It’s time for truly liberal-minded Christians to do better. Including me.
In case you missed it, I had a wild week on Twitter. It started when I criticized Albert Mohler’s attack on David French for supporting the Respect for Marriage Act. Needless to say, I got blowback from Mohler’s army of social media followers. Then came a Twitter scuffle with a Canadian Christian activist and his followers who, after announcing that “most Christian pastors & theologians in the west” would support slavery “if it were still legal,” said there was no redeeming value in reading the work of Jonathan Edwards. Finally, Beth Allison Barr and Kristin Kobes Du Mez turned their Twitter followers on me for letting Jay Green’s essay on Christian political discourse see the light of publication.
I am a glutton for punishment on Twitter. I don’t really have much of a social media posse because my 20K+ followers are an eclectic mix of evangelical Christians and secular historians. As a result, my posts are always going to offend someone. On most occasions, half of my followers or more don’t care what I am posting about. Those who are successful on Twitter—or at least those with large followings they can unleash on those with whom they disagree—tend to sing one note. People follow them because they know what to expect.
Twitter is not good for my soul. It brings out the worst of my working-class upbringing among North Jersey Italians and Slovakians. I spent virtually every Sunday afternoon of my childhood sitting around the dining room table with extended family yelling and screaming about politics until we all left the table not speaking to one another. The following week we would gather again, kiss and make up, and then start the cycle all over again. I think I developed my booming voice from constantly trying to yell over everyone in order to make my point.
But if there was one thing true about our weekly family “discussions,” it was that things never got personal. Sure, we were mad at each other for a few days, but our arguments were always about ideas. This upbringing served me well in graduate school and during my stint (1997-1999) as a fellow at the Philadelphia Center (now McNeil Center) for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Every other Wednesday and Friday the pre-doctoral residential fellows joined the top early Americanists from around the Mid-Atlantic to critique a pre-circulated paper. The debates and discussion, moderated by the ever-civil American historian Richard Dunn, were the stuff of legends. The presenter sat in front of a room filled with dozens of professional historians and graduate students and defended his or her arguments for two hours. No matter how intense the debate, the seminar always ended in good cheer, a glass of wine, and some delicious Indian food.
Today this kind of intellectual debate is hard to come by. I’ve always defended the premise that good historical thinking—centered on complexity, nuance, context, contingency, empathy, and more—is essential to a thriving democracy. But social media does not permit it. There is a certain narcissism to it all. Rather than engaging with actual ideas, people come away from disagreements offended, hurt, or betrayed. There seems to be a refusal to enter imaginatively into another person’s argument. It’s easier to attack the writer for having the wrong skin color or the wrong gender or the wrong tone. “How dare they say that!”
Take, for example, my debate with Joash Thomas over slavery and Edwards. When I challenged one of his tweets opposing his view that “most” Western pastors” would support slavery, he chose to call me a “white moderate” (from Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail) and an enabler of slaveholders. It’s now been two days and he still has not said a word about the merits of my argument. I’ve heard plenty about my white privilege and “condescending” attitude, but little about the ideas I advanced in response to his Twitter rant. This is anti-intellectualism of the worst kind.
Or consider the debate over Jay Green’s Current piece. Jay knows that his piece was flawed. But I don’t think it was that flawed. (Perhaps one of us will do a piece in the near future showing why some of the folks in the now infamous “Emancipatory Maximalists” quadrant really do belong there.) I also failed to live up to my own ideals during this debate by stoking the Twitter fires with a few inflammatory tweets and retweets. I’m not proud of that. But when a pastor puts up an image of his catechism’s explanation of the ninth commandment, accuses me of sin, and then privately asks me if I am having mental health problems, things have gone too far. This is what passes for Christian political discourse these days.
I am going to try to do better. If I learned one thing this week it is that Twitter is where not only nuanced thinking but democracy itself go to die. Twitter is not about intellectual discourse. It’s about platforms and followers and loyalty and outrage.
This is why I am so glad to be part of the family of intellectuals and thinkers we are cultivating here at Current. We are trying to build a journal of opinion. In such journals people debate ideas and try to move the culture along in desired directions through those ideas. Sometimes elbows fly and people get mad. People argue—sometimes vociferously. But it’s rarely personal. We at Current believe that cultures change not through dramatic revolutions or 280 characters spewed forth on Twitter, but through long, drawn-out intellectual battles for position fought in the seminar rooms, academic professional societies (although some may be unredeemable), and, yes, the little magazines.
Social media preaching cultivates shallow thinking and breeds a lack of civility, even among those who are not part of the social media craziness emanating from the MAGA right wing. This week once again confirmed this truth. It’s time for truly liberal-minded Christians to do better. And as the old hymn goes, “Let it begin with me.”
John Fea is Executive Editor of Current
Amen.
Will the Current still publish responses to Green’s piece?
Yes, we will, Eric. Look for the first one on Monday morning.
John, while I can appreciate much of what you write here, I also believe you are being a bit disingenuous. Your article attacking Mohler pretty much said that one could not have a good-faith disagreement on the Respect for Marriage Act, and that any opposition to it HAD to be in bad faith. (I realize you also were defending David French from what you considered to be a bad-faith reading of what he wrote in support for the law, and there was some truth to your point.) When you use “ilk” to describe anyone who might disagree with that law, I would say that was unjustified attack language, the kind of language you denounce when other people use it.
But you wrote of the meetings you had in which there was spirited discussion but it was kept on the professional level and one did not equate academic and philosophical disagreements with someone being racist, sexist, etc. As one who taught in college for more than 30 years, I remember those kinds of meetings and the decorum that was expected when there was disagreement.
Why did that change? As much as you might want to blame people on the right, it is the left that controls academe today. I saw that firsthand in my own experience at the university where I taught for more than 20 years (before retiring at the end of December 2021). When I arrived there in 2001, the atmosphere on campus among faculty was fairly congenial. In fact, even though my views would have been considered more conservative than most of the faculty (I tended to vote for the Libertarian candidates in most elections), I still was elected to chair the university’s tenure/promotion subcommittee and was able to influence major changes in the tenure and promotion processes. That was then.
What changed? As I see it, some changes occurred gradually and then sped up during the Trump presidency, the COVID lockdowns, and the very public murder of George Floyd and the accompanying protests. Those were the outward things, but in my view, they only sped up the changes that were happening. On the academic side, we saw Critical Theory being infused more and more into the curriculum in particular and academic life in general. I believe that the example Jesus used of yeast slowly spreading through dough is a good description of what happened in the academic world.
You and Jay Green and others might disagree with my point, but I do not believe that Critical Theory advanced because it was superior to anything else. It advanced, instead, through outright bullying, shaming, and policies adapted in academe of ensuring that graduate schools would turn out only those that shared the same sense of mission. Institutional outcomes were redirected as well, and instead of becoming vehicles where people could share ideas and worldviews, those outcomes became pre-determined, and anyone who disagreed was, well, racist-sexist-antigay, etc., as Intersectionality took over with very predictable results.
While the right has its own ugly cancel culture, what we see on Twitter, and especially Academic Twitter (or what used to be Academic Twitter) is the product of the academic left. After all, the left controls most of higher education, elementary and secondary education in public schools and the more prestigious private schools, most of the media, and, increasingly, the law schools. This point is undisputable. You might not like what Twitter has become today, but you and your colleagues have played a role in it by ensuring that the academic world is the left’s playground.
While I believe that many at Grove City College overreacted to Jemar Tisby’s talke (which I have heard in its entirety), nonetheless, your attempt to paint the college as being racist is exactly what you claim to condemn elsewhere. You assumed that no one at GCC that disagreed with some or many of Tisby’s assertions did so only out of racism, so any response contrary to Tisby’s conclusions also had to be motivated by racism. And remember that you carried on your jihad against GCC for many days, and it was clear that you did not consider any of this up for discussion. Grove City College and its leadership were racist and that ws the alpha and the omega to the “discussion.”
As I see it, much of this site is dedicated to demonstrating that fundamentalists and Christian conservatives are bad people and have no redeeming value. This is not a situation in which you might disagree with others but still consider them to be brothers and sisters in Christ. No, this is the good people and the bad people and they are the bad people who have nothing to offer. So, it is hard for me to believe that you really “want to do better,” as you already have claimed that those that make the “wrong” political choices (i.e., voting for Republicans) probably are not Christians at all but pursuers of a different religion.
I do not believe that anything good comes out of a politicized Christianity, and that applies to the right and the left. To me, the film “2,000 Mules” has no place being shown in a church and I will not be part of any church that has infused politics — right and left — into its worship and message. I want no part of Christian Nationalism and because I married a Black woman and am a member (and officer) in a historically Black church, I probably have no idea as to the scale that Christian Nationalism has infected evangelical churches. Maybe I don’t want to know because it would be too depressing.
But neither do I believe that one loses one’s salvation for voting for Herschel Walker. (I still have not forgiven him for scoring the winning touchdown in the 1980 Georgia-Tennessee game, running over Bill Bates on his way to the end zone.) I would not vote for him, but neither would I vote for a candidate that believes that government should use coercion to enforce the Sexual Revolution and who believes there should be no limits placed on abortion on demand. If we cannot draw limits somewhere, then perhaps we should look inwardly.
I know that some of my own comments (some that have seen eternal moderation) have been troll-like and I probably need to do better myself. But if you are going to decry acadmic cancel culture, you need to be honest about its origins and then go from there.
John,
I appreciate your reflection on the Green essay and the blowback. However, I thought your parting shot at “MEGA right wing” was gratuitous. As a recovering Trumpster I am an avid reader of Current. I don’t agree with much of what I read but it is bracing and generally edifying copy, especially from you and Jay. In Dr. Green’s quadrant I would generally place myself straddling the “civilizational minimalist” and “civilizational maximalist” squares. I found Green’s essay terrific and thought-provoking, even if I might have done somethings differently. I have worked with Olasky, Douthat, the EPPC, D’Souza, Metaxas and Mohler. I had Ellis as a journalism student at World Journalism Institute. I count them all as current friends and fondly remember my association with them. I left the Trump tribe after January 6 and have not looked back. I am a slow learner. I read the Current every day to judge my own ideas. The bombast from the left doesn’t move me but gentle rebukes leave their mark. Keep up the good work. I need what you post and write in order to check my own thinking.
William, I am glad that you understand your comments are “troll-like.” You should reconsider your post entirely, because it is off-base.
John,
I’m glad I don’t spend a lot of time on Twitter and missed the first two brush-ups. I don’t know how you keep up with it. I’ve spent too much time just trying to keep up with the last one.
You and I met a couple of years ago at a previous Lee Symposium. What I have been proud of in this situation is at the symposium we had vigorous disagreements but they never became personal. It was wonderful to be able to model that for the students who initially felt there was a lot of tension because they live in a world wherecivil disagreement is such a rarity. I am glad to have been a part of letting students see that aspect of intellectual life.
Rondall
Thanks, John, for your good work.
Thank you, John, for leading a ” family of intellectuals and thinkers who are cultivating ( liberal) debate” and trying ” to move the culture along in desired directions”.
Your personal stories in this editorial about ” elbows flying” and “vociferously arguing” ( without making it personal) are some of your best writing.
Thanks for sharing. Keep up the good fight.
Thank you Tony. I have been in some serious social media (and face-to-face) battles with the historical profession over the years. They have all been documented and are easy to find on the internet. But I don’t have personal beefs with anyone in this debate. But personal attacks are another thing. One guy actually used a term normally used for sexual abusers to describe me. And this guy is a pastor. I am saddened that these things are not DIRECTLY and SPECIFICALLY called out by the tweeters with large followings.
Thanks, Richard
I don’t see a moral equivalence between Jay placing people in an intellectual category as it relates to Christian political engagement and people and twitter followers describing me as “sloppy,” “blind,” “void of the Spirit,” “indecent,” “embarrassing,” “a bully,” “a coward,” “ungracious,” and “ignorant” among other things. One was an intellectual exercise that was badly conceived. The others are character attacks. This is why I wrote this piece. These folks are not only silent about their followers using this stuff, but have “liked” and “retweeted” some of these comments. And who is illiberal here? If there is one thing I learned from my Black brothers and sisters, silence in the face of injustice and cruelty is complicity.
Thanks Rondall. We are happy to run your critique of Jay’s piece this week. Frankly, I’m sick of keeping up with it. There is more important work to do. But this is where we are right now.
Thanks for the post Robert. I mentioned MAGA because I see the MAGA movement as illiberal. They believe in election fraud, they storm the United States capital, they are not interested in pluralism. So I do not see them as part of the “arena” we are trying to cultivate here at CURRENT. Whatever the case, I appreciate your reading of CURRENT. Your comment here is a model of engagement among differences that we hope to promote. Thanks.