I Love You but You Didn’t Do the Reading

Fasten your seatbelts…we’re in for a rough ride. With impeachment dominating headlines, there were a bunch of stories that you might have missed. Here’s our weekly roundup of news n views:

The top Democratic contenders got together to talk about education. How did it go?

Fired/not-fired from Wheaton, Larycia Hawkins still feels the pain, at CT.

The need to give an awkward speech on the first day of class is a small detail that offers a clue to how all-encompassing the changes in Hawkins’ life have been since she left Wheaton. “The further we get out from the job that I left,” she says, “it’s easier. But one of the things it has changed is how I introduce myself on the first day.”

hawkins CTPoll finds that “Christian nationalists” tend to think they will be punished if Trump loses in 2020, at RIP.

there is widespread belief among Christian nationalist Protestants that atheists will strip their essential political rights if they gain political power. . . . Christian nationalists see the next election as apocalyptical. If they win, then democracy continues; if they lose under the Trump banner, then they are destined for the gulags.

Christian nationalists 2020 RIPZoiks: Billionaire gives $100 million to Yale to start Broad school-leadership program, at Forbes.

There’s little to point to in the last twenty years that would suggest that a slightly trained educational amateur who “thinks like a CEO” is a good bet for running a school system well. Broadies have certainly found their way to positions of power and established lucrative careers for themselves, but there is little evidence that they have benefited students.

Why do teachers get creeped out by this sort of school-leadership program? My three reasons here at ILYBYGTH.

broad yale

He’s betting $100 million that I’m wrong…

Freshman at George Southern U gives a presentation on “replacement theory.”  The university backed up his right to do so. At IHE.

“‘Diversity is our strength’ is a bare-faced lie,” he said. “I don’t care if you call me a racist.”

Rochester students walk out, at RDC.

Hundreds of students across the Rochester City School District protested the recent proposed layoffs of more than 200 district employees Monday. . . . “We care about our teachers,” [junior Maya Waller] said while walking on Main Street Monday morning. “It’s not right that their mismanagement of money is negatively impacting teachers, staff and students (who) weren’t there to make the decision anyway.”

Can a “Fairness to All Act” square the circle for evangelical colleges and LGBTQ issues?

Southern Baptist Seminar boots instructor for being too anti-LGBTQ, at IHE.

[Robert Oscar] Lopez held other views outside the conservative mainstream, such as that homosexuality was inexorably linked to pederasty. Some called it hate speech. He said he based his insights on personal experience, and that being raised by a bisexual mother and her female partner made him socially awkward and led him to the “gay underworld” for a time.

Eventually, Lopez left California and secular academe for Southwestern [Baptist Theological Seminary]. The Texas institution doesn’t have tenure, but he thought he had found a permanent place among like-minded, socially conservative academics.

Things went well for Lopez for a while. But he couldn’t have predicted the events to come.

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I Love You but You Didn’t Do the Reading

Our weekly list of ILYBYGTH-themed stories from around the interwebs:

Queen Betsy jeered from Left and Right:

betsy devos dolores umbridge

Saving Hogwarts: Something we can all agree on?

What’s wrong with data? Jeff Tabone reviews The Tyranny of Metrics at FPR.

  • Best bit: “measurements rarely reflect the prime educational mission of an institution.”

Historians tweet about Trump ‘n’ Putin at HNN.

A sort-of-conservative fix for higher ed: Razib Khan reviews The University We Need at NR.

Abortion rights and the coming divide. Will the USA be split in three? At RCP.

SCOTUS could get a different sort of new majority, too: Private-school attendees. At Atlantic.

After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans scrapped its entire public-school system in favor of privatization and competition. Did the charter-school revolution help New Orleans?

Trump’s Christian Nationalism, by Gene Zubovich at R&P.

Is it kosher for public-school student to fundraise for a religious mission trip? A Colorado court says no, at FA.

When it comes to fixing schools, tech billionaires will continue to fail. Zeynep Tufekci in NYT.

There’s One Word Missing from this Essay about Trump’s Christian Nationalism

Sorry for the long title, but it’s all true. I read with great interest Gene Zubovich’s recent article in Religion & Politics about Trump’s appeal to Christian Nationalism. It’s a great argument, but Zubovich leaves out one crucial word.

Nationalism-GettyImages-809665350_780x508

For Jesus AND America…

Zubovich hits the nail squarely on the head when he argues that Trump’s shameless appeals to God and Country are a big part of Trump’s appeal among conservative evangelicals. As Zubovich puts it,

Trump has repeatedly argued that when America remains true to its faith and traditional values, God will bless the country with the might to defeat its foes. And his words resonate with Christian nationalists—those who believe the United States was founded as a Christian nation and must continue to be one—because they tie together so many of the Christian Right’s beliefs and instincts. We have good reason to believe that Christian nationalism is one of the reasons evangelicals overwhelmingly support Trump.

Moreover, Zubovich recognizes the other side of this coin. Though big majorities of conservative evangelicals love Trump’s Christian-nationalist spiel, evangelicals also provide its most trenchant critics. For example, as Zubovich explains,

In May, American clergy issued the “Reclaiming Jesus” manifesto, which rejected Trump’s nationalist slogan of America First “as a theological heresy for followers of Christ.” . . . [They] reminded Americans: “Our churches and our nations are part of an international community whose interests always surpass national boundaries.” They went on to say, “We, in turn, should love and serve the world and all its inhabitants, rather than seek first narrow, nationalistic prerogatives.”

So far, so good. But Zubovich leaves out a vital bit. This debate over the relationship between nationalism and globalism among American evangelicals has always really only been a debate among WHITE American evangelicals. For other groups, most notably African American conservative evangelicals, the temptation to lump religion in with government has never been an issue.

Don’t get me wrong: It’s not that there aren’t a lot of patriotic African American conservative evangelicals in the USA. There certainly are. The urge to equate the government with the church, though, has only been a curse among white evangelicals. For obvious historical reasons, African Americans have always tended to keep their church strictly separate from other social institutions, institutions that all too often embraced slavery, Jim Crow, and anti-black racism.

Insisting on this one word, then, is more than just academic nitpicking. If we want to understand Trump’s appeal among conservative evangelicals—and we DO want to understand it—we need to be very careful to remember that only one segment of American conservative evangelicals has suffered from a muddling of religious zeal with patriotic fervor.

I Love You but You Didn’t Do the Reading

I spent the week buried in the Philadelphia archives, but somehow the world kept on turnin. Here are a couple of stories this week that have nothing to do with Joseph Lancaster.

Defending Kanye at NR.

pence at hillsdale

Do they care that we’re conservatives?

Pence at Hillsdale commencement—the conservative collegiate long game, at Politico.

A Canadian university wonders: Can only Indigenous professors teach about First-Nations history? At CBC.

Peter Greene tees off on Florida’s standardized tests for five-year-olds. At Curmudgucation.

Should fans of Wendell Berry forsake social media? Matt Stewart makes the case at FPR.

  • “We can rest assured, bonded by our faith in each other’s commitment to at least forsaking Twitter, that we are closer to being localists than to being hipster localists. The distinction is simple: a localist does not have to keep the Big Ether informed of one’s commitment to localism at all times and in all places.”

Get em young: Sarah Pulliam Bailey rides along on a Christian-nationalist kids’ tour of DC. At WaPo.

Gaza protest

Signs of the apocalypse?

Apocalypticism, Trump, and Jerusalem:

School revolts hold the key to stopping Trumpism: Henry Giroux at BR.

Standardized tests…what could go wrong? The fallout from glitchy tests in Tennessee, at Chalkbeat.

Arizona tried to edit evolution out of its science standards, at KNAU.

Asking uncomfortable questions at SMU—“Why are Black people so loud?”—“What is the difference between white trash and white people?” At CHE.