‘The Narrative of Christian Oppression’

A Christian professor at a secular university has had it with the accounts I publish from Christians in higher education. This is a great letter:

I’ve wanted to write to you for some time about your coverage of higher education, but your latest post is the last straw.  I want to say two things.  One, this student who wrote to you would not be rational—assuming he describes events accurately and completely—in leaving academia on the basis of those events.  Two, the way that you write about these things and the stories you publish are destructive.  They are not helping the situation of Christian academics—they are making things worse.  I say this not out of any hostility to you or your blog.  I’ve been reading your blog for years.  I agree with you about almost everything.  My complaint is not about your point of view; it is about how you are expressing it.

I have been in the academic world for almost twenty years; many of those as a graduate student, and many as a teacher and researcher.  I have always studied and taught at secular institutions.  In the beginning, it was by default; I was secular, when I started out.  I converted to Christianity shortly after I started teaching, and from then on it was a choice that I made–more than once–to stay and teach in secular schools.  I have witnessed many incidents that fit well into your narrative, ones that you would quickly publish as evidence of the complete corruption of the academic world and for the necessity of retreating Benedict-style into the wilderness. And yet these incidents are not the whole story.

Take the student’s story that you published today.  Is this a story about the unbearable climate for Christian academics?  In a way, yes.  But there’s another perspective.  In a way, there is no such thing as a ‘climate’.  There are only individual human beings.  This professor is a human being– a bad professor, if he or she is as described.  Why?  For one thing, he has a bad interpretation of the Annunciation. He is (I take it) assuming that the story has its source in pagan myths about the gods raping mortals and producing offspring.  But it is much more plausible to think that the gospel writers, insofar as they have stories like this in mind, are undermining them, are arguing that this God, the true god, does not deal with mortals in this way.  The gospels emphasize consent.  The fathers of the Church emphasize consent.  Nothing could be more important (in a certain respect) to Catholic and Orthodox theology than the consent of Mary.  It is a fallacy to assume that when an author has a source (assuming the myths are a source here) he or she uses it uncritically.  Given that—could the graduate students have brought an alternate interpretation to the professor directly?  Would he have engaged in the conversation?  Will he engage in it now?  Mind you, he might not be convinced, but he should engage.  If not, he is a bad professor and a bad thinker, too wedded to his own views to analyze them or defend them.  The student could find a secular professor (or more than one) who would find such behavior objectionable—it violates common-sense standards.  If he can’t find a sympathetic person in his department, he should transfer out of that program, because it is not one that has any serious standards.

The fact that the chair of the department held a meeting with the TAs and the professor shows that the chair believed that something may have gone wrong.  That is a sign that the ‘climate’ is not quite as the letter-writer sees it.  Now, the chair made a mistake in handling the situation this way.  That’s because everyone knows that grad students are cowards.  They will not state their honest opinion in front of the professor, because, as the letter writer notes, they are afraid that their careers will be damaged.  The chair should have talked to students privately and formed his or her own judgment.  The letter-writer, or the woman who was badly treated, should now talk to the chair privately about how they think the situation was handled.  Perhaps this conversation will not go well.  Perhaps the chair is really deeply unsympathetic to the students and doesn’t care about upholding standards for reasonable disagreement.  In that case, again, find a different department.  In terms of the professor’s outrageous remark to the student to STFU:  how has the student complained about it?  As about the professor’s refusal to engage with disagreement (one issue) or as about inappropriate or abusive behavior (another issue)? Both separately can be raised both with the professor and with the chair.

Notice that none of these possible conversations are about the treatment of Christianity or Christian students.  Rather, they are about 1) the meaning of the Annunciation and the correct representation of Christian theology 2) appropriate ways of responding to disagreement from students 3) effective ways of handling conflict between professors and graduate TAs 4) inappropriate or abusive behavior.

What I suspect has happened instead is that the letter-writer has viewed these events through the lens of the oppression of Christian academics—the Narrative of Christian Oppression.  That has led him to view the situation as hopeless and to fail to try to communicate with the human beings in question in a way that might resolve the difficulties.  Now, I know nothing about the outcomes of these possible conversations.  Perhaps they will end with the professor or the chair saying “You, Christian, do not belong in this department”, or the equivalent.  If so, the Christian student can depart in peace, shaking the dust from his feet, knowing that he has reaching the limits of what he can reasonably do.  But perhaps they will end quite differently.  Perhaps they will not fit neatly into the narrative at all.  The student has neatly skated over the evidence that his department is not as bad as he thinks:  the fact that the chair held a meeting about these events, and the fact that they accepted him into the program, even though he interpreted literature in his writing sample.  Some member or members of the department read that writing sample and thought it was good:  that is a fact.

The way to survive in these programs is to cling to common ground.  Cling to standards, cling to the love of literature (or history or whatever it is).  Cling to the work that you share as a project with your non-believing colleagues and teachers.  Seek out people who value something in common with you, especially if they are not Christian.  Form friendships.  Work together on the basis of those common values.  A standard for behavior or a standard for good thinking is not a static thing.  It is valued in the breach as well as in the observance.  Speak to your teachers and fellow-students as if they, too, can recognize the breach and can respond to it.  Accept their response if they acknowledge the breach, even if the result is not what you wanted.  Forbear some injuries.  Fight when necessary.  Make the choice to stay, make it repeatedly, because of your love of the subject and because you can adequately pursue what you love.

 

When you are in an environment where there is no common ground, where there is nothing you value in common with the others—when you know that not because you read too many blogs but because you have met your teachers and fellow-students eyeball-to-eyeball and forced them to clarify what they accept and what they reject—then it is time to leave.   Or you can choose to leave because for you the pain of the struggle outweighs the joy of the work.  But make no mistake:  that’s your calculation, and it’s your choice.

Having these conversations and forming these relationships is difficult.  It is awkward.  The continual testing of the difficult teacher, the difficult department, is tedious and fraught with anxiety. Engagement involves taking a risk, the risk that the authority figures in question will turn against you, that you may not be able to succeed in the way you set out to do.  But look—if you are thinking of leaving the profession, what difference does it make? If the climate is that bad, you have nothing to lose by engaging your teachers and colleagues.  You have nothing to lose by speaking your mind.  Nothing to lose, that is, but the sense of your superiority to them—the sense of superiority which is the worst temptation of Christian academics like myself.

 

Not only that, but there are always other options beyond leaving the profession:   switching advisors, switching programs, switching fields. Part of the human perspective on these questions involves taking in the massive differences between individual teachers, programs, and fields.  For instance, I suspect English is the worst field for this sort of thing.  History, philosophy, classics, the sciences are generally better.  You very often have the option to switch.  But you won’t think about those options if you are enchanted by the Narrative of Christian Oppression.  You will flee at the first difficulty, just as this student seems ready to do, because you will think from reading Rod Dreher that the whole university system has gone to hell and there’s no hope for any of it.

 

I teach now at the secular liberal arts college where I was an undergraduate.  It has never been a place where religion was marginalized—never.  But over the past few years we get fewer and fewer Christian students.  The student body is increasingly secular.  I wonder if that is because the Christian students and their parents read this blog (and others like it) and think that their only hope is in a Christian college.   This is a terrible shame for two reasons.  For one, it is a terrible loss to colleges like this one.  I would never have become a Christian if I had not forged friendships with Christian students at the secular institutions I attended. Further, how will our tradition of open conversation and real community across differences hold up if there are fewer and fewer religious students and teachers?

 

But there is a second reason that the abandonment of secular institutions by Christians is a shame, and I will be blunt.  Contemporary Christians—taken as a  group—do not have the intellectual heft of their secular counterparts.  The best scholarship, the highest quality thinking, still goes on at secular institutions.  To go to a Christian institution involves—by and large–an intellectual compromise.  (Notre Dame is one exception, but you could argue that that is because it is such a secularized place). The Narrative of Christian Oppression is partly to blame.  Rather than thinking about history, or philosophy, or literature, or any of the disciplines, Christian academics have a tendency to get preoccupied with their correctness, with their superiority to their secular counterparts.  Insofar as this infects the Christian curricula and the culture at these institutions, their precious focus on their disciplines themselves and the excellence it makes possible are lost.  Someday secular academia really may go to hell in a handbasket, and your Benedict Option will be necessary.  But I sure hope that in the meantime Christian academics will carry away as many Egyptian treasures as they can.  What they’d take now sure wouldn’t count for much.

 

I’ve had my own struggles. I too am continually tempted by the prospect of my own superiority.  I’ve always tried to engage with the secular world.  I have felt sometimes as if the attempt to engage was too draining to be worth it.  It certainly isn’t for everyone.  Members of oppressed minorities, whether they are historically oppressed races, women in male-dominated fields, or Christians in secular schools, they have to take on more strain.  It is harder for us. That strain can make you bitter, or it can be taken up with that cross we are all supposed to take up.  It can, indeed, be a heroic, beautiful, joyful struggle, just as anything worthwhile is, no matter how small or invisible or seemingly ineffectual.

 

If you print this, please don’t print my name, not because I’m afraid of repercussions, but because I don’t want the image of a culture warrior with my students.  At my school we don’t talk about our religious or political identities in class.  That’s because we create real “safe spaces” where students can actually say what they think without any fear of judgment.  My views aren’t secret—I share them with students and colleagues privately—but I do not publicize or flaunt them out of respect for the openness of those conversations.

The professor identified herself to me privately, and her institution. I’m really grateful to her for having written. I don’t know about the climate in higher education aside from what friends within it and readers tell me. More information is better, I think. So, thanks.