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There’s’ something religious about ‘political correctness’

There’s’ something religious about ‘political correctness’

Last updated on: August 30, 2015 at 9:48 pm by J. Paul Valley

There’s’ something religious about ‘political correctness’ 2015-08-30T21:48:51+00:00 J. Paul Valley

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Editor’s note: This expression of ideas is way too long and meanders a bit. The author apologizes for not editing it down, but he’s just got a lot going on right now.

Shortly after returning home on a drizzly afternoon, I began doing the dishes. When I do the dishes, I listen to things, because doing the dishes is boring and it distracts me from all the gross slimy things that my fingers make contact with.

On this particular dish session, I listened to a fascinating interview on Radio West (a show on KUER, the SLC NPR affiliate) where the host, Doug Fabrizio (Doug-E Fresh), spoke with Greg Lukianoff, an advocate of civil liberties in academia who recently co-authored an article in The Atlantic about the changing landscape of college discourse.

Universities, he argued, are quickly becoming places where students believe they should be shielded from ideas, materials and even words that challenge their worldview. Something that people typically refer to as “political correctness.”

The interview was interesting, and when I was done with the dishes I pulled up my Twitter feed to check in on what’s going on in the world. And as it just so happened, a new controversy surrounding a student that wishes to abstain from reading material for fear of offense has once again erupted!

Serendipity!

Now, whenever I see these things — these “political correctness” on college campuses things — I’m always a little skeptical. Mostly because I wonder how frequent they really are. People do and say strange things everyday, but just because there’s a couple of college students who don’t understand that you can’t study American history without talking about racism in pretty frank terms doesn’t mean we’re in the depths of a national crisis. It just means not everyone’s on the same page, which seems natural.

But Lukianoff’s interview did a lot to sway me to believe that maybe things are getting a little out of hand on college campuses. That’s when I read an explainer that explained at me the story of an incoming Freshman at Duke who is apparently refusing, quite publicly, to read Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home because he thinks it’s pornography.

Now, the explainer I read wasn’t terribly helpful because it mostly shouted about why Fun Home is a great book, which might be true (I haven’t read it) but that seems a little beside the point. The point, from what I can gather from other sources, is that this youngster is simply uninterested in reading something he believes to be offensive. In fact, he wrote in the Washington Post that he “researched the book’s content” and even “read a portion of it.” So his decision seems at least relatively informed. Oh, and his main justification is that he believes the depiction of sexuality to be offensive to his Christian beliefs (something that many suspect to be based more on anti-homosexual beliefs than just sexuality in general).

Interestingly, he doesn’t have to read it, which is why it’s a little strange he made a whole ordeal out of it. He says in the post that the book is only recommended summer reading, and that he posted a comment to the Duke Class of 2019 Facebook page explaining why he won’t read the book, hoping to help others that agree feel better about their decision to opt out. Then the internet people got wind of it.

So as far as I can tell, this is basically much ado about nothing. A kid didn’t want to read a book that he doesn’t have to read and so he didn’t and nothing will happen. But, possibly because of the context of the Lukianoff interview, I have read with curiosity the reactions to his pretty freaking boring decision.

First, there is the strange attempt to define with authority what is and is not pornographic, which is kinda silly but still an interesting conversation. There is also the “This Young Christian Boy Is Being Persecuted by the Secular Liberal Media” angle, which is also silly and considerably less interesting.

But what is interesting to me (again, because of the context of the Radio West interview) is the “political correctness” angle. Is this a case of “political correctness” run amok on college campuses? Some seem to think so, but others seem to think that the fact that it’s a decision driven by a religious worldview disqualifies it from being proof a “political correctness” uprising (I keep putting political correctness in quotes because Lukianoff argued quite persuasively that that’s a really awful term to describe what’s going on, but it’s all we have).

In fact, one writer calls out Lukianoff’s article specifically, claiming that the Duke situation is in fact proof that schools are not experiencing an uptick in overly sensitive people with liberal sensitivities. It is, and always has been, the opposite.

But here’s what I don’t get. On both the liberal and conservative side, these issues seem to me to be connected in a very fundamental way, which I think also helps me see some nuances. Separating them by ideological lines seems almost arbitrary. Especially when one considers that the main worries of those who argue the liberal justification — that some images, words or even ideas can be harmful to individual students, and teachers/administrators should be sensitive to that — are shared by those on the other side.

Separating it between those who use political ideology and those who use religious beliefs for justification also seems arbitrary, since that would assume one is more likely to produce rational conclusions than the other (which isn’t actually true).

That’s why I think it might help these conversations if we started using some other vague term, like “theologically correct” or “religiously correct” to describe situations that are essentially the same as issues of “political correctness” but are grounded in the dogmas of religion and not political worldview.

That would make complaining about them a lot easier, and people would maybe see that these things aren’t so terribly different. If you hate the idea that someone would choose to opt out of reading something because they are worried the images of naked women will harm their spirituality, just remember that if you switch the word “spirituality” with “identity,” it has essentially the same meaning.

(And as plenty of research shows, separating religious convictions from things like race, gender or sexuality in the age of identity politics isn’t all that constructive).

And to be perfectly honest, I understand the urge to avoid material that one finds offensive. I’m currently religious, and I grew up that way, too. I spent the vast majority of my young life avoiding material that I personally found offensive, and that is something that really only changed when I went to college.

That is, I guess, why it’s not hard for me to see these issues as interconnected. In my mind, “I refuse to read something because I find it sinful” and “I refuse to read something because I find it socially offensive” are basically different names for the same thing. Now, ideologically I get that their different. One might argue that it is better to, for example, be offended by racism than by homosexuality (which I agree with), but the fact remains that people always have and always will disagree about stuff. So how we handle disagreements should be consistent.

So the real debate here, and what I think the cause of a lot of frustration surrounding this issue, is where the line should be drawn. It seems that on both sides, people want the freedom to shape their own understanding of the world, without being forced to consume things they find hurtful or damaging. And that seems perfectly reasonable to me. But we also have this notion that education should be about shifting perspectives, and that can’t happen unless you aren’t constantly in control of what information you are or are not exposed to.

So it’s a tricky line, and I think the case of the Duke student exposes a little bit of a blind spot. This kid is clearly not just some nut, he represents a group of students that have a very particular worldview. So calling him a loser isn’t really getting us anywhere. This is about what education should and should not mean. Something which, at the moment, isn’t clearly defined. We’re in a period of transition.

Another point I want to bring up that is that despite how confused one might be about this frosh’s objections, there is something to be said about the fact that if he is coming from a very conservative home, with little to no exposure to nudity or sexuality, encountering these things in a graphic novel can actually be a relatively traumatic experience.

It’s something that people who advocate for pluralism argue frequently. It’s important to respect the boundaries of a person’s convictions, not because you agree with those boundaries, but because you recognize that people take their convictions very seriously and flippantly disrespecting them can have legitimately damaging effects on their emotional well being.

Now, I’m not saying that the Duke kid fits into that category. Maybe he loves Paul Verhoeven films and he’s just being a jerk about homosexuality or something. The point is, we don’t know. And so claiming that this kid doesn’t deserve a college education seems a little extreme to me, especially when one would typically not levy the same condemnation to someone who made a similar choice on social justice grounds.

Having said that, I personally don’t agree with the student’s decision. As one who is both religiously observant, and a huge fan of graphic novels, I take issue with the fact that he interprets Matthew 5:28-29 as meaning “never see a naked woman” and that he personally finds images to have a greater capacity for vulgarity than other forms of media. He also tosses around phrases like “professing Christians” to describe those in the faith who disagree with him, which is less than awesome. I also tend to side with those who think it’s important for students to read things that dramatically alter their worldview. It did wonders for me.

But in the end, I get it. I get why he’s opting out, I get why people are kind of annoyed by it. I get that we’re in a period right now where students are more empowered than ever before, especially those whose needs were previously overlooked, and that can be a hard change to navigate gracefully. But what I don’t get is the constant denial that college campuses are losing their place as a center of debate and new ideas, unless of course we’re talking about the influence of religious folk. Basically, we’re all just talking past each other. It’s a problem that seems easy to fix, but in the age of the Internet, constructive solutions sometimes seem utterly unattainable.

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