midwest. Preaching a similar message, Luke Rader’s River-Lake Gospel Tabernacle was deemed “the worst place, barring none in the Twin Cities, as far as anti-Semitic vitriol.” Both men had ties to Wheaton College. While Riley preached the funeral sermon for Wheaton’s second President Charles Blanchard, Rader’s brother Paul was a college trustee.

But what do these Wheaton grads think Wheaton was back in the days of Jonathan Blanchard? Lena Dunham’s Oberlin? George Marsden’s reasons for including Wheaton’s founder and founder’s son in his history of — ahem — fundamentalism were sound, even common sensical:

These fights [against Masonry and Roman Catholicism] were simultaneously conservative and radical. Blannchard, who had by now been joined in his campaigns by his son Charles, believed that America was a “Christian nation” and worked for a Christian amendment to the Constitution. Their concepts of Christian ideals, however, showed little regard for prevailing middle-class stands. The 1874 platform of the National Christian Association included recognition of Christianity in the United States Constitution, Sabbath and prohibition laws, outlawing secret lodges, preservation of the “civil equality secured to all American citizens by articles 13th, 14th, and 15th of our amended Constitution,” international arbitration for peace, that “land and other monopolies be discountenance,” “justice to Indians,” abolition of the Electoral Colleges, and election of the President and Vice President by direct vote of the people….

Jonathan Blanchard’s son Charles, thought deeply dedicated to preserving his father’s views, completed Wheaton’s transition into the new evangelical and eventually fundamentalist outlook. The alliance with the Moody forces was clearly the crucial step…. By the end of his career, Charles was a significant figure in the fundamentalist movement. In 1919 he drafted the doctrinal statement of the Word’s Christian Fundamentals Association and in 1926 arch-fundamentalist William Bell Riley delivered the eulogy at his funeral…. Among [Blanchard’s] favorite texts, recalled from his anti-Masonic forays, were “Have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness” and “Come out from among them and be separate. (Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 29, 31)

We don’t need selective history to justify cherry-picked theology.

Yes, it’s a shame if Dr. Hawkins loses her position over her remarks. Yes, it’s tough for administrators to protect faculty privileges while also maintaining institutional identity (not to mention satisfying alumni and donors).

But we don’t need to make up theology or history to justify our own rooting interests. The idea that the Blanchards would have been on the side of Muslims is risible, almost as funny as thinking that anyone would want to justify an institutional policy or personal conviction today by appealing to — wait for it — Jonathan and Charles Blanchard. Those guys would chew any contemporary Protestant up and spit us out. If they’d do that to Protestants dot dot dot

Would Lena Dunham Know the Difference?

Published on by D. G. Hart4 Comments

The folks at Vanity Fair wonder if it is possible to tell the difference between Pope Francis’ views on capitalism and those Oberlin College’s newspaper.

Here are the quotes:

A. “How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?”

B. “To all this we can add widespread corruption and self-serving tax evasion, which has taken on worldwide dimensions. The thirst for power and possessions knows no limits.”

C. “Capitalism’s danger does not only lie in the direct exploitation; prolonged depression and social dislocations caused by the breakdown of laissez faire capitalism can pose an ominous threat to our fundamental freedoms and to democracy.”

D. “Human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded. We have created a ‘disposable’ culture which is now spreading. It is no longer simply about exploitation and oppression, but something new.”

E. “the obscenity of neoliberal capitalism”

F. “Having seen liberals treat class conflict with murmur and reluctance, it is the task of the Left to put labor back into the heart of progressive politics by emerging from the cubicles of fragmentary identity politics.”

G. “It is evident that unbridled consumerism combined with inequality proves doubly damaging to the social fabric.”

H. “Trade unions have been an essential force for social progress, without which a semblance of a decent and humane society is impossible under capitalism.”

I. “Ethics has come to be viewed with a certain scornful derision.”

J. “The dual crises of the capitalist economy and the planetary environment are systemic, paradigmatic and deep.”

Here are the answers:

Pope: A, B, D, G, I

Oberlin: C, E, F, H, J

Wouldn’t adding Jesus at least make it sound Christian? Mary, even?

Microaggression Culture

Published on by D. G. Hart12 Comments

Conor Friedersdorf on college campus exchanges (worth a read):

The culture on display on many college and university campuses, by way of contrast, is “characterized by concern with status and sensitivity to slight combined with a heavy reliance on third parties. People are intolerant of insults, even if unintentional, and react by bringing them to the attention of authorities or to the public at large. Domination is the main form of deviance, and victimization a way of attracting sympathy, so rather than emphasize either their strength or inner worth, the aggrieved emphasize their oppression and social marginalization.”

I don’t know about you, but that sounds like the way my brother and I related when we were younger than 12.

Why call this victimhood? Why not childish?