“I believe: That the Lord God created the universe.
I believe: That he sent his only son to die for my sins.
And I believe: That ancient Jews built boats and sailed to America.
I am a Mormon. And a Mormon just believes.”
Elder Price, “I Believe,” The Book of Mormon
When I came to Baylor University 36 years ago, I was warned about the possibility of students taping lectures to send to their pastors back home. Baylor was at the epicenter of all the Southern Baptist fundamentalist takeover efforts, and it was a dangerous time to in any way confront students’ beliefs.
When I arrived in 1989, faith was at the heart of Baylor life. If you described Baylor as a Christian university, the emphasis in those days was heavily on the adjective. I was told that cursing in class was one of several moral failings that could get me fired. The majority of my students were Texas Baptists and, in those days, they could answer basic Sunday school questions about the Bible.
Greg Garrett
For the most part, I was able to teach what I wanted and to do the writing and research to which I felt called. But as an untenured assistant professor, I was summoned into President Herbert Reynolds’ office after publishing a literary short story with a bad word in it, and I was called into my department chair’s office after Billy Graham’s granddaughter objected to having to read a work by a major contemporary writer she found offensive.
Baylor as an institution has a whole lot of history navigating the tensions between Christian faith and higher education.
Over the last three-plus decades, I’ve witnessed and been part of major changes in Baylor life. Personally, I came to Baylor as a person outside a church tradition; asked by the then-provost if I supported the university’s mission, I offered a resounding yes. If there was a teaching job attached, then I was absolutely on board. Better Baylor than the South Dakota School of Mines.
“In response to their proffers of belief, I always ask the question: What else do you believe?”
When Baylor achieved R-1 status, marking it as a major research institution, I celebrated that achievement. As I looked around my classrooms, I now saw a minority of students who identified as Christian. Sunday school questions about biblical references often drew quizzical looks. But there were still — and I’m sure always will be — plenty of students who are religiously, politically and culturally conservative, folks who remind me of my first years at Baylor, the kind of students who will refer to their faith in class discussion and in written assignments, and as a deeply religious person, out to my students as a preacher and Christian theologian, I do not denigrate that.
But in response to their proffers of belief, I always ask the question: What else do you believe?
This week an undergraduate at the University of Oklahoma went public with what she called religious persecution after the instructor in her psychology class failed her on a response paper to a scholarly article on gender roles and bullying.
I’m an award-winning teacher who has read thousands of response papers, hundreds of thousands of student words. This OU student’s paper was not a good one. What she wrote was not a good-faith response to the assigned scholarly article, and although this wasn’t the thrust of her response or her instructor’s notes, her description of those who don’t conform to her faith-based understandings of gender and sexual roles as “demonic” is, as her instructor notes, “offensive.”
When I asked my American literature class at Baylor for their thoughts on this question yesterday, I invited 5 minutes of response. They took 35 minutes, and I give thanks for these students who have explored topics like book-banning, diversity and inclusion in response to our study of American literature, history and culture. Here are a few of their conclusions.
First, faith and personal belief can’t be divorced from a student’s responses in a college classroom. I concur. Many of the response papers I’ve read from my highly diverse class this semester begin with some version of “I’m a Christian and —” or “I’m not a person of faith and —” Successful papers move on from that statement of belief or disbelief to construct an actual response to the text under consideration.
“Successful papers move on from that statement of belief or disbelief to construct an actual response to the text under consideration.”
In regard to this OU response paper, my students agreed that faith and personal belief could be a starting point. But academic study requires engagement with an academic discipline and with the ideas contained within it.
“You don’t have a right to not be offended,” one of my more conservative students said yesterday, which conforms with my own understanding of education. Often when we bang up against ideas antithetical to ours, we’re forced to defend — or to reframe — those ideas, and in my American lit class this fall, I’ve seen students doing just that in listening and responding to their classmates. Education involves challenge, not simply comfortable affirmation.
Second, if you don’t want to engage the course material, you don’t have to take the class. This was a psychology class. The OU coed is, reportedly, premed. If she gets into a medical school, she may be confronted with more material that confronts her.
If her faith forbids abortion, then what will she do when she reaches a unit about emergency D&Cs necessary to save a mother’s life?
If she believes divorce is a sin, what will she do when she treats a battered wife in her emergency room?
If she believes that God never gives us a problem too big to handle, then how might she counsel a suicidal patient?
Samantha Fulnecky
This OU student involved my friends at Turning Point USA because she told them she was being persecuted for bringing up Christianity in her response paper. (She is reported to have mentioned her faith in earlier papers, which would certainly track with my years of reading response papers. If you see the world through a certain lens, you consistently see it that way, and I can’t walk out the door without being a follower of Jesus.) Turning Point turned up the heat. And things blew up.
Did they need to?
I am — as many of you readers are — among the millions of Christians whose faith causes them to read this essay and about this student’s essay in an entirely different light. For welcoming and inclusive Christians, God doesn’t prescribe how people live or love.
God just loves.
But I love many people who hold the OU coed’s religious beliefs. So I’d love to think her response — which departed from the actual reading matter about gender roles to attack trans people in a class taught by a trans person — was not simply a cynical provocation. But her immediate appeal to the Oklahoma University chapter of Turning Point in a deeply conservative state (Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt himself weighed in on the matter — a grade dispute in a college class! — by posting “The situation at OU is deeply concerning. I’m calling on the OU regents to review the results of the investigation & ensure other students aren’t unfairly penalized for their beliefs.”) suggests it was a planned escalation.
Turning Point then doubled down on the student essay’s use of “demonic,” posting that “mentally ill professors” like her trans instructor should not be allowed to teach Oklahoma students.
I teach and have long taught gay and trans students at Baylor. They are among the most brilliant and beautiful minds I’ve encountered. They go on to careers in lots of fields, including university teaching. And while conservative Christians may think of them as demonic or mentally ill or deluded, I know them personally to be generous and gentle and giving, especially in the classroom. They too bring their experience into what they do, and having been shunned and shamed, they are usually slow to do the same to anyone else.
Third, some of my American Lit students echoed Turning Point’s Twitter assertion that the professor should have been mature enough not to take personal attacks personally. Maybe this OU student did feel personally attacked (and, again, I wonder if she did not intend just that).
Mel Curth
But the instructor observed the student’s comments were “offensive.” I know the job of the professor is to be more than an audience of one. As I told my students yesterday, if someone in a response paper writes, “I think straight white guys are stupid,” after the initial pinch, I am mature enough to set it aside. But the ideas and opinions people express have consequences. And I would comment likewise to this mythical student of mine attacking straight white dudes: “Some people may find what you’ve said offensive.”
Because they will.
In our classroom.
In the larger world you’re supposed to be preparing to enter and encounter.
Whether you’re in a secular or Christian educational setting (I’ve taught in both), one of the callings of a professor is to help a student achieve some clarity about how what she believes may be received by a larger audience.
I’m grateful to my American Lit students who helped me wrestle with this question of freedom of speech and academic freedom. Baylor, like every other American university, is contending with a culture where an opinion can be amplified through social media, become a battle in the culture wars, bring an institution into the sights of the Trump administration.
It’s a painful reality, and many of you know I believe Baylor has not dealt with it as well as we might have.
But — as a deeply religious professor who is also the only Baylor faculty member on Charlie Kirk’s professor watchlist (quelle ironie!) — here’s where I land:
A student’s Christian (or Muslim or Buddhist or atheist) identity is a hermeneutical filter that can and does come into the classroom. We are who we are.
As I have told my own students, “Fine. That’s your first paragraph.”
“Religious identity does not absolve a student from doing the work, completing the assignment.”
But that religious identity does not absolve a student from doing the work, completing the assignment, treating others — including a professor or those outside the walls of the classroom — with respect.
“Demonic” is a hateful and hurtful word, however it emerges.
And this particular incident — involving the amplified intolerance of Turning Point and a student whose mom is a culture warrior who literally defended some of the January 6 insurrectionists — does not feel to me like an actual religious liberty case, let alone one that should suspend an instructor from the classroom and launch the student into conservative media stardom.
But that is the world in which we live.
I wish this instructor had simply said, “You didn’t respond to the assignment. Try again.”
But I’m also conscious of how that grace might have been treated as yet another opportunity to use the student’s personal beliefs as a justification for intolerance, personal attack, cultural currency.
“I believe” is a powerful statement.
I believe.
But, as The Book of Mormon demonstrates, believing something does not make it so.
I’m sorry the University of Oklahoma was so quick to cave in to cultural pressure.
And I pray Baylor will continue to hold the line against classroom attacks on personal freedom.
We do, at least, have a whole lot of experience into how that looks.
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. He is currently administering a major research grant on racism from the Eula Mae and John Baugh Foundation and finishing a book on racist mythologies for Oxford University Press. 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.
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