She Said Its Two Feet High And Risin': Five Years After Hurricane Katrina, What Would Jesus Do?

Five years ago today I had just moved back into our current house after nine months of renovations that were way overdue. We had given our temporary apartment back to the landlord, and for part of August I had shuttled back and forth between our New York home and various forms of temporary housing in Shoreline. Our nephew had gone on vacation and I camped in his home down the street; I spent five days at a motel in Worcester, MA at a national sports event; and I spent one surreal night in a chain hotel outside Shoreline, which turned out to be almost entire rented out to the city as an overflow for homeless families waiting for Section 8 housing. As it turned out, these migrations were a preview of things to come: a year or so later, when it was discovered that thousands of displaced Gulf Coast residents were being made ill by the formaldehyde in their trailers, my accommodations seemed pretty luxurious.

But this was not immediately apparent, nor was it apparent that the reason my renovation was so far behind was that my contractor was being swallowed by red ink, a silent recession that preceded the economic crash we suffered two years later. His business, I suspect, was resembling a Ponzi scheme: he had spent my money on someone else's house, and was frantically drumming up new business to finish mine.

On the night of August 30 2005, as Hurricane Katrina barreled down grimly on the City of New Orleans, I was almost completely oblivious of everything I know now -- or of the disaster that was about to occur in the Gulf. A combination of starting school, having run out of alternative housing, and knowing that the only way to get the contractor to finish was to move back into the house so I could yell at him every day, saw me swabbing plaster dust out of the front room early that evening while I still had daylight to work in. I blew up an air mattress, and settled in for a short, grimy camping trip in a half-finished house with no utilities. The contractor had promised a bathroom would be working by that day: it wasn't. He promised electricity: there wasn't any. So as the levees broke, I was in the backyard living as many of the lucky people in the Gulf would soon be living: brushing my teeth with bottled water, peeing in the grass and feeling very sorry for myself. I called my partner on the cell phone to complain of my dire state, without fully comprehending that one of America's great cultural treasures was being torn apart, its people fleeing, drowning, dying in the streets and being preyed upon.

As I reflect on that disaster, following so quickly on the 9/11 terrorist attacks, followed by an economic meltdown that occurred as SEC watchdogs were downloading porn to their computers, and followed in turn by an unprecedented oil spill that has once again devastated the economy and ecology of the Gulf, one thing that seems clear to me is that it is utterly impossible -- if you ever did -- to view the United States as a blessed place whose problems are caused by the infiltration of outsiders. That is, it is impossible if you are a person who actually believes that the natural world that gives human beings eyes to see, evidence to think about and minds with which to sort that evidence. Glenn Beck's weird production over the weekend points to one way people cope with their inability to think about our national problems without blaming someone (someone else, over there): they believe that what is wrong is that, as a country, we have deviated from the One True Way (the Bible, the Constitution, or both.) Government is too big, the Tea Party folk yell; and the role of religion in our lives too small. And yet these people, too, have signed on -- whether by voting or refusing to vote -- to politicians who have presided over a period of unprecedented corruption, greed and venality.

If they were seventeenth century Puritans, they would come to Massachusetts and massacre the Indians; if they were nineteenth century Mormons, they would head to Utah and -- well, massacre the Indians -- all the while believing that they were doing God's work and that a society could succeed without being impeded by government. The Puritans believed this even as they were lining up, every three or four years, to be carted away in British naval vessels so that they would not be massacred, in turn, by the relatives of Indians they had massacred.

Looking back over the last five years, we need less God and more politics: by that I mean not less faith, and all the forms of ethical community that faith can provide, but we need to end the lie that you can substitute faith for politics. What Barack Obama calls the "man made disaster" of Katrina (and others regarded as the act of an angry God) was a profoundly political disaster, something that has not yet been fully acknowledged. It was the end point of a moment in time in which warnings about the levees had not been heeded because there was no political will to appropriate the money to build them; in which professional government had been derided, starved and privatized to the point that FEMA was more or less a shell agency, less able to cope with a natural disaster than the mish-mash of NGO's that rush into places like Pakistan. The United States didn't even have the National Guard available, because they were mired down in two wars that were supposed to be over.

Meanwhile, we have millions of people who believe that "more [Christian] religion" -- as opposed to a return to an ethic of mutual care that is coordinated and inspired by a government that discriminates against no community of faith -- is going to be the ticket to get us out of this mess. What is a mystery to me is that many of the people who believe this have been terribly harmed, not by God's wrath, and not by an intrusive government, but by an America suffused by individualism: we are drowning in corporate greed entirely unfettered by morality, the rule of law or the responsibility of the modern state to deliver the basic services that humanize all of us. Instead of committing to creating a government that will house its people, we sit with our eyes glued to reality TV, where people "solve their own problems" with the help of TV producers, renovation gurus, and weight-loss stars.

We have gone from being a strong state where Rosie the Riveter promised that "We Can Do It!" to a heavily bureaucratic weak state, where we are constantly assured that "We Can Do It - All Alone Except For Jesus!" As our political leaders in both parties have nattered on happily about God, Americans have become poorer and more insecure. People who weren't swept out of their homes by water, fire or wind have lost them to predatory lenders and an economy gutted by corporations who care nothing for their workers -- or their customers, for that matter. Henry Ford may have been a nasty anti-Semite, but he also understood that if workers were healthy, well-fed and secure they did a better job; and that if those same workers weren't paid enough to buy his cars, he wasn't going to sell so many.

Meanwhile, those who have the most bizarre ideas about faith get the most airtime, and they have turned their audiences into idiots. Interviewed by the New York Times at the Glenn Beck event, Floridian Becky Benson came to the rally because Jesus "would not have agreed with the economic stimulus package, bank bailouts and welfare. 'You cannot sit and expect someone to hand out to you,' she said. 'You don’t spend your way out of debt.”'" Well people don't, but countries do, Becky. And Jesus actually didn't believe that we all lived and died alone, nor did he think you just sat there and watched while people who needed your help went right down the tubes. Jesus didn't mean take responsibility for yourself and $crew everyone else; Jesus intended us to take responsibility for each other.

One of the ways you do that is through creating honest and efficient government, something that the Tea Party folk believe is simply a detail, when in fact it is the whole project. Kentuckian Ron Sears assured the Times reporter that “The federal government is only to offer us protection from our enemies and help us when we need it." Yes, and really the least of our problems are enemies who are armed, Ron: an efficient and honest federal government should be there to protect us from ignorance, greed, lies, and vanity -- in addition to weather, disease, and the toxins Mr. Beck's corporate buddies pour into our earth, skies and waterways. And you won't mind if the federal highways buckle and crumble, will you Ron? Or the planes crash into each other in mid-flight? Or if you have to live in a tent for five years eating possum because God swept your city away and there isn't anyone who will force your insurance company to rebuild your house?

So as we memorialize Katrina, let's also keep in mind that it was a real disaster, but it was also a metaphor for what we have become as a nation. Most of all, Katrina was a political disaster, one that was presided over by the Bush administration but one that can hardly be laid entirely at its doorstep, since both political parties started down this road in the 1970s. Katrina was a historical moment that ripped the cover off of the false promises of thirty years of neoliberal policies that have put money first and people second; that have tricked people into believing that that everything you need to know can be learned growing up in a nuclear family, quoting selectively from the Constitution or reading the Bible; and worst of all, thirty years of false messiahs who enrich themselves while leading their followers into penury.

What would Jesus do? Throw Glenn Beck and every money changer like him out of the temple, that's what, and get back to what government is supposed to do: help people take care of themselves, make politics a vehicle for loving one's neighbor (not blaming him, or seeing if she needs to be deported) and protecting Americans from those who prey on the simple, the weak and the vulnerable. Until we do, the waters will keep on rising.

And now, let's hear from a true man of God.

Department Of Teaching and Preaching: Update On Academic Freedom Case At University of Illinois

Or is that the UI homophobia-in-the-classroom case? You figure it out. Inside Higher Ed's Scott Jaschik updates us on the teaching status of religious studies instructor Kenneth Howell at the University of Illinois, Champaigne-Urbana. Howell came under scrutiny because of an email he sent to his class that articulated gay male sex acts as immoral and the equivalent of bestiality: you may recall that I wrote about it here. It appears that for years, Catholic thought instructors have been nominated and paid by the Newman Center, an institution that exists on many campuses to support the faith and the sociability of Catholic students. Although Howell has been reinstated for the fall, this incident has created an opportunity to end a curious arrangement that some faculty on campus have opposed for reasons you don't have to be skeptical of religion to understand. Think about it: would you hire someone nominated and paid for by BP, and approved by no department, to teach the ethics of offshore drilling?

According to this report, the agreement puts Howell (who is a published scholar) back in the classroom, and affirms that he is subject to public university guidelines around the expression of religious views (and presumably, expressions of prejudice that would not be perceived as discriminatory if articulated in a community of like-minded believers.)

A bigger question might be: are religious institutions a legitimate "student service?" And what is the role of clerics on secular campuses, unless they have been hired in a secular capacity as tenure-track faculty or administrators? This isn't something I have seen discussed much, and yet most campuses devote a part of their budget to doing so. The Howell incident should perhaps cause us to wonder why, in this day and age, secular institutions feel they have any obligation to provide religious resources to students at all: or, to put an even finer point on it, to students of some faiths and not others. I suspect the answer to the question is that when they do hire preachers of various kinds, for one low, low, price they get an adjunct teacher/psychotherapist/co-curricular coordinator all wrapped up in one.

But it is also one of those wheels within wheels situations that makes me happy I am not an administrator. Nothing I have seen has addressed the question of a complaint filed by a student not in the class: despite your views on faculty hired because they have been approved and paid for by the Vatican, all of us should find this a little scary. It has not exactly resolved the academic freedom issue, which may create difficulties for UI down the line. While Howell will have a contract for next semester, the religion department now has control over its hiring (as it should), and will decide whether to retain him in the future.

So here's the happy choice facing UI's chair of religion next year: continue to employ indefinitely an instructor who the department doesn't seem to care enough for to defend, and who it never hired in the first place; or decline to employ him further and risk a lawsuit backed by either the liberal AAUP, the conservative Alliance Defense Fund, or both.

Because it is summer, I have illustrated this post with James Tissot's "Jesus Teaching At The Shore," taken from this website.

The Politics Of The Classroom: Is It Homophobic To Teach About The Scriptural Basis For Homophobia?

Janine Giordano Drake, over at Religion and American History asks us to think about a university classroom inflected by sacred beliefs that do not coexist comfortably with contemporary cosmopolitan ideas about diversity, respect for personal dignity and human rights. In doing so, she raises the question of whether the absolute separation of secular knowledge from ideological or faith-based knowledge is desirable, or even possible. For those who want to read more of Drake's thoughts about being a Christian scholar, click here.

The incident which prompted Drake's post occurred at the University of Illinois which, as a public university, has special vulnerabilities around the separation of the sacred and the secular. In a nutshell, a Catholic theologian circulated an email to his class about why heterosexuality, and the gender binary system, are "natural" and "real"; and why consent does not provide a moral basis for performing sexual acts that ignore the divine reproductive function of sexuality. A student complained to the chair of the department about this and similar statements made in class that articulated a conservative Catholic position on sexuality. The professor, the student reported, "allowed little room for opposition to Catholic dogma." But to the best of my understanding no particular student, or students, were picked out to be shamed or personally degraded by the teacher; and the views expressed had directly to do with the subject of the course and the course readings. The teacher -- who was an adjunct connected to the Newman Center on campus -- was not renewed. It is unclear whether it was because of this conflict, or because of other pedagogical or budgetary issues.

Drake has linked to the original documents to help us think about this incident and the larger questions it raises. In doing so, she demonstrates one good strategy for teaching things that our students may find objectionable, and for helping students learn to disagree respectfully with each other and with us. When they provide primary documents, professors can speak out of a personal belief system, but also bring a range of voices into the classroom that allow students to attach their own beliefs to, and test their views against, knowledge and authority that is not internal to the classroom and to the student-teacher relationship.

Whether you decide you are on the same page as Drake or not after you read her piece, I think you might agree that she makes two generative points. She notes that theological positions which advocate for the divine role of reproduction in sexuality are often poorly or partially represented, even in the best scholarship (and by extension, in the best classrooms.) Because of this the influence of these views is often understated and perceived by students -- most of whom are (metaphorically) milling around in a vast political center -- as eccentric. Second, she very gently raises the question of why it is necessarily oppressive or wrong for students to be a captive audience to views that they find objectionable. An argument might be made on behalf of the email sent by the professor that goes like this: the views in question (sodomy is always morally wrong, and is the equivalent of pedophilia and bestiality, even when both parties consent), appalling as they may be to many of us, express a scripture-based point of view that many people in this country actually do believe, and that are the basis of a well-organized opposition to GLBT human rights. Furthermore, they provide the logic for powerful statements like "marriage should be between a man and a woman," "love the sinner, hate the sin" and "gay marriage destroys the family" that otherwise seem merely shallow and mean.

For the reason I just described, in my "Politics of Sex After 1968" survey, I teach a documentary film produced by a Christian organization in which "former" gays and lesbians talk about the pain, confinement and isolation of their lives as queer people. They discuss how they came back to heterosexuality, and were able to marry, by being reborn in Christ. I teach this film in part because the vast majority of my students understand coming out as gay as an opposite experience, when in fact it is quite similar to what the Christain ex-gays describe: as the discovery and affirmation of a genuine self, as a release from isolation, and as being welcomed into a caring community of others "like them." I think students need to understand that any experience of the self is particular, not universal; and that profoundly different views about possible relationships to a sexual self are possible at the same historical moment.

Despite the fact that many of my students have suffered, and are struggling, with a variety of anxieties and burdens related to their sexuality, since most of them are pretty secular, I think it is also important for them to try to understand a relationship to sexuality, and to faith, that isn't just social. Many of my students find this film objectionable, and for that reason it is very hard to teach because I often have to overcome a refusal to engage. But another reason I use it, year after year, is to teach them that if you are going to be a really good historian, you can't be selective about who you listen to or have empathy for. I think our struggles over this film are worthwhile, but many of them just hate it. Some really let me have it in the teaching evaluations for bringing "hate speech" (the phrase used by the complainant at the University of Illinois) into class.

But here's something that has never happened to me. What Drake doesn't mention is that the student who complained was not even in the class. Rather, he claims to be writing on behalf of "a friend" who did take the class and passed the email, and information about the class, on to him. Identifying himself as a heterosexual male, but imagining himself as a gay man who would have been shamed by having to listen to such views, he writes:

I am in no way a gay rights activist, but allowing this hate speech at a public university is entirely unacceptable. It sickens me to know that hard-working Illinoisans are funding the salary of a man who does nothing but try to indoctrinate students and perpetuate stereotypes. Once again, this is a public university and should thus have no religious affiliation. Teaching a student about the tenets of a religion is one thing. Declaring that homosexual acts violate the natural laws of man is another. The courses at this institution should be geared to contribute to the public discourse and promote independent thought; not limit one's worldview and ostracize people of a certain sexual orientation.

It's OK, in other words, to teach religion as long as you don't teach anything about it that I would find degrading or offensive.

Don't get me wrong: the point of this post is not some narcissistic desire to demonstrate how super-tolerant I am of homophobic, right-wing theology. My question is: do we think it is OK to do unto others as they would do unto us? Do we guarantee academic freedom for some people and not others? Most important, to avoid public controversy of all kinds, is higher ed simply going to give students permission to shut out things they find offensive as if they live in an entirely different country from the people they disagree with? Worse, should we not begin to talk about how students -- in their teaching evaluations and in complaints to the administration -- are now routinely urging that teachers be fired who do not provide suitable validation for their students' view?