In my last post, I mentioned the positive experience that I had with PLATO’s “Philosophy in High School” conference. I want to share something else that PLATO is doing that I learned about just today: a philosophy journal! It’s titled Questions: Philosophy for Young People. The last issue (#23) focused on “Community”. The next issue (#24) focuses on “Conflict and Cooperation”. The deadline for the next issue is the end of April. I would like to encourage my students to try to publish to this journal in the future!
PLATO’s “Philosophy in High School” Conference
Yesterday, I spent a few hours attending a conference via Zoom called “Philosophy in High School”. It was organized by the Student Advisory Council of PLATO: the “Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization”. What I admire about this conference most was that it combined presentations from faculty and students. As a member of the “Educational Resources and Review Committee” of the Society of Biblical Literature, I can say that I’ve been part of conversations around what it could look like to do something like this for the field of biblical studies. I’ll say more about that idea below. For now, let me praise the student organizers who made the “Philosophy in High School” conference a reality. They did a great job!
I attended four presentations. The first was by Lucio Mare of Stanford Online High School. He spoke on “Philosophy as the Education of High Schoolers: Using Pierre Hadot’s ‘Philosophy as a Way of Life’ to Teach History and Philosophy of Science”. The remaining three presentations were by students: Sin Man Lea Cheng and Xiaotong Chen, “Philosophy: making life vibrant”; Sophie Zhang, “How can learning about ethics help high school students inside and outside of school?”; and Kate Given, “Transforming Classroom Conversation with Philosophy”. All three were well done! As a high school teacher, I know that it can be difficult to get students prepared for 5-10 minutes of presentation. These young people had a half hour set aside for presentations and discussions!
While philosophy has its own uphill battle agains the cult of STEM (and FYI, philosophy and STEM shouldn’t be rivals at all, so this means we’re doing STEM wrong!), biblical studies is much further down the hill when it comes to attracting enough young people to do a conference like this one. There are a few reasons.
First, philosophy is far more accessible. Yes, the Bible can be found anywhere but good tools for studying the Bible are difficult to find. Where I live in San Antonio, it’s difficult to keep up with current biblical scholarship because there are few libraries who do. For example, when I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, I could spend a day at the Flora Lamson Hewlett Library at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. There were a ton of resources there. But San Antonio has nothing quite like this. While I know there are topics within analytic philosophy (e.g. philosophy of mind) that share similar limitations when it comes to resources and that prevent entry by people who can’t keep up with the quickly unfolding literature on the topic, there’s so much more than you can do under the purview of “philosophy” than you can under “biblical studies”.
Second, and this is related, you can philosophize from anywhere about anything at any time. There’s the story of how Raymond Aron was sitting with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir at the Bec-de-Gaz bar in Paris in 1932-33 drinking apricot cocktails when Aron, who had been studying the “phenomenology” of Edmund Husserl, told Sarte and Beauvoir, “if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!” (See Sarah Bakewell’s The Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails, pp. 1-3.) I can philosophize about friendships, education, music, movies, traffic, city planning, travel, etc. I can do biblical studies with regard to the Bible and the reception history of the Bible, which is extensive but also limited in comparison.
Third, as I’ve discussed recently, biblical studies are less attractive to young people because the Bible is becoming less attractive to young people. We’re in the midst of a cultural shift away from Christianity, so there’ll be fewer people reading the Bible in the future. Teens are philosophizing all the time, whether or not they’re aware of it. Teens aren’t reading the Bible all the time. You would know it if you’re were doing it! What it means to study the Bible is a more restricted activity.
If we’re to create a conference on biblical studies that includes high school participants, we’d have a fourth and final obstacle: philosophy has a rational air about it. When people encounter the Bible prior to reading it in an academic context, the vibe is something like “devotional”. How a conference for high school readers of the Bible wouldn’t devolve into a series of devotionals or apologetics is something that would need to be discussed. Religious studies may have more promise here. (In other words, something connected with the American Academy of Religion.)
That being said, it was wonderful to see a conference like this one. Kudos to PLATO and their Student Advisory Council. I hope to see future conferences like this one!
The sunk-cost fallacy, resignation, and failure
I’m finding Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity to be a revelation. As I move from page to page, I encounter ways of saying things that I’ve felt but that I hadn’t been able to articulate, as yesterday’s post “The sub-man and the serious man” exemplifies. Earlier in the book (pp. 28-29 of Bernard Frechtman’s translation will be my focus here), Beauvoir discusses the person who must choose to quit something and how this leaves us with a bitterness. She writes:
“In the face of an obstacle which it is impossible to overcome, stubbornness is stupid. If I persist in beating my fist against a stone wall, my freedom exhausts itself in this useless gesture without succeeding in giving itself a content. It debases itself in a vain contingency.”
Beauvoir describes something like the “sunk-cost fallacy”. In his article “What is the ‘sunk cost fallacy’? Is it ever a good thing?,” the economist Aaron Nicholas defines this fallacy as “an inability to ignore costs that have already been spent and can’t be recovered.” We continue to invest in something that shows little promise of success because if we step away from it, if we quit, we’ll have wasted the previous investment. The fallacy argues that you may find out that you’ll continue to waste further investments if you continue investing in a failing cause. (On a side note, Ryan Doody argues that the sunk-cost fallacy is not an actual fallacy: see “The Sunk Cost ‘Fallacy’ Is Not a Fallacy”. But that’s something to discuss another day.) It’s not reasonable to keep losing simply because you have lost. The investments may be financial but they can be investments of time and emotion which represent other sacrifices. It’s unfortunate that you lost that money/time in the past but if you stop now, you can save yourself from further loss. The choice to embrace further loss because of past loss is unreasonable.
I was quite close to failing my doctoral program toward the end. I survived though somewhat traumatized. It took me a while before I could return to studying the subject that I had spent a few years researching. I didn’t want to think about it anymore. I wanted to move on to something new. I think part of the trauma—which is a word I use cautiously, but one that I think is fitting here—is that I kept asking myself how I could live with myself if I quit. I had dreamt of earning a doctorate since I was an undergraduate. I had sacrificed time with friends. In fact, I had missed the weddings of two of my closest friends. I had invested a lot of time. I had invested a lot of money, both spent and not-earned (being that some of the time dedicated to academia was time not working a job that could’ve been paying me well). I willed myself to complete the program but I wondered “at what cost?” For a few years, it felt like a Pyrrhic victory. I second guessed my myopic approach to life but also I knew that if I would’ve quit, it would’ve lingered with me for a very long time. I needed the sacrifices to get me that piece of paper, if nothing else. This reason could’ve lead others to accuse me of entertaining the sunk-cost fallacy. I was carrying onward, even as it harmed my brain health, because I couldn’t accept that all my past efforts wouldn’t result in reaching their ultimate goal.
There are times when you know you are out of options and you must quit though. As I neared the end of my doctoral program, I was lucky to have been hired by the high school where I work to this day. I had done some adjunct work. I had done a teaching internship. I knew those lifestyles were unsustainable. Also, I knew that there was no path forward toward the dream of teaching religion in a college or seminary setting, so I did something that I had swore to myself that I would never do: went to work with adolescents. It proved to be the right choice but it felt like a dream was dying at the time. I had imagined myself discussing lofty ideas in a graduate school context, or maybe an undergraduate one but not in a high school. I wouldn’t say that it felt like I had failed, per se, but at the time it did seem like the Universe had offered me a consolation prize for my efforts.
Beauvoir comments on this feeling of quitting:
“Yet, there is hardly a sadder virtue than resignation. It transforms into phantoms and contingent reveries projects which had at the beginning been set up as will and freedom. A young man has hoped for a happy or useful or glorious life. If the man he has become looks upon these miscarried attempts of his adolescence with disillusioned indifference, there they are, forever frozen in the dead past. When an effort fails, one declares bitterly that he has lost time and wasted his powers. The failure condemns that whole part of ourselves which had engaged in the effort.”
There’s the trope of the man who talks endlessly of when he was a great high school quarterback as if that’s the last time that he had done anything successful. We feel pity for such people. We sense an arrested development. We look at someone who had dreamt of more. “You can be anything you set your mind to,” we lie to kids. As we age, we realize that adulthood is about making decisions. John-Paul Sarte proclaimed that, “man is condemned to be free” (in his speech “Existentialism is a Humanism”). You feel this condemnation as you age. You have to make difficult decisions about relationships, careers, expenses, values, etc. Sometimes you’re stuck in a real lose-lose situation where something you want to keep must be forsaken. We can’t have it all, unfortunately. There’s an exchange, always.
When we look back at perceived failures, we lose that part of our lives. It is “forever frozen in the dead past”. It doesn’t have to be. We’re unable to interpret its value in relation to our current present. When we “succeed” we see those successes as having laid the foundation for our present. Interestingly, we struggle to do the same with “failures”. Yet there are times when successes might lead us down roads that we’ll regret having traveled and there are times when failures force us to go to places that we know we wouldn’t have chosen, though it proved to be for the better.
I don’t know if there’s a universe in which I taught in a seminary or a college instead of where I’ve been for almost eight full years now. But I do know that while I have my frustrations, and I have my irritations, the past eight years have been more good than bad, by far. Most days I’m simultaneously dissatisfied and satisfied with my career but the satisfaction outweighs the dissatisfaction, the wins outnumber the loses, and the perks are more significant than disadvantages. I’m relatively happy with where my life is.
There’s a way to avoid the risk of failure completely. There’s a way to never have to experience resignation. There’s an alternative to sunk-cost. Here’s how Beauvoir describes it:
“We could indeed assert our freedom against all constraint if we agreed to renounce the particularity of our projects. If a door refuses to open, let us accept not opening it and we are free. But by doing that, one manages only to save an abstract notion of freedom. It is emptied of all content and all truth. The power of man ceases to be limited because it is annulled. It is the particularity of the project which determines the limitation of the power, but it is also what gives the project its content and permits it to be set up. There are people who are filled with such horror at the idea of a defeat that they keep themselves from ever doing anything. But no one would dream of considering this gloomy passivity as the triumph of freedom.”
We can avoid sunk-costs by not investing. We can avoid failure by not trying. We can avoid resignation by not becoming involved in the first place. This is an option. In choosing this option there is a freedom but it’s merely “an abstract notion…emptied of all content and truth”. For Beauvoir, this option is a non-option. We can’t be the people who “are filled with such horror at the idea of a defeat that they keep themselves from ever doing anything.” The freedom to fail is a greater freedom than the freedom to never try anything because we fear failing.
The sub-man and the serious man
I’ve been reading Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity (Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté). This morning, I encountered two of her “characters”. The first is the “sub-man” (sous-homme) and the second is the “serious man” (l’homme sérieux). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Beauvoir by Debra Bergoffen and Megan Burke (“Simone de Beauvoir”) connects these two as both trying “to refuse to recognize the experience of freedom”. Ethan Hekker (“Simone de Beauvoir’s Existentialist Ethics”) summarizes these characters nicely. He says of the sub-man:
…the sub-man restricts himself as much as possible to the world; in an attempt to perhaps escape his shortcomings, or to excuse any attempt to try anything, he claims that nothing merits effort. Nothing is that meaningful or worthwhile. de Beauvoir says that the most harmful quality of the sub-man is that he is most likely to become one of a mob; ignorant rhetoric appeals easily to the sub-man, since that’s the easiest thing to listen to.
Then of the “serious man,” Hekker writes:
The “serious man” is one who dedicates his life staunchly to one particular cause, ideology, or set of values that he considers to be good. The serious man stops at nothing to achieve the cause, or embolden the ideology, even if it comes at the detriment of others. To de Beauvoir, the serious man doesn’t necessarily care about the cause as much as he does his ability to get lost in it.
The “sub-man” caught my attention because it presents a picture of what some ideologies aim to do to us as humans. I’ll take my own field of work as an example. In education (and you’ll hear this rhetoric in traditional public, public charter, and various types of private schools), it’s common for higher ups to shame teachers with phrases like, “It’s for the kids!” Why should you accept lower pay? The kids. Why should you avoid self-advocacy in the work place? The kids. Why should you spend your own money on supplies, snacks, etc.? The kids. It’s not uncommon to be reminded that people don’t get into education, “for the money,” and this is true but manipulative. Usually, when teachers complain about their pay it’s not because they’re suddenly in it “for the money”; it’s because they want their basic needs met.
Beauvoir writes (in Bernard Frechtman’s translation, p. 49):
“…the sub-man plays the part of the inessential in the face of the object which is considered as the essential. He suppresses himself to the advantage of the Thing, which, sanctified by respect, appears in the form of a Cause, science, philosophy, revolution, etc. But the truth is that this rue miscarries, for the Cause can not save the individual insofar as he is a concrete and separate existence.”
When I read this, I thought immediately of the teacher who has become the “sub-man”. The “Cause” is “Education,” capital “E”. The sub-man becomes “inessential”. The teacher is exposable if they’re unwilling to sell themselves wholly to “the Cause”. If you Google articles about the rate of teacher resignations in the United States over the past half-decade, you’ll realize that many educators have concluded that they won’t be “inessential”. This is for good reason. Let’s remember that doing it “for the kids,” is rarely a statement made in good faith. The politician, the board member, the administrator, etc., may believe that they believe in what they’re saying to teachers but often, for a variety of reasons, people in the aforementioned roles choose to ignore the systemic failures of education (e.g. teaching to the test, grade inflation, the rat-race of the college admissions process and the portfolio building we’ve hoisted on children). But beyond the bad faith use of manipulative phrases like “do it for the kids,” is the sad reality that if we deconstruct this phrase we’ll realize that (1) it justifies dehumanizing adults who remain humans with their own worlds: wills, wants, emotions, feelings, dreams, identities, etc., and more sinister (2) it does this so that some day “the children” can grow and mature into cogs in the machine themselves! We value the humanity of the children but only in so far as we can anticipate that they’ll be adults one day who can be exploited.
According to Beauvoir, “The attitude of the sub-man passes logically over into that of the serious man; he forces himself to submerge his freedom in the content which the latter accepts from society. He loses himself in the object in order to annihilate his subjectivity (p. 49).”
Quick biographical detour. I was raised within a sect of Christianity known as “Oneness Pentecostalism”. My perspective is that it’s an extreme expression of religion that is unhealthy, at best, and downright harmful, at worst. When I became an adult, I left that world behind me. I’ve known people who couldn’t leave. I’ve pitied them but I know they don’t need my pity. Subjectively, who’s to say. It may be as many of them have believed over the years that I, the apostate, need pity. But since I’m writing, let me share another quote from Beauvoir that reminded me of what I had seen time and time again as my contemporaries in my 20s realized all the problems with the Oneness Pentecostal subculture but chose to remain (p. 50):
“Often the young man, who has not, like the sub-man, first rejected existence, so that these questions are not even raised, is nevertheless frightened to answer them. After a more or less long crisis, either he turns back toward the world of his parents and his teachers or he adheres to the values which are new but seem to him just as sure. Instead of assuming an affectivity which would throw him dangerously beyond himself, he represses it.”
This must seem perverse to anyone unfamiliar with the subculture that I’m referencing but I remember being filled with fear when I realized that I didn’t think that I believed much of what I had been taught about things ranging from eternal judgment to how one becomes a “real” Christian (speaking in tongues as the outward evidence of salvation) to how one must appear on the outside (dress and grooming) to be “holy”. I wondered whether I was “backsliding” toward future eternal damnation.
Once this fear had been overcome though, it was freeing. It was freeing to choose to shape my own understanding of Christianity, which has evolved endlessly all the way up to this point in my life. But I knew people who chose to stay in the safety of their small religious communities because they couldn’t risk the “what if”. They worried that they had been taught “the truth,” as you’ll often hear it called in those circles: “the full gospel”. They turned back to the world that they knew; they repressed their doubts.
The serious man “dedicates his life staunchly to one particular cause, ideology, or set of values that he considers to be good,” as Hekker phrased it. For many of my fellow educators, for many of my former co-religionists, what was used once to demoralize us into accepting our condition (making us sub-people) makes us vulnerable to adopting the ideology so that we can recover ready-made meaning. About this person, Beauvoir says that “he is no longer a man, but a father, a boss, a member of the Christian Church or the Communist Party (p. 52).” Once we have forsaken our identity as individuals who might change and evolve over time, open to what freedom may offer us, we become the “serious man”. This can be dangerous, as Beauvoir reminds us (p. 53):
“The serious leads to a fanaticism which is as formidable as the fanaticism of passion. It is a fanaticism of the Inquisition which does not hesitate to impose a credo, that is, an internal movement, by means of external constraints. It is a fanaticism of the Vigilantes of America who defend morality by means of lynchings. It is the political fanaticism which empties politics of all human content and imposes the State, not for individuals, but against them.”
This may seem dramatic but I’ve watched as underground fantasies of capturing the world “for Christ” have emerged to become legitimate threats to democracy. The Pentecostals who raised me have no problem with Christian Nationalism, or more accurately, Christian Fascism: Google “New Apostolic Reformation” to see what I mean. The educator who has given up on self-advocacy “for the children” may not turn into an extremist but they’ll judge their colleagues who aim for work-life balance, who don’t spend a bunch of their own money funding things that their schools won’t, etc. In doing so, they’re at least agreeing with the “Cause” that the problem isn’t systemic or institutional; the problem is with the teacher.
(I say this as a teacher who works hard. I arrive early to my job. I do find myself irritated by colleagues who seem laissez-faire about their vocations, who seem to lack work ethic. I don’t think I’ve crossed the line yet into reproducing the manipulative, anti-worker language that I see floating around the edu-sphere but I’m aware that my temptation is less “quiet quitting” and more “joining ‘the Cause'”. I’m definitely self-critiquing here as my identity is tied to my job in such a way that I must put effort into leaving work at work.)
Beauvoir understands that sometimes we can’t escape becoming “serious”. There are social factors and demands of all kinds (think keeping a paycheck to pay the bills or to feed your own kids) that lead people to remain in situations that they know aren’t ideal. She writes, “…certain adults can live in the universe of the serious in all honestly, for example, those who are denied instruments of escape, those who are enslaved or who are mystified. The less economic and social circumstances allow an individual to act upon the world, the more this world appears to him as given (p. 51).” I think of people who I know who became clergy, not only in Oneness Pentecostalism but within Evangelicalism. As they aged their views changed. They didn’t believe themselves the “statement of faith” on their church’s website. But to say this out loud would mean the termination of their employment. What do they do then? The fear of loss is great: lost status, a lost paycheck, a loss of community. These are real losses. Some realize that they’re down life’s journey too far to reinvent themselves now, so they self-justify in order to stay where they’re at. They preach from a pulpit every Sunday doctrines that they haven’t believed in years. I don’t judge this. It may not be wrong in a sense. They are serving their community in some way through this inauthenticity. And let’s be honest: all of us must do this to some degree to live in our world with others. The real question is how much inauthenticity is worth it to keep what you have?
Philosophies of animals
I’m a vegetarian. It’s not for health reasons, per se. I’ve been teased as the most unhealthy vegetarian that some of my friends know, since I’m not particularly fond of vegetables! Instead, it’s because of my dog, Frida, mostly. In the six years that my wife and I have been her humans, I’ve come to see animals and animal minds in a new way. I know that there’s the danger of anthropomorphizing animals but I think that there’s an equal and opposite danger when we try to see animals as something fundamentally different from us humans. We humans are animals too. We humans with our wills, our desires, our needs, our pain and suffering are more similar to our animal companions that we’re wont to admit.
Obviously, my decision to become a vegetarian begins with my experience of animals. I think those experiences are rooted in values that go back to my childhood. I come from a family of hunters but I wasn’t interested in hunting. I couldn’t shoot a deer when encouraged. That doesn’t mean that I didn’t eat meat. I ate meat until I was 38 years old. I quit during Lent of 2020. Prior to quitting meat, I had begun to feel disgust when cooking meat. The meat began to smell bad to me. Again, my experiences led the way.
I live in Texas. Obviously, this is a state where people love to eat meat. BBQ is popular up and down the state; various meat-based tacos too. But it’s more than the taste of meat that causes many Texans to distrust a vegetarians. There are economic and cultural reasons too. According to the Texas Historical Commission (see “The Texas Tradition of Cattle Ranching Began in Tejas”), “Cattle ranching is still an important part of the Texas economy. In 2012, Texas grossed $10.5 billion (yes, with a “b”) in cattle production—approximately half the state’s commodities. The Lone Star State is number one in beef cattle production in the United States, and Texas is home to 248,800 farms and ranches totaling 130.2 million acres.” Vegetarianism isn’t a threat in itself but advocating for vegetarianism may be a sort of cultural treason down here. As the aforementioned article states, “Cattle ranching is not only part of the Texas economy, but also a part of the culture.” The article gives reasons, reasons that I understand, but ultimately I believe that in several decades one of the moral failures that future generations will pin on us (among many, of which I’m guilty of quite a few) is how we treated animals. They may not be vegetarians but I think they’ll look back in disgust at how we’ve slaughtered animals for food and they’ll see factory farming as something of an abomination.
The self-imposed cultural isolation that I experience as a vegetarian who is one for moral reasons has led me to read books exploring the philosophy of animals. For anyone who may be thinking about animals, how they relate to us, how we should treat them, and whether we should eat them, let me recommend some of the books I’ve read, or am reading, or intend to read.
Read: When Animals Dream: The Hidden World of Animal Consciousness by David M. Peña-Guzmán
Guzmán, along with his co-host Ellie Anderson, are two philosophers that I encountered through the podcast “Overthink”. His book models the strength of philosophical thinking that engages scientific data. Through the paradigm of dreams, Guzmán explores our interior subjectivity and how if animals have something like what we have, what that means for how we relate to them.
Read but need to re-read: Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to Other Animals by Christine M. Korsgaard
I need to re-read this one because it’s rooted in dense, Kantian philosophy. You know, the ethics of seeing humans not as a mere ends but as ends in themselves. Now apply that to non-human animals. Unlike Kagan, Korsgaard leaves no room for “human superiority”. Her argument is one that I’ve been pondering as she claims (p. 74):
“Value is a perspectival notion: values arise from the point of view of valuing creatures. And the values that arise from one point of view can be discordant with values that arise from another. There may be a way in which it is true that a more cognitively sophisticated creature loses more by death, but there is also a way in which both the sophisticated creature and unsophisticated one lose everything that matter. In fact, we can see ethical life as an attempt to bring some unity or harmony into our various evaluative perspectives, by choosing those ends that are good for all of us. If we view ethical life this way, it is not surprising that things become more difficult when we try to take other animals into account.”
Reading: How to Count Animals: More or Less by Shelly Kagan
I’m reading this one right now. I don’t have a lot to say other than that Kagan offers a perspective that maintains humanity’s place as more morally valuable creatures while continuing to argue that this doesn’t in any way mean that animals lack moral value.
Intend to Read: Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility by Martha C. Nussbaum
I haven’t read this one yet but I plan on it. For now, all I have to say is that the interviews I’ve heard with Nussbaum insured that I’ll read this book when I have the opportunity!
An assessment that I’m glad I gave (and how it relates to what I’ve been saying about biblical studies)
As the past quarter drew to a close, I introduced a new assessment to my students: a “Quarterly Writing Assessment”. I asked them to write a short response (ten sentences minimum) to a prompt that in summary asks them to tell me one thing they’ve learned that has changed their perspective/shifted their paradigm; one thing that would be missing from their education if they hadn’t taken my class.
For my own psychology, I’m glad I gave this assessment. Sometimes, it’s hard to tell whether students are really learning anything. How much are they memorizing for a quiz or test? How much are they turning your required work into passing busy work? Will it stick?
As I’ve been grading these assignments, I’m heartened. My “Introduction to the Bible II: The Christian Scriptures” students have been telling me about how they’ve come to recognize the Bible’s internal diversity; how interpretive paradigms have shifted over time; how it’s ok if someone else interprets the Bible differently; how “messianism” as a concept has shifted how they look at Jesus as “Christ”; how the differences between the Gospels has influenced who they understand Jesus to be; why Mark’s Jesus is so secretive about his identity and John’s Jesus is so loud about it; how Jesus’ teachings in the Sermon on the Mount and in his parables have them pondering why Jesus favored the oppressed and marginalized.
My “Religion in Global Context” students have told me that they understand why studying religion is important; how religious illiteracy has negative consequences; how they’ve realized that not all religions look alike; how they’ve realized that there’s no single way to define “religion”; how they’ve learned a bit about Hinduism, Sikhism, and Islam; how they’ve been introduced to questions about reality and metaphysics through Indian philosophical categories (e.g. Brahman, Atman, karma, samsara, moksha, dharma) in ways that have them rethinking what they understand to be “real”.
My “Religion in the United States” students have told me how they learned about the diversity of Christianities in the original Thirteen Colonies and adjacently how diverse Christianity is; how the Founding Father’s views of Christianity weren’t monolithic; how some Founding Fathers (e.g. Samuel Adams; John Jay; John Witherspoon) may receive approval from confessional/creedal Christians today while others (George Washington; John Adams; Thomas Jefferson) are more complicated; the importance of the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment; the role of the Supreme Court and IRS in shaping how Americans view “religion” and how religion is practiced here; the nature of Indigenous American religion.
As I read what my students wrote, I felt like each class was indispensable to their education. It made me proud of what our catalog offers. The funny thing is this: I think we need a class on ethics and I think we need a class introducing philosophical thinking. Since students have to take only 2 semesters of religion to graduate, I don’t know where these classes fit or if they do fit at all. I do know that as frustrated as I may be at times when it comes to teaching religion in a world where STEM is squeezing the humanities to death, I don’t doubt for a second that our society needs what our humanities classes have to offer.
I want to return to my biblical studies students because I’ve been writing a lot about those classes the past few days. First, I mentioned that I’m faced with an existential crisis when teaching this class. I’m teaching the sacred texts of a dying institution in America: the Bible of the Christian Church. I’m aware that many of my students, presuming trajectories hold, won’t be reading their Bibles as adults and likely many won’t be part of any Church.
This led to me reflect on how critical approaches to the Bible play a part in demystifying the Bible but also this act results in the eventual demise of biblical studies. As more and more people see the Bible as another human creation (and the Church as a human institution), fewer of them will be interested in it. Eventually, this will impact the future of biblical studies, shrinking our ranks, leading to the closure of our programs and our presses, because I’m confident that many biblical scholars entered biblical studies in order to have religious questions answered. The irony is that in our effort to dismantle dangerous forms of biblicism, we’re simultaneously depleting our “farm system” (to use a baseball term) because biblicist cultures give rise to future biblical scholars (or so I presume until empirical data proving otherwise is shown to me).
Finally, I argued that critical approaches to the Bible remain the right approach, even knowing the consequences, because at this time and place (21st century United States), if we fail to help students deconstruct biblicist views of the Bible then biblicist views of the Bible will remain the default interpretation of the Bible. This isn’t to say that people will read the Bible accepting its authority through a biblicist paradigm alone. Many will reject the Bible outright presuming that the line that biblicist draw in the sand (read it as the inerrant “Word of God” or leave “the Church’s Bible” alone) is a real line that one either crosses or doesn’t. In other words, I think there’s a necessary gamble. If we want contemporary young people to mature into adults who show interest in the Bible as “wisdom literature” with which they can wrestle in a life-giving way—even non-Christians, just as I, a Christian, wrestle with the Vedas and Upanishads, the Dhammapada, the Quran, etc.—then we must show that the black-and-white paradigm of biblicism is a false dichotomy. If we want them to approach the Bible as a source for creative theological thinking, they must realize the Bible is a conversation-starter, not a conversation-ender.
Do I wish we could skip past the deconstruction of biblicism in order to help students read the Bible wisely? Yes. Do I think we can do this without risking the effects of residual biblicism remaining with our students? No. I don’t see how we can lead students to a mature understanding of the Bible without dispelling the mythologies of our culture. If you doubt what I’m saying, go to Barnes & Noble. Walk through the section related to the Bible and to Christianity. Recognize that this is the dominant understanding of what the Bible is and what Christianity represents. Realize that many adherents to Christianity and readers of the Bible think the selection at Barnes & Noble is normative; recognize that many who reject Christianity and the Bible agree. This shouldn’t be. It doesn’t have to be. At least I hope it doesn’t have to be.
The Bible is a talisman (for many). Reading it leads to deconstruction. Deconstruction is necessary.
Jacques Derrida tried to point out that deconstruction isn’t a method. It’s what happens when you read (at least when you read closely). When you read something, you see the flaws in the text, you notice the gaps, you recognize what’s being fronted and what’s being supplanted, you hear the silence.
One can read a text and one can READ a text. When I speak of critical biblical studies, I’m not saying that the readers are disparaging of the text. To think critically is to be cautious, careful, aware. It’s to try to set aside assumptions. When we do this, texts deconstruct themselves.
Yesterday, I wrote a post claiming that critical biblical studies has a death-drive. My claim is that critical biblical studies exist in reaction to modernity, primarily, but it has come to exist in reaction to fundamentalism and Evangelicalism, being that those two ideologies are themselves reactions to modernity. The tone of the post could lead people to think that I’m saying we should abandon critical biblical studies or that we should leave the first naïveté alone. If we want students to value the Bible, then we need to let them retain the Sunday School version of the Bible that they’ve been taught.
Let me be clear: that’s not what I’m saying at all. I do think there’s a place for a second naiveté (something like a theological-reading of the Bible or seeing the Bible as a “wisdom text”) but I don’t believe we should leave the first naïveté alone because doing so is safe. It’s not. In an original draft of this post, I unpacked how concepts like biblicism and inerrancy are dangerous but that’s being redundant. One can find this information all over the Internet. And, to be honest, I don’t want to draw the attention of a particular class of online apologists. If you know, you know. And if you know, you know that the first naiveté is rich soil for ideologies ranging from homophobia to Christian Nationalism. If you know, I don’t need to say more.
What I do need to say is this: I don’t see how we can lead students from the first naiveté into the second naiveté without them experiencing the process of deconstructing the text as they engage modern critical scholarship on the Bible. Could this result in many students who abandon the Bible altogether? Yes but also no. My bet is that many of those students weren’t reading the Bible anyways. They had magical ideas about the Bible as a pretext that justified whatever ideology they associated with it. Critical scholarship is necessary if we’re going to de-weaponize the Bible. If students decide that the Bible isn’t for them and that’s it irrelevant now, then this may be better than if they grow to become the type of people who assume the Bible is their talisman, they magic amulet that curses their enemies and blesses their friends.
For the student who will mature to the point where they can experience a second naïveté, the deconstructing process is essential. We can’t force students to continue their journey toward learning how the Bible can be life-giving wisdom literature that doesn’t have to be read as anti-modernity, anti-democracy, anti-science, etc. We can open the door for them though. In fact, that’s all we can do. And critical scholarship is a key. If we could jump from first naïveté to second naïveté without the deconstruction that may cause disillusionment and disinterest in the Bible and in the Church, that would be wonderful. But we can’t ignore the cards we’ve been dealt. And we can’t pretend that the Bible hasn’t been given some sort of artificial meaning by our society that likes to cite it without reading it in order to weaponize it.
As I told a friend over text this morning, I have gained so much from the theological writings of people like David Bentley Hart. Will he sell as much as say “new atheists” like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, on the one hand, or fundamentalists like John Piper and Mark Driscoll, on the other hand? No. These books sell better and are consumed more because of their polarized simplicity. Sadly, interesting thoughts about the concept of “God” won’t be encountered because the sloppy stuff is easier to access and understand. But that doesn’t mean Hart is wrong for offering us the opportunity to become mature thinkers.
Similarly, yes, people may polarize around the Bible as the inerrant, infallible “Word of God” that justifies their every ideology, or around the Bible as a book of forgettable collection of outdated, ancient myths that needs to be rejected from the first page to the last. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t have the responsibility of offering students a way forward. The way forward to an informed rejection of the Bible (rather than merely a reactionary one) or toward a second naïveté (rather than a reactionary religious fundamentalism) goes through a critical engagement with the text first. At least, that’s my view at the moment.
The “death-drive” of critical Biblical Studies
Biblical Studies, at least in its critical form, has a death-drive. Let me explain. On the one hand, there are those who study the Bible academically “for the church” (but as I discussed in my last post, the church is declining, at least in North America and Europe). Their goal is to preserve the relevance of biblical studies for religious reasons. If they were successful in their mission, not only would interest in the Bible spread but more importantly Christianity would. For many Catholic and Evangelical scholars, the study of the Bible is part of the mission. Globally, they might be a success, but not in North America and Europe, which is my focus here.
On the other side, you have critical scholars who hope to deconstruct the Bible’s meaning and message. While they may not be aware of it, there’s an attempt to demystify the Bible which means to normalize it. Once it’s normalized, its significance will fade. As its significance fades, fewer people from future generations will be interested in studying it, especially in a professional capacity. College and university administrations will find little reason to fund biblical studies because, well, why? They want their schools to be attractive and this means highlighting the programs that are en vogue.
And these two poles need each other. As much as critical scholarship may despise Evangelicalism’s biblicism, there’s little relevance to critical scholarship without Evangelicalism’s biblicism to deconstruct. Be honest: as much as I respect and admire Bart D. Ehrman‘s scholarship, does it mean anything without fundamentalism and Evangelicalism? Will there be a place for future Ehrman-types in a post-Christian America in say 2040 or 2050? Without the Green Family, the Museum of the Bible, Evangelical voters, etc., there’s an argument to be made that the Bible does’t mean much anymore. Paradoxically, some of the more toxic means of preserving the Bible’s cultural relevancy simultaneously keep critical scholars in the news.
(And in some sense, we might say that Evangelicalism and fundamentalism are feeder programs for critical scholarship. Our current selves reacting to our past selves. While I know of no such poll, I wish there was data on how many members of the Society of Biblical Literature entered biblical studies because they had religious questions they needed addressed. Even if their current study of the Bible is for purely professional reasons, I doubt they found their way to an academic study of the Bible primarily because they had interesting historical, literary, linguistic, etc., questions divorced of any religious/spiritual curiosity.)
Let me provide an analogy. My friend, the religion scholar James McGrath, alongside Charles G. Häberl, published an English translation of the Mandaean Book of John back in 2020. Objectively, this is a great scholarly accomplishment. Will this text receive wide-spread, long-term attention. Unlikely. Why? Because there are probably no more than 100,000 Mandaeans globally and Mandaeanism is a dying religion. Most of them won’t be reading English-language scholarship on their religion, if they’re reading any scholarship on their religion at all. The broader public may be curious about Mandaeans for a moment but only for a moment. For this reason, few people will pursue advanced degrees in “Mandaean studies” (presuming any such program exists even now). There are a handful of scholars globally who are experts on Mandaeanism at the moment, and I don’t foresee their ranks growing.
Why do I mention the plight of Mandaeanism? Christianity’s global population sits at more than 2 billion. This is comparing apples to something even less apple-like than oranges. But biblical scholarship is centered in North America and Europe. In North America and Europe, Christianity, especially Protestant Christianity, seems to have entered an irreversible decline. Without something to deconstruct, there won’t be many jobs for critical biblical scholars of the future.
Of course, there are mainline Christians who want to show that you can be scholarly, and secular, and pluralistic, and value the role of the Bible within “communities of faith” while also being Christian. But this middle ground, even as I try to stand here with all its complications, lacks population and influence. We want our cake and we want to eat it too. Reality seems to favor polarization and extremes at the moment. Trying to reconcile critical scholarship with an active Christianity bores many. Drama sells!
And this makes sense. When your Christianity lacks an oppositional stance to culture, future generations can’t see why dedicating themselves to something like the study of the Bible or ordination in ministry is important. Yes, Jesus said to choose between God and Money, but it appears that I don’t have to do this. Yes, Jesus said to put our treasure in heaven rather than on the earth, but it appears I can have treasure in both places. Why dedicate myself to the study of Scripture, theology, sacraments, etc., when I can be “just as Christian” working for a Fortune 500 company. We’ve demythologized ourselves to death, and I’m not saying it was wrong to do this. But it is to say that there is cause-and-effect. We’re so much a part of culture that there’s no reason to dedicate ourselves to Christianity and the institution of “the Church”. (I can hear the screams of Kierkegaard, Wesley, and others as they realize that “western culture” and Christianity are beginning to return to this synthesis even as “western culture” distances itself from Christianity!)
This isn’t to say that Catholic and Evangelical culture is otherworldly; it’s to say Catholic and Evangelical culture does a better job of presenting itself as such so that people may be just as materialistic, just as this-worldly as we mainliners, but they don’t think of themselves this way. They still have a sense of mission. They still see themselves as outsiders who must “save” what is “lost”. (And if I learned anything from Harvey Whitehouse’s dense book The Ritual Animal: Imitation and Cohesion in the Evolution of Social Complexity, it’s that people often bond closer to each other when their subculture is demanding and entry and preservation is difficult, even traumatic—think fraternity hazings or joining the Marines.) If you’re a young Evangelical, there’s a better chance that you’ll see a reason for dedicating yourself to professional ministry than if you’re a young mainliner. And the statistics support this, I think. In the interview that Tripp Fuller did with Ryan Burge that I mentioned in my last post, Burge pointed out that all of the largest, still growing seminaries are Evangelical save Duke Divinity (see around 13:00-50:00-ish for that discussion).
This may be good news for critical biblical studies, even if it makes critical biblical scholars cringe. But it’s temporary, I think. Even as Evangelicals have a sense of mission, even as it may draw them closer together, and even as it serves to feed their academic institutions, their numbers will continue to decline unless for some reason “the great de-churching” reverses. This seems unlikely. Millennials are secular by greater numbers and even as they age and have children, they’re not returning. This seems to be the probable trajectory for Gen Z as well. Many who left Evangelicalism did so because of how Evangelicals treat LGBTQIA+ people and because of the nature of their involvement in politics (see the PRRI graphic below). These things don’t appear to be bugs in the Evangelical system but instead features. Therefore, while Evangelicals will outlast the mainline, this doesn’t mean they won’t fade as well.
If the Bible isn’t the sacred text of our culture, even a sacred text that we pretend to read, what takes its place? What provides us with unifying language and symbols? What provides us with something to deconstruct and reject as we grow older? Maybe nothing. Maybe STEM textbooks will be peak literacy! But I digress. Returning to my main point: those of us participating in the project of critical scholarship on the Bible since the 19th century have collectively begun to accomplish what we set out to do: we’ve naturalized the Bible. This is likely a good thing considering how the Bible has been (ab)used throughout history. But we appear to have been telling people that our own irrelevancy is a goal. And maybe it has been. If it has been, we need to be ready for the closing of our departments. We should expect fewer students to show interest in our programs and our scholarship. We shouldn’t be surprised as our publishers close up shop. It was the inevitable consequence of our collective demythologizing project. It was the predetermined end of our death-drive.
The Fading Bible of Dying Churches
This week, I was talking to a clergy friend. I mentioned to them that over the past few years I’ve faced an existential crisis. When I teach my biblical studies courses, I have acute sense that I’m introducing my students to an increasingly irrelevant cultural artifact. I don’t feel this way when I teach my theory of religion course, “Religion in Global Context”. I don’t feel this way when I teach my course “Religion in the United States”. But when I teach my introductions to the Bible, something feels strange.
Sometimes it’s the subtle emotional and mental tug of war that I must do with my student’s attention. Sometimes it feels like they’re just not interested. And while I know that some “edu-influencers” out there might suggest that the problem lies in my pedagogy, I reject that notion. I know I’m an engaging and creative teacher. I know that I’m good at keeping student’s attention, even in an age where TikTok, Snapchat, and other forms of social media, along with the constant demand of the smartphones in their pockets (which is where they’re at, even if school policy says otherwise), compete with me. When “Religion in Global Context” and “Religion in the United States” students are asked to stick with me as we wade into some deep concepts, they’re usually willing to trust me. They appear willing and eager to learn.
This is true of more than 50% of my biblical studies students as well. I don’t want to be dramatic. I don’t want to paint a picture of classes filled with disengaged teens. That’s not the case at all. But when I do struggle to keep them with me, when I do struggle to hold their attention, when I do receive the occasional, sharp and targeted question, “Why do I have to learn this? Why does this matter?” it’s always when teaching the Bible.
My clergy friend faces something similar. They’re working in the world of mainline Christianity. If you haven’t paid attention, while Christianity’s influence is fading in the United States, the mainline leads the way. My friend is working on the ship as it sinks. This doesn’t mean that the work they’re doing is irrelevant but it can be hard to know that you’re providing end-of-life care for an institution you love. For example, the political scientist Ryan Burge told Tripp Fuller on a recent episode of “Homebrewed Christianity” that 52% of PC (USA) ministers are retired. That’s a dead-man-walking denomination. The Episcopal Church, for whom I work indirectly, is “dead” by 2040 (or 2050?), which doesn’t mean that there actually will be zero Episcopalians in a decade and a half…but there won’t be many.
(This change has been coming for a long time. I’ve been listening to “Emerged: An Oral History of the Emerging Church Movement” created Tripp Fuller and Tony Jones. It reminds me of why I was interested in the “emerging church” in my 20s. I knew then that the choice was between a dying church or a remade one. John Piper’s “Farewell Rob Bell” tweet may as well have said “farewell Millennials and Gen Z”. I tried to make it work in evangelicalism once I saw the emerging movement fading as quickly as it had risen, but I couldn’t do it.)
As someone who works with adolescents, I see the decline in religiosity before many others see it, which in the United States means mostly a decline in established Christianity. Ryan Burge shared some statistics recently on the decline in church attendance among high school seniors from 1995-2022, and it’s a steep drop! In 1995, only 15% of high school seniors said that they never attend church. It’s 30% now. In 1995, 32% attended weekly. It’s 22% now. Secularization has won the day, for better or worse. Returning to Burge’s research, Gen Z is 48-49% atheist/agnostic/non-affiliated. Now, about 31% of Gen Z are “Nones,” or non-affiliated. They may be “spiritual but not religious” (see Burge’s graphic below) so this doesn’t mean they’ve abandoned ideas about “god” or “the afterlife” completely; it means they’re not accepting wholesale packaged doctrine. It means they’re not interested in doing what I did as a kid: spending two or three days a week at a local church.
I’ve created my biblical studies course with this in mind. I don’t presume biblical literacy from my students. My classes are academic in nature but I begin with the basics (“Genesis 1:1 means book-chapter-verse” level basics). I try to provide space for personal engagement without being confessional. While I work for a school affiliated with the Episcopal Church, we accept students from a wide-variety of religious traditions—Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Sikh, Jewish, Muslim—I’ve taught them all. And many students from these traditions have taken my classes on the Bible. Often, they seem to be more engaged than my Christian students. As the old saying goes, “familiarity breeds contempt”. The other private Christian schools in the greater San Antonio area are confessional in nature. Many of these schools wouldn’t admit students who come from non-Christian families. I’m confident that in those mostly Catholic and Evangelical settings, engagement with the Bible is stronger but that’s because I was raised and became an adult within these biblicist subcultures, so I know what role the Bible plays. This doesn’t mean that I think the Bible is taken more seriously in those contexts. It can be a bit of a good luck charm; it can be studied through the lens of apologetics where you begin with the answer and work back to the question. But it’s more important to those students because of biblicism than it is to most of my students who better represent the generational trends we see nationally.
There’s panic because of this cultural paradigm shift. Gallup reports that fewer Americans see the Bible as the literal “Word of God”. Christianity Today reports, many Americans have stopped reading their Bibles. Organizations like “The Gospel Coalition” that are built on biblicism speak of a “Bible Literacy Crisis!” The pope of the SBC, Al Mohler, wrote about this “scandal” several years ago. As important as the Bible has been within American culture, “the time they are a-changin” as Bob Dylan sings. I don’t think a reversal of trends is in the forecast though.
As our society becomes more culturally secular, and more pluralistic, I wonder what it means to teach the Bible to high school students, even from the perspective that I teach it. (And yes, I can hear some say that maybe I need to shift to a more confessional, more theological approach…but I can’t do that in good faith nor does it make practical sense when most of my Christian students are Roman Catholic and I’m not. It wouldn’t solve anything.) My field of study has been dying. There are fewer jobs in academic biblical studies. The Annual Report of the Society of Biblical Studies shows that while there are more members than there were in 2000, we have likely peaked and I’m skeptical that we’ll see a rebound (see the graphic below from the Annual Report). I’ve encouraged fellow members of SBL to consider teaching high school but I know that this likely doesn’t mean teaching the Bible but rather teaching history or social studies using the skills your education gave you.
In my eight years as a high school teacher, I’ve encouraged many students to minor in religion; I’ve hoped that more would major in it (since I see religious studies and philosophy as very employable majors). But I’ve encouraged only one student to consider theological/biblical studies and that’s because they were interested in being both clergy and an academic. I suppose that they could survive with two skis but not with one! I can’t encourage working for only a dying church or only a dying field of academics but maybe they can piece the two together for good life working for both?
When I teach my students to question how people use the word “religion,” or about comparative religion, or about how the Supreme Court interprets the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses, or about how Mormonism and Pentecostalism arose in the American context, I sense the immediate relevancy. When I teach them about the Bible, there are moments—moments when I read their reflections and see them truly wrestling with the nature of the Bible, and how it’s read, and how it’s been interpreted, and how it’s been applied—that I see they’re learning something and that they’re critically thinking which is my goal as an educator. But as I’ve been saying, there’s the lingering sense that I’m teaching them something they’ll never revisit in adulthood. Why? Because they won’t be reading the Bible and they may not be attending church anymore. Is this good or bad for the future of our society? I don’t know. Has Bible reading and church attendance made Americans better people, better neighbors? Does secularism lead to healthier societies or more sickly ones? I don’t know. But I do know we’re in the middle of a massive cultural shift—one that’s been going on since before I was born in 1982—and we’re just beginning to see what this shift means but not clearly enough to truly know what a future of biblical illiteracy and American secularism entails.
(Final note: yes, Christian Nationalism has been loud. But it appears most Americans reject it or are skeptical of it. This doesn’t mean that the Christian Nationalist philosophy can’t win the day but that’s a different discussion altogether. And I would choose most forms of secularism over Christian Nationalism all day, every day.)
Holy Envy: Sikh Langar
I read Barbara Brown Taylor’s Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others back in 2021. It continues to shape how I understand my own engagement with people of different religious persuasions. I don’t participate in interfaith dialogue and community building with the goal of erasing differences or pretending that we’re all the same. I think we can celebrate many of our differences and also that we can remain in disagreement without being hostile or disagreeable. When we celebrate differences, this is what Brown Taylor means by “holy envy”. It when you see something offered by another religious tradition and you think something like, “That’s beautiful. I wish my tradition had that.”
Whenever I bring my students to our nearby gurdwara, our Sikh hosts welcome my students into a langar. Harvard University’s Pluralism Project summarizes the point of the langar this way:
Langar is the communal meal shared by Sikhs and all visitors to the gurdwara. Since the founding of the Sikh community, langar has come to be an important part of Sikh religious life. After the service, no Sikh will leave without partaking of langar. For Sikhs, eating together in this way is expressive of the equality and oneness of all humankind. At the same time, it strengthens the Sikh sense of community. Visitors and guests are readily and warmly included in the great hospitality of the Sikh tradition. In visiting a gurdwara one will always be offered the sweet prashad which is distributed in the sanctuary as the “grace” of the guru. And in visiting at the time of a service, one will be offered the entire langar meal.
“Langar: The Communal Meal”
They’ve told me that serving food to me and my students is a blessing for them. There’s no doubt that it’s a blessing on us as well. The food is delicious and the hospitality unmatched.
In Amritsar, Punjab, there’s a building known as “Harmandir Sahib” or more broadly as “the Golden Temple”. It’s a point of pilgrimage for many Sikhs but more relevant to this post, the langar there serves 100,000 people per day (not a typo). This video by vlogger Khalid Al Ameri provides a good overview of what happens there: “Inside the Gold Temple”. Gurdwaras around the world welcome people to the langar, whether you’re Sikh or not. Sikhs have told me that wherever I go in the world, if I’m hungry, lost, in danger, or there’s been some sort of disaster, all I need to do is look for the gurdwara.
The communal meal is beautiful. My own tradition has Eucharist (or Mass, or Communion, or the Lord’s Supper) which has its own food-as-sacrament beauty but entering a langar is unique. Once a student of mine asked if the Sikh communal meal was like what early Christians celebrated, and as far as I can tell this seems to be the case, except when it was abused like it appears to have been by the Corinthian Christians. Since we Christians have ritualized and sacramentalized our meal to the point where it hardly can be called a meal, I envy what Sikhism has. I’m sure it’s not perfect. I’m sure there are Sikhs who can tell stories about how this or that went wrong in this or that langar. But the tradition has centralized something beautiful in its pragmatism, community building, and hospitality that many communities of my coreligionists lack.
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