Pivot Points: Adventures on the Road to Christian Contentment (Chapter 9)

Current is grateful for P&R Publishing’s permission to serialize Marvin Olasky’s memoir, Pivot Points: Adventures on the Road to Christian Contentment.   

Chapter 9: Good Times in Texas

In August 1983, I and my family leave Delaware, which has three counties, and head to Texas, which has 254. I’ve been to Texas only twice and Susan never has been there, but she knows about it from a movie, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, filmed just outside Austin. She also knows about Charles Whitman and his mass shooting from the University of Texas (UT) tower in 1965. Since she’s made it to first base with a pulled muscle, she’s game for 100-degree temperatures and fire ants. I admire her courage.

Most of my faculty colleagues are former reporters from Dallas and Houston, politically moderate or liberal but genuinely curious. Decades older than me, with deep roots in the incestuous world of Texas Democratic politics and journalism, they are skeptics and storytellers. I like them.

The students are friendly, sometimes too friendly. One female offers the classic line, “I’ll do anything for an A.” I laugh that off and keep my office door open. One football player is willing to do anything for a C except write a term paper. The university athletic department makes me a “guest coach” so I can have a pregame meal with players, roam the sideline during a game, and give the fullback an extension on the paper deadline, which he will write with help from “academic advisors.”

Getting tenure requires me to write a book and publish a slew of academic journal articles. The DuPont experience leaves me interested in writing a history of corporate public relations. When I visit my cancer-stricken father in Boston, I stop in Cambridge (just across the Charles River) to interview the father of modern public relations, Edward Bernays, still alive at age ninety-two.

Bernays lives in a house near Harvard. His study displays wall-to-wall photographs of famous clients and advertising campaigns, including Eleanor Roosevelt and tobacco industry pooh-bahs who hire him in the 1920s to make smoking more popular among women. Sixty years later, Bernays is proud of creating a march down Fifth Avenue with women holding cigarettes high like torches of liberation. Like many retired politicians, Bernays likes to talk about himself. He frequently mentions his walks with famous uncle Sigmund Freud.

As with DuPont president Heckert, I ask Bernays what he believes about God. He doesn’t exist, Bernays says, and real power is in the hands of those “who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses.” Those in media inner rings “constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.” Bernays is proud that he could “pull the wires which control the public mind” so “vast numbers of human beings . . . live together as a smoothly functioning society.”

The historical research leads to a scholarly book and ten academic journal articles. I’m well on my way to tenure. Susan, after volunteering at a pro-life center in Delaware and finding no similar one in Austin, organizes and chairs the Austin Crisis Pregnancy Center. Small pivot time: Should I write about journalistic coverage of abortion, knowing that to some of my colleagues a pro-life prospective is like being pro-cancer?

I jump in. Susan and I coauthor an article, “From Crime to Compassion,” for the Summer 1986 Human Life Review. The journal is sitting on a file cabinet next to my office as a tenured colleague walks by. She notices the name and says, “That’s a pretty narrow topic for a journal.”

The standard advice given to young Christian professors is to write noncontroversial articles and reveal Christian beliefs only when tenured. Once a person starts on that path, though, it’s hard to get off. Another promotion opportunity, or some other reason to wait, will always come. So off I go: with scholarly prose but vivid detail from nineteenth-century newspapers, here come eight more academic journal articles and a history book spotlighting gutsy stories like the New York Times undercover investigation of abortion businesses in 1871.

Those early years in Austin are good ones personally. Tuesdays and Thursdays are days to teach, meet with students and faculty colleagues, and forage in the library. Writing at home on other days allows for breaks to play catch with the kids and take walk-and-talks with Susan. We buy a split-level house in Northeast Austin on a lot with mature cedar elms and a creek running through it.

We double the number of our children, going from two to four. Our oldest son attends the public elementary school two blocks from our house and then a Lutheran school four blocks away. He plays Optimist League baseball, so Susan and I in 1985 spend the first of twenty-one straight seasons watching our kids play ball.

I don’t recall ever having bedtime stories, so reading to the children allows for filling in gaps in my own cultural knowledge, starting with Goodnight Moon. As the kids get older, C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia and J. R. R. Tolkien’s Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings both work well, with some abridging of longer passages in the latter when attention lags. My sons go high over the Misty Mountains and down into dungeons deep and caverns old. They benefit by hearing and eventually reading these books before they become films.

I’m also grateful for long car trips in the summer, typically starting at 4 a.m. with music timed so our children can wake up to Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” at maximum volume as the sun comes up. We play tortoise-and-hare on college campuses, catch crayfish at a battlefield in Tennessee, throw snowballs in June in the Colorado mountains, sing along with Bob Dylan tapes as we drive across Texas, and spot turtles along the Natchez Trace Parkway.

Amid these good times I put my name forward for tenure, with at least three times the productivity needed. The journalism profs don’t agree with my Christian and pro-life views, but they total up the publications and play by the rules. I’m tenured in 1987 and am on my way to promotion to full professor, with more books and articles on aspects of journalism history about to roll off the printing presses.

From that research, I learn that until the late 1800s American journalists typically have a Bible-based understanding that objective truth exists. They try to describe the objective reality of God’s world. That changes as journalists come to believe at street level what Friedrich Nietzsche propounds
philosophically: God is dead and everything is subjective, the result of power configurations.

Half a lifetime ago, at age thirty-seven, I write a book, Prodigal Press, that begins a long march to reform journalism. I see opportunity for a middle road between an “objectivity” that pretends neither God nor natural law exists and a subjectivity that exalts individual opinion and deduction over facts on the ground and induction. Will I have the opportunity to put this thinking into practice?

As the 1980s end, I look at my marriage and career with satisfaction. After reading The Lord of the Rings aloud beside a child’s bed for months, I choke up over the last sentences, where Sam Gamgee decides to come home and not embark on further adventures: “He went on, and there was yellow light, and fire within; and the evening meal was ready, and he was expected. And Rose drew him in, and set him in his chair, and put little Elanor upon his lap. He drew a deep breath. ‘Well, I’m back,’ he said.”

I feel myself done with adventures and happy to be settled.