I wrote a few weeks ago about the dubious reliability of headlines.
In our clickbait culture, the more incendiary the headline, the more
clicks. And, while the examples I catalogued there were more egregious than the
one I'll be looking at here, the principle still holds. So here it is, from The
Atlantic (Part of what is depressing to me in all of this is the
Buzzfeedification of the entire news landscape. The Atlantic, for
goodness sake's! Melville, Whitman, Emerson, Longfellow, Dickinson, Twain, and
virtually every other American genius of the past 150 years was published
there.)
This is the headline from a recent Emma Green article:
These Conservative Christians Are Opposed to Trump—and
Suffering the Consequences
I started reading this because I've felt some of the
pressure implicit in this headline. Not from the Christian school I teach at;
our administration has been careful to acknowledge and validate the
fact that there are a multitude of potential Christian beliefs on
political issues and, therefore, the school will not try to adjudicate
what its employees believe. Do we tend conservative as an institution? Absolutely. Is it mandated?
Not at all; in fact, there are a good number of more liberal Christians on staff.
The pressure I have felt has come from social media,
specifically anything I have posted that has been in the slightest bit
critical of Trump. One "friend" went so far as to question my
Christianity when I observed that Hillary Clinton's concession speech was more
gracious than anything we could have hoped for had the shoe been on the other
foot. Seriously. "Do you still claim Christianity?" was the exact
wording of his measured response. Another got into an extended argument with me under that post before
unfriending me altogether. Again, I've never posted anything that would suggest
I voted for Hillary Clinton (which I didn't) or am anything other than a
politically conservative Christian (I most decidedly am), but the biggest
pushback I get isn't from my liberal "snowflake" friends when I post
something pro-life but conservative ones who cannot brook any
dissent against our Glorious Leader.
The actual article is far more interesting than the title
would cause one to believe. The first two anecdotes are from a woman named
Joy Beth Smith whose position at Focus on the Family was rescinded (she chose
to be fired over accepting a severance) and Shannon Dingle, a woman who chose
to leave Key Ministry, a Christian disability-advocacy group after being asked
to refrain from incendiary, by their standards, social media posting. I don't necessarily like the
fact that these women are no longer employed by these organizations, but it must be said that part
of tethering yourself to an organization is accepting that, whether or not you
want to be all of the time, you are a representative of that organization.
Dingle's and Smith's social media posting seem pretty tame to me and
not worthy of censure, but I can understand an organization with a conservative
donor base not wanting their organization associated with content in any way
antithetical to the organization. Moreover, it is not as if someone going to work at Focus on the Family can be surprised by the organization's conservative politics. I mean, come on. They were started by this guy. Green helpfully notes this pressure after giving the
women's stories. I'll quote a pertinent bit at length:
Dingle’s story, along with Smith’s, represents a tension all non-profits face: How should they handle political issues that arguably aren’t directly related their mission? Social-media policies, including the official policy at Focus and the implicit standard at Key, are not uncommon. Organizations may have a reasonable desire to control their image and message on sensitive issues, including the statements made by their employees. HR matters are also complicated: Many factors go into discussions about employee departures, which can sometimes be invisible from the outside. (italics added)
I've had to think through this even on this dumpy little personal
blog that relatively very few people actually read. I often go out of my way
to not mention the organization that I work for as I
don't want what I write here to be reflective of that organization, but it is
something I persistently think about. If I were to write something that were to
somehow go viral, would I want the entirety of the content on this site to be
fair game for judging my school? I can't say that I would
be absolutely comfortable with that; in truth, I cannot even remember
everything that I have written in this space over the past six years. For
this reason, I control much of what I post on social media. I have a public
Twitter account, but my Facebook I restrict to students (and coworkers) I know would not
be offended by a hastily scribed opinion.
Green's acknowledgment that "organizations may have a
reasonable desire to control their image on sensitive issues" is
incredibly apt. Part of our intense individualism can cause us to forget that
we are members of communities to which, at times, we must defer. It is only
fitting that an employee of an organization consider how her organization is
implicated by what she puts online. We try to teach our high school students this very thing: whether it is fair for them or not, they represent our school to
the community and this is most true outside of the hours they spend inside our building. Green
probably deals with the same thing, given her position at The Atlantic. In
one way it is simply a feature of growing up.
That being said, there were other parts of the article that
were more disturbing. Audrey Assad, a Catholic musician and Syrian
refugee, has been asked to, in her words, "shut up and sing" and
leave political concerns, like caring for refugees, to the side and focus more
on explicitly Christian issues. The problem here is that these are just her words. She
hasn't quoted anyone saying any such thing; just noted that she has felt
it implied. I am not saying that nothing of the sort has happened to her—it certainly
strikes me as plausible. However, at this point Assad's accusations are merely hearsay.
The story of Meghan Liddy, a missionary working with orphans in Ghana, is
sadder. After writing in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, Liddy had
multiple funding sources pulled from her ministry. There's some irony there—her
donors believed presumably that the black Ghanian lives they were sending money
to support mattered; the ones closer to home less so.
It is a fraught time, politically, for the church. Many in my
generation of conservative Christians have soured on the ultra-capitalist,
the-church-as-Republican-Party-at-prayer ethos that dominated our parent's generation.
Our concerns have broadened away, not from pro-life and pro-family causes which we still
vigorously support (perhaps to an even greater degree than our parent's generation), but from the mindset that produced voter's guides on
Jesus's preferred tax policy. This puts young Christians working at
organizations comprised of leadership from the previous generation in a
tenuous position. What looks like theological waffling to older believers
is merely a change in emphasis. But all too often any dissent—no matter how
mild—calls all of a believer's orthodoxy into question. "You don't support
tax breaks for the wealthy? Do you even believe in the resurrection?"
Snark aside, I am sympathetic to voices on both sides. I wish these women—and
the article seemed to quite intentionally focus only on women feeling the sting
of the pro-Trump backlash—had more opportunities to voice the broad range of
possible Christian opinions on controversial issues than they are currently
being given. That being said, I also understand the reluctance of an organization
to alienate their donor base needlessly, especially on issues outside of the scope of their organizational focus. I pray for the church as we figure
this out. I pray for understanding on both sides. I pray, most fervently, that we stop
airing this out on the internet and take care of these disputes in a manner
more becoming of brothers and sisters as well as in a manner consistent with the Scriptures we treasure. I pray finally that mutual recrimination is replaced by mutual understanding, even if and when we disagree. How we handle the generational
transition will be vitally important for the witness of the church in America.
It behooves us to get it right.
