Note From the Academic Christian Underground

A great, great letter from a reader. I’ve obscured some identifying details at his/her request:

I have been reading your blog for some time, but in the wake of recent incidents on college campuses, I feel compelled to respond, especially as a newly minted PhD who is a) a theologically conservative Christian, and b) of Asian descent.

This isn’t my real Gmail account; I’m writing pseudonymously.  I did my undergraduate years at one of the elite colleges currently embroiled in SJW fury. Currently I am a tenure track professor of English.

These thoughts might be a bit scattered but the gravity of the situation, multiplied by the ordinary pressures of being a tenure track professor with an overflowing list of obligations, makes it hard to deliver an airtight piece of writing. Consider this some scattered thoughts.

1.  Thank you for covering this!

I am immeasurably grateful for this blog’s coverage of campus politics and the suppression of unfavorable views.  It’s like coming up for fresh air in a suffocating room.  I’d like to share about my experience as some context for my gratitude.

I spent last year teaching in a Great Books program, and my supervisor was a prominent scholar in her field.  She was undoubtedly helpful in guiding me to refine my pedagogy; however, she also took for granted the equation of Christians and narrowmindedness.  I’m sure she wouldn’t characterize herself this way, but after sitting in a meeting in which she casually treated “Republican senators” as a stand-in for all of contemporary Christianity, I could reach no other conclusion.

She was speaking about Christians, by the way, because we were teaching the Gospels in the course.  At the end of the year, I wrote a letter in which I both thanked her for the positives and called her out on her prejudice (as gently as I could, and with wine attached, to be extra ingratiating).  In the process, I had to out myself as a Christian.  I still haven’t heard from her.

The Great Books course was in general a nightmare for me, as I was thrown into the task of teaching one epic work after another with very little training (this is another subject — the way that universities expect already overburdened graduate students to do the same work as professors, at a fraction of the pay, and in fields outside their specialization).  On top of this, I had to deal with the casual condescension towards Christianity that prevailed when it came time to teach the Bible.  In addition to my supervisor’s comment, when they brought in a guest lecturer to “instruct” faculty on how to teach the Bible, his lecture consisted of labeling Luke as implicitly anti-Semitic and John as explicitly so.  There was no hint of respect for the purely literary merits of either text, a grace afforded the parade of misogynist Greek texts we read in the preceding eight weeks.

All of which is to say — the struggle is real, and if it weren’t for support from people outside the system like you, pursuing a degree in secular academia would feel wholly like an exercise in futility.  By the way, I also taught Dante, and included a primer in theology during my lecture – making sure the students did not see religion as a mere code for politics, but as profoundly central to Dante’s thinking in its own right.

2.  Please support Christian academics who are in the secular academy, especially academics of color.

I’m not writing from my personal Gmail account because I don’t even want to take a possible chance of running afoul of thought policing.  I literally just started teaching at my position, and I have zero guidance for how to obtain tenure while remaining true to my beliefs.  This would have been hard enough had campus activists across America not turned my field into a dystopian novel.  Now, however, I am especially paranoid of being found out.

However, I also still believe in the reason I started this degree in the first place: as impossible as it seems, there still need to be voices in the secular academy who will bear witness to this generation.  Moreover, the truth is that Christians of non-white descent have a much better chance of being heard right now than non-Christians.  We are the ones who have the best shot at pointing out the inconsistencies in cultural Marxism, and at forcing the Social Justice movement to recognize the religious roots of its own identity.

Most of these elite colleges are obsessed with framing themselves as ‘global institutions.’  As you well know, a truly ‘global’ institution would have to recognize that Asia, Latin America and Africa are thriving centers of orthodox Christianity.  While I do not wish to discount the contributions of thoughtful white academics like Alan Jacobs, I am convinced that a strong cohort of Christian academics of color – whom I have to believe are out there, but afraid of speaking up – can tie the current obsession with racial/ethnic difference to a recognition of non-Western Christianities, which will be impossible to ignore in the coming decades.  In doing so, perhaps we can use the Enemy’s tools against him, so to speak.

This is not to say that I have found the perfect strategy for speaking up while also avoiding mob fury, but I believe it’s worth trying.  I have much respect for the Benedict Option you discuss, but in recent posts, I find your despair over secular academia somewhat discouraging.  People like me are out there and we need help!  We have no mentors in academia, and certainly very little support in the church, where the dominant mood is shoring up the strength of Christian colleges.

3.  Please support Christian professors in secular English departments specifically.

There are a few that I know of in my own department, perhaps surprisingly.  I read the post on engineers saving the academy, and I do have to say that I thought it rather defeatist on the subject of “language” as it’s taught.  The engineering prof writes, “Writing and reading should be real as tractors.  It was once, and can still be again.”

Writing and reading still are as real as tractors! A statement such as this cedes far too much ground to postmodernist scholarship, as if the postmodernists really did have the power to magically transmogrify language into a matter of “burning cornfields at night.”  Writing and reading still are dreadfully, wonderfully real; if anything, the incendiary power of Erika Christakis’ email testifies to this fact.

I came across a lot of bullshit during my time [in college], but I also came across a lot of grad students and professors who are disenchanted with pure identity politics. Postcolonial scholars overlook Edward Said’s explicit love of Austen, Bronte, et al. For Said, a love of the Great Books’ literary form and a critical eye towards their politics were not mutually exclusive perspectives.  He called for living with the tension, rather than banishing it in the name of either left- or right-wing shibboleths.  Many in the academy remember this love of literary form, and – especially in Victorian circles, my specialty — insist on attention to form just like the best of the old school critics.

This new attention to form coincides (again, in my field at least) with a renewed attention to/respect for religion.  For decades, people taught Victorian literature as the story of Matthew Arnold’s retreating Sea of Faith, the disenchantment of the world against which pious believers fought in vain.  Now, people increasingly recognize that no such retreat occurred, save among the elite intelligentsia.  (One influential book, Callum Brown’s The Death of Christian Britain, dates widespread secularization in Britain as late as the 1960s!)

All of which is to say that there are also signs of a renewed appreciation for language that might, against all odds, work hand in hand with a renewed desire to figure out what the hell religion is, anyway.

Again, all this with the qualifier that I know my own field best.  It may be different elsewhere.

4.  Preserve, in the name of evangelism and God’s kingdom, a sensitivity to systemic racism.

I believe Edward Said was right – appreciating literary form and recognizing literature’s complicity in structures of oppression need not be at odds with one another.  Similarly, I believe that the recent flare-ups represent an opportunity to reject the old culture wars, precisely by scrambling the Left’s hoary stereotypes of grumpy white people concerned about all the colored folk demanding “free stuff.”  This is why I believe that, even as we decry the Christakis and Wolfe incidents as bullshit, we must refuse to cede discussion of systemic racism to the secular Left or to heterodox mainline Christianity.

Here, I’m a big fan of Conor Friedersdorf‘s defense of his position.  I think he’s done it beautifully, and he bears witness to the lunacy of the Left attacking a journalist who has done at least as much as anyone else to protect the speech of anti-racist activists.  To his points, I only add that we must see this as a missional opportunity to reach the SJW population.

This may sound like lunacy to you – especially as someone who emphasizes fortifying Christian identity via strategic retreat!  I think such retreat is vitally necessary, and that your writing about the Benedict Option raises urgent concerns for Christians across the country.

But, Rod, I also think that this should go hand in hand with a determination to evangelize people we might be tempted to dismiss as snowflakes, loons, etc.  Indeed, I think one of the best ways we can remember what it means to be a Christian is to preserve the Great Commission at the center of our faith; one of the hardest things we can do, in the name of preserving our identity, is to reach those we might consider unreachable.

To some degree, this means following the Apostle Paul’s injunction to reach the lost by any means necessary: to those under the law, I became as one under the law, etc.  In this context, I believe we must resist the temptation to deride SJW’s and their cause.  In a very real sense, they adhere to their own heretical variant of Christianity, a la Ross Douthat’s bad-religion thesis.  I’m swiping this from a comment I saw on a recent Yale Daily News op-ed, but it makes total sense.  It especially makes sense when I think of the story you relayed the other day, about the non-Christian black student who bluntly rejected the concept of forgiveness.

This is a movement that worships at the feet of Justice, forgetting that Justice cannot exist without a Judge.  This is a tragedy.  To reach them, to restore the image of the unknown God whom they worship in ignorance, one simply cannot ignore what is legitimate in their analysis of contemporary America.  In all honesty, this is why I was a bit put off by your analysis of the South Carolinan cop who threw the student across the room.  I know you acknowledged that the cop may have overstepped his bounds, en route to an insistence that the teen was out of line.  Why not reverse the formulation – although the teen was out of line, the cop’s response was outsized and inappropriate?

(Indeed, the cop in that video and the students calling for Erika Christakis’ blood seem to be unlikely kindred spirits!  Just a thought.)

I know this is already a very long email, but I guess what I’m saying is this: precisely because these times are so trying, we cannot simply give up on Christ’s call to fight oppression.  This includes both the oppression of illiberal PC policing and the oppression of systemic racism.  It requires discernment (sadly, more discernment than a lot of people have) to distinguish an Eric Garner case from a Halloween costume controversy.  But if Christians don’t do it, I don’t know who will.

A final thought: maybe if we are on point about decrying racism while also maintaining conservative sexual ethics, we can make it harder for the Left to conflate race and sexual orientation, as it seems hellbent on doing.

I’ve written long enough.  Perhaps you can see this as a compliment – I wouldn’t have written this much if I didn’t think it was worth it.  God bless you and yours.

Sometimes, I just love my readers.