Two Ways of Seeing Education are in Tension and they are both True

I teach history as my day job. Specifically, I teach world history to high school students. In that capacity I have become increasingly aware that my profession exists in a place of tension between two ideas of what education is, lets call them Education Proper (EP) and Education as Certification (EC).  In the context of the coronavirus shutdown this tension has increased almost to—and frankly probably past—the breaking point.

Some explanation: Education Proper is what most people think of first when we think about the value of education: learning skills and facts, acquiring the collection of knowledge and skills which culture and government have decided make up a sort of lowest common denominator for active engagement in our society. There are, of course, many many legitimate critiques which can be and have been made of the particular set. Ours in the US is messy and has evolved only slightly from something designed to shape people into straight white cis male factory workers or (if they are more successful) businessmen. Despite that, there is a sort of general agreement that certain skills (reading, writing, arithmetic, a modicum of critical thinking, a basic history of the nation and even more basic history of the world, a rough understanding of biology, chemistry, and physics, exposure to music, and an assortment of fine arts etc...) will help a young person to live a more rewarding/flourishing life. In fact the whole justification for the idea of public education—as I understand it the real motivation may have been more sinister—lies in the understanding that the attainment of this body of knowledge and these skill represent a basic human good and should therefore be guaranteed to everyone regardless of income. 

So far so good. I got into teaching because I believe in the value of Education Proper. I genuinely believe that in teaching students to engage in historical thinking and analysis and in ushering them into the story of humanity (flawed and incomplete as all tellings of that story are) I am benefiting both my students and society as a whole. The tension comes with the introduction of the second theory of what education is, one which I like far less but which I cannot deny the reality of. Education as Certification is something which I think developed out of a practical recognition of the accuracy of EP. Because attaining an education situates a person to be more successful in many of the jobs our society happens to value (and thus more likely to be able to support themselves) education has taken on a particular social and monetary value. And because we use grades and grade point averages to represent the quality of a person's education as assessed by the school that educated them, a student who fails to earn a high school diploma is at a significant disadvantage in society. Thus EC has resulted in teachers finding ourselves in the position of gatekeepers to opportunity. As a world history teacher, students in my state are not eligible for a high school diploma unless they pass my class. 

Here, then, is the core tension: According the the EP model I am doing a student a disservice by assigning them a grade which does not reflect their actual achievement in my subject. If the grade I assign is too high then the student will be judged unfairly and will be put in situations for which they are unprepared. If the grade I assign is too low then the student will not have an appropriately high estimation of their abilities and may not attempt challenges which they are actually able to handle. A student who receives a passing grade from me without sufficient proficiency in world history will be caught flat footed in society.  And this is far more stark an issue for elementary and middle school students. A 4th grader who graduates to 5th grade without having a sufficient grasp of 4th grade material will be at a severe disadvantage in a 5th grade class and curriculum built on the expectation that all students in the class have already acquired a certain degree of proficiency. This means that 5th grade will be more difficult for the already-struggling student who needs more help. To promote a student before they are ready is to set them up for failure.

But according to the EC model, I am doing a student a disservice when I do not assign them a passing grade. In the Covid-lockdown world of education, students with less access to technology are at a severe disadvantage relative to their peers. As a result of this economic and material inequity, these students often lack access to educational help and content which is available to their wealthier peers. According to the EC model, I would be perpetuating and magnifying exiting social inequities if I denied these students a passing grade in my class. Certainly it is not their fault that they have failed to attain (or at least to demonstrate) the necessary proficiency in my subject—the circumstances simply did not allow them the opportunity. But that does not change the fact that they have not acquired the proficiency which a passing grade is thought to represent. 

All of this puts educators in what seems to me to be an impossible double-bind regarding any student who fails to demonstrate proficiency in our subjects. I want to repeat that this double-bind is always present as a result of societal racism, classism, and sexim (traditional, hetero, and cis) but that it is magnified significantly under required distance-learning conditions. Both the EC and EP models are accurate representations of the world of education, and yet in the case of this student, injustice is magnified by the truth of the EP model if they receive a passing grade which their proficiency does not merit (instead of being required to repeat and pass the course in order to receive a passing grade), and injustice is magnified by the truth of the EC model if they are denied a passing grade (and the social/material advantages which come with that certification) despite the fact that their failure to become sufficiently proficient is not their fault.

I don't really have answers this time, but I think this question is important. Feel free to leave your thoughts in comments.

Characteristics of the Unwise - Wisdom of the Vikings Part 13

Worry

The unwise man

is awake all night

worries over and again.

When morning rises

he is restless still,

his burden as before.

Face Value

The unwise man

assumes that only

friends laugh to his face.

At the table with the wise

he cannot tell

what they say behind his back

Note: This is part 13 in an ongoing series (the series starts HERE) bringing together the Hávamál (a collection of Norse wisdom poetry) and the still-evolving rules and mores of the Internet, particularly as they are developing in the realm of social media.

Because humans are a social species, we all have a tendency to create a sort of mask of false-self which we use to interact with our world. We "prepare a face to meet the faces that ]we] meet". Of course this makes vulnerability, relationship, and connection far more difficult to achieve and plenty has been said about it already—if you are interested I would recommend the work of Brene Brown. Certainly the Vikings are not a culture with which we generally associate vulnerability. The same ought to be said of social media and internet culture. 

Living in the context of a functional anarchy and without the protections of a state, reputation was more important for the survival of a medieval Icelander than it is for most of us today. As a social species, we are fundamentally dependent on one another and threat of social isolation is ultimately existential. People literally die as a result—both direct and indirect—of social isolation. The psychological upshot of this human dynamic is to reinforce the urge to guard our reputations closely, to put great effort into defending our names and characters. 

All of that is natural and the degree to which it is true in modern off-line meat-space society is intensified by an order of magnitude in the contexts of medieval Iceland and the social internet. 

And yet, the best option—at the end of the day the only workable option—is the massively counter-intuitive choice to embrace authenticity and vulnerability. As the wise among the Vikings remind us, it is the unwise who "is awake at night over and over again". Bring to mind that person who is so afraid of being seen to have been wrong that she cannot ever concede a point in a discussion, or that friend who can never graciously accept a single barb as his expense. Have you noticed that they seem to become almost tone deaf online? Have you noticed those people (the unwise) who think they are "winning" when to every reader they are only making greater and greater fools of themselves?

At the table with the wisehe cannot tellwhat they say behind his back.

So take a breath. Be willing to be seen. Admit when you are wrong. Be quiet when you could talk sometimes. And be willing to walk away when you need to. Don't stay up too late replaying a discussion, trying to formulate the perfect answer. When morning comes you will still be restless.

C.S. Lewis, Contrapoints, and Canceling

Introduction:

The best (by which I mean the strongest and most reasonable) argument I have ever encountered against canceling, cancel culture, or call-out culture is the one recently made by Natalie Wynn in her video essay Cancelled. The best argument I have ever encountered in favor of the practice was made by C.S. Lewis in his book Reflections on the Psalms. Unsurprisingly given the quality of these two minds—dissimilar though the personalities behind them are—both arguments are exceptionally nuanced and more than a little ambivalent. Neither Lewis nor Wynn are quite able to make up their

minds on the subject.

Please do not take my celebration of the arguments by Wynn and Lewis (both of which I will discuss below) as a suggestion that either of them has somehow managed some sort of definitive treatment of the subject—neither has—or that someone interested in the topic would be sufficiently informed by engaging with their arguments. What I am saying is that their arguments—each taken as a whole—are the strongest and most reasonable for and against cancelling; both are best experienced within the context of a much larger contemporary discussion.

There is probably also something intriguing to me about the social and historical location of these two folks and the way in which their respective positions are opposite what one might predict. Lewis was an Oxford don and celebrated author. Wynn is a purposefully lapsed philosophy student and trans woman who is best known as a video essayist. To be fair, the two are both white, share an education in philosophy, a particularly winsome way with words, opposition to fascism, and a tendency to incorporate alcohol into the text of their work but beyond that the contrast is pretty stark. Then of course I am drawing on the theory work of a black neo-pagan anarchist for my overall analysis. And yet it is the curmudgeonly Oxford don who provides the argument in favor of cancelling while the trans leftist vloger supplies the argument against.

While I intend to look first at Lewis' argument in favor of cancelling, I am going to quote Wynn in the process definition she gave for cancelling as it was first intended as the basis for my working definition in this piece:

It [canceling] started as a vigilante strategy for bringing justice and accountability to powerful people who previously had been immune to any consequences for their actions.

Cancelling then, for the purposes of this piece, will be defined as the bottom-up imposition of social opprobrium against someone who is understood to have violated community moral standards.

C.S. Lewis:

What I have called Lewis' argument for cancelling makes up most of the chapter titled Connivance in Reflections on the Psalms. Lewis intended argument in the chapter has to do with understanding those
Psalms in which the Psalmist professes hate for those whom he takes to be the enemies of God. The phenomenon, as Lewis sees it, is then the question of how we ought to relate to those we take to be evil—should we hate them? Lewis' first thought is that we should reject such suggestions altogether:

Now obviously all this—taking upon oneself to hate those whom one thinks God's enemies, avoiding the society of those one things wicked, judging our neighbors, thinking oneself "too good" for some of them (not in the snobbish way, which is a trivial sin in comparison, but in the deepest meaning of the words "too good")—is an extremely dangerous, almost a fatal, game.It leads straight to "Pharisaism"(1) in the sense which Our Lord's own teaching has given to that word. It leads not only to the wickedness but to the absurdity of those who in later times came to be called the "unco guid".

but by the end of the paragraph he has admitted a countervailing factor, the analysis of which ends up forming the bulk of the chapter:

But we must not be Pharisaical even to the Pharisees(1). It is foolish to read such passages without realising that a quite genuine problem is involved. And I am not at all confident about the solution.

Without using the term, what Lewis identifies is the problem of social capital and the way in which it is accumulated by the wicked in the absence of public approbation. Lewis describes the problem so well that it is worth quoting at length:

We hear it said again and again that the editor of some newspaper is a rascal, that some politician is a liar, that some official person is a tyrannical Jack-in-office and even dishonest, that some celebrity (film-star, author, or what not) leads a most vile and mischievous life. And the general rule in modern society is that no one refuses to meet any of these people and to behave towards them in the friendliest and most cordial manner. People will even go out of their way to meet them. They will not even stop buying the rascally newspaper, thus paying the owner for the lies, the detestable intrusions upon private life and private tragedy, the blasphemies and the pornography, which they profess to condemn.

I have said there is a problem here, but there are really two. One is social and almost political. It may be asked whether that state of society in which rascality undergoes no social penalty is a healthy one; whether we should not be a happier country if certain important people were pariahs as the hangman once was—blackballed at every club, dropped by every acquaintance, and liable to the print of riding-crop or fingers across the face if they were ever bold enough to speak to a respectable woman. It leads into the larger question whether the great evil of our civil life is not the fact that there seems now no medium between hopeless submission and full-dress revolution. Rioting has died out, moderate rioting. It can be argued that if the windows of various ministries and newspapers were more often broken, if certain people were more often put under pumps and (mildly—mud, not stones) pelted in the streets, we should get on a great deal better. It is not wholly desirable that any man should be allowed at once the pleasures of a tyrant or a wolf's-head and also those of an honest freeman among his equals. To this question I do not know the answer. The dangers of a change in the direction I have outlined are very great;so are the evils of our present tameness. [emphasis mine].

On the one hand, Lewis is concerned about what it means to live in a world in which evil (let us not be shy in calling oppression, marginalization, racism, sexism, and many of the other sins for which people are frequently subject to cancelling "evil") behavior is liberated from any social consequences. It would be one thing (and Lewis raises his concerns in this direction in The Abolition of Man) if the problem were that society no longer disapproved of the evil behaviors—but that is not the issue in play for Lewis here or in our contemporary discussion about cancelling. In the situation Lewis is concerned with, society still recognizes that the behavior is evil but has chosen not to impose any social punishment. In effect, the behavior is being called out (or is so generally well know that no call out is even necessary) but the person involved is not being canceled. Lewis reflects later on in the chapter:

Many people have a very strong desire to meet celebrated or "important" people, including those whom they disapprove, from curiosity or vanity. It gives them something to talk or even (anyone may produce a book of reminiscences) to write about. It is felt to conger distinction if the great, though odious, man recognises you in the street.

and he goes on to speculate about the ways in which peer pressure in combination with this dynamic can incline us towards acceptance and even embrace of what we knew to be evil before the whole process started.

Throughout all of this argument in favor of censure or cancelling of those who behave wickedly Lewis makes a distinction which is both vital to him as a Christian and a basic tenet of those who, today, speak or write in favor of cancelling. In contemporary parlance we say that it is vital to always "punch up and not down", or as Lewis put it:

how ought we to behave in the presence of very bad people? I will limit this by changing "very bad people" to "very bad people who are powerful, prosperous, and impenitent". If they are outcasts, poor and miserable, whose wickedness obviously has not "paid", then every Christian knows the answer. Christ speaking to the Samaritan woman at the well, Christ with the woman taken in adultery, Christ dining with publicans, is our example. [emphasis mine]

Thus I think it fair to summarize Lewis' view of cancelling as a dangerous practice which may nevertheless be necessary for the protection of justice and the overall health of both the individual and society but which should always target only those who are "powerful, prosperous, and impenitent".

Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints):

Natalie Wynn has a whole lot to say about canceling. Given that her (first in a series?) video essay on the subject (embedded below) is more than an hour and a half long I will summarize her argument though I certainly recommend watching the entire essay as she provides a full series of examples and evidence in support of her core claims.

As something of a sincere (if amused) content warning for constitutionally conservative folks: Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints) engages at an entirely different register from C.S. Lewis and so if you came to this post for the Lewis this could be more than a little jarring. Wynn uses a whole lot of bawdy humor, sarcasm, and cussing. If that isn't your thing, be warned.

Wynn breaks cancelling as it is currently practiced (I want to come back to this later) into 7 "Tropes" each of which she unpacks and illustrates over the course of her essay. In contrast to Lewis, who was working almost entirely with hypotheticals, Wynn cites events either from her own experience of being canceled or from well known and/or well documented cancelings. Thus while Lewis' writing on the subject works from general cases—what sort of situations and people seem to merit canceling—and allow the reader to discern in particular instances whether a given person or action qualifies, Wynn works from the particular—such and such things happened when so and so was canceled—towards generalized conclusions about whether or not canceling is a valid/moral/appropriate action. 

I have cited Wynn's definition of canceling above and already it should be clear that Wynn is at least as nuanced as Lewis in here analysis. Although she comes down against canceling—or at least against canceling in many of the contexts in which it currently occurs—she recognizes some important values in it; specifically she recognizes that canceling is/can be/started as a tool for bringing justice into situations where, because of—to borrow from Lewis again—"people who are powerful, prosperous, and impenitent" have been able to escape justice. Her argument is thus not against the tool as such but against what she sees as contemporary and common misuses of a powerful tool.

1. The Presumption of Guilt

The first of Wynn's seven Tropes of canceling is the presumption of guilt. Specifically because contemporary canceling began as a corrective to an unjust legal system—by which I very explicitly mean a legal system in which those with prosperity and power are often able to avoid many legal consequences for their actions—it does not claim or require the same standards of proof as a courtroom. In fact canceling is, at its core, theorized as a practice of the dispossessed. If you have really been wronged—wronged in a way that is common among people like you—by someone who is protected from justice by a legal system which is biased in favor of people like the person who wronged you, then speaking out and simply hoping to be believed may well be your best or only option.

Obviously this trope is, and clearly has been, subject to tremendous abuse. But the presumption of guilt is not a flat or neutral trope. In fact (and Wynn references this in her essay) it is really the presumption of guilt on the part of the powerful when the accusation is made by someone who is marginalized. On this level it can (or, at best, should) operate as a corrective to an unjust legal system. The problem (and this analysis comes from Angie), is that in both liberal and leftist contexts, marginalization is itself a source of social power specifically because both liberals and leftists axiomatically accept the proposition that existing power structures are unjust. This means that an accusation, by dint of being also a claim to the status of marginalization, becomes simultaneously the acquisition of marginalization which thereby "confirms" the legitimacy of the accusation. Of course the very axiomatically accepted belief which drives this problem has a strong historical and evidentiary basis: existing power structures are in fact unjust, do in fact server the interests of the powerful, prosperous, and impenitent, and it is in fact reasonable therefore to weight our judgement in favor of the socially, legally, historically marginalized. Looming behind all of this, of course, are two intractable facts that punishment of the innocent is, itself, unjust; and that real victims of real oppression are often not believed.

It strikes me that the tension created by this trope will remain so long as the unjust situation which gave rise to it (or at least the positive form of it: "believe marginalized accusers when their claims are credible") remains in place. While life in the tension between this trope and the presumption of innocence is uncomfortable, I will hazard that living in that tension is more just than simply resolving it in favor of either of the two dynamics which create it.

2. Abstraction

Wynn explains abstraction, the second trope, as the process of shifting from specifics of an individual persons specific misdeed (person X did Y) to the claim that that person does that sort of deed. Wynn uses the example of a young you tube semi-celebrity who was accused of something fairly specific which was then abstracted into a much larger species of evil, a species which contains acts far more heinous than the act of which he was initially accused. This trope does seem to be a particularly large problem in the context of the current internet. In tandem with the third trope (discussed below) it has the effect of shifting accusations from things people have done (and may or may not have repented) to identifying them as evildoers as such.

3. Essentialism

Essentialism is, in Wynn's analysis, the process of identifying the accused with the crime. On one level this seems like a ubiquitous enough process—we do it all the time when anyone other than ourselves (or maybe those we love) commit acts of evil—it is the linguistic shift from "Bob stole something" to "Bob is a thief", the identification of a person with their action(s). Now the process of deciding how many times someone needs to do something before we should identify them with it (essentialize them in Wynn's parlance) is often a subjective and vague one. Kill one person in cold blood and it does not seem at all unfair to call you a murderer; lie once in order to avoid an awkward social situation and it is probably unreasonable (even if technically accurate) to say that you are a liar. Notice that the effect of this trope is magnified by the one above (abstraction) because, in general, the more an action is considered evil, the more reasonable it feels to essentialize it. Thus if someone—let's say Bob—were to once take home a ream of printer paper (the specific act) it would not necessarily feel reasonable to essentialize them as a thief, but once the action has been abstracted (Bob steals) it is much easier to essentialize Bob as "a thief".

It is around this point that Wynn starts to make the significant (if largely unstated) distinction between canceling as it could or should be and canceling as it often occurs. In fact from this point in her essay forward it becomes fairly clear that Wynn's tropes in fact frame what we might call "toxic canceling" as distinguished from canceling in theory or canceling as such. Put another way, we can read/watch Wynn's essay as a critique of how Tropes 2-7 have damaged a social justice tool which could otherwise be used well, if carefully.

4. Pseudo-moralism/Pseudo Intellectualism

This trope, pseudo-moralism/pseudo-intellectualism, is probably the weakest part of Wynn's argument—if only because it is always finally impossible to know another person's real intentions—but it is also the least necessary for the structure of the argument as a whole and for the conclusion. It does, however, pack a significant rhetorical punch and it sets up a parallelism with a psychology Lewis addresses, that of the bandwagoner or conniver. Whereas Wynn argues that many of the people who participate in cancelling (both those who make the initial accusation and those who participate in the actual canceling itself) operate in bad faith—that the reasons they give for canceling the various subjects are not their real reasons, that in fact they were motivated by a sort of crowd masochism and the joy of seeing apparently powerful people "taken down a notch"—Lewis spends several paragraphs (discussed above) working through the potential motives of people who choose to give evil folks a pass. In effect, whereas Wynn examines the psychology of those who cancel in bad faith, Lewis examines the psychology of those who fail to cancel in bad faith. Thus these two psychological temptations taken together serve as the Sylla and Charibdis between which a healthy culture will have to navigate

In Wynn's words:

Moralism or intellectualism provide a phony pretext for the call-out. You can pretend you just want an apology, you can pretend you're just a concerned citizen who wants the person to improve. You can pretend you're simply offering up criticism when what you're really doing is attacking a person's career and reputation out of spite, envy, revenge, I mean it could be any motivation.... It's schadenfreude right? This kind of petty sadism. 

Wynn's follows this statement with an immediate acknowledgement that not everyone involved in a given canceling is insincere but maintains that bad-faith motives must account for a significant portion of the act.  The body of evidence she supplies in support of this claim are bound up in the next trope: No Forgiveness. Wynn effectively argues that if the stated moral or intellectual grounds for the canceling were genuine then an apology (what I think she is really getting at is evidence of what Lewis would call repentance) on the part of the accused ought to result in the end of the canceling—at least the sort of internet malpractice cases which Wynn is concerned with. She then supplies a significant collection of evidence that said forgiveness does not, in fact, take place.

5. No Forgiveness

It is on trope 5 that Wynn and Lewis come into near synchronicity. Remember that for Lewis, the value of call-out and/or canceling resides in it's application to the "powerful, prosperous, and impenitent". While Wynn chose to use the language of forgiveness, it is clear from the way she discusses the forgiveness which is withheld that she is not suggesting that there needs to be any sort of total reconciliation between the accuser and the accused (she knows as well as Lewis that it is a monstrous thing to force or require a victim to reconcile to their oppressor) only that the canceling should be revoked. The canceling endures after an apology because, in Wynn's words:

Cancelers will often dismiss an apology as "insincere" no matter how convincingly written or delivered. And of course an insincere apology is [taken as] further proof of what a machiavellian psychopath you really are. Now sometimes a good apology will calm things down for a while, but next time there's a scandal the original accusation will be raised again, as if you never apologized.

Where Wynn and Lewis meet is in the conclusion that, whatever its total merits, a culture which includes canceling has gone bad in the moment that it fails to provide a mechanism for redemption of the canceled or called-out. But then this is one of the ways in which I think Christianity has something really substantial to offer not just online-liberal-and-leftist-discourse but the world as a whole. Christianity is nothing if not a religion of redemption. We are resurrection people and I will argue until  I am blue that a society will always be limited in any attempt to move towards justice until it learns both to unflinchingly identify and own its own evils—both structural/corporate and instantiated in individual persons—though that unflinching gaze so often feels like death, and to embrace redemption, resurrection from that death. I have written elsewhere (A Funeral Oration for C.S. Lewis and On the Resurrection of the Dead) about what this process could look like in its application to Lewis himself as a model for applying it generally.

From this point in Wynn's analysis forward she is describing a form of cancelling which is so thoroughly corrupted that Lewis would, of necessity, have been in near lock step with her in condemning it.

6. The Transitive Property of Cancellation

To her credit, this trope—the Transitive Property of Cancellation—seems to upset Wynn the most. As she describes it (and recounts her own experiences with it), the transitive property of cancellation is the dynamic whereby a failure to participate in canceling a particular person results in being canceled yourself. Wynn shares the stories of a number of people, some friends and acquaintances and some who did nothing beyond showing support for the statement of someone else who had publicly refused to cancel Wynn, who have been on the receiving end of this dynamic. The accounts are heartbreaking. Further, Wynn's account of this transitive effect further demonstrates a certain mob mentality effect which seems to occur once the canceling process has begun. Specifically where there is some awareness of the original "punch up not down" rule when it came to the original cancellation (of Wynn) insofar as it was justified on the basis of her social media semi-fame, the application of this transitive property has in fact resulted in attacks on, and harassment of, people against whom these attacks are unambiguous cases of "punching down".

 As for Lewis, while a case could be mounted that those who refuse to cancel Wynn might fall into the category of band-wagoners and that they would therefore merit canceling on that level, that argument founders on the fact that Lewis never even suggests that merely being a band-wagoner should rise to the level of canceling. In fact, Lewis tacitly argues against canceling band-wagoners by exemplifying the opposite.

In Connivance Lewis outlines a specific interaction he had with a band-wagoner of the worst sort (that is, for Lewis, a band-wagoner who associates with evil in order to gain access to their evil) and throughout he carefully masks the identity of the person whom he is using for an example. The story Lewis tells about the young man is damning and his conclusion is just as cutting:

Here is the perfect band-wagoner. Immediately on the decision "This is a revolting tyranny", follows the question "How can I as quickly as possible cease to be one of the victims and become one of the tyrants?" If i had been able to introduce the young man to someone in the Ministry, I think we may be sure that his manners to that hated "meddler" would have been genial and friendly in the extreme. 

And yet, given the opportunity, Lewis declines to identify and thereby cancel even this worst of bandwagon offenders.

This trope also engages in some of the worst excesses of disgust based moral reasoning but that will have to wait for a separate essay.

7. Dualism

The Dualism trope (Wynn's last) is almost inevitable given the previous 6. It amounts to an impossible reduction of all people into the simplistic categories of good and bad or good and evil. And uses that to justify nearly any quantity of abuse and harassment of the evil. Hopefully by now the circularity of the process is becoming clear and the reduction to dualism (because almost none of these processes begin with dualism) is emerging as almost an inevitability. If a group permits itself first to assume guilt (1-Presumption of Guilt), then to equate specific actions with larger and broader species of evil(2-Abstraction), reduce the accused to their offence (3-Essentialism), insulate itself against introspection(4-Pseudo-Intellectualism/Pseudo-Moralism), cut off all avenues of redemption (5-No Forgiveness), and then expand the censure to include guilt-by-association so that any speaking out in defense of the accused results in similar treatment (6-The Transitive Property of Cancelation), the reduction of the whole discourse to black and white terms is practically unavoidable. The first, second, and fifth tropes all but forbid the introduction of nuance, and the sixth trope enacts penalties against anyone who might try to introduce any significant complexity to the conversation.

The great power of reductive dualism after all is its motive function. A reduction to dualism obliterates all scruples. Certainly dualism has a sort of ontological strength as well, Lewis refers to the spiritual/religious iteration of it as (next to Christianity) "the most reasonable creed on the market". Good and evil are vital as moral polarities of course, but humans and human societies do not exist at the poles, we exist along a spectrum between them. Reduction to dualism forces us to ignore the good or the evil in a person in order to act for or against them. But since all people contain both good and evil, acting for or against them will always be a mixed bag. By reducing to dualism we act against evil (and in so doing also against the good which the reducing process ignores) or for good (and in so doing also for the evil which the reducing process ignores). It is therefore vital that we, to quote one of the godfathers of vlogging) "learn to imagine one another complexly".

Or as Lewis put it in The Weight of Glory:

The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbor’s glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken.

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare.

All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations.

Conclusion. A Reflection and Some Recommendations:

It is worth noticing that Lewis' and Wynn's arguments form a chiasm. Lewis begins from the position that canceling is wrong and then responds to his initial position with an argument that a lack of canceling is a symptom of an unhealthy culture; Wynn begins by recognizing the good and necessary role that canceling plays in situations of injustice and then responds to her initial position with an argument that, in the form it currently takes, canceling has become only another form of injustice. This chiastic structure ought to suggest a point where the two arguments meet, and that there may be some treasure buried at the spot marked X.

Both Lewis and Wynn acknowledge that canceling is an attempt at correcting a particular injustice. Where Wynn refers to "bringing justice and accountability to powerful people", Lewis agrees that "It is not wholly desirable that any man should be allowed at once the pleasures of a tyrant ... and also those of an honest man". On both accounts there is a need for a mechanism for bringing at least a modicum of justice in situations where existing power structures are unable or unwilling to act. And in fact both authors are consciously dealing with cases outside of any formal justice system. Of course, there are many important reasons for the existence of the bureaucracies and official structures of legal justice, but it would be foolishness to suggest that even the best justice systems is perfect. Whether because it is built to err against wrongful punishment, because it was framed by people who themselves had broken (racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, etc...) notions of process and justice, or simply because there are some injustices which the public does not want the state to involve itself in, there will—I would go so far as to say should—always be some holes.

Still the fact that all justice systems have fail-points means that there are always victims without recourse to those systems, and to be content to leave things at that—to dust of our hands and walk away—is unconscionable. Thus the need which canceling attempts to meet.

And yet, as both Wynn and Lewis are aware, an unregulated, people-driven justice mechanism is one of the most dangerous things in the world; it is neither accidental nor inappropriate that the darker days of the French revolution and even the terror are frequently invoked in this conversation since the reign of terror is the natural end point if, and only if, the worst excesses and distortions of canceling prevail and are then joined to the violence of the state or of the mob.

Moving away from their point of agreement, the different perspectives and approaches that Wynn and Lewis reveal a very helpful outline of what a healthy cancel or call out culture might look like—or at least they provide us with protective guide rails.

On both accounts the operation is fairly straight forward. From Wynn's argument we simply invert tropes 2-7 to generate a look at what a just cancel mechanism could look like. To that I want to then add a few principles from Lewis, namely charity (hoping the best for everyone) and humility (keeping our own weaknesses in mind). Brought together the guidelines for just cancellation would look like this:

1. (Lewis) In as much as it is possible, assume the best of everyone involved.
2. (Wynn) Keep the call-out specific: What did the person do or say?
3. (Wynn) Maintain the distinction between the action and the actor. 
4. (Wynn) Inasmuch as possible work to operate in good faith.
5. (Wynn) Accept apologies (at least provisionally) and pay attention to behavior and speech over time.
6. (Wynn) Allow discussion about the called-out person and respect the fact that relationships impact moral reasoning.
7. (Wynn) The John Green Rule—Always work the imagine the other complexly.
8. (Lewis) Engage in regular introspection, remembering that power corrupts.

The Hermeneutics of C.S. Lewis: A Review of "Reflections on the Psalms"

It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers will bring us to Him. We must not use the Bible as a sort of encyclopedia out of which texts can be taken for use as weapons.

Every year or so I see this C.S. Lewis quote make the social media rounds. It is inevitably cheered and championed by progressive and other non-Evangelical Christians and is scorned, challenged, and/or ignored by the Evangelical and Fundamentalist crowd. The quality of the challenge varies but the strongest one I have encountered is this post from William O'Flaherty who has written an (occasionally helpful) book on Lewis misquotes. O'Flaherty's argument is that while it is not a mis-quote (he acknowledges that it comes from a letter Lewis wrote in 1958) it also should not be shared because it is from a letter and is therefore a response to a specific question (the question was about what Lewis though of the doctrine of inspiration but O'Flaherty neglects to mention this). O'Flaherty then suggests that if Lewis had wanted to write extensively or publicly on the subject of inspiration we would have an essay from him on the topic.

This is not an especially good argument (it is essentially an argument from silence that the quote has been taken out of context) but it is at least an argument. For all of that it is an argument which fails pretty miserably as an example of C.S. Lewis scholarship. While it is true that Lewis did not write any essay on the doctrine of inspiration (one has to wonder how careful O'Flaherty is being with his word choice) Lewis did write three chapters on the subject of inspiration and Biblical interpretation in his book Reflections on the Psalms.

The first nine chapters of the book are roughly what you would expect from Lewis: a thematic analysis of the book of Psalms, interspersed with reflections and insights on a variety of topics. While the whole is well worth reading, Chapter 9 A Word About Praising is so insightful and (almost ironically) timely that it merits a detour and select quoting. Lewis project in the chapter is dealing with the "stumbling block" Lewis claims to have encountered early in his time as a Christian. In Lewis' words:

We all despise the man who demands continued assurance of his own virtue, intelligence or delightfulness; we despise still more the crowd of people round every dictator, every millionaire, every celebrity, who gratify that demand. Thus a picture at once ludicrous and horrible, both of God and of His worshippers, threatened to appear in my mind.

Lewis solves this conundrum (one he thought almost embarrassingly simple to many but which I suspect many in our own age have not even risen to) by reflecting further on his own experiences of delight and love:

I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise unless (sometimes even if) shyness or the fear of boring others is deliberately brought in to check it. The world rings with praise--lovers praising their mistresses, readers their favorite poet, walkers praising the countryside, players praising their favorite game--praise of weather, wines, dishes actors, motors, horses, colleges, countries, historical personages, children, flowers, mountains, rare stamps, rare beetles, even some politicians or scholars. I had not noticed how the humblest , and at the same time most balanced and capacious minds, praised most,  while the cranks, misfits, and malcontents praised least. The good critics found something to praise in many imperfect works; the bad ones continually narrowed the list of books we might be allowed to read. The healthy and unaffected man, even if luxuriously brought up widely experienced in good cookery, could praise a very modest meal; the dyspeptic and the snob found fault with all.

A few years worth of meditation and spiritual growth lie in those words.

And for all of that wealth (the above digression is the smallest sampling, each chapter contains gems of similar worth), it is Lewis' treatment of Scripture and Scripture interpretation in chapters ten, eleven, and twelve which I was most strongly driven to write about.

Lewis' Hermeneutics

In the last three chapter of Reflections on the Psalms Lewis addresses, not the psalms or themes from the psalms directly, but questions of Biblical interpretation which arise from a study of the Psalms in a modern (and post NT) context and his own methods and approaches to Biblical interpretation. In chapters ten and twelve his primary focus is on what he refers to as second meanings--meanings within the psalms that the original authors themselves might (or even certainly) not have seen in their own works--Lewis comes out in favor of allegorical and prophetic second meaning interpretations of the psalms (as well as other OT passages) and uses an argument from his own work in literary criticism to do so:

The status I claim for such things [second meanings], then, is neither that of coincidence on the one hand nor that of supernatural prevision on the other. I will try to illustrate  it by three imaginable cases. i. A holy person, explicitly claiming to prophesy by the Spirit tells us that there is in the universe such and such a creature. Later we learn (which God forbid) to travel in space and distribute upon new worlds the vomit of our own corruption; and, sure enough, on the remote planet of some remote star, we find that very creature. This would be prophesy in the strictest sense. This would be evidence for the prophets's miraculous gift  and strong presumptive evidence for the truth of anything else he had said. ii. A wholly unscientific writer of fantasies invents a creature for purely artistic reasons. Later on, we find a creature recognisably like it. This would be just the writer's luck. A man who knows nothing about racing may once in his life back a winner. iii. A great biologist, illustrating the relation between animal organisms and their environment, invents for this purpose a hypothetical animal adapted to a hypothetical environment. Later, we find a creature very like it (of course in an environment very like the one he had supposed). This resemblance is not in the least accidental. Insight and knowledge, not luck, led to the invention. The real nature of life explains why there is such a creature in the universe and also why there was such a creature in his lectures. If while we re-read the lectures, we think of the the reality, we are not bringing arbitrary fancies of our own to bear on the text. This second meaning is congenial to it. The examples I have in mind correspond to this third case; except of course that something more sensitive and personal  than scientific knowledge is involved--what the writer or speaker was, not only what he knew.

Lewis proceeds to helpfully apply this lens to New Testament and Patristic readings of the Old Testament. As an aside I suspect that he has established here a principle which may go a great ways towards resolving certain tensions between "death of the author" and "authorial intent" disputes in our own day. In Chapter ten Lewis primarily deploys this insight to defend the idea of true pagan prophets (he points primarily to Plato and to Virgil though I think the same argument serves in favor of Lao Tzu as well) making similar arguments to those he makes in Mere Christianity and other works concerning similarities between pagan "Corn King" myth and the truth myth of Christianity. In Chapter twelve he applied the ideas more directly to Old Testament passages and to the surprising, allegorical, and symbolic readings of them that we find in the New Testament and the Patristics.

Chapter eleven is an exposition of Lewis' own beliefs on the nature of the Bible and of Bible interpretation (hermeneutics), and it is the existence of this chapter which wholly undermines the claims O'Flaherty makes about the quote I began with. Throughout the chapter Lewis shows himself to be very much in line with a neo-orthodox and christocentric/red-letter understanding of the nature of inspiration and the proper interpretation of the Bible.

The chapter merits a close, point-by-point examination. Lewis opens by straightforwardly disclosing his project:

For us these writings are "holy", or "inspired", or, as St. Paul says, "The Oracles of God". But this has been understood in more than one way, and I must try to explain how I understand it at least so far as the Old Testament is concerned. [emphasis mine]

Lewis will, in fact, also clarify a good deal of how he understands inspiration in the New Testament as well. He continues,

I have been suspected of being what is called a Fundamentalist. That is because I never regard any narrative as unhistorical simply on the ground that includes the miraculous.

I do not think that any Lewis scholar would suggest that Lewis was anything but a thoroughgoing supernaturalist and, from the perspective of those who subscribe to "liberal theology" in the 19th century German tradition, this would seem to locate him in the camp of the Fundamentalists or Evangelicals. This, however, is a mistake of the sort we call the false dilemma. There are more than two possible theologies of inspiration--even when painting with a very broad brush--and Lewis is neither a 19th century German style liberal or a Fundamentalist as he goes on to clarify:

 Some people find the miraculous so hard to believe that they cannot imagine any reason for my acceptance of it other than a prior belief that every sentence of the Old Testament has historical or scientific truth. But this I do not hold, any more than St. Jerome did when he said that Moses described Creation "after the manner of a popular poet" (as we should say mythically) or than Calvin did when he doubted whether the story of Job were history or fiction. [emphases mine]

Lewis here is clearly in the same position which so many of us who are currently being labeled "progressive" Christians find ourselves: on the one hand, robust supernaturalists happy to affirm the creeds and the rest and thus seen as still "Evangelical" or "Fundamentalist" by certain liberal and mainline theologians (I remember one moment in recent Twitter history wherein non-Evangelical Chrisitian Twitter was shocked to discover that so many still believe in the bodily resurrection of Christ); on the other hand non-interrantists who cheerfully apply non-literalist readings of a wide variety when approaching the text of the Bible.  Lewis clarifies that his reason for accepting the miraculous is philosophical:

I have never found any philosophical grounds for the universal negative proposition that miracles do not happen. I have to decide on quite other grounds (if I decide at all) whether a given narrative is historical or not. The Book of Job appears to me unhistorical because it begins about a man quite unconnected with all history or even legend, with no genealogy, living in a country of which the Bible elsewhere has hardly anything to say; because, in fact, the author quite obviously writes as a story-teller not as a chronicler. [emphasis mine]

In that last clause we get a glimpse of how Lewis individual vocation as a literary scholar informed his hermeneutic. As a man well versed in genre, he allowed what he knew about classical and ancient literary writing and genre to inform the way he interpreted the Bible.

If all of this were not enough, Lewis breaks cleanly from any Fundamnetalist (and many Evangelical) intepretative doctrines when he continues:

I have therefore no difficulty in accepting, say, the view of those scholars who tell us that the account of Creation in Genesis is derived from earlier Semitic stories which were Pagan and mythical.

And Lewis has already shown in chapter ten why such a proposition is no threat to his view of scripture as a whole--much less his faith. He spends a few paragraphs making this connection explicit, concluding:

There are poets like those in the Song of Songs who probably never dreamed of any but a secular and natural purpose in what they composed. There is (and it is no less important) the work first of the Jewish and then of the Christian Church in preserving and canonising just these books. There is the work of redactors and editors in modifying them. On all of these I suppose a Divine pressure; of which not by any means all need have been conscious.

The human qualities of the raw materials show through. Naivety, error, contradiction, even (as in the cursing psalms) wickedness are not removed. [emphasis mine]

So much for the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy.

Immediately following this Lewis locates himself squarely within the neo-orthodox tradition on inspiration and summarily demolishes Mr. O'Flaherty's argument:

The total result is not "the Word of God" in the sense that every passage, in itself, gives impeccable science or history. It carries the Word of God; and we (under grace, with attention to tradition and to interpreters wiser than ourselves, and with the use of such intelligence and learning as we may have) receive that word from it not by using it as an encyclopedia or an encyclical but by steeping ourselves in its tone or temper ad so learning its overall message.

This statement might have appeared in any of a number of the theologians who claim that the Bible is a  medium through which we come to know the Word of God but is not itself that Word (a title the Bible grants to Jesus).

From here, Lewis goes on to recognize that the nature of the Bible as an "untidy and leaky vehicle" is frustrating to some (so much so that many of them resort to denying it altogether)

One can respect, and at moments envy, both the Fundamentalist's view of the Bible and the Roman Catholic's view of the Church. 

but, Lewis holds that it is actually a very good thing, and in his argument to that effect his christocentric/red-letter hermeneutic shines through:

We may observe that the teaching of Our Lord Himself, in which there is no imperfection, is not given us in that cut-and-dried, fool-proof, systematic fashion we might have expected or desired. He wrote no book. We have only reported sayings, most of them uttered in answer to questions, shaped in some degree by their context. And when we have collected them all we cannot reduce them to a system. He preaches but He does not lecture. He uses paradox, proverb, exaggeration, parable, irony; even (I mean no irreverence) the 'wisecrack'. He utters maxims which, like popular proverbs, if rigorously taken, may seem to contradict one another. His teaching therefore cannot be grasped by the intellect alone, cannot be "got up" as if it were a "subject". If we try to do that with it, we shall find Him the most elusive of teachers. He hardly ever gave a straight answer to a straight question. He will not be, in the way we want, "pinned down". The attempt is (again, I mean no irreverence) like trying to bottle a sunbeam.

Lewis argues that what is true of Jesus' teaching is also ultimately true of Paul's teaching and of the Bible as a whole. In fact it is in his statement on that point that the final piece falls into place and the degree to which he affirmed the doctrine (currently enunciated by Greg Boyd and others) that the Bible is most accurately interpreted when Jesus' teachings are taken to be the center and highest point of revelation such that the rest, in varying degrees, should be understood by the light of what Jesus more authoritatively taught. Lewis in fact divides the Bible into three levels or degrees for the purpose of interpretation, first the teachings of Jesus, then in the teachings of Paul (for myself I would want to expand that to the epistles as a whole), and then the rest of Scripture. Each lower level can thus best be interpreted only by the light of the level(s) above it; all (as we saw earlier) only being profitably interpreted by the light of grace and the supervention of the Holy Spirit. As Lewis puts it:

Thus on three levels, in appropriate degrees, we meet the same refusal of what we might have thought best for us--in the Word Himself [Jesus], in the Apostle to the Gentiles [St. Paul], in Scripture as a whole.

Lewis goes on to connect this view of Scripture to the meaning of the incarnation where he almost tangentially embraces the Eastern Orthodox doctrine of theosis:

For we are taught that the Incarnation itself proceeded "not by the conversion of the godhead into flesh but by the taking of (the) manhood into God"; in it the human life becomes the vehicle of Divine life. If the Scriptures proceed not by conversion of God's word into a literature but by taking up of a literature to be the vehicle of God's word, this is not anomalous. 

Returning to his beloved theme of anti-reductionism, Lewis ventures an explanation for why and how all of this should be so:

Because the lower nature, in being taken up and loaded with a new burden and advanced to anew privilege, remains, and is not annihilated, it will always be possible to ignore the up-grading and see nothing but the lower. Thus men can read the life of Our Lord (because it is a human life) as nothing but a human life. Many, perhaps most, modern philosophies read human life merely as an animal life of unusual complexity. The Cartesians read animal life as mechanism. Just in the same way Scripture can be read as merely human literature. No new discovery, no new method, will ever give a final victory to either interpretation. For what is required, on all these levels alike, is not merely knowledge but a certain insight; getting the focus right. Those who can see in each of these instances only the lower will always be plausible. One who contended that a poem was nothing but black marks on white paper would be unanswerable if he addressed an audience who couldn't read. Look at it through microscopes, analyse the printer's ink and the paper, study it (in that way) as long as you like; you will never find something over and above all the products of analysis whereof you can say "This is the poem". Those who can read however, will continue to say the poem exists.

Thus the Bible is, according to Lewis, a fundamentally spiritual text without at any moment ceasing to be a material and literary text. The great mistake of the fundamentalists in his view amounts to a sort of bizarre flattening in which the spiritual dimension of the Bible is substituted for the material and literary text, with the result that Fundamentalists and Evangelicals are constantly, and futilely, trying to equate the spiritual meaning of the Bible with the standard and literary lower meaning of the Bible. The materialists commit the same error of flattening the text but they do it by simply denying the second meaning. Neither group is, in the end, willing to let the Bible be the haunted and holy text that it is.

So Anyway

I highly recommend Reflections on the Psalms 5/5

On Becoming the Monster

Nietzsche is watching

I believe that Donald Trump's politics are best described as American fascism. Also—because apparently this has to be said these days—it is very bad thing to be a fascist because fascism is a very bad thing, has been a very bad thing for as long as it has been a thing, and will always be a very bad thing. For that reason it has been encouraging to watch the Democrats oppose Trump on grounds which are often (not always) both strong* and moral**.

That is not to say that the Democrats are, as a whole or as individuals, especially wonderful or especially moral. What it does say is that the President's behavior and speech has been so bad that his political opponents, opportunistic or ideologically pure, have been able to assume the moral and logical high ground for quite some time; with the concomitant result that they have enjoyed the alliance of moral and reasonable people from outside their own political party. They have, of course, also enjoyed the alliance of political opportunists from outside their own party, but that would have happened no matter who the president was.

As a result of all this, we find ourselves in a position where we don't really know the degree to which Democrats as a whole, and individually, really are proponents of reason and morality (and I want to state for the record that both of these categories can operate independently of a person's general politics). They may all be shining beacons of integrity an reason, or they may all be crummy opportunists who are only too eager to exploit the country. In all likelihood of course, the truth lies somewhere between those poles. Hypocrisy is, after all, the tax that vice pays to virtue which is why virtue often characterizes the preferred rhetoric and methodology of those politicians to whom it is available as a sufficiently powerful attack on their opponents.

All of this is well and good and is something I have kept in mind over the course of the Trump presidency. Recently, however, I have started to notice a few Democratic and anti-Trump figures arguing that "winning" in 2020 is going to require Democrats to "play dirty". I want to highlight that sentiment and place a giant warning circle around it. 

Ezra Klein over at Vox wrote what I think is the most insightful and accurate account of the Trumpification of white American Evangelicalsim and it is all about power. In the second paragraph of the piece (the entirety of which is well worth reading) Klein lays out the thesis:

Enter Donald Trump. Whatever Trump’s moral failings, he’s a street fighter suited for an era of political combat. Christian conservatives believe — rightly or wrongly — that they’ve been held back by their sense of righteousness, grace, and gentility, with disastrous results. Trump operates without restraint. He is the enemy they believe the secular deserve, and perhaps unfortunately, the champion they need. Understanding this dynamic is crucial to understanding the psychology that attracts establishment Republicans to Trump, and convinces them that his offense is their best defense.

This... happened

The choice which white Evangelicalism made in 2016, which has scandalized so many other US Christians and has played a significant role in alienating a portion of Gen X and Millennial Americans who grew up within US Evangelicalism is the choice to abandon "their sense of righteousness, grace, gentility"—in other words, to abandon strong moral arguments—in favor of what they euphemistically call "street fighter" tactics. There is a whole lot that could be said about this and Klein has already said much of it, but I want to focus here on the warning that this needs to be for those of us who are committed to actually working to build a better world, to standing against injustice, to being on the side of the oppressed and the marginalized. The great temptation is to descend.

It is vital that we not forget, that we not fail to notice, that white American Evangelicals have justified their embrace of a philandering, racist, misogynist, dirtbag by first concluding that evil (here I am referring specifically to the many actions and words of Trump which cause white American Evangelicals to squirm and say things like "we didn't elect a Sunday School teacher") is finally more powerful than good. Machiavelli's view that "the ends justify the means"—while a very great evil—remains relatively harmless against those who believe that good is more powerful than evil. It is only once we begin to believe that lies are more powerful than the truth, that subterfuge and misrepresentation is more powerful than integrity that Machiavelli's poison can begin to really infect our thinking.

I do not have a whole lot of use for Nietzsche but he was 100% on the ball when he warned "Beware that, when fighting monsters, you do not yourself become a monster." If we become that which we seek to defeat, only with a different hue, then in that same moment we have already lost the capacity to win. I am afraid that there is no help for it. Evil cannot be resisted on its own grounds of lies, deceit, bullying, and violence, evil gives way only to good and good will not prevail without faith. It is in the nature of good that it nearly always appears the weaker power at first. Good will prevail—it must prevail—but in the short term the Truth, Integrity, Nuance, Complexity, and Honesty, will always seem weaker and more fragile than the smarmy and swaggering oversimplified and obfuscating lies of evil.

Good ends will never be achieved through evil means, or put more directly, evil means will never succeed in achieving good ends—the means always entail then ends—and if we forget that, we are doomed to create our own Trump.

Footnotes:

*Strong grounds would be grounds which are, and should be, convincing to a rational, reasonable person.

**Moral grounds would be grounds which do, and should, carry moral weight and do not involve advocating immoral motives or actions.

My Miracle

I find that I am more than a little shy in writing this piece; it is, at once, apparently unlikely, and open to skepticisms of all sorts. For all that it is a true story and one which I want to have out in the world—I think it matters. I have held off on writing it out properly so far mostly because I have had intentions to include it in a much more comprehensive account of how I went from being a politically and theologically conservative evangelical Bible college student to where I am today ("LGBTQ+ affirming Anabaptist post-evangelical anarcho-pacifist" only scratches the surface). I still hope to write that story out properly at some point and, since this story plays a pivotal role in that one, I will have to recount this one. But since I have not gotten around to properly writing it up yet, I want to get this one out in the meantime. Anyway, this is a story of my miracle*.

In the fall of 2011 I had just managed to work my way back into teaching and was, at the same time, beginning to really question my theology around sexuality (for reasons that I will get into some other time, I was already fully affirming of transgender identities). The coincidence of these two developments in my life came together in the form of two brilliant students. One a young lady who was, at the time, dating another young woman at the school, and the other a brilliant young trans man, James, who was at that time still identifying as a lesbian. These two were both the sort of students that you just like having in class and getting to know. Both are brilliant, engaging, and friendly—the one hardworking, passionate; an inspired poet with an ever-present gleam of laughter in her eye; the other energetic, mischievous, and compassionate with a sense of justice which drives him to speak out at all the right times. Without knowing a thing about it it the time, these two students made it impossible for me to think of "questions around the theology of LGBTQ+ identies" in the abstract. I had to deal with the question in the concrete: were the the things my conservative Christian upbringing told me to believe about these two young people true or were they not? As anyone who has followed this blog at all surely knows by now, I came to the conclusion that God fully celebrates the identities, relationships, and marriages of LGBTQ+ folks.

Any analysis of one's own deliberation and discernment processes are prone to error, but so far as I can tell my theological shift began with accepting the plausibility, even the compelling logic, of LGB affirming interpretations of certain key passages from the Bible (I have written about those arguments in this series) but in the early fall of 2011 I was still afraid to accept those conclusions. I was still fighting against the weight of a homophobic Christian culture, of a church and a peer group which I knew held contrary beliefs, and of the fear of being wrong. It was those two students who gave me the perspective and--frankly--the courage to break through those barriers in my own soul. By November I had begun to publicly (I think online and certainly to my friends and family) acknowledge that my "views had changed".

But this is supposed to be a story about a miracle so I need to jump forward a bit. Several months later (late winter or early spring) found me having a conversation with James. He was telling me about instances of bullying that he and his friends endured at our high school. I didn't know much at the time but I knew enough to ask him whether the Gay Straight Alliance (GSA) at the

school wasn't helping enough with the problem. He ruefully told me that we didn't really have a functional GSA. I was a little surprised to hear it and told him that he ought to start one. That is as much of the conversation as I remember but he has since assured me that I followed up with a promise to be the faculty adviser if he couldn't find someone better. The first day of school for the 2012/13 school year, he popped up in my classroom grinning from ear to ear and waving the forms that I needed to sign in order to make the GSA and official club. Clearly running the Gay Straight Alliance at a public high school is not what I would have seen myself doing as recently as one year earlier, but I was not about to say "no" at this point so I signed the form, and declared him president of the club. Seven years later he has graduated from both high school and college and the GSA is still going strong.

It didn't take long for our weekly club meetings to become a highlight of my week. If you haven't ever had the chance to create and hang out in a safe space for marginalized and bullied high school students then you haven't fully lived. LGBTQ+ and ally high school students are some of the most resilient, quirky, fun teenagers in the world. I really have had the time of my life being their faculty adviser.

And that is how I find myself sitting in my car in the parking lot of a local grocery store praying that I wasn't sending kids to hell. This might not make a lot of sense to anyone who wasn't raised in the toxic soup of white American Evangelicalism. By the fall of 2012 I barely believed in an eternal hell anyway and I definitely didn't believe that being gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender would send you there. But fear is only rarely about what we give our conscious mental assent to. Very few of the children who are afraid of monsters in the dark still actually believe on a conscious rational level that those monsters exist. You really don't have to believe in something to be afraid of it. So despite my own convinced beliefs, I was afraid that by organizing a safe and supportive space for LGBTQ+ teens I was facilitating their damnation to a fate I didn't believe in.***

Beyond the lingering fears rooted in my white American evangelical upbringing, I was struggling with something else in the fall of 2012: homophobia. Miriam Webster defines homophobia as "irrational fear of, aversion to, or discrimination against homosexuality or homosexuals***". The term overlaps with, but is distinct from, heterosexism, "discrimination or prejudice by heterosexuals against homosexuals***" Given those definitions, over the course of 2011 I had moved away from conscious and intentional heterosexism but was still very much struggling with unconscious and visceral homophobia. The way I would have probably put it at the time is that I was find when interacting with LGBTQ+ folks in general and I supported their social and legal liberation but when I thought about what "being gay" entailed, it skeeved me out and I would experience what psychologists and sociologists refer to as a disgust reaction.

Let me take a moment here to emphasize something: if this disgust reaction is something you experience as well please know that this is something which was done to you by an overtly heterosexist and homophobic society, and that, if you were raised in white American evangelicalism**** then this malformation of your emotional self was perpetrated against you by evil, sinful forces which have long operated within the church and are only slowly being exorcised.

Some beliefs can sicken the soul

Disgust reactions are really hard to revise but they are not impossible to get rid of. They are also extremely destructive. When disgust is activated against people or groups it results in marginalization, persecution, scapegoating and, in extreme cases, genocide. It is by activating a disgust reaction against minority communities that evil men have been most effective in attacking and damaging those communities. Based on what I have read***** (here is a decent place to start) I tend to think about changing a learned and ingrained disgust reaction about the same way I think about overcoming a phobia: possible but difficult and ordinarily requiring a lot of work. In that context, changing my beliefs was the way to start, and ongoing positive interactions with people who were likely to elicit that reaction was a solid way to move forward. But despite being on (probably) the right track psychologically, this remained a problem for me. I had enough of a handle on it that, so far as I can tell, my students were entirely unaware; it almost never occurred to me when I was around actual LGBTQ+ people in any case but I knew that it was having some effect on my overall relationship with my duties as facilitator of the GSA. If you have never experienced this imagine having in involuntary queasy reaction 10% or so of the time you think about your best friend. It wouldn't end your friendship but it would definitely be something you would want to overcome if at all possible.

So there I am, sitting in my car, suddenly flooded by irrational fears and doubts and struggling to overcome an ingrained reaction which I hated an which was getting in the way of relating to and helping the very students I most wanted to help. I started praying.

This wasn't the first time I had prayed about this topic or asked God for some sort of guidance. As I said, I had been working through bible study and theology on the topic for more than a year at that point and that process had involved a whole lot of prayer. To put it in distinctly white American evangelical language, my exegetical and discernment process had been bathed in prayer from the start.

Not much of a stretch

In 2007 my wife and I joined the Vineyard Community Church of Central Maryland, a charismatic and (at the time) relatively progressive—context matters folks—evangelical church. I found a whole lot of healing and growth in that church and was profoundly mentored and encouraged by the pastor at that time, John Odean. His support and teaching are substantially responsible for my even being willing to begin questioning the perverse doctrines I had been taught about LGBTQ+ people. But by 2012 John O had moved on and the new pastor, whom I got along with fairly well at the time, brought a different focus to the church. This new pastor was passionately motivated to see miraculous events (healings, speaking in tongues, prophecy etc...) at the church and in that vein he like to bring in various teachers and pastors who were known to practice and elicit that sort of experience. One of those pastors he brought in, offered to pray and prophesy over each member of our leadership team—including me. So I had walked up to the front of the church with my long hair, beard, beat up jeans and over-sized sweatshirt to get a prophecy. The teacher (a pastor at another church in our denomination) put his hands on my head and prayed quietly for a while and then told me "I think God is calling you work with marginalized and outcast people in this community". I had thanked him and gone back to my seat more than a little skeptical. The idea that a statement like that might apply well to someone who looked like I did in that mostly white middle class suburban church was hardly any sort of stretch. I had mentally filed the prayer away as sort of interesting but unlikely to mean much and gone on with life.

A year or so later and I am sitting in a car, pleading with God for direction, trying to figure out whether all of these negative feelings were damage I needed to heal from and overcome, or that last warnings of the Holy Spirit to a confused soul about to cause horrible damage to the spirits of teenagers by encouraging them in identities and behaviors which God objected to. "Jesus," I prayed, "am I doing the right thing?"

I talk to God a lot and God does talk back sometimes, but it is pretty rare for me for God's response to shake my soul. Usually, the stuff I hear from God I perceive as gentle encouragement, suggestion, or reminder: a stray thought or spontaneous emotion which has the smell of the Divine about it, the sort of whisper that doesn't seem to have come from my own thoughts, but hey, maybe they did. Very occasionally though, God speaks in a way that causes the bones of my soul to vibrate, communicating directly to me so clearly and overwhelmingly that I can't account for it as anything but connection with One who is greater, fuller, deeper, and higher than I am or could ever imagine. God's response this time was like that.

Those of you who have experienced the sort of thing I am describing will know that putting the response into words always diminishes it; the best I can get at is a "mostly this but that isn't quite right and it was also so much more" like if you were trying to describe sailing on the ocean and could only come up with "It's like stepping in a puddle but floating instead of touching the bottom". So God didn't respond to my prayer by saying "This is exactly what I have for you. That is what I was talking about when I told the preacher that you were being called to work with the marginalized and outcast in your community" but that is the closest I can come to describing what God actually did communicate to me.

But that isn't my miracle.

The miracle accompanied the response and was in addition to it. As soon as the prayer had ended I was enormously comforted. I felt like I had my answer and I felt something more. My disgust reaction had vanished entirely. I haven't felt it since. A process of pyschological healing from sinful malformation at the hands of a broken and homophobic heterosexist church and homophobic heterosexist society which ought to have required months if not years, happened in a moment. From that day until now the disgust reaction has been entirely absent from my mental landscape regarding LGBTQ+ people. God gave me both the confidence and the capacity to lean joyfully into holy work: advocacy for LGBTQ+ people and particularly teenagers.

That isn't to say that I am all the way where I need to be. I doubt that any of us are, and I know that I still have thought patterns and reactions (but not disgust reactions) which were formed by heterosexism, patriarchy, cissexism, homophobia, and transphobia (to name just a few) I have much to learn and many LGBTQ+ people and allies to learn it from. My claim is only that this one barrier, a socially formed disgust reaction rooted in homophobia was overcome for me by the power of the Holy Spirit.

This is what I now understand when I hear people talking about being liberated from sin and death. This is what I now understand when I read about Christ overcoming the body of sin. It was for freedom that Christ set us free. Freedom to free others from the clutches of sin: homophobia, transphobia, heterosexim, cissexim, racism, patriarchy, greed, consumerism, nationalism... the list goes on and the journey is long. But it is joy and it is freedom.

In the aftermath of that experience I was kicked off of the leadership team of my church (which we subsequently left) but the new pastor because of my online advocacy for the full inclusion of LGBTQ+ folks in the life of the church. But that is another story (one I hope to write up properly at some point). I bring it up here only to say that it was the message of encouragement from God and the evidence of my miracle (as well as the support of a beautiful community) which gave me the strength to get through that with my faith intact.

Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. 

James 1:2-4 NIV

Please support the work of GLSEN and of the Trevor Project, two remarkable organizations working to support and protect LGBTQ+ teenagers and high school students.

Footnotes:

* When I say "miracle" I am speaking of a supernatural event which is outside of ordinary experience and which seems to subvert the usual course of material causation. That is I mean by "miracle" exactly what folks generally take it to mean and not some sort of liberal theology appropriation of the term to describe the mere good and or psychologically profound.
**If you are interested in my views on hell, I found David Bentley Hart's recent That All Shall Be Saved rather convincing.
***I 100% recommend against calling anyone "a homosexual" outside of an academic or specialist context.
**** I am very much aware of the fact that this spiritual dynamic is at play in other Christian and religious traditions; white Evangelical Christianity merely happens to be the tradition with which I have personal experience.
***** I you are looking for spiritual (Christian) analyses of Disgust Reactions my brother and I wrote a paper on exactly that subject: Eucontamination: A Christian Study of the Logic of Disgust and Contamination