534 - Political Incorrectness and Theological Education

Political Incorrectness and Theological Education
By Glenn R. Bucher

The Commencement began with an invocation. The Jewish chaplain prayed that each graduate would believe in herself. It ended with a benediction. The Protestant chaplain thanked God that the four years were over. She asked God's blessings on the graduates who decided to join Hillary Clinton, the Commencement speaker, for an illegal swim in the college lake, a favorite college rite of hers.

I was surprised that Wellesley College retained a place in its Commencement program for religious rituals of another era. Given the endowment, I couldn't imagine that this public display was strategic for institutional advancement. My surprise turned to disgust as I thought about the theological trivia offered by the two chaplains. Where did they get their theological education? A number of institutions came to mind.

Trying to act like the father of a new diploma-carrying daughter, I asked her what the prayers meant. "Nothing," she said. "They're only a reflection of politically correct thinking on this campus." I inquired further. "We're so afraid of offending one another's traditions here-a kind of back-handed compliment," she went on, "that we've boiled down all statements about anything important to their least common denominator. In fact, we've managed to abuse every tradition in the process and say nothing significant at all."

Lots of readers of THEOLOGY TODAY will love this story. That's the problem! Not, obviously, because we may be responsible for the prayers-since these days we don't have very much to affirm theologically, not because we respect PC (political correctness)-but because the episode confirms our worst suspicions about PC. We think these prayers are what PC has brought to us and brought us to. Ideology, pedagogical wimpishness (multi-vocal classrooms), disrespect for the Western tradition, a dose of liberation theology, some Equal Education Opportunity and Affirmative Action, and preoccupation about race, gender, and class issues have rendered theological talk lukewarm, at best. And the denominational bureaucrats have bought in. I can hear it all now.

What's most discouraging about this kind of theological response to PC is the defense of intellectual privilege and uncritical thinking it reveals. Or, if you wish, what's wrong with it is the implicit ideology. It's as though the theologians have led the way in critical thinking

Glenn R. Bucher is President of the Graduate Theological Union. He served previously as Dean of the Faculty and Vice President for Academic Affairs at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, GA.

535 - Political Incorrectness and Theological Education

about Western traditions, cultures, and religions and now need to criticize the criticism-a corrective of sorts. In fact, it's the opposite!

The seminaries and the churches, indeed too many universities, have been the cabooses, not the engines, on the train of thought about multiculturalism, education, and God. Having never pulled the train nor even supplied the fuel-yes, of course, there are fearless individual and even institutional exceptions-we now want to caution that the PC train is speeding too fast if not going down the wrong track. It doesn't take a lot of railroad history to figure out how out of line this criticism is. It's alarming how conservative the liberals are sounding these days.

A few painful examples are worth mentioning. Professors who, unaccustomed to a few forty-five-year-old mothers in a seminary course groping for their voice and experience, reach the conclusion that the institution is about to be overtaken by a radical lesbian caucus; seminaries that claim only merit as the criterion for employment and appoint women to the faculty whose disdain for feminist scholarship and pedagogy is well-known; and churches where the call process is marginally attentive to denominational inclusiveness goals to obscure the good-old-boy network that usually operates.

A little less close to home, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., once one of the symbols of a proud liberal intellectual tradition and still the defender of the Niebuhrian legacy, now says (see The Disunifying of America) that America is on the verge of ethnic strife like Yugoslavia if the ideology of Unum in E Pluribus is not reaffirmed. Indeed, he blames the ethnics for cultic separation, hardly mentioning that for them, historic separation was an involuntary act. Obviously, a certain version of American civil religion is still alive and well.

And John Silber, once himself a symbol of university faculty protest against a Board of Regents over race, also now argues (see What's Wrong with America, and How to Fix It) that moral education in the schools is what we need. The moral education he has in mind is what grammar school kids were required to learn in the nineteenth century in New England. According to Silber, they learned to spell, think, and value all at once. He doesn't mention that, aside from the abolitionists, the products of this schooling included a whole lot of others who either didn't get the point about egalitarianism or, more likely, had their social privilege solidified by moral education while thinking they were inclusive minded.

Some of us who learned theology and politics in the 1960s find these examples and a host of others, from Stanford's curriculum fight to the criticisms of inclusive language to D'Souza's Illiberal Education to Kimball's Tenured Radicals, increasingly baffling. What we learned from Schlesinger and his favorite theologian, "Reine," as well as from the pre-Boston University John Silber was that the genius of democracy lies in its checks and balances on unexamined privilege and power and that the views of university boards are shaped by individual and institutional cultural histories. We also learned in the seminary

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classrooms, from reading Augustine and Luther, behind the barricades, and from the street-corner orators that checks and balances don't always work, on the university campus, on Capitol Hill or in the church. So what's alarming about the current outrage against PC is the notion that it really is time to turn back the clock. In fact, the clock has hardly been ticking.

Of course there are PC abuses: disregarding merit in favor of ideology in hiring practices, ignoring the classics because of authorship, assuming that all the middle-class American church needs to guarantee its renewal is a strong dose of Third World theology, relegating experience to the level of truth, imposing rules about inclusive language without inviting discussion, insisting that the only criterion for relevant theological talk is what speaks directly to the particularities of my situation, assuming that church history began when my favorite pastor accepted his current call, and so on. Of course these are examples of intellectual and theological myopia! But irrespective of their prevalence, when measured against the long history of traditions where certain sociologies of knowledge and ideologies went unexamined, they are the exceptions and not the rule. And they are no excuse for the reassertion of privileged thinking and intellectual and theological arrogance that seem to be in vogue these days.

So what, if anything, does theology have to say about PC? Anything, that is, beyond a resounding "no," that assumes PC means only ideological shout-downs of views that one finds reprehensible? It was this question which five theological types set out to answer in the fall of 1991 at a Columbia Theological Seminary forum titled "Political Correctness, the Reformed Tradition, and Pluralism: Implications for Theological Education" (see Theological Education, Spring, 1992, pp. 74-90). The five-professors in Black Church Studies, New Testament, and Theology, a new pastor, and an Old Testament graduate student-explored the topic around various themes: community, First Amendment rights, the stranger, inclusive language, and ideology. Since I moderated this discussion, I was not in a position to make any comments. Now, thanks to THEOLOGY TODAY, that occasion presents itself.

For me, it is the theological statements of the panel that continue to stand out most crisply and freshly as helpful perspectives on the PC debate. The pastor said it this way: God is bigger than I thought, I am smaller than I thought, and God is more responsibly sought in multicultural community than in isolated individualism. He concluded that those who take such theology seriously will welcome the end of denominationalism and insist on the weekly experience of Word and sacrament. What's worthy of note is how one's disposition toward the PC debate might just be informed by some theology and the eucharist, at least in one pastor's head and ministry. Oh, yes, there was also this comment: "The role that fear and insecurity are playing in this

537 - Political Incorrectness and Theological Education

jargon-laden talk about 'correctness' cannot be overestimated." That's also one of the themes of this essay, though I didn't set out thinking that PC, fear and anxiety, and the eucharist might be interconnected.

The PC debate, in part, has to do with who writes history, whose culture and language are dominant, and who has the power. Those who worry about PC as a leftist version of McCarthyism have a legitimate concern. But as I said earlier, it is not one that's now very pertinent, given the big picture of dominant history, culture, and power. What's even more scary than being victimized by a new ideology-an experience most traditional theologians, seminaries, and churches have not had-is that if you get too far into the PC debate, whatever your views, you just could get changed yourself. Might the theological inclusiveness we mouth all the time actually blindside us in our more reactionary moments? Then, God forbid, the dialogue could conceivably change, too, as well as institutional goals-and the base of one's power. To imagine the prospect of such change is downright exciting and terrifying. How much do we want to be saved?

Finally, "the world that gave rise to our theological curricula no longer exists." That's discouraging, if you're fifty-five and were hoping for ten final peaceful years in a seminary classroom. Of course, there's always pretending that it really ain't so. Or that if I keep my lofty theological propositions lofty enough everyone will find something of value.

The problem is that this curricular observation was followed by talk of sin, grace, and the cross, of self-righteousness, openness to being surprised, and costly discipleship. And what could all that have to do with PC? Of course, such theology, like the realities behind the words, cuts all ways, irrespective of where you fall on the PC continuum. But since my interest here is in off-setting reactionary theology, talk of sin, grace, and the cross is a way of saying that we begin with the debris in our own eyes. After all, we presumably have the theological resources to cry, laugh, and hope, even with and for ourselves.

Political incorrectness is what happens when pluralism, theology, and PC are brought together. That's the bottom line of this essay. By political incorrectness I mean, of course, the capacity to resist what has become all too "politically correct" in the churches and theological education, the fearful easy dismissal of those who have only begun to say that their cultures, languages, and- theologies are at least as legitimate as "ours." In my view, theological education needs a lot more of this kind of political incorrectness. Seminarians and professors need it. The gospel requires it!