So Many Christians, So Few Lions: So Where is This Taking Us?

Last week, in my discussion of So Many Christians, So Few Lions: Is There Christianophobia in the United States by George Yancey and David Williamson, I mentioned “objectifying,” the process by which people hostile to Christians essentially dehumanize them. This is not a theoretical issue; virtually every genocide has it roots in dehumanizing groups or culture. Hitler and Goebbels did this with the Jews; it happened in Rwanda and Bosnia; one could even argue it happened with the American Indians, with the Australian aborigines, and with African-Americans from slavery times onward.  

Objectifying people can have deadly consequences.

This doesn’t mean I think that journalists, movie stars, executives at the Ford Foundation, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, and George Soros are ready to herd conservative Christians into concentration camps. That sentiment would be objectifying people hostile to Christians.

What is clear, however, is this: the (largely successful) attempts to push Christian influence to the very margins of society, and preferably to eliminate it from the public sphere altogether, will continue and probably intensify. In certain areas, like the universities, people with view contrary to the prevailing ones will find themselves more and more isolated and cut off. Students with conservative Christian views will be stigmatized. Parents who object to their public school children being propagandized will find themselves suspect, talked about, and marginalized, usually in some condescending manner.

These things are happening now.

Politics isn’t much better. The Republican Party needs the votes of conservative Christians, but many party leaders want nothing to do with what conservative Christians care about. The Democratic Party is not interested in those votes.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it may be a good thing. Our Christian faith is not defined by politics or parties, or by whom we vote for. At least it shouldn’t be. It’s also not defined by who wins elections, or by the next boneheaded editorial in the newspaper, or by Hollywood glorifying some behavior that is wrong (Hollywood has been doing that for a very long time).

What the culture doesn’t understand is that it’s become “the culture.” And it’s conservative Christians who have become “the counter-culture.”

Whenever and wherever Christianity has worked best, it has always been countercultural. That’s how Christianity started – as a countercultural influence against first the established Jewish religion in Judea and Galilee and eventually against the Roman Empire. Jesus did not lead an armed rebellion against the Jewish rulers, and the early Christians did not lead an armed rebellion against Rome. Instead of armed rebellions, the tactics involved ministering to people.

The two areas that seem to me to hold the most promise are the inner city and the arts.

Fifty years after the United States embarked upon a quest to eradicate poverty, we have the disaster zones known as the inner cities.  When I worked for St. Louis Public Schools, I spent a lot of time in areas of the inner city that I hadn’t even known existed, like an elementary school with security doors and video surveillance, and barbed wire and bars on the windows through the second story. It sat by itself in a sea of empty lots, houses and community long destroyed. The student turnover rate was 110 percent annually.

Opportunity abounds in this place, in all kinds of ways.

The second area is the arts, but not if we keep them in the Christian ghetto. Initiatives are happening all over, like the International Arts Movement championed by Makoto Fujimura. It reaches into a number of cities, and it can reach into even more. The online poetry site I work with, Tweetspeak Poetry, is staffed largely by people of the Christian faith but who focus on things of beauty, value, and worth.

And we pray. We pray for our communities, and we pray for the people who are hostile to us. Regularly praying for people is a good way to avoid objectifying them.

And we can do that.

Start by reading this book. It’s important.

Related: Yesterday, So Many Christians co-author George Yancey posted an article in online Christianity Today entitled “What Christianophobia Looks Like in America.”

Illustration: Golden Sea by Makoto Fujimura (2011), mineral pigments and gold on kumohada, collection of Roberta and Howard Ahmanson.

So Many Christians, So Few Lions: Deconstruction

I’ve been reading in So Many Christians, So Few Lions: Is There Christianophobia in the United States? by George Yancey and David Williamson, and I need to make a detour –a related detour, but a detour nonetheless. 

In the mid-1980s, I had my first direct experience with “deconstruction” – a theory of literary criticism that emerged in the late 1960s in Europe (lots of strange things emerged in the 1960s). I was in a masters program at Washington University in St. Louis, and I took a number of English and history seminars. I didn’t hear anyone say “deconstruction;” instead, what I heard was "post-modernism," “story” and “storytelling” in ways I had never heard before. And the idea was that “story” could define and redefine reality.  

In other words, everything was relative. There were no “texts” – there were only interpretations of texts and interpreters of texts. If this sounds bewildering (if not suspect), it’s because it is. What it does in practice is wipe away any idea of “truth” – there was no truth except for whatever the current power structures said truth was.  

This seemed to be mostly a preoccupation of the English department, which was then in the process of jettisoning the notion of a canon in literature. (“Canon? What canon? Charles Dickens and Jane Austen are no better and no worse than James Patterson and Nora Roberts. The canon was just a bunch of old dead white males anyway.”) 

The seminars I was in were comprised almost entirely of adults who had been out of college for a while (I was the one of the youngest people on the program), so professors had to be careful. You couldn’t talk deconstruction with gainfully employed (or retired) adults with considerable life experience in the same way you could talk with undergraduates.  

But I suspected enough to know something was different from my own undergraduate days. So I started looking into it. Names kept coming up – Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, for example, were two of the leading lights of deconstruction. The more I looked into it, the more I understood that this wasn’t some little literary theory of interest only to a few English professors. This was having an impact on culture. 

One impact was in journalism and communication schools. It was in the 1980s that the idea of “story” and “narrative” began to displace “objectivity” in journalism schools. Deconstructionists argued there was no such thing as objectivity (a notion breathed into journalism by Walter Lippmann back in the 1910s and 1920s).  

Today we can watch, and experience, a event like Ferguson and not really know if we are seeing what is really happening or just following along with the “media narrative.” Media narratives begin with the idea of what the story is – and then come together to demonstrate and illustrate that point.  

Most journalists would likely object to this characterization. But the Justice Department report cited numerous examples of witnesses to the Michael Brown shooting last August who were afraid to contradict their neighbors or contradict the media reports. And these people turned out to be the most credible witnesses.  

This is one reason why most of believe in endemic media bias, which always seems to mystify reporters and editors (and especially editorial page editors). 

Open discussion of the problems and distortions of deconstruction is not common, especially in universities. I’ve seen a number of conservative commentators discuss it, but virtually none on the progressive or liberal side. And yet contemporary politics is shot through with this stuff.  

It was a surprise to hear that a novel had been published that used deconstruction and its problems as a central theme. Daniel Taylor’s Death Comes for the Decontructionist was published last year, and it is that novel. I’ll be posting my review on Friday, but I can I’ve been surprised in a number of ways – the open discussion, the clear explanation of what deconstruction is and isn’t, the artful way the theme is developed (a murder mystery, no less), and the full understanding of what deconstruction sets itself against.  

Indirectly, the novel also helps illustrate some of what’s behind the Christianophobia addressed by So Many Christians, So Few Lions. 

Ideas have consequences. Those media narratives have consequences. And we need to understand those ideas and those media narratives.

 

Photograph by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

“So Many Christians, So Few Lions”

About 10 years ago, I was in my office at work, and a colleague came by to talk about a project. I don’t remember exactly what the project was about, but it did involve people who had been critical of the company and its products.

Then, out of the clear blue, my colleague said, “But you know who really frightens me?”

I shook my  head.

“Those Christians,” she replied, shuddering.

“Those Christians,” she nodded. “Those evangelicals. They scare me, always trying to force there views on us.”

Stunned, I sat for a moment without speaking.

“Do I scare you?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“I’m one of them,” I said. “One of those evangelical Christians. Do I try to force my views on you?”

It was her turn to be stunned. I could see cognitive dissonance exploding inside her head.

“Well,” she said finally, “if you are one of them, you must be the exception.”

It was my first experience of “Christianophobia” with a work colleague. I had experienced it before, something on the level of group hysteria, over a school district controversy. My colleague was college-educated, older than I was by a few years, with a journalism background.

If you asked conservative Christians if there is Christianophobia in the United States, the likely response would be a rather large majority affirmative. The evidence has largely anecdotal – court decisions, stories of university political correctness run wild (lots of those), sneering editorials by the local newspaper, fundraising letters by organizations like People for the American Way.

George Yancey

All anecdotal, until So Many Christians, Do Few Lions: Is There Christianophobia in the United States? by George Yancey and David Williamson. The authors are sociology professors at the University of North Texas, a public university (not religious) in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

The book, while more engaging than the typical sociology book, is still a sociology text. Yancey and Wiliamson don’t sensationalize their subject or write in screaming prose. You have to read slowly and deliberately. The appendices comprise about half the volume.

David Williamson

They make their case. Using existing surveys plus ones they themselves conducted, they make a solid case that there is indeed Christianophobia in the United States, and especially among a rather elite group – highly educated, relatively wealthy whites. In overall size, they would be smaller than the conservative Christians they fear. In influence, position, and power, however, they’ve got it all over the Christians.

In terms of what has been happening culturally in the United States, this is an important subject to consider and discuss. And I will be discussing key parts of the book over the next two to three Mondays – who are the people so afraid of conservative Christians; why do they believe what they do; how do they rationalize what would otherwise be considered intolerant, bigoted beliefs; and what the implications might be.

I do know that my work colleague who so feared “those Christians” fit almost exactly the demographic described by Yancey and Williamson. And that happened a decade ago. 

The situation has not improved since then.

Painting: The Christian Martyrs Last Prayer, oil on canvas by Jean-Leon Gerome (1883); the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.