By now, most of you know Baylor University is one of the first stops on the Turning Point USA college tour. The Baylor administration has justified the campus presence of Donald Trump Jr., Erika Kirk and “Border Czar” Tom Homan by arguing that they were invited by Baylor’s Turning Point student chapter, who are, truly, a small group of students in the sea of Baylor humanity.
Faculty, alumni, and other lovers of Baylor have been stricken by this announcement. I know these are difficult times for the Baylor administration as they try to navigate the dangerous impulses of the Trump White House and the difficulties of trying to keep a major university afloat as demographics shift and donors waver.
Greg Garrett
And I want to be very clear: I don’t have to navigate those waters. I recognize that as a tenured endowed professor at Baylor, I have a freedom and privilege many Baylor folks don’t. As a person often invited into pulpits and church settings by bishops, pastors and priests to talk about challenging subjects, I’m well aware I speak in those settings without the fear that a major donor will stop giving to the church because I said something crosswise to his beliefs.
But I also don’t feel I should be afraid of saying something crosswise when it comes to Baylor hosting Turning Point USA and its traveling partisan roadshow.
James Talarico says there is nothing less Christian than stealing from the poor to give to the rich, and that is one of the things I hold close as I object to Baylor welcoming this partisan political rally to campus.
That matters as we look at the president’s son and think about the 750,000 people estimated to have lost their lives because this administration killed foreign aid to the world’s poorest people while he and the Trump family rake in billions off the presidency and its influence.
It matters as we look at the border czar and think about those who came to America seeking better lives, those granted asylum and even of American citizens brutalized, terrorized, kidnapped and sent to gulags while the American pope reminds all Christians we worship a Christ who loves and values the marginalized of all sorts, including the immigrants within our gates.
It matters as we look at Charlie Kirk’s widow, who has told young white men not to be ashamed of owning their identity in a culture where only the most pernicious lies suggest they are anything other than the kings of creation.
It matters as we look at an administration that has tried to erase American history, ignore sins of injustice, dictate what schools and universities can teach and how they can operate, and whose every policy is about making America less diverse and more white, as though that is a good and holy thing.
“I cannot pretend Turning Point is simply coming to Baylor as a conversation partner on faith, politics and culture.”
I cannot pretend Turning Point is simply coming to Baylor as a conversation partner on faith, politics and culture, participating in a free exchange of ideas, and I will not regard them as a Christian organization with whom I can have respectful dialogue.
Turning Point and the minions of the Trump administration are coming to Baylor to enforce their white Christian nationalist viewpoints — that white men are and must be ascendant, that white women need to be birthing babies round the clock, that Black and brown people need to be disenfranchised or thrown out of the country entirely, and that universities need to be told to support these agendas or be destroyed.
Baylor’s motto is simple: We form students to serve the state, the church and the world. These are not Turning Point’s values. When Charlie Kirk wrote a book about the fraud he considered university educations to be, he was foregrounding what Turning Point was and what it feared.
I have taught at Baylor for 36 years. Thousands of students have sat in my classes, and I doubt any of them would say our experience was a fraud, or that my identity as a Christian educator was fraudulent.
I hope they would say I helped them wrestle with important issues and affirmed their wrestling, even if I didn’t agree with their outcomes.
I hope they would recognize my faith was central to how I loved them as students and what we did in the classroom.
I hope some of them would say my expression of faith helped them to construct their own authentic faith.
Yet I think it is very possible I might be called out at this Baylor Turning Point rally as the dangerous radical they proclaim me to be, the lone Baylor faculty member on the Turning Point Professor Watchlist.
“In my ongoing research around Turning Point, I have discovered a fact that sits heavily with me.”
In my ongoing research around Turning Point, I have discovered a fact that sits heavily with me: In 2012, Charlie Kirk was admitted to Baylor University. He chose not to attend, going to college elsewhere for a year before dropping out.
But as I try to think about him as another beloved child of God, I cannot help but wish he had come to Baylor.
That he had studied Plato and Socrates with Anne-Marie Schultz, Medieval literature with Tom Hanks, journalism with Bob Darden, women’s history with Beth Allison Barr, the Psalms with Bill Bellinger.
That he had sat in my American lit survey and read Frederick Douglass and James Baldwin, Leslie Marmon Silko and Harper Lee.
That he had been able to live into Baylor’s professed ethos that there is no value more Christian than actual wrestling with truth, that he had truly experienced how the truth can make you free.
That didn’t happen, of course, and I won’t speak ill of the dead. He wound up elsewhere, and this present moment is the fruit of that.
But when Turning Point comes to the Baylor campus, we need to be completely clear that what they are bringing is not about faith, despite the white Christian nationalist trappings, despite Charlie Kirk’s tragic death.
Their presence on Baylor’s campus is about fear and about hatred and about power.
And scary as this moment is, we cannot let it pass without protest, and comment, and a reaffirmation that our central value is and always must be love.
As the First Letter of John teaches, love is of God, and anyone who says, “I love God,” but hates their brothers or sisters is lying, since if we do not love the brother or sister we have seen, how can we love the God we have not?
Greg Garrett is an award-winning professor at Baylor University, where he is the Carole McDaniel Hanks Professor of Literature and Culture. One of America’s leading voices on religion and culture, he is the author of 30 books, most recently the novel Bastille Day and The Gospel According to James Baldwin: What America’s Great Prophet Can Teach Us about Life, Love, and Identity. Greg is a seminary-trained lay preacher in the Episcopal Church and Honorary Canon Theologian at the American Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Paris. He lives in Austin with his wife, Jeanie, and their two daughters.