What do you do when the world around you stops making sense?
This is a question everyone faces at times and we each struggle through it in a variety of ways. From a brief moment of confusion to an enduring existential crisis, encountering disturbing experiences in the world is a part of the human experience. How one handles such moments of disorientation determines the form of the individual's growth, either channeling it in a direction that can assimilate the new experiences, or in a way that suppresses them.
As a teacher, creating such moments of disorientation is an essential part of what I do. It is hard to learn when you think you know where everything is going. It is also hard to learn when you don't care about what is happening in front of you. Nothing breaks through apathy like a shocking example that does not fit one's assumptions about the world.
A classroom crisis of this sort is usually operating on the margins of one's identity. For example, while teaching Sophocles' Antigone, I use passages like the following (lines 879-880, 886-894) to help students realize that the Greek experience of love would make for rather different Valentine's cards:
Challenging one's notion of love, despite the lip-service we pay in our society to its importance, goes over much better than touching on anything connected to religion or politics. When either of those topics make it to the classroom, people take note and the air can become electric. This occurs even when the issue is only tangentially related to them. Material that once was banal can unexpectedly become relevant depending on current events.
For example, in the spring of 2017 my classes on Confucius became much more charged. In explaining the Confucian notion of a rightly-ordered state, I provide them with this quotation from the Analects:
On the other hand, Confucius suggests that a leader who is truly virtuous and encourages people to act in certain ways because they are the right thing to do, rather than because they will be punished for failing to act in that manner, will be much more effective. Not only will peoples' behavior change because they have internalized the moral example, but they will actually become more virtuous, or "good." One of the central concepts of Confucian thought is that the behavior of those with power and prestige shapes those around them; if they are good, then society will improve, while if they are bad, society will collapse. I like to call it trickle-down morality.
This is the point where students become tense.
Whatever their take on politics, the tensions between the republican party's rhetorical deployment of virtue and the behavior of Donald Trump have taken this notion and made it immediately relevant to students' identities. I wasn't teaching at the time, but I suspect it may have also felt relevant (with a noticeably different partisan tinge) around 1997. The intersection of ideas and closely-held identities is what makes or breaks an education, since it is at those moments that students have the opportunity to consider their experience of the world from an unfamiliar perspective.
As a teacher, I'm grateful when students can see that the concepts and material we are discussing connects to their lives. Whatever the pedagogical benefits of such encounters between coursework and students' identities, however, I strongly suspect that such teachable moments also feed in to the "God's Not Dead" syndrome.
When teachers try to illustrate the importance of religion to human lived experience, they can alienate Christians. As Deandre Poole experienced while teaching a standard textbook in anthropology at Florida Atlantic, trying to help students think about the way in which religion changes the way we act can be difficult. In his case, asking students to step on a piece of paper on which they had written "Jesus" was designed to provoke thought. The exercise did not force students to step on the paper, but encouraged them to consider why the thought of doing so produced anxiety, while stepping on most papers with writing on them would not. The difference is that the name Jesus carries special significance in our culture, which is largely Christian. The exercise was designed to help students realize how religion shaped their sense of the world in a way that most other forces and values do not.
I encounter this when discussing religion from most any angle, such as trying to help students understand the significance of creation myths, whether they are come from the Tanakh or the Rig Veda or the Popol Vuh. Despite the fact that such discussions are not focused on proving or disproving religion in general, nor any particular religion, the effort to talk about the importance of religion for people is often experienced by students as threatening. Rather than considering what that says about the way in which religion's structure cultural life, or how they can imbue words and objects and ceremonies with profound significance, many try to block out the experience to avoid discomfort.
There is a cottage-industry of apologetic materials pitched at parents as essential to preserve their children's religious faith. Books like "Don't Check Your Brains at the Door" and world view conferences such as Summit are designed, among other things, to immunize students against education. By telling high school students that their teachers are out to make them reject Christianity and equipping them with tidy arguments and snide questions to deploy in the classroom, they provide students with a sense of superiority to their teachers. The expectation of attack within the classroom can prime Christian students to discount whatever they hear as "fake news" if it makes them uncomfortable.
Implicitly, this renders education a process of credentialing rather than intellectual growth, an assault on the faith of students that they must survive rather than something that can strengthen and enrich their faith if they choose to engage it.
Fear drives the "God's Not Dead" syndrome and the publication of apologetic materials, and this is what I found to be the tell. Such an approach to education implies that one's faith is at risk of implosion--encountering too much reality will lead it to disappear in a puff of smoke, so one must gird one's loins for battle (Ephesians 6 and I Peter 3:15 are popular Bible verses in this context) when talking of faith.
There are other approaches that Christians can adopt, however, and while they might at times be frightening, they begin from faith rather than fear. I would suggest that the faithful Christian should live and act in the world in confidence. If what they believe is true, then trying to understand the world should ultimately not undermine their faith. This posture toward the world invites discomfort (while still acknowledging it as such) because an encounter with the foreign provides the opportunity to deepen one's faith and understanding by conforming them to reality. It is grounded in the acceptance that as humans, none of us know everything, and pursues greater understanding in humble confidence.
Such an approach was advocated by C.S. Lewis in "Learning in Wartime," a speech given to undergraduates beginning their studies at Oxford as Hitler began to bomb Poland in 1939. As he explained why academic study was worthwhile despite the crisis, Lewis also succinctly articulated the antidote to the "God's Not Dead" Syndrome:
When the world ceases to make sense and one is tempted to push aside the offending facts or experiences, think twice before doing so and instead consider: would you like to grow as a human being with a mind and a soul, or would you rather constrict both in the false hope that such rigidity will make the anxiety go away?
This is a question everyone faces at times and we each struggle through it in a variety of ways. From a brief moment of confusion to an enduring existential crisis, encountering disturbing experiences in the world is a part of the human experience. How one handles such moments of disorientation determines the form of the individual's growth, either channeling it in a direction that can assimilate the new experiences, or in a way that suppresses them.
As a teacher, creating such moments of disorientation is an essential part of what I do. It is hard to learn when you think you know where everything is going. It is also hard to learn when you don't care about what is happening in front of you. Nothing breaks through apathy like a shocking example that does not fit one's assumptions about the world.
A classroom crisis of this sort is usually operating on the margins of one's identity. For example, while teaching Sophocles' Antigone, I use passages like the following (lines 879-880, 886-894) to help students realize that the Greek experience of love would make for rather different Valentine's cards:
Love, never conquered in battleWhile the commercialized descriptions of romantic love common in our own age may suggest that people do dumb things because of love, it is rarely depicted as an irresistible divine curse that assaults and plunders the person in love, making one actually insane.
Love the plunderer laying waste the rich! ...
whoever feels your grip is driven mad.
Love!--
you wrench the minds of the righteous into outrage,
swerve them to their ruin--you have ignited this,
this kindred strife, father and son at war
and Love alone the victor--
Warm glance of the bride triumphant, burning with desire!
Throned in power, side-by-side with the mighty laws!
Irresistible Aphrodite, never conquered--
Love, you mock us for your sport.
Challenging one's notion of love, despite the lip-service we pay in our society to its importance, goes over much better than touching on anything connected to religion or politics. When either of those topics make it to the classroom, people take note and the air can become electric. This occurs even when the issue is only tangentially related to them. Material that once was banal can unexpectedly become relevant depending on current events.
For example, in the spring of 2017 my classes on Confucius became much more charged. In explaining the Confucian notion of a rightly-ordered state, I provide them with this quotation from the Analects:
If the people be led by laws, and uniformity sought to be given them by punishments, they will try to avoid the punishment, but have no sense of shame. If they be led by virtue, and uniformity sought to be given them by the rules of propriety, they will have the sense of shame, and moreover will become good.Here Confucius argues against a strict legalist approach to government by suggesting that people will only avoid the law when they think they might be caught, but will break it whenever they deem punishment unlikely because they do not actually care about the law; since they have not internalized it, they "have no sense of shame" and willingly break the law whenever doing so appears convenient. My favorite example of such a law in our culture is a speed limit. Few people are unwilling to admit to speeding from time to time and the assumption that most people speed on occasion is pretty widespread. The the impact of speed limits is severely limited because most people only comply with those laws out of their fear of punishment.
On the other hand, Confucius suggests that a leader who is truly virtuous and encourages people to act in certain ways because they are the right thing to do, rather than because they will be punished for failing to act in that manner, will be much more effective. Not only will peoples' behavior change because they have internalized the moral example, but they will actually become more virtuous, or "good." One of the central concepts of Confucian thought is that the behavior of those with power and prestige shapes those around them; if they are good, then society will improve, while if they are bad, society will collapse. I like to call it trickle-down morality.
This is the point where students become tense.
Whatever their take on politics, the tensions between the republican party's rhetorical deployment of virtue and the behavior of Donald Trump have taken this notion and made it immediately relevant to students' identities. I wasn't teaching at the time, but I suspect it may have also felt relevant (with a noticeably different partisan tinge) around 1997. The intersection of ideas and closely-held identities is what makes or breaks an education, since it is at those moments that students have the opportunity to consider their experience of the world from an unfamiliar perspective.
As a teacher, I'm grateful when students can see that the concepts and material we are discussing connects to their lives. Whatever the pedagogical benefits of such encounters between coursework and students' identities, however, I strongly suspect that such teachable moments also feed in to the "God's Not Dead" syndrome.
When teachers try to illustrate the importance of religion to human lived experience, they can alienate Christians. As Deandre Poole experienced while teaching a standard textbook in anthropology at Florida Atlantic, trying to help students think about the way in which religion changes the way we act can be difficult. In his case, asking students to step on a piece of paper on which they had written "Jesus" was designed to provoke thought. The exercise did not force students to step on the paper, but encouraged them to consider why the thought of doing so produced anxiety, while stepping on most papers with writing on them would not. The difference is that the name Jesus carries special significance in our culture, which is largely Christian. The exercise was designed to help students realize how religion shaped their sense of the world in a way that most other forces and values do not.
I encounter this when discussing religion from most any angle, such as trying to help students understand the significance of creation myths, whether they are come from the Tanakh or the Rig Veda or the Popol Vuh. Despite the fact that such discussions are not focused on proving or disproving religion in general, nor any particular religion, the effort to talk about the importance of religion for people is often experienced by students as threatening. Rather than considering what that says about the way in which religion's structure cultural life, or how they can imbue words and objects and ceremonies with profound significance, many try to block out the experience to avoid discomfort.
There is a cottage-industry of apologetic materials pitched at parents as essential to preserve their children's religious faith. Books like "Don't Check Your Brains at the Door" and world view conferences such as Summit are designed, among other things, to immunize students against education. By telling high school students that their teachers are out to make them reject Christianity and equipping them with tidy arguments and snide questions to deploy in the classroom, they provide students with a sense of superiority to their teachers. The expectation of attack within the classroom can prime Christian students to discount whatever they hear as "fake news" if it makes them uncomfortable.
Implicitly, this renders education a process of credentialing rather than intellectual growth, an assault on the faith of students that they must survive rather than something that can strengthen and enrich their faith if they choose to engage it.
Fear drives the "God's Not Dead" syndrome and the publication of apologetic materials, and this is what I found to be the tell. Such an approach to education implies that one's faith is at risk of implosion--encountering too much reality will lead it to disappear in a puff of smoke, so one must gird one's loins for battle (Ephesians 6 and I Peter 3:15 are popular Bible verses in this context) when talking of faith.
There are other approaches that Christians can adopt, however, and while they might at times be frightening, they begin from faith rather than fear. I would suggest that the faithful Christian should live and act in the world in confidence. If what they believe is true, then trying to understand the world should ultimately not undermine their faith. This posture toward the world invites discomfort (while still acknowledging it as such) because an encounter with the foreign provides the opportunity to deepen one's faith and understanding by conforming them to reality. It is grounded in the acceptance that as humans, none of us know everything, and pursues greater understanding in humble confidence.
Such an approach was advocated by C.S. Lewis in "Learning in Wartime," a speech given to undergraduates beginning their studies at Oxford as Hitler began to bomb Poland in 1939. As he explained why academic study was worthwhile despite the crisis, Lewis also succinctly articulated the antidote to the "God's Not Dead" Syndrome:
By leading that life [of the scholar] to the glory of God I do not, of course, mean any attempt to make our intellectual inquiries work out to edifying conclusions. That would be, as [Sir Francis] Bacon says, to offer to the author of truth the unclean sacrifice of a lie. I mean the pursuit of knowledge and beauty, in a sense, for their own sake, but in a sense which does not exclude their being for God's sake. An appetite for these things exists in the human mind, and God makes no appetite in vain. We can therefore pursue knowledge as such, and beauty, as such, in the sure confidence that by so doing we are either advancing to the vision of God ourselves or indirectly helping others to do so.Lewis insisted that attempting to understand the world for its own sake (i.e., not in an effort to score points for God or some other cause) was a Christian duty for those who had the time and opportunity to study. His confidence extended even to those moments when one learns something and does not see why it matters or how it advances one's understanding of God, trusting that the effort may help others even if it does little for oneself.
When the world ceases to make sense and one is tempted to push aside the offending facts or experiences, think twice before doing so and instead consider: would you like to grow as a human being with a mind and a soul, or would you rather constrict both in the false hope that such rigidity will make the anxiety go away?
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