[Paleopsych] TCS: Faculty Clubs and Church Pews

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Faculty Clubs and Church Pews
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    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 prostitutes")


    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.