Hard to believe another week has come and gone so fast. It has been difficult to keep tabs on all the ILYBYGTH-related stories out there. Here are a few that SAGLRROILYGYBTH might find interesting:
If you were the principal, what would YOU do? This South Carolina teacher got suspended for having her kids defend the Klan. HT: MM
- The New York Times picked up the story, too. They offer a little more context of similar sorts of classroom assignments from around the country.
Five Wheaton College students face charges in a violent hazing assault, as reported by the Chicago Tribune.
- Pietist Schoolman Chris Gehrz worries about the anti-Islamic tones of the attack.
- How does football change evangelical colleges? Christianity Today’s Mark Galli interviewed Dan Wood of the National Christian College Athletics Association.
- ILYBYGTH noted the long history of tension between high-flying athletic programs and evangelical colleges.
Ben Shapiro on the problem with college protesters, the “idol of self.”
What should a science booster-club leader do when a parent questions his religious beliefs? One story from the National Center for Science Education.
Did the right wing come from outer space? David Auerbach looks at the sci-fi roots of radical conservatism.
“More…than just big hair and money.” An interview with John Wigger, author of a new history of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker.
What are historians saying about Ken Burns’ and Lynn Novick’s new Vietnam War documentary? At HNN, Professor Bob Buzzanco offers a few criticisms.
What do standardized history tests tell us? Not so much, argues Sam Wineburg and his colleagues.
Why so few conservative professors? George Yancey says there’s more to it than self-selection.
A portrait of a culture-war powerhouse: Daniel Bennett on the history of conservative legal activists Alliance Defending Freedom.
- Why should SAGLRROILYBYGTH care about ADF? Because—as ILYBYGTH argues this week—such legal activist groups are a key player in our continuing culture wars.
I Love You but You're Going to Hell 
Dan
/ September 25, 2017Why all the mitigating speech about the Wheaton “attack?” Male football players threatened a teammate with rape and then attempted a sexual assault with an unknown object before beating their victim who they kidnapped and tortured. This and the pretense of being Islamic terrorists who like to rape animals is both homophobic and Islamophobic but clearly related to real news and entertainment media influenced by the post 9/11 wars and the US’s adoption of arbitrary detention and torture practices with suspected terrorists.
It’s interesting that Gehrz mentions Larycia Hawkins’ ouster from Wheaton in this context for her solidarity with not only Muslims but LGBT people in her community. (Neither of you mentioned the sexual identity part or called it rape-torture.) I am not sure what Chris thinks the connection may be. Did Wheaton and the Evangelical community’s ratification of the idea that Muslims have a different (false) deity foster conditions that made the football players’ assault more likely, or more likely to be expressed in Islamophobic, homophobic terms? Maybe, but that seems like a stretch.
The unusual feature of this type of attack is that the attackers take on the identity and behaviors of the most ostracized, demonized figures in their world while performing acts they probably did not at that moment think of as rape and torture, but rape and torture it was. If demonizing Muslims and gay people leads to some people taking on these identities in pantomime, as a kind of blackface parody, then perhaps Evangelicals should reconsider their strategy of ostracization and demonization for that reason: what is othered as a sexualized source of fear and violence will make it more attractive to aggressive and perverse male minds whose narrative sources for this militarized, sexualized, religious fantasy are overdetermined in the evangelical and mainstream cultures. The evils that are rejected and pushed outside the community come back with a fury, like the return of a repressed fantasy.