To: "homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org" <homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Subject: [Homestead] Our natural color is purple
Date: Tue, 28 Dec 2004 06:13:36 -0700
Can both ends move to the middle? This writer, an evangelical law professor
(he says that's not an oxymoron) thinks the reds and blues have much in
common but haven't realized it yet; they just haven't found the path to the
meeting ground.
Faculty Clubs and Church Pews
By William J. Stuntz
Published 11/29/2004
The past few months have seen a lot of talk about red and blue America,
mostly by people on one side of the partisan divide who find the other side
a mystery.
It isn't a mystery to me, because I live on both sides. For the past twenty
years, I've belonged to evangelical Protestant churches, the kind where
George W. Bush rolled up huge majorities. And for the past eighteen years,
I've worked in secular universities where one can hardly believe that Bush
voters exist. Evangelical churches are red America at its reddest. And
universities, especially the ones in New England (where I work now), are as
blue as the bluest sky.
Not surprisingly, each of these institutions is enemy territory to the
other. But the enmity is needless. It may be a sign that I'm terminally
weird, but I love them both, passionately. And I think that if my church
friends and my university friends got to know each other, they'd find a lot
to like and admire. More to the point, the representatives of each side
would learn something important and useful from the other side. These
institutions may be red and blue now. But their natural color is purple.
You wouldn't know it from talking to the people who populate universities
or fill church pews.
A lot of my church friends think universities represent the forces of
darkness. Law schools -- my corner of the academic world -- are
particularly suspect. A fellow singer in a church choir once asked me what
I did for a living. When I told her, she said, "A Christian lawyer? Isn't
that sort of like being a Christian prostitute? I mean, you can't really do
that, right?" She wasn't kidding. And if I had said no, you don't
understand; I'm a law professor, not a lawyer, I'm pretty sure that would
not have helped matters. ("Oh, so you train people to be prostitutesÂ…")
You hear the same kinds of comments running in the other direction. Some
years ago a faculty colleague and I were talking about religion and
politics, and this colleague said "You know, I think you're the first
Christian I've ever met who isn't stupid." My professor friend wasn't
kidding either. I've had other conversations like these -- albeit usually a
little more tactful -- on both sides, a dozen times over the years. Maybe
two dozen. People in each of these two worlds find the other frightening,
and appalling.
All of us are appalling, I suppose, but these reactions are mostly due to
ignorance. Most of my Christian friends have no clue what goes on in
faculty clubs. And my colleagues in faculty offices cannot imagine what
happens in those evangelical churches on Sunday morning.
In both cases, the truth is surprisingly attractive. And surprisingly
similar: Churches and universities are the two twenty-first century
American enterprises that care most about ideas, about language, and about
understanding the world we live in, with all its beauty and ugliness.
Nearly all older universities were founded as schools of theology: a
telling fact. Another one is this: A large part of what goes on in those
church buildings that dot the countryside is education -- people reading
hard texts, and trying to sort out what they mean.
Another similarity is less obvious but no less important. Ours is an
individualist culture; people rarely put their community's welfare ahead of
their own. It isn't so rare in churches and universities. Churches are
mostly run by volunteer labor (not to mention volunteered money): those who
tend nurseries and teach Sunday School classes get nothing but a pat on the
back for their labor. Not unlike the professors who staff important faculty
committees. An economist friend once told me that economics departments are
ungovernable, because economists understand the reward structure that
drives universities: professors who do thankless institutional tasks
competently must do more such tasks. Yet the trains run more or less on
time -- maybe historians are running the economics departments -- because
enough faculty attach enough importance to the welfare of their colleagues
and students. Selfishness and exploitation are of course common too, in
universities and churches as everywhere else. But one sees a good deal of
day-to-day altruism, which is not common everywhere else.
And each side of this divide has something to teach the other. Evangelicals
would benefit greatly from the love of argument that pervades universities.
The "scandal of the evangelical mind" -- the title of a wonderful book by
evangelical author and professor Mark Noll -- isn't that evangelicals
aren't smart or don't love ideas. They are, and they do. No, the real
scandal is the lack of tough, hard questioning to test those ideas.
Christians believe in a God-Man who called himself (among other things)
"the Truth." Truth-seeking, testing beliefs with tough-minded questions and
arguments, is a deeply Christian enterprise. Evangelical churches should be
swimming in it. Too few are.
For their part, universities would be better, richer places if they had an
infusion of the humility that one finds in those churches. Too often, the
world of top universities is defined by its arrogance: the style of
argument is more "it's plainly true that" than "I wonder whether." We like
to test our ideas, but once they've passed the relevant academic hurdles
(the bar is lower than we like to think), we talk and act as though those
ideas are not just right but obviously right -- only a fool or a bigot
could think otherwise.
The atmosphere I've found in the churches to which my family and I have
belonged is very different. Evangelicals like "testimonies"; it's common
for talks to Christian groups to begin with a little autobiography, as the
speaker describes the path he has traveled on his road to faith. Somewhere
in the course of that testimony, the speaker always talks about what a mess
he is: how many things he has gotten wrong, why the people sitting in the
chairs should really be teaching him, not the other way around. This isn't
a pose; the evangelicals I know really do believe that they -- we (I'm in
this camp too) -- are half-blind fools, stumbling our way toward truth,
regularly falling off the right path and, by God's grace, picking ourselves
up and trying to get back on. But while humility is more a virtue than a
tactic, it turns out to be a pretty good tactic. Ideas and arguments go
down a lot easier when accompanied by the admission that the speaker might,
after all, be wrong.
That gets to an aspect of evangelical culture that the mainstream press has
never understood: the combination of strong faith commitments with
uncertainty, the awareness that I don't know everything, that I have a lot
more to learn than to teach. Belief that a good God has a plan does not
imply knowledge of the plan's details. Judging from the lives and
conversations of my Christian friends, faith in that God does not tend to
produce a belief in one's infallibility. More the opposite: Christians
believe we see "through a glass, darkly" when we see at all -- and that
we're constantly tempted to imagine ourselves as better and smarter than we
really are. If that sensibility were a little more common in universities,
faculty meetings would be a lot more pleasant. And it should be more
common: Academics know better than anyone just how vast is the pool of
human knowledge, and how little of it any of us can grasp. Talking humbly
should be second nature.
There is even a measure of political common ground. True, university
faculties are heavily Democratic, and evangelical churches are thick with
Republicans. But that red-blue polarization is mostly a consequence of
which issues are on the table -- and which ones aren't. Change the issue
menu, and those electoral maps may look very different. Imagine a
presidential campaign in which the two candidates seriously debated how a
loving society should treat its poorest members. Helping the poor is
supposed to be the left's central commitment, going back to the days of FDR
and the New Deal. In practice, the commitment has all but disappeared from
national politics. Judging by the speeches of liberal Democratic
politicians, what poor people need most is free abortions. Anti-poverty
programs tend to help middle-class government employees; the poor end up
with a few scraps from the table. Teachers' unions have a stranglehold on
failed urban school systems, even though fixing those schools would be the
best anti-poverty program imaginable.
I don't think my liberal Democratic professor friends like this state of
affairs. And -- here's a news flash -- neither do most evangelicals, who
regard helping the poor as both a passion and a spiritual obligation, not
just a political preference. (This may be even more true of theologically
conservative Catholics.) These men and women vote Republican not because
they like the party's policy toward poverty -- cut taxes and hope for the
best -- but because poverty isn't on the table anymore. In evangelical
churches, elections are mostly about abortion. Neither party seems much
concerned with giving a hand to those who most need it.
That could change. I can't prove it, but I think there is a large, latent
pro-redistribution evangelical vote, ready to get behind the first
politician to tap into it. (Barack Obama, are you listening?) If liberal
Democratic academics believe the things they say they believe -- and I
think they do -- there is an alliance here just waiting to happen.
Humility, love of serious ideas, commitment to helping the poor -- these
are things my faculty friends and my church friends ought to be able to get
together on. If they ever do, look out: American politics, and maybe
American life, will be turned upside down. And all those politicians who
can only speak in one color will be out of a job.
I can hardly wait.
William J. Stuntz is a Professor at Harvard Law School.