Not Only Is God Dead, but the Really Smart People Always Knew It

Last night, I was talking with a woman in my graduate program whom I don’t know well but have found to be nothing but really bright and really sweet. She’s a Christian–I haven’t asked for deets on what flavor, although I know she’s a fan of Calvin except for the predestination part–and her undergrad institution was “basically a Bible College.” She’s now running into the same problem I ran into a few years ago, when I made a personal and academic inquiry into Catholicism (as one of many totally uncharacteristic responses to my mother’s death): to wit, if you attempt scholarly research on a religious subject and operate on any premise other than that the faithful are batshit crazy, you’re pretty much screwed.

Now, this woman and I are currently attending the largest Catholic university in the U.S., so you wouldn’t think our academic environment would be rife with anti-Christian sentiment. (Well, unless you’re the kind of “Christian” who believes Catholics aren’t.) And it’s not, relative to a lot of universities, I guess. But generally speaking, wherever two or three are gathered in the name of academe, God ain’t invited, and DePaul’s no glaring exception. My Renaissance and Enlightenment Rhetoric prof warned us on the first day of class that “When you deal with the Renaissance, you deal with the Church,” and anyone squeamish about churchy stuff was welcome to hit the road with no hard feelings. Yet she herself knows squat, for someone who teaches the period immediately following, about the even churchier middle ages, and was floored when I suggested that Augustine (quoted by Erasmus in our first reading) was probably not advising against women killing rapists solely because he was a white male protecting his own, but maybe also because even his female audience at the time would have had a sincere interest in not roasting for all eternity. You think?

And still, she’s a hell of a lot better than a prof I had at U of T, who nixed my idea to do an essay on how Donne’s conversion influenced his poetry because, I shit you not, “Catholicism and Anglicanism are so similar, I can’t imagine it made that much of a difference.” These were the words of a Renaissance scholar, y’all. Never mind that Donne’s most famous relative had allowed his head to be lopped off, parboiled, and displayed on London Bridge rather than capitulate to control-freak Proddies. Never mind that his brother died in jail waiting to find out if he was gonna be drawn and quartered for harboring a priest. Never mind that conversion meant a one-way trip to the Lake of Fire, and yeah, they actually believed that shit back then. Apostasy, schmostasy! Next question.

My inquiry did not ultimately lead me back to Catholicism in any serious way. It led me to a passionate love of fucked-up hagiographies, a blind rage toward Ratzinger even if he doesn’t directly affect me, and eventually to a shamefully predictable, white, lefty quasi-Buddhism with a mild undertone of ass-covering agnosticism. But it also led me to have deep sympathy for anyone attempting to balance faith and an academic career.

In institutions where the gravest sin is to generalize about any given population, it is perfectly acceptable to regard white Christians as irredemable fucking morons. I was tempted to write “people with a sincere religious faith” there first, but the hypocrisy actually goes deeper than that. It’s not merely that academics have no problem negatively stereotyping a group they disagree with–it’s that they have no problem stereotyping people they think should know better. Those cute little Hindus and Muslims and Latino or African-American Christians are welcome to have faith–it’s a cultural thing, you know–but white people? Come on. You’re embarrassing us! So it’s not even just that white Christian intellectuals (yeah, there’s such a thing) get marginalized–it’s that the pre-marginalized populations are still treated to the not-so-soft bigotry of naked condescension. God is dead, duh, but don’t tell the brown people! It’ll blow their minds!

And it’s not just that it’s hypocritical–I’m a hypocrite fifteen times before breakfast every day–it’s that it’s intellectually lazy. For someone to read Augustine through the lens of feminist criticism but not sincere Christian belief, for a friggin’ Renaissance lit scholar at an elite university to regard the distinction between Catholicism and Anglicanism as a Pope ‘n’ Mary quibble… on scholarly grounds alone, it’s horseshit. And it’s double horseshit, in an environment where one of the most horrifying failures of intellectual rigor is to dismiss any group of people as categorically wrongheaded, to assume that people making a genuine effort to participate in a two-thousand-year-old tradition are idiots.

I don’t know if the Christian woman in my grad program is someone I’d want to get trashed and watch South Park with, but I know she’s damn well smart, and that her critical thinking skills are not hindered by her personal beliefs. Bummer that’s not true of half her profs.

Having said all that, Christians don’t make it easy sometimes.

Meanwhile, a consortium of American evangelical groups is still negotiating with Israel to build a Christian theme park and visitor center on the shores of the Sea of Galilee.

Jesus H., people. Work with me here.