Christianity, Generational Difference, and DJT

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 The first two anecdotes are from a woman named Joy Beth Smith whose position at Focus on the Family was rescinded (she chose to be fired over accepting a severance) and Shannon Dingle, a woman who chose to leave Key Ministry, a Christian disability-advocacy group after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.

Hamilton Threw Away His Shot

I finished Ron Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton the other day. It was one of those lengthy biographies that I feel like should count for six books on my annual reading list. I want a gold star for finishing. Someone give me a damn gold star!

Anyway, one thing I was not expecting at the end of the book was the utterly pathetic nature of Hamilton's demise. Years collapse pretty easily when looking back 200 years and I assumed, given Aaron Burr's status as vice president of the United States and Hamilton's own political prowess, that this would be the modern equivalent of Mike Pence squaring off with Harry Reid (which would be kinda cool). In truth, Burr was a lame duck VP from the get go, a burr (get it?) in Thomas Jefferson's saddle that had no chance at another term and whose future political prospects at any level were increasingly dim.

Likewise, Hamilton had worked himself out of power with his war of words with John Adams, his well- and self-publicized affair with Maria Reynolds, and his general unwillingness to ever just, like, chill for a minute. Hamilton had no national presence and had retreated back into a lucrative but trivial New York City law practice. 

In other words, this was not a clash of Titans but a clash of has-been Uncle Ricos (Napoleon Dynamite reference FTW) thumping their chests in a pathetic bout of "honor." Burr was an opportunist who people figured out was an opportunist. Hamilton was a vital member of the founding and initial solvency of the union but his own worst enemy. They fought each other over a word: despicable. Hamilton supposedly used that word to describe Burr. Burr said, "Hey, wtf, bro?" Hamilton was, like, "Yeah, I don't remember saying that, but I'm not going to take it back if I did." It took them weeks to work through this. Both were near 50 years old and never once did one of them go: "Hey, this is crazy. Maybe we shouldn't point guns at each other in New Jersey because we're both arrogant, has-been d-bags." But, being arrogant, has-been d-bags, no one made that move.

So, on that fateful morning in July of 1804 that I mostly had heard about before the musical came out from this commercial, these two men lined up across from each other, pointed dueling pistols at each other, and Aaron Burr shot Alexander Hamilton in between the ribs. Hamilton, with an eye to posterity, went around in the weeks before the duel (again, this lingered for weeks; it is hard for me to stay mad for more than an hour about something) telling everyone to whom he revealed his plan that he planned to "throw away his shot." In dueling parlance, this meant that he was not going to shoot at Burr. He would aim his gun at the sky and trust Burr to do the gentlemanly thing and aim his gun at the sky. Then they would hug and go get ice cream or something.

Instead, Burr shot him and he died a few days later, leaving behind his wife and seven children. I struggle to see this a noble end. His death certainly exudes pathos, but the pointlessness of it all is overwhelming. 

It would make a weird ending to the book, which is why Chernow comes back to the story of Eliza Hamilton and her efforts to prolong Alexander's renown. Eliza lived into the 1850s, an inveterate abolitionist and orphanage philanthropist, dying before the war that tested the union her husband fought for so vigorously to a degree that her husband largely intuited. Therefore, the book gets to end on a noble note. But these last 10 pages could not undo for me the previous chapters, where we see a once great man brought down by his own pettiness and vain ambition.

One of the best songs from the musical is "I'm Not Throwing Away My Shot." It comes early in the play and focuses on young Alexander's ambition to make his mark in the world. In the end he didn't so much throw away his shot--though he literally did that in the duel--as squander it. He died pathetically and needlessly, and try as we might to hang posthumous laurels upon him, the miserable circumstances of his death have stuck in my craw. 

Look at My Son

At some point not everything in my life will be related to Hamilton: The Musical. At some point. This is not that point.

My wife gave birth to our third child last week. Beckett Alan Coffman. He's a cute fellow. My wife was amazing during the delivery (of course). We went to a local midwife clinic down the street from a hospital in case of emergencies. We left our house at around midnight to head in, he was born at 2:16, and we made it back home shortly after 6. Our kids didn't even know we were gone. They went to bed, oblivious, and woke up with a baby brother. Surprise!

Beckett mostly sleeps and eats and occasionally poops and every now and again opens his eyes. We are smitten, all of us. My oldest son was not yet two when my daughter was born. He dug it, but doesn't remember it. He's now 5-1/2 and my daughter is 3-1/2 so this one will stick for them. My daughter refused a Super Bowl party at her grandparent's the other night because she wanted to "stay home with my baby." She told him the other morning: "I will take care of you until you're all grown up and then I'll take care of you some more." It is darling and wonderful and lovely and all of the adjectives.

And one thing that has struck me in the past few days of wanting to tell everyone about my son and show them his picture and heap up superlatives as to his ineffability is how hardwired that impulse is in any parent. Look! We all scream. This is my child. 

I'll bring C.S. Lewis into this before I fall back on Hamilton. In his book, Reflections on the Psalms, Lewis explains at length this desire to praise that all lovers feel.

But the most obvious fact about praise — whether of God or anything — strangely escaped me. I thought of it in terms of compliment, approval, or the giving of honour. I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise unless . . . shyness or the fear of boring others is deliberately brought in to check it. 

The world rings with praise — lovers praising their mistresses [Romeo praising Juliet and vice versa], readers their favourite poet, walkers praising the countryside, players praising their favourite game — praise of weather, wines, dishes, actors, motors, horses, colleges, countries, historical personages, children, flowers, mountains, rare stamps, rare beetles, even sometimes politicians or scholars. . . . Except where intolerably adverse circumstances interfere, praise almost seems to be inner health made audible. . . . I had not noticed either that just as men spontaneously praise whatever they value, so they spontaneously urge us to join them in praising it: “Isn’t she lovely? Wasn’t it glorious? Don’t you think that magnificent?” The Psalmists in telling everyone to praise God are doing what all men do when they speak of what they care about.

We praise what we love. We are inveterate praisers. Our love of something is bound up in our communication of that love. When I see people I can’t help but tell them about my son. It is, as Lewis says, a spontaneous overlow.

Lewis continues

I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation. It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete till it is expressed. It is frustrating to have discovered a new author and not to be able to tell anyone how good he is; to come suddenly, at the turn of the road, upon some mountain valley of unexpected grandeur and then to have to keep silent because the people with you care for it no more than for a tin can in the ditch; to hear a good joke and find no one to share it with.

My love for my son is completed, somehow, someway, in the praise that I lavish on his very existence. I would feel stunted in my love if I couldn’t share it, express it, consummate the enjoyment I get from him.

Now on to Hamilton. One of my favorite songs in the musical is after the war when Hamilton and Burr are singing to their newborn children. Hamilton’s first line in the song is, “Philip, you outshine the morning sun, my son. Look at my son, pride is not the word I’m looking for; there is so much more inside me now.” Clara argues that Lin-Manuel Miranda was able to write this song because of the birth of his own child in the middle of the composition of Hamilton. I maintained that creativity could account for the line, but after beholding my newborn son the other day I am leaning more towards my wife’s perspective. The line seems to require parenthood.

And Hamilton the character is right—there is more to what I am feeling than mere pride. It is something holier than that, something like a desire for others to participate in the beauty and grace of my son. There is a glory that emanates from his tiny body that has the power to illumine the darkness, that beckons us all to the light.

Ambition and the Teacher

I'm picking back up with some thoughts on ambition. You can find the other posts here.

When we were on our Hawaii trip a few weeks back my wife and I drove up to Hawi, a cute little hippie town on the north end of the Big Island, for a sushi lunch and some conversation. As we took our post-lunch constitutional, I started telling her about some of my writing ambitions for the year. Then we started talking more broadly about ambition. In career paths before teaching ambition was always a pretty straightforward matter. You work hard in order to move up the proverbial ladder. 

But what about a job where there is no ladder?

Sure, I can strive to become a department chair someday and maybe something like that will happen. But most other modes of advancement are out. I don't want to be an administrator because I love the classroom. I don't care about being recruited by a "better" school because I already teach at a fantastic school. I have no short-term plans for a Ph.D. or immediate ambition to teach at the collegiate level. Some of this stuff might/could happen someday but it is all Someday. And, there is no clear path to the achievement of this goal.

So it makes the career a perplexing choice for inspiring and fostering ambition. This is part of the reason I think that teaching can be a frustrating career choice for so many. In The Gift of Failure, Jessica Lahey notes that the average post-college teacher lasts just three years in the classroom. There are myriad factors behind this (too many to innumerate here), but I think at least an important one has to be that teaching can feel like a dead end gig. And while the popular claim that teachers typically come from the bottom third of academic performers has been, if not entirely debunked, then seriously called into question, the fact remains that teaching has fallen out of the public estimation as a noble and necessary career.  I have no doubt that some of this is fair and some of this is unfair, but whether justified or not the end result is that both good and bad teachers are maligned and considered, in the words of the old aphorism, as "those who can't do." Which can only serve to cement this notion further.

All of this makes it hard to know how to be ambitious as a teacher. Does it mean to focus solely on classroom excellence, lesson planning, and curriculum development? Is it something I measure based on student survey responses? Is the standard that I simply try to remain happy doing this job? Do I try to become a writer and someone known for educational philosophy or independent scholarship?

My guess is that it is some combination of all of these, though the latter one is hard to pull off. But I trust you see the bind. It is not a straightforward prospect and it makes those of us who are ambitious often unsure of what to do with that ambition. In no way does this decrease my love of this career--it is by far the best I have ever had--but it does mean I am going to have to figure some of this stuff out as I go.

The Dubious Reliability of Headlines

I used to be something of a news junkie. Let's just say that at previous jobs I had a lot of time on my hands but had to look like I was still being productive. I couldn't just pull out a book and start annotating so I read a ton of internet content. This was in a simpler time for the web (roughly 2007-2010, which feels like an eternity ago in internet time), but I still spent a good chunk of my time seething over the actions of others as reported to the various sources I consumed.

I don't read a lot of news today. Mostly I think it is garbage, even the stuff that isn't clearly fake. Here are two example from my reading in the past 24 hours.

The first comes from the sports site Deadspin which published the following article about Kansas coach Bill Self's response to the rape allegations in the players' dorm. Here is the article's title:

Bill Self Discusses "Distraction" Of "Very Serious Alleged Allegation" Of Rape At Men's Basketball Dorm

"Distraction" is in scare quotes. These players are "distracted" by the rape of a 16 year old girl. Boohoo for them. SMH, Self, I can't even with this.

Is this what the article states, though? Here is the Self quote in response, it is worth noting, to a journalist who asked if the accusation was a distraction.

It’s not a distraction, it’s a major distraction. Certainly, most importantly, in general, when you talk about distraction, you talk about how it affects us. But more importantly, there’s an obviously very serious alleged allegation that has been made. So that trumps figuring how to guard Monk or Fox to be real candid with you. It’s been a distraction and one that we’ll deal with and our players will deal with. It’s not what we want to do but it’s what’s required at this time.

Nowhere in that quote does he claim "distraction" with nefarious intent as the title so clearly implies. In fact, Self says the very opposite--finding out the truth is monumentally more important than figuring out who guards which Kentucky player. The headline makes Self look like a rape apologist, a single-minded basketball only automaton. But he's not. And I say this as anything but a Jayhawk enthusiast.

Here's another example that is perhaps more pernicious. This was a New York Times headline that blew up on my Twitter feed yesterday.

Trump Strategist Stephen Bannon Says Media Should ‘Keep Its Mouth Shut’

That's bad, right? Leave the press alone, you alt-right d-bag! Surely, though, the New York Times would never mislead its readers with a shoddy headline. Let's check, just to make sure.

WASHINGTON — Just days after President Trump spoke of a “running war’’ with the media, his chief White House strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, ratcheted up the attacks, arguing that news organizations had been “humiliated” by the election outcome and repeatedly describing the media as “the opposition party” of the current administration.

“The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while,” Mr. Bannon said in an interview on Wednesday.

Oh, so he didn't say anything like what the headline implied? That's strange. Bannon is only saying what the media should have figured out in early November: they do not have their finger on the pulse of America. Which, given the fact that no one saw a Trump election coming, ought to be pretty obvious.

But here's the thing. Very few people actually read past the headlines. NPR proved this a couple of years ago with their April Fools headline that literally said "Why Doesn't America Read Anymore?" The copy of the article openly admitted that this was an April Fool's joke but the Facebook comments people posted remained blissfully unaware of this fact. Many were the laments about the sad state of reading in America. I blame this in part on The Onion. I have a head stuffed full of headline titles from The Onion but I can't tell whether the article itself was any good.

The net effect is that we are all deceived as to what is true. Everything is spun. Everything is molded, curated, and crafted to fit the confirmation bias of whoever the target audience might be. There is no room for nuance, for difficult truth, for self-reflection. Those things don't yield clicks like the hyperbolic headlines do. 

The fact that the media doesn't get this strikes me as sad, until I realize that this is not what people demand from the media anymore. Those qualities above are just the ones we seem to have jettisoned in this age. The media reflects us, who we are today, and that is sad for all parties implicated.

I Am Not Throwing Away My Shot

My intended series on ambition has thus far consisted of one post on Alexander Hamilton's life and a warning of the perils of ambition. To recount briefly: ambition can be myopia-inducing, causing us to focus on the aim of our ambition and ignoring or diminishing our other responsibilities. I ended by rejecting the notion that your ambition can be broad and be successful--opportunity cost always dictates that if we are focusing on one thing there is an infinite list of other things losing our attention. 

In this post I want to follow up on another thing that frightens me about ambition: failure. The old proverb to not put all of your eggs in one basket is relevant here. If I choose one thing--writing, say--as my thing and I pour all of my energy and effort into achieving success in this field there is an overwhelming chance that I will fail. And then what am I left with? A life with a single aim that fell short of justifying the effort. 

That sounds admittedly bleak, but I am not being fatalistic or sombre. That's the reality. Ambition is not ambition if its aim is not recognized success. I don't mean to bring the dictionary into this, but the definition of ambition is "an earnest desire for some type of achievement or distinction, as power, honor, fame, and wealth, and the willingness to strive for its attainment." If my wife and mom think I'm a great writer but it never goes beyond that level of distinction--sorry mom and Clara--that's simply not enough to vindicate that choice. 

That's scary to me. It just feels safer to not try anything that great. To content myself with a modest existence. To quote Seinfeld, "Not that there's anything wrong with that," but at the same time it strikes me as unsatisfactory. Maybe that's because I'm still young. Maybe it's because I've never tasted failure on a grand scale. Maybe my mostly timid nature has shielded me so far from being ambitious enough to ever be hurt by ambition.

This is a post with no grand answer or succinct and pithy conclusion. I just don't know. It is one thing I constantly weigh when I think about ambition. And the question I am left with is if this fear is a warning to be heeded or an obstacle to be ignored and hopefully overcome.

Out of the Mouth of Babes

Our third child is due in just under three weeks. It is getting very real for us at the Coffman household. We have a bigger gap between our second and third child than we did between the first and second. Our kids now are older, more put together. Potty-trained. Sleeping through the night. Slowly growing out of that subrational state of toddlerhood and infancy. Well, to hell with all that! Back to square one for us.

We've been trying to treasure these last few weeks where it's just the four of us. I want my kids to remember this as a special time of anticipation but also joy at being together. The other night we did two things we almost never do: we ordered pizza and watched a movie. Pepperoni and Cheese. Hot wings. Swiss Family Robinson. Caramel corn. Regular popcorn. It was a banner night for the Coffmans.

As we tucked in the kids after the movie I prayed and thanked God for the time that we have had as "just the four of us." Owen stopped me during my prayer. "Dad, there are already five of us. Beckett is right there in Mom's tummy." He then went over to hug his brother, such as he can, and kissed the belly cradling his life.

Apart from being touching and cute and all of that it was also remarkably wise. I wrote last week about being moved by the 9/11 Memorial and the addendum "and her unborn child" added to the remembrance of pregnant mothers who died in the attack. This was another and profound pro-life statement in my week. Even my five year old son knows that it's a baby in there, that it has always been a baby in there. His brother. My son.

Again, drop justification, philosophizing, the talking points of Planned Parenthood and NARAL and this is what you have: a five year old dropping truth bombs as the obvious statements of fact that they are. Plain enough for children; obscured only by adults.