Standing on Your Head and Other Impossible Feats of Gay Theologians

Summer is never my best time. What winter is to someone who lives in northern Minnesota, summer is for me—nothing to do except power through. I’m reading Tucker Malarkey’s novel Resurrection right now. It’s set in Cairo. As I read page after page of descriptions of the pitiless sun of Egypt, I keep reminding myself that I live in a city that is on the same latitude with Cairo.

The Sahara with humidity. That’s Arkansas in summertime—for me, at least, with my Pillsbury-dough boy body and fair complexion. Give me the bracing chill winds of Scotland sweeping across fields on a July day, anytime. Though put me there for a summer, and I expect I’d soon grouse about how I missed the smell of gardenias in June in my muggy Southern garden . . . .

In the spiritual torpor summer induces—aided and abetted by that accidie about which I blogged a few days ago—I’ve been asking myself why on earth I ever got the crack-brained idea of keeping a blog. What’s it all about?

What lunatic inspiration ever led me to suppose that I could somehow build a bridge between the gay community and the world of the churches? The gay community, which has been treated like offal by the churches, and which rightly repudiates religious communities that profess love while practicing hate. The churches, who will not and cannot hear the voices of gay believers, because they begin with the assumption that anything we say proceeds from sickness and sin.

What made me think it was not only possible, but worthwhile, to try to speak out of gay experience as I do theology? It’s not as if the gay community is clamoring for theological spokespersons. It’s not even as if there’s a lot of welcome within the gay community for those of us insane enough to keep clinging to faith. And it’s surely not as though any church has put out a welcome mat for the likes of me.

I suppose I’ve been rethinking this blog as I read a fascinating book the past week or so—Julie Powell’s Julie and Julia. It’s Powell’s account of a topsy-turvy year of blogging while she tried to cook her way madly through every recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, blogging about her culinary adventures all the while.

As with any book, one can read Julie and Julia as a mélange of many texts. It’s about food and cooking; about marriage and relationships; about how crackpot ideas feed creativity; about the cultural world of urban thirty-somethings in post-9/11 New York. It’s about good Democrats and evil Republicans. It’s above all about the cool, understated movie-saturated irony of the generation to which Julie Powell belongs.

It’s also about blogging: how the practice creeps into our lives and takes over. It’s about persistence in blogging even when the originating idea for a blog is totally off the wall—as with my own blog.

And it’s also about how, through blogging about her own crack-brained inspiration to cook through Child’s entire MtAofFC in a year—in a dilapidated tiny kitchen in an outer-borough “loft” apartment, while working days as a temp—Julie Powell discovered a path for herself as a writer. The book ends with the hopeful recognition that, by giving ourselves to even the craziest vocational impulses, we may actually discover a “reason” for it all, at the end of the tunnel (which forms the beginning of a new tunnel leading to another end and another beginning).

Soooo, I’m ending this week continuing to attempt the impossible: to do theology from that no-place meeting point of two communities who do not want to meet, who eye each other suspiciously while circling round each other looking for a grapple hold to bring the other down. Crazy as it seems, I intend to keep doing theology from the no-place formed by the intersection of the gay experience and the churches—from the no-place formed by my experience as an animal the existence of which neither community trumpets: the gay theologian.

What else do I have? From where else do we write, except from the path we tread in our own unique life? From what wells of creativity do we draw, ultimately, except our own—and where does that creativity come from, if not from our own experience?

So I write (and care) about the disastrous FISA vote this week, and the bill that our president has now signed into law, in part, because I have experienced the kind of undue and often illegal prying people sometimes engage in, when they want to silence someone else. I have experienced such scrutiny as a gay theologian. In one of the two disastrous job experiences where my sexual orientation and “lifestyle” meant everything to those intent to do me in, I discovered after I had received an unexplained terminal contract that a book I had written had circulated secretly among faculty (and the monks who owned the college), prior to the terminal contract.

Faculty and monks had marked “errors” in the margins in red ink. At the same time that I learned about the secret vetting of my book (with no opportunity on my part to defend myself), I also learned from students that they had been quizzed by colleagues and monks about what I was teaching in a New Testament class. Specifically, said colleagues and monks accused me of teaching a “political Christ.” One of the students who informed me of the spying—an outstanding student from India who gave me a mural of the Lord Krishna that I cherish—told me that he replied, “He’s teaching the New Testament. And he’s following the textbooks we’re using to study the New Testament.”

At this point in my career, I was still naïve enough to be dumbfounded that people—academics, people of faith—could behave in such an underhanded way. When I later searched for my contract and found it had disappeared, along with other documents in my office containing details about my salary, I found it almost impossible to imagine that anyone had deliberately gone into my office and removed these materials from their place in my filing cabinet. I was equally baffled when a faculty member who had repeatedly stuffed my mailbox with hate mail passed me in the hallway and muttered to me that we were both agents for different ideological masters. Just as I was dumbfounded when I learned that, the night before my hearing to appeal the unexplained terminal contract, the vice-president for academic affairs had given my personnel file—my private personnel file—to committee members to take home and read . . . .

Graduate school had not prepared me for such ludicrous shenanigans. Life had not prepared me. I didn’t know that people who claimed to represent the churches, while denying me the right even to live peaceably within a church communion, could behave in such an unethical way—ostensibly on behalf of the noble cause of defending the church.

So, yes, I’m concerned about spying, and about the wide latitude now given to our government and the telecoms to continue unwarranted spying in which they have already been engaged. And my fears about the abuse of this “privilege” have not been allayed this week, as I have read about how the archdiocese of St. Louis sent a spy to a women’s ordination ceremony last November, to film one particular attendant, Sr. Louise Lears (see Tom Fox and NCR Staff, “St. Louis Archdiocese Videoed Women’s Ordination Rite,” http://ncronline3.org/drupal/?q=node/1397).

Reports indicate that, with 600 or so folks in attendance, the films taken by the archdiocese zoom in repeatedly on Sr. Louise. Recently, when it was announced that the Archbishop of St. Louis, Raymond Burke, was being promoted to a Vatican post, as one of his last acts before leaving St. Louis, Burke forced Sr. Lears out of her ministerial positions and banned her from communion. The spying was clearly premeditated, because the person doing it on behalf of the archdiocese filed an affidavit about the spying with the archdiocese ahead of time.

Ugly. Stinky. As in, stinks to high heaven. I identify with Louise Lears even more, because she’s 58 years old. As I am. I know what it feels like to be booted—with ugly, stinky techniques of marginalization attending the booting—when one is approaching retirement.

My feelings about this case deepened yesterday when I opened the latest report from my teachers’ retirement account. Because of my checkered past as a theologian in non-gay-affirming church-affiliated colleges, I have been unable to build up any retirement fund to speak of. The years in which I willingly (and gladly) worked for a pittance in HBCUs—I considered this part of my vocation as a theologian—certainly didn’t help feather the nest, either.

So when I opened the envelope and discovered that, in the first quarter of this year, my account dwindled by over $7000, I experienced some twinges of concern. When one has no job and no prospect of a job—a paying job, that is—and when one’s savings are seeping out of one’s account due to economic downturns, it’s hard to smile. Hard to feel upbeat and cheery. (And as I say this, I am also strongly aware that there are millions of folks in the world—folks more deserving than I am—whose primary concern is not a dwindling retirement fund, but whether there is enough food to feed the family today.)

I understand—a little bit and from a distance—what Sr. Lears must be going through now. It’s hard to hit a brick wall at any point, but particularly as one nears retirement. It’s also hard to set out on a vocational path that seems to represent God’s call for your life, to serve a church and its communities (in my case, several churches and the African-American community by my work in HBCUs), and to have the church and communities you have served repudiate and expel you. And use ugly, stinky techniques of marginalization to effect their expulsion, while professing that they unilaterally own God, and informing you that you deserve the wretched treatment doled out to you in the name of God.

As I mulled these thoughts over in the last few days, I also ran across a fascinating story that—to my addled mind—confirms the need for theologians who speak out of and understand the gay experience. A number of news sites are reporting that Bradley LaShawn Fowler of Canton, Michigan, is suing Zondervan and Thomas Nelson publishers for producing translations of the New Testament that use the word “homosexual” in their translation of 1 Corinthians 6:9 (see www.usatoday.com/news/religion/2008-07-09-gay-bible_N.htm?csp=34).

Fowler alleges that through their decision to use the term “homosexuals” or “homosexual behavior” to translate the Greek term arsenokoitai in the original text, the publishers have made his life hell as a gay man. He notes that the belief of his family and others that he is headed for hell as a gay man—based on the use of the term “homosexual” in this biblical translation—has resulted in violence towards him and other gay folks.

I’m perfectly aware that some news accounts dealing with this story are treating the case as frivolous, and the story as yet another sample of special pleading by a gay community that needs simply to accept that the bible condemns homosexuals and homosexuality. I’d like to argue, however, that Fowler is making a very important point.

The exceedingly obscure word Paul uses here, which he seems, in fact, to have coined, and which the publishers are translating as “homosexual,” is the word arsenokoitai. Precisely because this word is not found in extrabiblical literature—because Paul seems to be coining it—we have no clear idea what he meant in using it. As in not a clue . . . .

Literally, the word seems to say something close to “male bedders”—that is, males who bed. Who bed somebody. Does this mean male prostitutes? Is it referring to men who take an active role in male-male sex, subordinating a younger man to unwanted sexual advances (a practice not unknown to Greek and Roman culture)?

Whatever the word means, it cannot mean what we mean by the term “homosexual” today, since the term “homosexual” did not even exist at the time Paul was writing. Until the end of the 19th century, when it became apparent to early psychological researchers that a certain proportion of the human community, across cultures and across time, consistently experiences as part of its God-given nature a more or less fixed erotic attraction to members of the same sex, there was no awareness, no term for the awareness, that people can have an innate predisposition to such erotic attraction.

Paul cannot be condemning what he could not even think of. He could not be using a word that simply did not exist in his culture. His language in the entire verse is far from lucid. Another murky term that has often been used to stigmatize gay men is the term malakoi, which occurs earlier in the text and literally means “the soft ones”—specifically, “the soft men.”

So. We have Paul in 1 Corinthians writing that among those who will not inherit the kingdom of God are “soft men” and “men bedders.” Hardly a pellucid text, and yet one on whose basis Christians have been willing to construct an astonishing edifice of malicious prejudice against a specific group of people for some time now.

As Fowler notes on a website explaining the basis of his lawsuit, the Zondervan-Nelson translation of this verse veered in the short space of three decades in the latter half of the twentieth century from translations that confidently told us the malakoi were effeminate to renderings that turned them into adulterers (see http://authorbrad.tripod.com/index.html). In the same period, the text careened from telling us that the arsenokoitai were “abusers of themselves with mankind” (whatever the heck that means), to proclaiming with supreme confidence that “homosexuals” (and, later, “those who engage in homosexual behavior”) would be barred from heaven. By 1994, the translation had revered to the 1964 usage: “abusers of themselves with mankind.” At one point, the mysterious term was even rendered as both “male prostitutes” and “homosexuals.”

You see the point? We don’t really know what the hell Paul meant when he enumerated this list of people bound for hell. That is, we do not know Paul’s intent with the arrogant certainty of those late-20th century translators who had Paul sending homosexuals to hell in this verse from Corinthians.

Which is to say, Fowler has a point, and it’s an important one. People base behavior on language. People frame their perceptions of others through language. In this nation with the soul of a church, we filter many of our perceptions through biblical texts—or what we believe those texts mean and say. (Few of us actually read the bible, least of all those who quote it with the most confidence.)

When we cannot be absolutely certain that a biblical verse used to condemn homosexuals actually intends to condemn homosexuals—when that verse could not even be speaking of those with an innate erotic attraction to others of their own sex, because such a psychological awareness and a term for this awareness were totally unknown to the biblical writers—why would we introduce a loaded, prejudice-laden (and prejudice-fomenting) term into our translation of a biblical text?

Bradley Fowler is asking the right questions. I say more power to him. And remind me sometime to tell you what happened when I asked permission from the U.S. Catholic Bishops’ Conference to use the Catholic translation of the scriptures, the New American bible, in my book Singing in a Strange Land. And also please remind me to tell you the story of what happened to an ethics text I wrote for a Catholic graduate program in ministry, in the last part of the 20th century—how a text that, a decade before, had been highly regarded by bishops around the country suddenly became problematic, because of its treatment of the preceding issues.

Point being: the act of translating the scriptures is enmeshed in all sorts of political considerations and political battles. It is naïve to think that those doing the translating are without bias. When that bias is not strongly supported by the scriptures themselves, and when it causes harm to a group of people, we need to take a long, hard look at what is going on with scripture translations and how they are being used.

And without theologians, who speaks for the gay community as these battles are fought? Without gay theologians sitting at the table as translations are hashed out, who assures that unreflective social biases don’t get read into the scriptures? These are questions women theologians have been raising for decades now, and with great persuasiveness. It’s time for the churches to let gay voices be heard, too. And, unfortunately, they simply aren't doing so, when they deny us job security and expel us from their communities when we refuse to apologize for being gay.

Which is to say, the gay voices are there, at the table, in the churches. They're just not open about their identity. And among those suppressed, self-denying gay church leaders and their theologians are many of those who still work hardest to bash those who are trying to live openly and with dignity as gay church members . . . .

I can't end this kvetching Friday post without remembering two folks who deserve my thanks as this week ends. One is Peterson Toscano, whose blog I cited a few days ago in my posting about Bayard Rustin entitled "Prejudice Is of a Single Bit." Peterson Toscano kindly noted my Bayard Rustin posting on his blog the same day, and for that I'm grateful. His notice has brought me some traffic from his outstanding blog.

I also want to thank my nephew Patrick for making me smile earlier in the week. Patrick is a fan of my spaghetti carbonara. He has been bugging me all summer to make that dish for him at some point while he's home for college.

It worked out that most of his family and Steve and I had a night this week free, so that turned into spaghetti carbonara night. Patrick wants to learn how to cook, so I walked him through the steps of mixing the eggs with a bit of milk, parmesan cheese, crushed garlic, salt, lots of fresh-ground black pepper, chopped bacon, and, if you wish, some melted butter, and then stirring this in the top of a double boiler while the pasta cooks.

I told him of disasters I've had when the egg sauce sets, and other disasters when I haven't gotten it sufficiently warm to form a sauce that will envelop the pasta in a silky sauce. I tried to walk him through the tricky part of stirring, stirring, timing, watching to see that the sauce is just warm but not cooked, right when the pasta comes from the pot.

As we cooked, Patrick reminded me that I had first cooked this dish for him when he was a little boy of around five, and we lived in North Carolina. He said, "I tasted it, and my life changed forever."

All those years of teaching, and I've always wondered if anything I ever said and did really made a difference. Now I know the way to form a lasting impression: just cook some decent spaghetti carbonara. Thanks for counting me in, Peterson and Patrick (and all the other wonderful people in my life whom I should thank a whole lot more often than I do).

Under the Magnifying Glass: Domestic Spying, Churches and Gay Employees, Faith-Based Programs

Interesting echoes of points I’ve made in previous postings, in a number of online articles I’ve read in the last few days. Today’s AlterNet carries an article by Matthew Rothschild of The Progressive entitled “Bush's Secret Army of Snoops and Snitches” (www.alternet.org/rights/90829).

As I did in my posting yesterday entitled “And Another Thing” (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/07/and-another-thing.html), Rothschild maintains that “[t]he full scale of Bush's assault on our civil liberties may not be known until years after he's left office. At the moment, all we can do is get glimpses here or there of what's going on” (my emphasis).

Rothschild notes that Bruce Finley of the Denver Post recently reported on a federally sponsored program employing private citizens as “terrorism liaison officers.” Said officers report on any “suspicious activity” they see among unsuspecting fellow citizens. Said reports then end up in secret government databases.

As Rothschild observes (and as I noted yesterday), “What constitutes ‘suspicious activity,’ of course, is in the eye of the beholder. But a draft Justice Department memo on the subject says that such things as ‘taking photos of no apparent aesthetic value’ or ‘making notes’ could constitute suspicious activity, Finley wrote.”

So that explains the creepy museum guide I encountered on my last museum visit, who followed me around looking over my shoulder as I carried around my journal making notes about some of the paintings I was studying?

States in which zealous terrorism liaison officers are now hard at work include Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Tennessee, Wisconsin, and Washington, D.C.

As Rothschild notes, citing Mark Silverstein of Colorado ACLU, this program is certain to cast doubt on the completely innocent activities of thousands and thousands of completely innocent people, all of whose names will end up in secret government databases. And as I asked in my posting yesterday—which notes the same probability—to what end is this information being gathered? How will it be used?

How is it already being used? Who may already have been a victim of such unsupervised spying in areas in which it is taking place? In states that permit at-will firing by employers, how would an employee ever know that his/her job had been terminated on the basis of a pack of lies gathered by terrorism liaison officers and then shared secretly with his/her employer?

The possibilities for abuse and injustice with this secret spying program are enormous. Secret reports gathered on innocent people, who never see the reports and cannot defend themselves against the slander contained in them; unscrupulous bosses who may wish to can employees who have made themselves personae non gratae by blowing the whistle about abuses in the workplace; bosses willing to receive and use secret information from illicit government programs to make their management of refractory employees easier: the mind boggles at the ways in which this program can be—and perhaps already is—abused to shut down free speech and curb whistle-blowing activities.

Rothschild also notes, as I did yesterday, that these spying programs operate in tandem with the private sector, and that Justice Department guidelines shield the private sector from uncomfortable disclosures about its illegal spying on American citizens.

Rotten to the core. This needs to stop. I will be extremely disappointed with Barack Obama, whom I have supported and to whose campaign I have repeatedly donated, if he does not reconsider his position on FISA.

+ + + + +

Another fascinating article I ran across yesterday at the British Medical News Today website is an article entitled “Research Reveals Clergy Find NHS Better Employer Than Church of England” (www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/114222.php).

This article reports on a recent study by researchers at Leeds Teaching Hospital NHS (National Health Services) Trust. The study finds that a significant proportion of Church of England clergy have left parish work to serve as hospital chaplains. The report further indicates that these hospital chaplains find that “NHS is a better employer of clergy than the Church of England - especially if you are gay” (my emphasis).

The Leeds study finds that large numbers of clergy who have a partner in ministry decide to work as hospital chaplains. Over 20% of male full-time hospital chaplains in England are ordained clergy in same-sex partnerships.

Of those surveyed, 25% of chaplains found that the Church of England had valued and respected them in parish ministry, whereas 75% reported that healthcare employers had treated them with respect and shown gratitude for their contributions.

The bottom line for these clergy in same-sex relationships is quite simple:
“The reason for the disparity in employment conditions is the church's exemption from employment law . . .” (my emphasis). This is a point I have made over and over again in postings on this blog—most recently, in my postings expressing reservations about government funded faith-based social service programs (see http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/07/obamas-faith-based-announcement-faith.html; http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/07/faith-based-social-programs-ending.html).

Quite simply, churches and church-sponsored institutions do routinely discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. They do so because they can do so. In many places, no law requires a church or church-based institution to refrain from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation in hiring and firing decisions or in how it treats an employee.

As I have noted a number of times in previous postings, the experiences that my partner and I have had working as theologians and administrators in church-affiliated institutions have been almost uniformly horrific, for this simple reason. Despite faint protests about the injustice of discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation, the churches of the radical middle still all too frequently do what they can legally get away with, in their treatment of gay employees.

This will change only when shifting cultural consensus leads to legal changes that then force churches—which always bring up the rear in movements to accord greater justice to despised minorities—to move from the ugly ethic of because-I-can to because-I-must.

The British Medical News article quotes Rev. Richard Kirker, Chief Executive of the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement, as follows, re: the Leeds study:

His research provides convincing evidence that gay clergy, and especially those in stable relationships, are being driven away from parish ministry. In terms of paid staff the NHS employs as many Anglican clergy as the 10th largest diocese in England.'

The Church cannot go on ignoring the reality of a "diocese" where over 20% of male staff are not only gay, but actually in same-sex partnerships. On the eve of the Lambeth Conference it is time for the Church of England to affirm the gifts and calling of gay people and to stop living in denial.

Without the basic protection of health and safety legislation and employment rights, many are feeling very vulnerable at this time (my emphasis).

The churches must no longer be allowed to bask in the glow of self-righteous (and empty) proclamations about their commitment to justice for despised minorities, while they permit themselves the right to discriminate freely against gay and lesbian employees. There is nothing daringly countercultural in the least about the church’s commitment to homophobic discrimination.

+ + + + +

The preceding point is made very strongly in a 3 July op-ed piece of the Times (London) by George Walden entitled “Time to Come out of the Liberal Closet on Gay Clergy, Archbishop” (www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article4257699.ece). Walden’s editorial is an appeal to Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams to bite the bullet and advocate total inclusion of gays in the Church of England, rather than continuing his liberal dance around this issue.

As I noted in my recent posting about the prophetic civil rights witness of Bayard Rustin (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/07/freedom-is-always-unfinished-business.html), effective leadership is moral leadership. It is leadership in which the leader exemplifies the moral principles she proclaims to those she leads.

Walden notes that Rowan Williams consistently pushes precisely that definition of leadership when he confronts political leaders. But in how he chooses to deal with his LGBT brothers and sisters, he abdicates moral leadership and undermines his claim to be an effective transformative leader:

Where is the conscience of a man who habitually denounces the Philistine politician for expediency and lack of moral leadership while himself pretending to be someone he is not, for political reasons?

“The more politics looks like a form of management rather than an engine of positive and morally desirable change,” he intoned a year ago, “the more energy it loses.” As Dr Williams seeks to resist change that he almost certainly believes in, his Church presents a pretty good spectacle of energy-leaching entropy itself.

Walden lambasts the silence of Rowan Williams on the subject of LGBT Christians—a silence that speaks volumes about his unwillingness to exemplify precisely the kind of courageous leadership he enjoins political leaders to demonstrate in other areas:

The oblique way that he addresses the subject suggests that he finds it as difficult as many others to see how the Church can continue to discriminate against practising homosexuals in an age in which scientific knowledge tells us that sexuality is rarely a question of choice. Sacred texts can be disputed, but all that matters is what the Bible would have said had it been known that homosexuality is largely genetic. How Christian can it be to deny men and women a sexuality that is, in Christian terms, God-given?

Why does the Archbishop not say out loud what we all suspect that he believes? His views on everything from Israel to Afghanistan via a third runway at Heathrow airport are as forthright as they are predictable. To listen to the Archbishop, the infamy of US imperialism is unparalleled in human history, yet on gays in the Church he marches, if not shoulder to shoulder, in perilous proximity to the American Right. Besides seeking to avoid schism he perhaps fears that an openly liberal stance could damage the CofE's image even among the modern-minded, and that the pews would be emptier than ever. However rational these fears, they are based on calculation, not conviction (my emphasis).

Again, this is a point I have made repeatedly in previous postings, as I reflect on the curious lacunae in many current church leaders’ statements about key social justice issues of our time—see, for instance, my 16 June comments on a roundtable discussion sponsored by United Methodist Bishop of Florida, Timothy Whitaker, which notes the deafening silence about the place of gay persons at the table in this church-sponsored discussion of key issues affecting the human community (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/06/place-of-gay-human-beings-as-church.html).

Equality is a moral imperative. I applaud Mr. Walden for reminding the Archbishop of Canterbury that the most compelling witness to the values of justice will ultimately be how the church behaves, not what it says. And yet, when it refuses even to address these issues—to create a safe place for honest discussion of them—how can it arrive at a position of justice? When churches are bleeding good clergy to other forms of ministry, because churches and church institutions cannot promise even basic forms of justice to clergy in same-sex relationships, can the churches convincingly preach justice to the world?

+ + + + +

And, finally, in the two postings cited above re: government faith-based social service programs, I raise questions about the lack of stringent guidelines to assure that funds provided to churches and church institutions engaged in social ministry are being used properly. I continue to push this concern. In that light, I recommend Stephanie Strom’s article “Funds Misappropriated at 2 Nonprofit Groups” in today’s NY Times (www.nytimes.com/2008/07/09/us/09embezzle.html?th&emc=th).

Synchronicity Strikes

Wow. Talk about synchronicity.

I just uploaded a comment to Colleen Baker (of the Enlightened Catholicism blog referenced in my links list), who had responded to my posting earlier today about FISA and unwarranted surveillance of private citizens’ online comments (as well as of their email and phone conversations).

After I sent my comment to Colleen, I clicked on the blog of the Arkansas Times, and discovered a thread discussing precisely the topic Colleen and I had been talking about in the comments section under the previous posting. As our comments note, both of us are concerned with the way in which churches and academic institutions can misuse information gathered in internet searches (and possibly through unwarranted surveillance of private communications) to disempower critical thinkers.

As my comment to Colleen states, “Unscrupulous faculty trying to do a colleague in can easily get the ear of top-level administrators and/or boards, who may decide to end the targeted person's employment just because the person has been made controversial.

All of this discourages what academic life is all about—free exchange of information and free speech.”

This is precisely the topic of the thread I’ve just discovered at Arkansas Times (www.arktimes.com/blogs/arkansasblog). The Times is lamenting the decision of a political science professor, Mark Elrod, at Harding University, a Church of Christ university in Searcy, Arkansas, to take his blog private. Dr. Elrod has been maintaining a blog similar to mine, in that anyone can access the blog without registering.

He now intends to require registration in order for readers to access the blog. In a posting today (www.markaelrod.net), he provides the following reason for his decision:

I know this creates an inconvenience for many of you and I apologize but I’ve come to the realization that I have over-estimated the capacity of both my academic (Harding University) and my religious (Church of Christ) community to deal with critical thinking or dissent in a public forum. In the last few weeks, I’ve grown tired with dealing with members of both communities who seem to view the world in black and white terms and think of all discussions as zero-sum games.

In short, I’d rather have a quiet, private discussion with friends than public arguments with anonymous critics who would rather run to my employer with complaints about something I said than trying to discuss it with me in a reasonable and rational manner (my emphasis).

That’s precisely my point in my comment to Colleen. When college administrators and board members allow themselves to be persuaded by bullies—including colleagues and representatives of special-interest groups—who want to shut down the free discourse of faculty members, it become altogether too easy in the age of internet communication for free speech to be suppressed in academic life. And this is particularly the case in church-affiliated colleges and universities, which often have opaque policies governing termination, and which frequently allow the academic institution to fire at will, without providing a reason for terminations of faculty.

In a subsequent post, Dr. Elrod suggests that his political viewpoints—freely and publicly expressed on his blog—are at the heart of the attempt to shut him up, an attempt emanating from “anonymous critics” who run to his employer to complain about what he has written on his blog: “I made this decision on my own as the result of the general frustration I have with members of our fellowship who want to make a spiritual judgment about me based on my political views. One of those views is my public support for Barack Obama for president.”

Dr. Elrod is, after all, a professor of political science, is he not?

On what sane basis should he be attacked for expressing his considered political views on a blog—political views grounded in his scholarship? Aren’t universities today talking constantly about the need to tear down town-gown walls, to bring the classroom to the public, to serve the public interest by educating all citizens interested in lifelong learning? And aren’t churches constantly talking about the need to bring their values into the public forum?

There really does need to be a test case regarding such suppression of free speech by bloggers who have academic positions. And I’d be even more delighted if this test case occurs in a church-affiliated institution like Harding, alma mater of the infamous Kenneth Starr. In my experience, far too many church-sponsored colleges/universities get away with murder, when it comes to suppressing the academic freedom of faculty—and they often do so in the sneaky, underhanded ways suggested by Dr. Elrod’s posting, in which secret reports are circulated to key administrators, in attempts to undermine the credibility or character of someone an institution wishes to shut up.

And Another Thing . . .

And another thing . . . (to channel Gilda Radner. I wish. That marvelous human being had more wit in her little finger than I have in my entire body.)

I did also mean to note earlier that the condition of spiritual itchiness often causes irritability. I have never been the least irritable of God’s creatures—as anyone who knows and loves me despite knowing me will attest.

But shake up one’s spiritual life, and you’re likely to get even more rocking and rolling on the part of those predisposed to irritability. My irritability is focusing lately on some of the huge lies we seem expected to swallow during the current election process.

The more I try to follow the “logic” of Mr. Obama’s ever-twisting path to what the commentators like to call the center, the more perturbed I am by the twists and turns. In particular, I’m very unhappy with his back-tracking on the FISA issue.

Here’s my concern, flat and unpolished: I believe in my heart of hearts that the domestic snooping that has been going on under the current administration—the warrantless violation of privacy in email accounts and phone accounts of citizens by the federal government—has been not only far wider than we know, but has been far more insidious in its political intent than the government has ever admitted.

I believe that the government has been gathering information on any number of citizens, which is designed to destroy the reputations and careers of those citizens—and that such destruction has been taking place in ways we don’t even know about. It takes only one leak of any kind of damaging (or deliberately misconstrued) information from the government to private employers, in states where employers may fire employees without providing any cause, to end someone’s career.

Do I know of any cases in which this has occurred? No, of course not. How could I, when we’re being protected from knowing how widespread the surveillance practiced by telecom companies is?

Do I suspect such cases have occurred? Absolutely. Our intelligence service made it its business to expend enormous amounts of energy (and money) compiling dossiers on Martin Luther King and other leading civil rights activists in the latter half of the 20th century. Here in Little Rock, when white “club” women worked hand in hand with their African-American domestics to keep the schools open during the integration crisis, the FBI routinely appeared at any of their gatherings to photograph their license plates.

Information such as this is always gathered for malicious use, for dirt, for dirt that those doing the spying intend to throw when it is opportune to do so. This was the intent of surveillance programs targeting American citizens in the McCarthy and Nixon era; it is the intent of similar surveillance programs in the current administration. There's a direct line of inheritance between the Nixon administration and the Bush administration.

The primary reason the telecoms and the government want to block our attempts to gather information about the domestic surveillance of recent years is that 1) we’ll learn it has been amazingly widespread and has targeted “ordinary” citizens, 2) it has had a malicious political purpose, including destruction of the reputations and careers of some citizens, 3) and if we ever learned the extent of the spying and how the information gathered has been used, we’d not only lose further confidence in our government, but the telecoms would be wide open to thousands of damaging lawsuits.

For those inclined to snoop, for those whose leadership style is paranoid, for those who have something to hide themselves and who are therefore intensely suspicious of others, the Internet age provides a much wider range of opportunities to spy. For such folks, this new age of technology does not usher in the possibility of wider communication, of building communities of discourse and action to work for the common good.

It ushers in new opportunities to oversee the communication of others and to use what one learns from that process against others, if one so desires.

I learned this lesson very well at an institution of higher learning at which I previously worked. This was after the advent of the Internet and email allowed (and required) much more university business to be transacted online.

As a member of the university’s leadership structure—and as someone eventually targeted myself by the university president, whose leadership style was intensely paranoid—I learned far more than I would ever like to know about the ability and shocking willingness of supposedly principled leaders to spy on employees. I learned of surveillance of telephone conversations and email; I learned of hidden cameras in offices about which employees had no knowledge.

On the basis of what I learned, I began to suspect that the surveillance included snooping on the private email communications (from home email accounts) of employees, when such snooping could take place. I also began to suspect (and this suspicion was eventually confirmed) that the employer in question compiled dossiers on some employees that were different than those available for employee scrutiny in the university’s personnel office.

We live in an age in which unprincipled folks will use new tools of mass communication to spy, if they wish to do so. We live in an age in which any one of us sends so many emails and pursues so much research online, that it is possible for an unprincipled supervisor with access to this information to twist almost anything we have written online to turn our words against us.

When we do not know that such surveillance is taking place—when we cannot know, because our government is unwilling for us to know—we cannot defend ourselves against it, and against its misuse. I am convinced that an employer who could successfully depict any employee as a potential “radical” could quite easily gain access from government sources and telecom companies, under the current climate of surveillance.

This needs to stop. I will be very disappointed in Mr. Obama if he continues to oppose stringent new FISA regulations that stop up the holes in domestic surveillance.