A Time to Laugh

Isaac came home talking about Martin Luther King, Jr. this week. He learned about him in school, of course — the first one in our immediate tribe to hear about him as a fact and not a threat:

See this picture, Mommy? He’s waving hello. And he’s saying, “White people, you be nice to black people. And black people, you be nice to white people.”

That about covers it.

Being the public address nerd that I am, I said, “Let’s watch his speech, Isaac!” And more motivated by the snuggling than the learning, he settled into my lap for a viewing.

“He said Stone Mountain, Georgia! I know where that is. That’s where the presidents heads are carved — George Washington, George Bush, and Abraham Lincoln.”

Oh, so close. So, so close and so very, very far. “You’re thinking of Mount Rushmore. But we’ve been to Stone Mountain, remember? There are presidents carved into stone there, but presidents of the Confederacy.”

“What’s the Confederacy?”

Sigh. . . . Where to begin. I did my best. The differences between the North’s industry and South’s agriculture. The labor-intensity of cotton. And slavery. I hate talking about slavery.

I ended up at Abraham Lincoln’s conclusion that the South’s leaving the Union was no option at all. And the Blue Coats and the Grey Coats.

We listened some more and jumped ahead a hundred years to the Civil Rights Movement. I told him that right here in Greenville, people couldn’t eat lunch in a restaurant simply because they were black. Or drink from the same water fountain or use the same bathroom.

I finally sighed through saying, “And you know what, Isaac? Mommy has just discovered one of the most hateful sources of this racism. Right here in Greenville. That’s Mommy’s job right now — working with God as He makes that crooked path straight.”

While I was stuck in my little Public Speaking 121 lecture, I listened to this greatest speech of the 20th-century again. For the first time in a long time. King’s talking about the same thing I read during Advent. It sounds different now than it did in my previous life.

Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain: And the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together:

No wonder King was such a threat. Shalom is a threat. A threat to habits, isolation, pride, greed. And King was just preaching Shalom. No, I think he was singing it.

I am presenting this paper at the annual National Communication Association Convention today. Check it out!

2009 NCA Standing Without And Within Apologia

My paper presents BJU’s apologia on race before and after November 2008 as well as the Please-Reconcile’s plea for BJU’s racial reconciliation. BJU’s statements are strange. To be quite blunt, they make no sense to a Yankee. But I’ve discovered that within the Old South ethic of the Lost Cause, the so-called apology makes perfect sense.

The best resource for understanding the Lost Cause rhetoric is an old friend to rhetoricians and a particularly familiar annoyance to Burkeans—Richard Weaver. In his 1943 LSU dissertation renamed Southern Tradition at Bay, Weaver surveys and appreciates Lost Cause literature post-Appomattox and includes a long discussion of Southern apologia.

Bob Jones University’s statements on race parallel Weaver’s Lost Cause apologia. The drama that Weaver both records and continues is a romance caught at a potentially tragic crisis point. The old rules of chivalry drive the action or rather reaction. Weaver’s hero, the southern Cavalier, moves more than acts. He is a man of leisure and good birth who simply is, until a moment of deadly crisis. When he is challenged, as if in a duel, his duty is to “serve the eternal verities” of the established order. Destruction, ruin, bankruptcy, injury are all irrelevant to preserving truth and maintaining “good form.” Guiding him is an unspoken code duello.

Even nearly one hundred and fifty years after the Civil War, the rhetorical drama of the Old South still persists in tiny provincial cultural pockets like Bob Jones University. Within the enduring rhetorical romance of sectarian religion, the code duello informs and contains conflict.  Intersecting Richard Weaver’s Old South drama with my previous description of rhetorical romance is a productive critical project. Each analysis rounds out the other and might provide a more organic explanation for the persisting romance in a micro-culture like southern fundamentalism.

Such an intersection also broadens BJU’s connection with the “segregationist ethos” of its founding family. Agrarianism, provincialism, populism, commerce, societal hierarchy, religion, nativism, and racism all goaded the Confederacy in their Romance-turned-tragedy. In our critical sweep, we, too, must avoid containing our cultural sin of racism in the South, in fundamentalism, or in Bob Jones University. The arcane mask these romantics don to distract their Other’s gaze from their own ugliness tempts us to our own form of tragedy. The Please-Reconcile effort was a comic attempt at removing their mask and correcting that sin without killing off the humanity underneath.

Further study intersecting southern fundamentalism with the Lost Cause drama would expose the salience and endurance possible (or not) in newer Lost Cause movements like Doug Wilson’s Federal Vision, southern secessionism, and identity Christianity. At the root of the problem within Southern romantic apologia is a juggling of the usual mystical purpose with the pragmatic agency. That is, by relegating the divine to the means of propping up a societal hierarchy, participants in the rhetorical drama are distracted from the essentially preservationist motive in their micro-culture. Further contrasting southern with northern fundamentalism, tracing how Weaver’s agrarianism found resonance in mid-century northern conservatism, and mapping the dramatistic similarities between the Civil War and current culture wars would productively assist scholars in deconstructing tragedy and creating a comic corrective.

A revealing moment in this interaction was the P-R’s admittance that they were shocked at their alma mater’s pervasively racist reputation. They offer one explanation that BJU is really not as racist as it seems, giving their alma mater a face-saving “out.” Another possible explanation is that the legal confrontation of BJU’s interracial dating prohibition sent the “segregationist ethos” far underground. The presumed inequality of the races remained in behind-closed-doors meetings. The students from both the North and the South who attended and graduated after 1983 Supreme Court case—which includes every member of the Please-Reconcile team—were witless about the racist foundation. They had been raised in the prevailing notion of “color-blindness” which made them deaf to the coded racism. They were literal-minded, morally earnest, personally outspoken, and driven to “do right.” Perhaps, by shedding the Old South rhetoric that was so prominent in BJU’s pre-1964 days and by generalizing for a larger audience, BJU was forging the tools for its own first homegrown public confrontation.

This intersection of the North with the Old South, of integrationist with separatist, of post-1983 students with pre-1964 administrators, of a second-generation Pollack with an Old South morality play — by putting together these two disparate “terms” we have our last place of freedom, Burke would say. In the end, such perspective by incongruity is our best source of comic correction keeping us from being too hopelessly ourselves.

When the Old South brushes up against this 2^nd-generation Pollack like that, I can’t ignore it. It’s what Burke would call Perspective by Incongruity — two dissimilar “terms” shoved together that each change the other simply by proximity. And that’s what happened a year ago when Bob Jones University produced a “Statement on Race” to say it was “profoundly sorry” for past racist policies.

I’m no stranger to Bob Jones University and so-called fundamentalism. Not only have I studied the rhetoric of American religious separatism formally, I’ve lived it. Having spent 20 years at BJU as a student, grad student, and faculty member, I am especially sensitive to their public discourse. Now that they fired me for being more scholarly than separatist, I’m looking anew at their public texts. While I was still inside the movement, I described their frame of acceptance as less tragic or comic and more romantic. My purpose then was descriptive as well as prescriptive—to explain to them, as an insider, how best to craft their message.

We all see how that turned out. So I am honing a new critical voice—one that’s still within a Burkean comic corrective, but without the apologist bent. I no longer need to prescribe to fundamentalists. And I’ve never sensed more strongly how incongruous it is to be a 2^nd-generation Pollack stuck in an Old South morality play.

The most recent example of a public text from Bob Jones University is this “Statement on Race.” BJU is infamous for its 1983 Supreme Court battle to maintain its policy forbidding “interracial dating.” The problems with their policy are so numerous and complex that we’d be here for weeks discussing them. Not only is their definition of “race” problematic—they limited their scope to only three races—but the definition of a “date” comes into play too. They lost that fight with the IRS, lost their tax-exemption status, but maintained this unseemly remnant of the Old South.

And not until Campaign 2000 did BJU’s racism rise again into public view. George W. Bush’s rather routine visit to an old Republican haunt in South Carolina didn’t seem too interesting until John McCain made it interesting. The media firestorm was so intense that BJU’s president went on Larry King Live to lift the interracial dating ban.

Alumni who had attended the school since 1983, however, didn’t think that was sufficient. One particular 1998 alum, Jon Henry, was so irritated by the continuing defense of racism among BJU constituency that he started, of all things, a Facebook group to force BJU to apologize for past racism. That on-a-whim action snowballed into a full-fledged alumni effort garnering 506 signatures attempting to move Bob Jones University one step closer to reconciliation and culminating in BJU’s 2008 “Statement on Race.”

1954MercerStatementToBJUBoard

This would be Ted Mercer’s final post to his blog (if he had one in the 1950s). But, of course, the story continues without him.

In his final “post,” Mercer is plainly exasperated. Bob Jones Sr. has called him more than just “inefficient” and “disloyal,” more than just “criminally insane” and “demon possessed.” In numerous private conversations with students, alumni, staff, and constituency, Jones has called Mercer a homosexual. And in this document, Mercer is trying to set the record straight (pun intended).

It’s hard to imagine the weight of this accusation today. I’m not going to deconstruct it anymore than to say that Jones’ “poisoning the well” for Mercer’s reputation is despicable and shameful.

A few people to note:

• Mr. James H. Price was “a member of the executive committee” and “attorney for Dr. Jones [Sr.].” He still resides in Greenville, and his son is a local attorney.
• Mrs. Keefer, Dean Keefer’s wife, worked at the Dining Common.
• Glen Lockwood told Mercer the exact numbers of enrollment (in contrast to the published numbers in the Sword) and was subsequently expelled for “[supplying] information to an enemy of the institution” (20). I believe he’s preached recently at Reformed Presbyterian Church, Southside in Indianapolis.
• Another faculty member is mentioned as resigning — Mr. Warwick.
• Matt and Millie Weld resigned because of BJSr.’s accusations against Mercer.

Alice Mercer, Ted Mercer’s wife, provides an honest and shoot-from-the-hip rebuke of Jones Sr. She clarifies what have been only fuzzy glimpses of the Family for those of us who followed her.

• She describes the more Pentecostal ethic in BJSr. with his “biblical discernment of spirits and of character” claim degenerating into a simple and blatant accusation of his argumentative opponents.
• She points up the double-standard on the “beverage use of alcohol” among the administrators — specifically that “little bottle” that BJSr. “[carries] around and take[s] sips from” (14).
• She draws the obvious connection (for the times) between BJU and the USSR.

Ted Mercer’s most startling and eerily-resonant statement in the whole document:

Your failure as individuals to support what I and hundreds of others believe is a reasonable request (for Dr. Jones to retract and apologize or to grant an open hearing to determine the guilty ones in this controversy) will only serve to prolong and intensify the controversy. The alumni have spoken. I have more than a thousand letters which the Board may inspect under the conditions of a hearing. These tell abundantly what many alumni think about these matters (5).

This explains much of the BJU official reaction to the Please-Reconcile movement a year ago. It was completely an alumni-driven effort to coax BJU to apologize for what was clearly institutional racism. While BJU did apologize, their spokesman, Gary Weier, went to great pains to explain that the alumni had nothing to do with their statement. No one, of course, believed him. So the question becomes why does BJU work so hard at proving that the alumni and faculty are irrelevant?

Habit may be one explanation.

Cynicism is a sin. Because it’s refusing to see God at work. A cynic hears a baby crying and is incensed. A believer hears the same cry and thanks God for a providentially-created clear expression of an unmet need. A parent can be a cynic and a believer in the same day, mind you. Sin is like that.

BJU apologized. That’s the way the Mainstream-Media is reporting it even if BJU was so careful not to use the A-word. They said “profoundly sorry” for being “racially hurtful.” It’s enough for now. It’s new enough for now.

And the alumni effort at Please-Reconcile.org was part of that. A big, big part. It’s undeniable. I personally read their documents months ago, was skeptical at first, prayed about it, and eventually signed. I even fasted last weekend in order to pray about the effort. And as soon as the leadership team closed the signing on Wednesday, went off to the printers, and began to stuff their envelopes, BJU released a carefully-Carol-Kiersteaded and/or Gary-Weiered statement.

As one of the signers, I am rejoicing. It would be too easy to be a Jonah-like cynic even if I would have preferred a more Gospel-centered resolution like the PCA’s. I don’t even care that the MSM has their tongue firmly planted in cheek.  I choose to rejoice that a little glimmer of repentance has been offered.

But I’ve been surprised by one source of cynicism — BJU insiders. Never saw that coming. They assert that the alumni had nothing to do with it. That we shouldn’t be rejoicing. That our bluff got called. That we’re just conflating God’s work with academic politics which makes us the worst reprobate imaginable.

Huh?

The petulant reaction is revealing. From inside, it seems, the statement was about corporate image and not about admitting (organizational) sin and foregrounding God’s forgiveness. It’s about a story (for the press), not the Story (of the Gospel).

It proves my theory on the rhetoric of the Romantic Separatist. For BJU, this was a new ball gown — more stylish and more up-to-date. The attention, they hope, will attract more people to their message. It’s all about the new designer dress, right? It’s about haute coutre!

But their sisters and brothers (in Christ) at the ball don’t see it as a new dress. They see it as an entirely new posture, with the sectarian Romantic walking into a room that she’d never dared enter before. And we are thrilled! We are running up to welcome her. We don’t even care what she’s wearing!

Because our beauty as Christians is not in our carefully-crafted words or in our snazzy new gown. It’s in Christ. His love makes us beautiful. Even when we’re klutzy, stumbling, and goofy. Or maybe especially when we are!

And I will continue to say, as I have for years as an insider and now an outsider, that Bob Jones University needs to realize that its appeal will not reside in its words or deeds, but in how Christ redeems those actions. Foregrounding that Redemption makes us less timid and inactive and more bold and fearless. We can act, fully confident in our standing as God’s own.

After having six pregnancies in my life and only two babies I’ve ever heard cry, positive pregnancy tests produce a great deal of anxiety for me. I look at that test and think, “Oh no!! Is this one going to take? Or is there sadness ahead? Is it safe to be happy? Or am I going to be made a fool?”

I learned awhile back that it doesn’t matter what’s ahead. This is now, and this is happy. It all starts with a positive test. It’s just a start, but it has to start. God will take care of the future. In admitting my own finite humanity, I can give Him the future.

This BJU statement is like that positive pregnancy test — pregnant with possibilities for God to work, a beginning for something we can’t yet fathom. It’s an Ebenezer — God has helped us thus far. Repentance is just the first chapter of the Gospel story.

Yes, a cynic hears a baby cry and hears a rebuke or a punishment. But a believer hears God’s blessing. And we must believe.

I’m so thankful. Can you believe it?

Statement about Race at Bob Jones University
At Bob Jones University, Scripture is our final authority for faith and practice and it is our intent to have it govern all of our policies. It teaches that God created the human race as one race. History, reality and Scripture affirm that in that act of creation was the potential for great diversity, manifested today by the remarkable racial and cultural diversity of humanity. Scripture also teaches that this beautiful, God-caused and sustained diversity is divinely intended to incline mankind to seek the Lord and depend on Him for salvation from sin (Acts 17:24–28).

The true unity of humanity is found only through faith in Christ alone for salvation from sin—in contrast to the superficial unity found in humanistic philosophies or political points of view. For those made new in Christ, all sinful social, cultural and racial barriers are erased (Colossians 3:11), allowing the beauty of redeemed human unity in diversity to be demonstrated through the Church.

The Christian is set free by Christ’s redeeming grace to love God fully and to love his neighbor as himself, regardless of his neighbor’s race or culture. As believers, we demonstrate our love for others first by presenting Christ our Great Savior to every person, irrespective of race, culture, or national origin. This we do in obedience to Christ’s final command to proclaim the Gospel to all men (Matthew 28:19–20). As believers we are also committed to demonstrating the love of Christ daily in our relationships with others, disregarding the economic, cultural and racial divisions invented by sinful humanity (Luke 10:25–37; James 2:1–13).

Bob Jones University has existed since 1927 as a private Christian institution of higher learning for the purpose of helping young men and women cultivate a biblical worldview, represent Christ and His Gospel to others, and glorify God in every dimension of life.

BJU’s history has been chiefly characterized by striving to achieve those goals; but like any human institution, we have failures as well. For almost two centuries American Christianity, including BJU in its early stages, was characterized by the segregationist ethos of American culture. Consequently, for far too long, we allowed institutional policies regarding race to be shaped more directly by that ethos than by the principles and precepts of the Scriptures. We conformed to the culture rather than provide a clear Christian counterpoint to it.

In so doing, we failed to accurately represent the Lord and to fulfill the commandment to love others as ourselves. For these failures we are profoundly sorry. Though no known antagonism toward minorities or expressions of racism on a personal level have ever been tolerated on our campus, we allowed institutional policies to remain in place that were racially hurtful.

On national television in March 2000, Bob Jones III, who was the university’s president until 2005, stated that BJU was wrong in not admitting African-American students before 1971, which sadly was a common practice of both public and private universities in the years prior to that time. On the same program, he announced the lifting of the University’s policy against interracial dating.

Our sincere desire is to exhibit a truly Christlike spirit and biblical position in these areas. Today, Bob Jones University enrolls students from all 50 states and nearly 50 countries, representing various ethnicities and cultures. The University solicits financial support for two scholarship funds for minority applicants, and the administration is committed to maintaining on the campus the racial and cultural diversity and harmony characteristic of the true Church of Jesus Christ throughout the world.

Thots?

Destroying Your Life From Within

1-3 And a final word to you arrogant rich: Take some lessons in lament. You’ll need buckets for the tears when the crash comes upon you. Your money is corrupt and your fine clothes stink. Your greedy luxuries are a cancer in your gut, destroying your life from within. You thought you were piling up wealth. What you’ve piled up is judgment.

4-6 All the workers you’ve exploited and cheated cry out for judgment. The groans of the workers you used and abused are a roar in the ears of the Master Avenger. You’ve looted the earth and lived it up. But all you’ll have to show for it is a fatter than usual corpse. In fact, what you’ve done is condemn and murder perfectly good persons, who stand there and take it.

7-8 Meanwhile, friends, wait patiently for the Master’s Arrival. You see farmers do this all the time, waiting for their valuable crops to mature, patiently letting the rain do its slow but sure work. Be patient like that. Stay steady and strong. The Master could arrive at any time.

9 Friends, don’t complain about each other. A far greater complaint could be lodged against you, you know. The Judge is standing just around the corner.

10-11 Take the old prophets as your mentors. They put up with anything, went through everything, and never once quit, all the time honoring God. What a gift life is to those who stay the course! You’ve heard, of course, of Job’s staying power, and you know how God brought it all together for him at the end. That’s because God cares, cares right down to the last detail.

12 And since you know that he cares, let your language show it. Don’t add words like “I swear to God” to your own words. Don’t show your impatience by concocting oaths to hurry up God. Just say yes or no. Just say what is true. That way, your language can’t be used against you.

Prayer to Be Reckoned With

13-15 Are you hurting? Pray. Do you feel great? Sing. Are you sick? Call the church leaders together to pray and anoint you with oil in the name of the Master. Believing-prayer will heal you, and Jesus will put you on your feet. And if you’ve sinned, you’ll be forgiven—healed inside and out.

16-18 Make this your common practice: Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you can live together whole and healed. The prayer of a person living right with God is something powerful to be reckoned with. Elijah, for instance, human just like us, prayed hard that it wouldn’t rain, and it didn’t—not a drop for three and a half years. Then he prayed that it would rain, and it did. The showers came and everything started growing again.

19-20 My dear friends, if you know people who have wandered off from God’s truth, don’t write them off. Go after them. Get them back and you will have rescued precious lives from destruction and prevented an epidemic of wandering away from God.

James 5

Just in case you need more encouragement to sign, here are a few poignant statements about the Please-Reconcile.org project:

• Becca (for those who feel detached from Bob Jones University and its racism)
• Lisa (for those who are tentative about the socio-cultural consequences of signing)
• Joy (for those who are unsure about the spiritual impact of racism)
• Kay
• Ben
• Jack
  (on facebook)
• Roanna (on facebook)
• Tim (on facebook)
• Loraena (for those who think there’s no theological basis for such pleas)
• Paul (for those who think BJU’s interracial dating prohibition was never a big deal)
• Joel (for those who still don’t think it’s a big deal)
• Joy again (if you are still not convinced.)

I’ve been reading a lot about confession and repentance the last few days. I didn’t realize that Calvin was the innovator who changed the ecclesiastical wording in corporate confessions from “I” to “we.” Confessing sin isn’t about remembering a long laundry list of missteps, goofs, unkindnesses, and near misses. It’s about the Gospel! And it’s not that we confess in order to get God’s blessing. No, the confessing is God’s blessing.

Here:

Repentance is the fruit of faith and prayer. Luther said in his Ninety-Five Theses that all of the Christian life should be marked by repentance. Calvin also sees repentance as a lifelong process. He says that repentance is not merely the start of the Christian life; it is the Christian life. It involves confession of sin as well as growth in holiness. Repentance is the lifelong response of the believer to the gospel in outward life, mind, heart, attitude, and will.

Repentance begins with turning to God from the heart and proceeds from a pure, earnest fear of God. It involves dying to self and sin (mortification) and coming alive to righteousness (vivification) in Christ.  Calvin does not limit repentance to an inward grace, but views it as the redirection of a man’s entire being to righteousness. Without a pure, earnest fear of God, a man will not be aware of the heinousness of sin or want to die to it. But mortification is essential because, though sin ceases to reign in the believer, it does not cease to dwell in him. Romans 7:14-25 shows that mortification is a lifelong process. With the Spirit’s help, the believer must put sin to death every day through self-denial, cross-bearing, and meditation on the future life.

Repentance is also characterized by newness of life, however. Mortification is the  means to vivification, which Calvin defines as “the desire to live in a holy and devoted manner, a desire arising from rebirth; as if it were said that man dies to himself that he may begin to live to God.”  True self-denial results in a life devoted to justice and mercy. The pious both “cease to do evil” and “learn to do well.” Through repentance, they bow in the dust before their holy Judge, then are raised to participate in the life, death, righteousness, and intercession of their Savior. As Calvin writes, “For if we truly partake in his death, ‘our old man is crucified by his power, and the body of sin perishes’ (Rom. 6:6), that the corruption of original nature may no longer thrive. If we share in his resurrection, through it we are raised up into newness of life to correspond with the righteousness of God.”

The words Calvin uses to describe the pious Christian life (reparatio, regeneratio, reformatio, renovatio, restitutio) point back to our original state of righteousness. They indicate that a life of pietas is restorative in nature. Through Spirit-worked repentance, believers are restored to the image of God.