Can a Woman Teach a Man?

Does it count as un-biblical if a woman teaches a man in seminary classes?  That’s the question debated recently in the pages of Christianity Today.

The issue was sparked by a change in policy at Cedarville University.  The relatively new president, Thomas White, recently announced that only women may enroll in a Bible class taught by a female faculty member.  This has been part of a continuing shift toward greater conservatism by the new administration, which one journalist described as being “taken over by Southern Baptists.”

The question is one of a “complementarian” view of gender relations.  I’m out of my theological depth here, so I invite correction if I get this wrong, but as I understand it, a complementarian view in evangelical Protestantism suggests that men and women have different roles to fulfill in family and church.  Males are meant by God to be the head and women are meant to be helpmates.  Complementarians, I understand, insist that this is not a question of chauvinism or male supremacy.  Rather, both men and women are understood to be equal but different.  In church affairs, following a complementarian interpretation of 1 Corinthians 11:3 (“But I want you to realize that the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man, and the head of Christ is God”) only men should teach men about church doctrine.

For secular folks like me, this is a difficult cultural pill to swallow.  The core of my social morality is that people are equal.  Talk about “different roles” for men and women, or for different social groups, makes me extremely uneasy.  To folks like me, this sounds like just window dressing for traditional hierarchical domination.

Smart complementarians get this.  Evangelical writers have explained the subtleties of complementarianism and what one woman called the “holy beauty of submission.”

In conservative Christian colleges, the question is whether women can teach men theology.  At Cedarville, the new answer is no.  In the pages of Christianity Today, evangelicals debated the issue. Mind you, this debate seems to have been within the ranks of complementarian theologians.  Respondents did not argue that men and women should be seen as equal.  Rather, those who thought women should be allowed to teach men argued that colleges were different than church.  In church, they granted, women must not lead men.  But college was different.

Those who agreed with the Cedarville policy argued that schools should be logically consistent.  If women should not be leaders of men, then women should not be teachers of men.

To outsiders like me, this debate illustrates the deep cultural divide between conservative evangelical Christian colleges and pluralist ones.  Even the terms of this discussion are foreign to folks like me.  For many secular folks, even the idea of such a discussion seems horrifying.  Even to ask if women should be allowed to take on leadership roles seems like a terrible revival of traditionalist hierarchy.

Yet if we outsiders want to understand conservative thinking, we need to try to understand debates like this one, precisely because the terms of the debate are so far beyond the pale of our thinking.  For example, as Dorothy Patterson, the “first lady” of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary responded, when in doubt, go with God.  Though teaching in the university may be a complementarian “gray area,” Patterson conceded, it was better to stay on the theological safe side.  God, Patterson concluded,

is going to have far greater pleasure in seeing a male theologian in the classroom than in our seeing if we couldn’t put a woman in simply because she’s gifted.

Unless and until secular folks like me make an effort to understand the worldview behind statements like that, we’ll never understand conservatism.

 

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by Adam Laats on May 17, 2014  •  Permalink
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Posted by Adam Laats on May 17, 2014

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2014/05/17/can-a-woman-teach-a-man/

Holocaust Denial, Evolution Denial, and “Teaching the Controversy”

Should students learn to think critically in schools?  Should they learn about both sides of controversial issues?  This morning at the National Center for Science Education blog, Glenn Branch compares creationists’ fondness for “teaching the controversy” to an explosively controversial history lesson from California.  For those of us interested in conservative ideas about schooling, this recent flap again demonstrates the ways “conservative” and “progressives” have swapped sides on this issue.

In the Rialto (California) Unified School District, eighth-grade students were asked to evaluate the arguments for and against the existence of the Holocaust.  “When tragic events occur in history, there is often debate about their actual existence,” the assignment reads, according to the San Bernardino County Sun.

For example, some people claim the Holocaust is not an actual historical event, but instead is a propaganda tool that was used for political and monetary gain. Based upon your research on this issue, write an argumentative essay, utilizing cited textual evidence, in which you explain whether or not you believe the Holocaust was an actual event in history, or merely a political scheme created to influence public emotion and gain. Remember to address counterclaims (rebuttals) to your stated claim. You are also required to use parenthetical (internal) citations and to provide a Works Cited page.

When the story came out about ten days ago, some conservative pundits tried to use this as proof of the moral monstrosity concealed in the Common Core State Standards.  The standards, some said, pushed school districts into adopting such terrible ideas as Holocaust denial.

Glenn Branch asks a different question.  How is this example of teaching “critical thinking” any different from creationist attempts to have students evaluate evolution and creationism side by side?  In both cases, students are encouraged to look at evidence.  Students are prompted to evaluate arguments and come to their own decisions.

But in the case of Holocaust denial, one side of the balance sheet has been thoroughly discredited.  It is not morally or educationally appropriate to ask students to decide whether or not the Holocaust happened, critics insist.  One of the sources students were given in this assignment stated the following:

With all this money at stake for Israel, it is easy to comprehend why this Holocaust hoax is so secretly guarded. In whatever way you can, please help shatter this profitable myth. It is time we stop sacrificing America’s welfare for the sake of Israel and spend our hard-earned dollars on Americans.

Offering students these sorts of false, hateful lies as “sources,” critics say, demeans the idea of pushing students to think critically.  If creationists thought that students should really explore every side of every issue, even sides with no intellectual or moral legitimacy, Branch argues,

then they should have been enthusiastically supporting the Rialto assignment. It’s to their moral credit that they weren’t, of course, but it proves—as if proof were needed by now—that “teach the controversy” and the like are merely rhetorical legerdemain intended to distract the spectator from the intellectual hollowness of the proposals they are supposed to support.

To suggest that schools ought to “teach the controversy” when there is in fact no controversy among mainstream scientists, Branch concludes, is just as bogus as having students evaluate the claims of Holocaust deniers.

The historian in me can’t help but notice the flip-flop we’ve seen over the course of the twentieth century.  In 1925, it was the pro-evolution side who pleaded with America to consider both sides in public schools.  Most famously, Scopes-trial attorney Dudley Field Malone begged the nation to allow the teaching of evolution.  “For God’s sake,” Malone implored, “let the children have their minds kept open.”  Ironically, as historian Ronald Numbers pointed out in Darwin Comes to America (pg. 91), later creationists adopted Malone’s plea as their own.

This is one of the themes I’m working with in my upcoming book.  Back in the 1920s, it was the conservative side of school battles who protested that these were false choices.  In 1929, for instance, the staunchly conservative leader of the Daughters of the American Revolution warned DAR members that progressives sneakily insisted on teaching both sides of every issue.  Such choices, she warned, were false ones.  Even to ask the questions tipped students away from truth and morality.  As she memorably argued,

Flagrant cases of un-American tendencies have been brought to light and exposed.  Exotic theories are promulgated in the name of science.  Disdain for law and order, and contempt for our accepted form of Government are subtly injected into the teachings of history.  Such practices are defended by the advancement of the decrepit theory that both sides of the question should be presented to permit the forming of unbiased opinions.  This may be the proper system for the seasoned adult who presumably can, if he will, revoke his errors when faced with the consequences of an unwise choice.  With the young, the chances are too great, for there a dangerous inequality exists.  One does not place before a delicate child a cup of strong black coffee and a glass of milk; or a big cigar and a stick of barley candy; or a narcotic and an orange, and in the name of progress and freedom insist that both must be tested in order that the child be given the right of choice.  Instead, one carefully supplies only what will make for the development of the young body and assure its normal growth.  Why then apply the very opposite theory when dealing with the delicate and impressionable fabric of the mind? (Emphasis added.)

With this historical lens, it seems doubly apparent that the argument for teaching both sides of any tricky issue has always been politically popular among Americans.  If there’s a controversy, many Americans have always agreed, let children hear both sides.

Back in the 1920s, progressives and evolution educators tried to make this case.  Let children hear about socialism and evolution, progressives pleaded.  At least allow schools to teach the controversy.  Back then, conservatives made the case that one side of those ideas was not equal.  To offer students both candy and cigars to choose from, as our DAR leader insisted, was a false choice, a false controversy.

Today, the sides have switched but the argument has not.  One side argues to let children hear both sides of a controversial issue and decide for themselves.  The other side insists that only one side has any truth, any intellectual legitimacy.

Me personally, I agree that Holocaust denial and evolution denial ought not be offered as equals to better history and better science.  But I know many readers might disagree.  How can creationists defend the legitimacy of “teaching the controversy” when most scientists agree that there is no controversy?  Is it like offering children a choice between heroin and citrus fruits?  Milk and coffee?  Candy or cigars?

 

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by Adam Laats on May 16, 2014  •  Permalink
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Posted by Adam Laats on May 16, 2014

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2014/05/16/holocaust-denial-evolution-denial-and-teaching-the-controversy/

Shelfies IV: Science & Religion Walk into a Bar…

–Guest post by Prajwal Kulkarni

[Editor’s Note: This post continues our series of bookshelf photos.  See contributions from yours truly here and here.  What’s on your shelf?  Send your shelfie to us at alaats@binghamton.edu.]   

Like the last shelfie by Patrick Halbrook, I’m also atypical. I’m a non-religious (but also not an atheist!) former scientist who has much sympathy for creationists. I count numerous evangelicals among the people I care about deeply. Here are a few of the books that have influenced me deeply over the years as well as what’s on my summer reading list. Finally: Thanks Adam for giving me a chance to post my shelfie!

Praj Shelfie

Do YOU Need Evolution?

The classics:

Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Natural Reflections: Human Cognition at the Nexus of Science and Religion (2010) – If you have to read one book science and religion, make it this one. Or rather, Herrnstein Smith explains why these abstract categories don’t do justice to the rich, varied experiences of people’s lives. Deeply, deeply affected my thinking and writing. She helped me articulate why it’s important to focus on scientists and religious people rather than science and religion.

Philip Kitcher, Science, Truth, and Democracy (2003) – Philosopher Philip Kitcher asks us to consider whether the pursuit of scientific truth is always valuable, or whether it entrenches and reifies existing power structures. What I most appreciated is his insistence that this question is empirical as much as it is philosophical.

Sandra Richter, The Epic of Eden: A Christian Entry into the Old Testament (2008) – Sandra Richter weaves together a beautiful metaphor of a disorganized closet to help Christians better understand the Old Testament. It will explain and clarify a lot about the Old Testament for both believers and skeptics. You should consider reading it just to experience her marvelous analogous and lucid explanations. Two things I always struggled with when teaching! My main criticism is that at times she assumed too much background knowledge on the part of her readers.

What I’m reading now:

Lee Strobel, The Case for Christ: A Journalist’s Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus (2013) – I got this book from a friend, and I’m (sort of!) enjoying it so far. Strobel collects an impressive body of research that could have better organized into a more coherent story. His findings are presented as informal interviews with a number of scholars. Despite these misgivings, I am learning a lot.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera (1985): You can’t expect me to only be reading serious books, can you? My wife and I are reading Garcia Marquez’s masterpiece together. One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of my favorite novels, and I look forward to this one as well!

Summer Reading:

Jacob Bronowski, Science and Human Values (1956) – Bronowski’s classic work is almost required reading for anyone interested in science and society. I’m almost embarrassed to admit I haven’t read it yet! While admitting science’s capacity for both good and evil, Bronowski nonetheless aims to show that science can ultimately advance human dignity.

Jason Rosenhouse, Among the Creationists: Dispatches from the Anti-Evolutionist Front Line (2012) – Unlike so many writings on this topic, Rosenhouse spends time getting to know actual creationists. This book is the result of over ten years spent attending creationist conferences and gatherings. Though I suspect he’s much more negative than I would be, I appreciate his approach.

Ronald Numbers, The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design (2006) – Numbers (who happens to be Adam’s former thesis advisor!) has written perhaps the single authoritative history on creationism in America. I’ve been told you’re not really in the club until you’ve read this book. I hope to get my membership card before the summer’s over!

Miscellaneous: Settlers of Catan (pictured) and Law and Order reruns (not pictured) will be enjoyed when I’m not reading these books.

About the author: Prajwal Kulkarni holds a PhD in Applied Physics from Stanford.  He blogs about creation, science, and reason at Do I Need Evolution?

 

 

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by Adam Laats on May 16, 2014  •  Permalink
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Posted by Adam Laats on May 16, 2014

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2014/05/16/shelfies-iv-science-religion-walk-into-a-bar/

Children Prefer Conservatives

Don’t take my word for it.  Check out the rankings from the Seventh Annual Children’s Choice Book Awards.  You’ll see that this group voted Rush Limbaugh their “author of the year” for his Rush Revere and The Brave Pilgrims: Time-Travel Adventures with Exceptional Americans.

Talk Radio and Talking Horses

Talk Radio and Talking Horses

What’s the book about? A substitute teacher and his talking time-traveling horse travel back to the Mayflower to travel with the Pilgrims. As Limbaugh introduces it to young readers, he wants “to try to help you understand what ‘American Exceptionalism’ and greatness is all about.” It does not mean that other countries aren’t just fine, too. But as Limbaugh puts it for his young readers, “American Exceptionalism and greatness means that America is special because it is different from all other countries in history. It is a land built on true freedom and individual liberty and it defends both around the world.”

Limbaugh has made efforts to introduce his vision of heroic history to schoolchildren everywhere. As of early 2014, Limbaugh claimed to have donated over 15,000 copies of his book to schools across America. As he told the conservative news site World Net Daily,

The mission is to connect with people that normally wouldn’t and don’t listen to a program like this but who someday will, and maybe their parents and grandparents do. I’m very proud of what I do, and I want as many people to be aware of it as possible. I’m very proud of what I believe. I’m very proud of my country. I want everybody to be. I really do. It may sound like pie-in-the-sky, but I want everybody to love this country as I do.

Academic historians might pooh-pooh this sort of thing. But America’s kids seem to like it. At the annual meeting of the Children’s Book Council, young attendees cast over 1,261,000 votes, and Limbaugh’s effort to introduce children to the wonders of America’s historical greatness came out on top.

 

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by Adam Laats on May 15, 2014  •  Permalink
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Posted by Adam Laats on May 15, 2014

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2014/05/15/children-prefer-conservatives/

Hell and Harvard

It looks as if Harvard will not host its Black Mass after all.  The school had planned to allow a Satanic group to perform its signature ceremony as a gesture toward inclusion and free speech.  Conservative reaction to the event tells us something about conservative ideas about higher education.

Naturally, many Catholics, conservative or otherwise, protested the plan.  The Black Mass, after all, is a deliberate inversion of the most sacred Catholic ritual.  According to some reports, Satanists in the Harvard mass boasted that they had acquired a consecrated Eucharistic wafer to mock and humiliate in their performance.  Harvard alumnus Father Roger Landry pleaded with Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust to cancel the ceremony.  Harvard, Landry argued, would not allow a mock lynching in the name of free speech.  Nor would Harvard allow racist verbal assaults.

But other conservatives criticized the event for different reasons.  This sort of bizarre public performance, some conservatives argued, demonstrated just how deeply elite colleges have veered out of the cultural mainstream.  Schools such as Harvard, some conservatives say, have lost all sense of what is normal in real life.

In the pages of National Review, for instance, AJ Delgado did not attack Satanism.  But he did attack elite higher education.  The perverted reasoning that led Harvard to accommodate such a hateful attack on Catholicism, Delgado argued, demonstrated the ways “the Ivy League continually sinks to shockingly low depths.”

Oklahoma representative Rebecca Hamilton elaborated on this theme.  “Harvard,” Hamilton insisted,

and its little troupe of elite schools are not healthy for this country. They create a 1% that is disconnected from and hostile to the rest of us. They are, in many ways, predatory.

As I argue in my upcoming book, educational conservatives have long insisted that elite colleges had lost their way.  At times, historians have accused conservatives of being “anti-intellectual” due to this tradition.  But that’s not the case.  Conservatives in general are no more anti-intellectual than anyone else.  But throughout the twentieth century conservative activists and intellectuals specifically lamented the perverted ideas dominant at elite universities and institutions.

In the 1930s, for example, conservatives attacked schools such as Columbia University for coddling communists and subversives.  It was not “college” in general that had gone wrong, conservatives argued.  But elite schools in particular had strayed from educational tradition.  US Congressman Hamilton Fish, a founder of the American Legion and dedicated red-hunter, listed in 1935 the schools that had become “honeycombed with socialists, near communists, and communists.”  Watch out, Fish warned, for Columbia, New York University, City College of New York, the University of Chicago, the University of Wisconsin, the University of North Carolina, and the University of Pennsylvania.  Such elite schools had gone off the rails.

Harvard’s flirtation with Satanism seems to have confirmed this theme among conservative activists and intellectuals.  Higher education is a good thing, most believe.  But the kooky garbage on offer at elite schools such as Harvard demonstrates the problem with the upper crust of academia.

 

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by Adam Laats on May 13, 2014  •  Permalink
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Posted by Adam Laats on May 13, 2014

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2014/05/13/hell-and-harvard/

In Defense of the Mediocre Male

Why doesn’t anyone care about unfair treatment of males in American schools?  From the American Enterprise Institute, Christina Hoff Sommers accuses educational leaders of being blinded by leftist ideology.  Leaders such as Arne Duncan, Sommers claims, don’t even see the problem.

Sommers, author of such books as Who Stole Feminism? and The War Against Boys, insists that we have a double problem on our hands.  First, we established an education system that favors females over males.  Second, we are putting our heads in the ideological sand and ignoring the problem.

In this short video, Sommers describes her ill treatment at the hands of left-leaning hosts on MSNBC.  When she raised the issue of male underachievement in schools on a talk show, the host dismissed her concerns with a condescending chuckle.

That exchange, Sommers says, demonstrates the double problem.  Males have always done worse in school, Sommers notes correctly.  In the past, however, even a “mediocre” male student could leave school and find work in manufacturing jobs.  These days, Sommers points out, career success demands educational success.  Fewer males than females aspire to higher education.  Sommers asks, “Why isn’t there a national effort to address this ambition gap?”

Congress, Sommers says, funds pro-girl educational efforts.  Education Secretary Arne Duncan, too, shows “apparent indifference” to problem of male underachievement.

Why?  Sommers suggests that educational leaders have been blinded by leftist ideology.  Leaders have assumed that equity in education means boosting female performance.  The real victims here, Sommers says, are the boys that have been ignored and shunted off to the side.

Sommers asks, why won’t educational leaders even admit the vast and growing inequity in our educational system?  Why won’t Arne Duncan do anything to support the mediocre male?

 

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by Adam Laats on May 13, 2014  •  Permalink
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Dynasties and Christian Colleges

Why do conservative Christian colleges pass from father to son?  That’s the question asked recently by Mark Oppenheimer in the New York Times.  He looks at the dynastic succession of school presidents at schools such as Liberty and Bob Jones.  But does Oppenheimer give short shrift to the history of the question?

It’s an intriguing line of inquiry.  Leading schools such as Liberty University, Oral Roberts, and Bob Jones University all have histories of passing leadership from father to son.  Sometimes this has worked well, Oppenheimer points out, but sometimes it has not.

Why have conservative schools constructed these sorts of dynasties?  Oppenheimer explains it as a sort of sectarian necessity.  Colleges such as Liberty and BJU started as outgrowths of the founders’ evangelistic efforts.  Those efforts included the creation of a sub-cultural identity.  Only a limited circle of true believers could be trusted to carry on the legacy.  As a result, Oppenheimer argues,

It would thus be a small band of insiders, versed in the particulars of the founder’s message, who would even be eligible to carry it into the future. That may be why, for example, the presidential search committee at Bob Jones University, while not seeking another Jones descendant, has stated “a preference for a B.J.U. graduate.”

Oppenheimer wisely consulted scholars such as Matthew Sutton and D. Michael Lindsay.  Lindsay warned not to read too much into this dynastic tradition at evangelical schools.  After all, the cases Oppenheimer cites make up only a handful, among hundreds of colleges.  And they are only at the “newer colleges.”

I have the greatest respect for President Lindsay as a scholar, school leader, and all-around nice guy.  [Full disclosure: Lindsay and I served together as postdoctoral fellows with the National Academy of Education.]  But in this case, Lindsay whitewashes the connection between legacy and Christian colleges.  And unfortunately, Oppenheimer lacks either the word count or the historical knowledge to push Lindsay on the issue.  It’s a shame.

After all, in contrast to Lindsay’s assertion, dynasties in evangelical colleges go way back.  And there seems to be some tentative connections we could suggest between the drive for orthodoxy and the family connections.  For example, the flagship evangelical school, Wheaton College, passed from father to son in 1882.  And though this might make today’s evangelicals uncomfortable, Charles Blanchard, son of founder Jonathan Blanchard, originally took the school in an explicitly fundamentalist direction.  To be fair, as I argue in my 1920s book, the meanings of “fundamentalism” as Blanchard the Younger understood them in the 1920s were significantly different than they became after Blanchard’s death.

There can be no mistake, however, in Charles Blanchard’s intention.  He wanted to align Wheaton College with fundamentalism, with orthodoxy, with the fight against modernism.

The question we still need to ask, though, is how much this drive for orthodoxy resulted from the dynastic structure of the college.  Did Charles Blanchard feel pressure to maintain his father’s orthodox legacy?  Did Bob Jones Jr.?  Jerry Falwell Jr.?

Oppenheimer asks a good question in this article.  But we wish he had the space and the background to push it a little further.

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by Adam Laats on May 12, 2014  •  Permalink
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Posted by Adam Laats on May 12, 2014

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2014/05/12/dynasties-and-christian-colleges/

Liberalism Leads to Campus Rape

Well-intentioned liberal rules—plus “binge drinking”—led us to an epidemic of campus sexual assaults.  That is the equation offered recently by conservative intellectual Patrick Deneen.  Deneen argues that the abdication of control by universities in the 1960s, meant to liberate students, has pushed the federal government to step in.

In recent days, we at ILYBYGTH have wondered about the connection between conservative Christianity and campus sexual assault.  Do overzealous reporters try to use uniformed bluster about “fundamentalism” to smear conservative religious people?  Or does there seem to be something peculiarly dangerous about authoritarian institutions such as fundamentalist colleges?

Professor Deneen has different concerns.  He notes the recent announcement by the federal government that it is investigating fifty-five universities for their handling of sexual-assault cases.  When universities and colleges fail to maintain the safety and security of their students, the Office of Civil Rights will step in.

As Deneen points out, this responsibility for the sexual morality of students used to be the responsibility of the universities themselves.  College graduates of a certain age may remember the elaborate rules that enveloped college-student social lives before the 1960s.  Female students at mainstream colleges—even at public institutions—often had to check in with “dorm mothers” at nine o’clock.  In every aspect of student life, the college took on the role of the parent.  In every way, the college acted in loco parentis—in place of the parent.

Of course, in the 1960s campuses in the US and around the world became hotbeds of political and cultural upheaval.  Students demanded more freedom, and they got it.  At many schools, in loco parentis rules were scrapped.  In many schools, indeed, core curricula were also scrapped in the name of freedom.  For instance, at my own beloved school, Binghamton University, students staged the “Bermuda Revolution.”  Not quite up to the office occupations and shotgun-wielding demands that rocked our neighbors at Columbia University or Cornell, but Bearcats managed to come together to protest strict student rules.  At Binghamton, the Bermuda Revolution brought students out to our Peace Quad clad in Bermuda shorts.  At the time, this was against the stern, traditional dress code that required shirts and ties for men and skirts and blouses for women.  As a result, the university changed those rules, giving students more freedom over their own lives.

Campus Revolutionaries, Binghamton Style

Campus Revolutionaries, Binghamton Style

One unintended consequence of this freedom is that more young people on college campuses have been exposed to sexual violence.  When students have more opportunity to drink alcohol and stay out late, more students find themselves in situations that lead to sexual assault.  As a result, the federal government has stepped in to investigate the way universities respond to charges of rape and sexual assault.

Professor Deneen argues that this tale of freedom gone awry can be seen as the history of liberalism in a nutshell.  As he puts it,

Longstanding local rules and cultures that governed behavior through education and cultivation of certain kinds of norms, manners, and morals, came to be regarded as an oppressive limitation upon the liberty of individuals. Those forms of control were lifted in the name of liberation, leading to regularized abuse of those liberties. In the name of redressing the injustices of those abuses, the federal government was seen as the only legitimate authority for redress and thereby exercised powers (ones that often require creative interpretations of federal law to reach down into private institutions) to re-regulate the liberated behaviors. However, now there is no longer a set of “norms” that seek to cultivate forms of self-rule, since this would constitute an unjust limitation of our freedom. Now there can only be punitive threats that occur after the fact. One cannot seek to limit the exercise of freedom before the fact (presumably by using at one’s disposal education in character and virtue); one can only punish after the fact when one body has harmed another body.

Conservative Christian colleges may have a unique set of challenges when dealing with the issue of sexual assault.  But Professor Deneen argues that sexual assault on other campuses has been a result of liberalism, not traditionalism.  Loose rules and permissive attitudes, Deneen notes, have led to an anything-goes culture.  The resulting “sexual anarchy” has left victims vulnerable to attack, with little recourse after the fact.

 

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by Adam Laats on May 11, 2014  •  Permalink
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Posted by Adam Laats on May 11, 2014

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Was I Fair to Ken Ham?

Ken Ham complains that I was not precise enough.  I think I was.

Here’s the issue: On his blog today, leading young-earth creationist Ken Ham chided yours truly for saying “Ken Ham” when I really meant something like “conservative Christians.”  Ham was reacting to a recent post of mine in which I asked about Ham’s inordinate influence over some conservative Protestant colleges.  In that post, I noted Ham’s recent pronouncements about leading evangelical schools such as Calvin College and Bryan College.  I wondered if conservative schools had to bend over backwards to satisfy Christian critics like Ham.  Did schools like Bryan College have to toe the Ham line in order to maintain their support base among conservative evangelical Protestants?

Be More Precise, Please

Be More Precise, Please

Ham said I needed to be “more precise.”  Ham made the fair point that Science Guy Bill Nye often used the unfair rhetorical strategy of reducing all creationism to simply Ken Ham.  Of talking about creationism as if it were just a one-man crusade to bilk taxpayers and fool schoolchildren.

When it comes to Bill Nye’s language, I agree with Ham.  Bill Nye–with whom I generally agree–does not always seem to understand creationism.  In a recent post, for instance, I agreed with Mr. Ham that Bill Nye “Misse[d] the Boat on Creationism.”  I have also agreed with Mr. Ham that Mr. Nye’s use of phrases such as “Ham’s followers” is sneaky and unfair.

But in this case, I was not doing any such thing.  In my essay about Mr. Ham’s influence on conservative Christian colleges, I was talking precisely about the work of Mr. Ham and Answers In Genesis.  If I was incorrect about the influence of Ham in the recent controversy at Bryan College, I’ll apologize.  But I won’t apologize for mistakes I didn’t make.

Ham also notes that I expand my questions to include the state of conservative evangelical colleges and sexual assault.  As ILYBYGTH readers know, this is a question that has been bandied about here recently.  Those who are new to the blog will not be aware that we do not simply attack “fundamentalist” schools as rape havens.  Indeed, our recent string of commentary began with questions about a journalist’s unschooled presumptions about the nature of fundamentalism.  We do not assume that sexual assault is somehow unique to conservative religious colleges, but it does seem that there is a connection between the opaque authoritarian cultures of many conservative colleges and a culture that blames the victims of sexual assault.

The central point of interest to me, though, then and now, is whether and how Mr. Ham has come to wield such authority over conservative evangelical colleges.  In the case of Bryan College, at least, Ham’s worries led to changes at the school.  I can’t help but wonder if Ham’s say-so is of enormous influence at similar colleges and universities.  This is not a question about conservatism in general.  This is not a question about creationism in general.  This is a specific question about the influence of Mr. Ham’s Answers In Genesis ministry.

 

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by Adam Laats on May 10, 2014  •  Permalink
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Posted by Adam Laats on May 10, 2014

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2014/05/10/was-i-fair-to-ken-ham/

Does Fundamentalism Promote Sex Abuse?

Do conservative Protestant evangelicals have a problem with sex abuse? Does evangelicalism suffer from an overabundance of “Christian cesspools” of abuse?

I’ve been chastised for asking whether this is a specifically fundamentalist problem—that is, a problem of theology—or rather an institutional problem. That is, is it specifically fundamentalist theology and “purity culture” at fundamentalist schools that encourages rape and sexual assault? Or do we see the same sorts of systemic abuse in non-fundamentalist colleges and universities? At big football schools, for example, administrators protect rapists to protect the football program. Could “party culture” be just as conducive to rape and sexual assault as “purity culture?”

In an article about the sex-abuse travails at Bob Jones University, Boz Tchividjian says this is not a question of theology, but of “authoritarianism.” Tchividjian argues that church structures lend themselves to sex abuse, but that this sort of abuse could happen “in any culture, elevating leaders beyond accountability, leaving victims’ rights to their whim, and sidelining critics who challenge their rule.” Yet Tchividjian’s work has illuminated the gruesome world of sex abuse and rape in evangelical and fundamentalist institutions.

As Kathryn Joyce describes in a recent essay in American Prospect, Tchividjian’s anti-abuse group GRACE was called in to Bob Jones University in 2012 to investigate accusations of widespread institutional neglect of charges of rape and sex abuse. Tchividjian, grandson of evangelist Billy Graham and former law professor at Liberty University, has long campaigned for more transparency about sex abuse among evangelicals. In Joyce’s AP piece, Tchividjian made his case for the terrible evangelical record with sex abuse. “One study,” Joyce writes,

has found that 93 percent of admitted sex offenders describe themselves as religious. Offenders who report strong church ties abuse more often, with younger victims. That’s not because Christians are inherently more abusive, he said, but because they’re more vulnerable to those who are. Tchividjian repeated what one convicted sex abuser told clinical psychologist Anna Salter in her book Predators: Pedophiles, Rapists, and Other Sex Offenders: “Church people”—always looking to see the best in people, to welcome converts, to save sinful souls—are “easy to fool.”

“When something does surface, all too often the church leadership quiets it down. Because they’re concerned about reputation: ‘This could harm the name of Jesus, so let’s just take care of it internally.’

Tchividjian rattled off ways in which Christians’ openness can allow abuse to go unchecked: Perpetrators tend to use scripture to coerce, justify, and silence. If they’re clergy, they will exploit their positions; if they’re laypeople, they will take advantage of a church hungry for volunteers and rely on the trust given to members of a church family. “The reason why offenders get away with what they do is because we have too many cultures of silence,” Tchividjian said. “When something does surface, all too often the church leadership quiets it down. Because they’re concerned about reputation: ‘This could harm the name of Jesus, so let’s just take care of it internally.’

In case after case, Tchividjian and his colleagues unearthed terrible and terrifying stories of abuse and cover-ups. Of students like Katie Landry at Bob Jones University. When Landry reported her rape to Dean Jim Berg, Berg allegedly told her that there was a “sin in your life that caused your rape.”

Tchividjian says this is a question of organizational structure, not of theology. But his own work seems to make the case that fundamentalist culture seems particularly prone to this sort of victim-blaming. As in this story from BJU, it seems fundamentalist cover-ups have the ability to use theologically inflected language to cow victims into silence.

I’m certainly sensitive to charges of fundamentalist-bashing. Indeed, my first take on the recent spate of “exposes” of sex abuse at fundamentalist colleges was to wonder if this was just another attempt to dismiss dissenting colleges. But there does seem to be a connection between fundamentalism—both theology and culture—and this climate of sex-abuse cover-up. It might not generate higher numbers of abuse victims than other opaque institutions—ask anyone at Penn State, Florida State, or a host of other non-fundamentalist institutions—but it seems fair to say that fundamentalism has generated a sick culture of abuse.

 

 

 

4 Comments
by Adam Laats on May 8, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Higher (Power) Education, In the News, Teaching Sex and Sexuality
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Posted by Adam Laats on May 8, 2014

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2014/05/08/does-fundamentalism-promote-sex-abuse/

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