In fact, if we take into account the fact that the response to my editorial on Jesse Jackson was never printed (see previous post), the only written response I ever got to anything was to my crossroads piece on abortion. All the articles I wrote, and the only time someone ever got offended strongly enough to write in was the article on abortion.
With that track record you’d think I’d be pretty satisfied, but I was pretty upset to see Nick’s letter questioning my figures on abortion rates.
Everyone knows that in any political debate that goes on there are a lot of statistical games. We played into that a bit at Crossroads. I would spend a couple hours researching on the Internet, and I would pull out all the facts and statistics that supported my side, and leave out everything else. Giessel would do the same thing on his side.
Now if my piece on abortion had run unopposed as an editorial, I could understand why someone would get upset. But it ran as a Crossroads piece. It wasn’t as if the other side was not represented. If you didn’t like my numbers, you could go across the page and look at Giessel’s figures.
Okay, so we were playing number games with an issue that was important to a lot of people, and I shouldn’t have been surprised that someone took issue with this. But instead of attempting to return to reason, and quoting some mainstream numbers, Nick takes issue with only my figures, and then returns with more right wing numbers quoted from a blatantly biased source. To me this was in effect saying, “I don’t even want to hear the other side of this debate. How dare you quote numbers that don’t come from a pro-life advocacy group.”
Ironically enough, the figures that Nick took issue with were not cited from a far left organization, but came from a pamphlet put together by a Calvin professor. My girlfriend had attended a lecture by this professor, and I had obtained the pamphlet through her. Although I did cite only the numbers that supported my argument, and left out all the other numbers, the source itself could not be more credible.
I guess I could have avoided all this if I would have cited my source the first time. But we were all, Giessel’s side as well as ours, lazy about citing sources at Crossroad. (This would of course get us into trouble again later with the Rehnquist piece.)
I dashed out an angry response to Nick’s letter, saying that I had gotten all the figures from a handout from a Calvin professor, and I said I hope Nick would be more careful with his statistics in the future. I handed it into Baxter at Chimes, and carried a copy of that response with me for the rest of the day. Whenever someone would say, “Hey Joel, you took a bit of a hit in the Chimes today, didn’t you?”, I would simply pull out my response and show it.
(Copy of that original letter here):
Any one who carefully read the Crossroads piece on Abortion two weeks ago could not help but notice a large disparity between the statistics I quoted and the statistics Giessel used. Nick Filippini could have taken this as a lesson in how slippery statistics can sometimes be and how one should be cautious before basing one’s arguments off of statistics. This was the lesson I, at least, derived from the experience.
Instead, Filippini goes on to call my statistics “ridiculous” and then proceeds to repudiate them using an overtly biased source, the strongly pro-life “America’s Crisis Pregnancy Hotline.”
I do concede, however, that Filippini is right when he faults me for not citing where I got my statistics. Both statistics he calls into question were obtained from “Reader #8. Abortion or Terminating Pregnancies.” This is a packet for Christians and it explores the question of abortion. It was produced by Hessel Bouma III, currently on Calvin College faculty and ethics adviser to Spectrum Health.
I hope that Mr. Filippini will be a little more cautious next time in his use of statistics.
Joel Swagman
My girlfriend did something I would never have thought to do, which was to e-mail the professor in question and make sure he was okay with my referencing him. The professor responded that he had read my article, but had not recognized any of my figures and did not want to be referenced in connection with them. I responded by sending an e-mail to him which outlined which of his statistics I had used, how I had used them, and what Nick’s response had been. The professor invited me to meet with him to discuss this.
The professor compared the statistics. “I said in my handout that the number of illegal abortions prior to 1973 was between 200,000 and 1.2 million annually,” he said, looking over his materials. “You wrote in your article that ‘some estimate that illegal abortion was as high as 1.2 million’, and you ignored the lower number. Now that’s perfectly legitimate to do when you are writing an opinion piece, but then you have to realize that you opened the door for him to come in with these other statistics from the other side. Of course these numbers he’s quoting are ridiculously low. His source seems to be highly partisan. But if you had quoted the whole range of numbers at the beginning, you might have avoided this.”
The professor gave me permission to cite him by name, although he expressed the concern I’d end up dragging him into the argument as well. (Although in the end this proved to be an unfulfilled fear.) He also advised me to be as polite as I possibly could, so I edited down my angry letter and tried to make it more conciliatory. Reading it now, I may have gone too far because it almost sounds sarcastically sweet, but that wasn’t my intention.
Since no one responded further, that was the end of the abortion debate, but that was not the end of my conflicts with Nick. Some time later I was having dinner with my family and my brother, a high school junior at the time, was complaining to me about his Sunday school class. “Some student from Calvin has been teaching our Sunday School class,” my brother said. “His name is Nick. Maybe you know him?”
“Yeah, I know him. Well actually I don’t know him, know him, but I know who he is. He attacked one of my articles in the Chimes.”
“Anyway,” said my brother, “the class is really awful. The whole theme for the past few weeks has been how evil homosexuality is. He’s been saying that our culture has become too tolerant of homosexuality, and we need to recognize how evil it is. He said that homosexuality is the worst sin ever, and that God hates homosexuals.”
Now, I love my brother, but I should probably have known him well enough to keep in mind the possibility that he might have been exaggerating things a little bit. However, after having already crossed swords once with Nick in the pages of Chimes, I was eager to believe he was an extremist Right wing ass-hole, and that everything my brother said about him was true. I assured my brother I would talk to Nick and straighten things out.
The problem was I had never met Nick. However I looked his picture up in the Student Body book, and then tried to pick him out in the student cafeteria during lunch. The first couple days I didn’t have any luck, but then one day I realized he was sitting right behind me. I excused myself from my friends and sat at Nick’s table. Although we had never met, I knew who he was, and he knew who I was.
“Nick, right?”
“Yes. Joel?”
“I understand you’re teaching a Sunday school class in the Church I grew up in.”
“Yes, you’re brothers in my class actually.”
“Yes, I’ve been talking to my brother, and I’m worried that you might be being misinterpreted by your students.” I was trying to be diplomatic. I repeated what my brother had said, and then finished by saying, “now I’m sure you’re not actually saying these things, but I’m concerned that he’s gotten that impression.”
Nick’s eyes were wide with horror. “No, that’s not what I’ve been teaching at all,” he said. “In fact that’s the exact opposite of what I’ve been teaching.” Nick explained to me that he believed the debate on homosexuality was being dominated by the extremists. He wanted to teach the Sunday school class to avoid both the acceptance of homosexuality advocated by the liberal culture, and the hatred of homosexuality advocated by people like Fred Phelps. (Reverend Fred Phelps is perhaps most famous for holding up a “God hates fags” sign at the funeral of Matthew Shepard.) Rather, Nick wanted to teach the class to love homosexuals as people even while condemning the lifestyle as a sin.
Perhaps I should have been satisfied by this response, but I pressed further. “Of course, there is some debate in the church these days,” I said. “Many people don’t think homosexuality should be regarded as a sin anymore. Don’t you think you should present that side to the class as well?” Nick replied that anyone who read the Bible carefully could come to no other conclusion than the sinfulness of homosexuality. “But that’s just your opinion,” I said. “There are other Christians who don’t believe the same as you. Shouldn’t you at least present the other side of the argument to the class?” Nick replied that he didn’t think any true debate existed in the church. We argued this for a bit, I essentially just rephrased my question in different ways, and he repeatedly gave me the same answer. After a while I gave up, thanked him for talking to me, and then left.
I was so focused on correcting the wrongs that perhaps I never gave Nick enough credit as to where he was right. My own conservative up bringing had tacitly encouraged hatred of homosexuals. My teachers and youth pastors never said to me, “You should go hate gay people,” but we were always being pushed in one direction only. My Christian Schoolteachers constantly complained about homosexuality gaining popular acceptance, but no one ever cautioned us against the excessive of the conservative movement. Add to this the natural human tendency to hate anyone who is different, and the tendency of youth to be drawn to the extremes, and it is unsurprising that so many of us grew up hating gays. In high school I participated in a debate in a “Current Events Discussion Class” in which I argued the position that homosexuals should be banned from the military. As we left the class, some of my classmates talked about how they would kill any homosexuals they met, and I felt a certain thrill in the solidarity that we all hated the same people, and that it was okay to hate gays because homosexuality was a sin. I wish I would have had a Sunday school teacher like Nick who wasn’t afraid to draw the line on either side.
But ultimately I believed he was wrong. All of the hate speech that is coming out of the Right is sheltered by the Church’s refusal to accept homosexuality. As long as the church preaches that homosexuality is a sin, it will inspire zealots to hate crimes and violence against homosexuals. It will encourage the religious right to try and impose their narrow idea of morality on the whole nation, and the ongoing attempt to combat homosexuality by legislation.
Also I didn’t view Sunday school as the appropriate forum for these ideas. Having grown up in this church myself, I was not particularly surprised by these classes, but perhaps my familiarity with it increased my anger. In my view, church should be a place where you learn how to try and be a better person. You should learn things like giving money to the poor, or turning the other cheek, or teachings of the bible that you can apply to your life. Church, and Sunday school, should not be places where we train the next generation of culture warriors to fight against the liberals and their message of tolerance. The majority of the Sunday school class was no doubt personally unaffected by the condemnations of homosexuality, and if there were any homosexuals in the class, they must certainly have felt awful about the whole topic.
Finally I was upset because this seemed like a continuation of the Church’s obsession with sex, which I remembered so well from my own middle school and high school days. The church seemed so intent on condemning sexual behavior. Almost every week at Sunday school, or every chapel at my Christian school, would deal with sexual topics. To the church, sex was the ultimate sin. And war was never condemned. War was okay, even honorable for Christians to fight in. I never heard any condemnations from my church of the wars that took place during my lifetime. Growing up, I heard condemnations of pre-marital sex several times a week. And preaching against homosexuality fit very nicely into their pattern.
Having somewhat worked myself up a bit, I sent an angry e-mail to the pastor and youth pastor of my church. E-mail is a dangerous thing, because you can get yourself to write angry things that you would never say in person. And with a click of a button, the e-mail is sent, and any thoughts about re-writing or editing come too late.
Among other ramblings, I said that they now had a responsibility to present the other side of the homosexuality debate to the Sunday school class. I also said they should be careful, because once the students realize they have been lied to, they will never trust them again.
My pastor replied, saying he and the youth pastor would like to take me out to lunch to discuss the issue. I was immediately shamed by the kind way they responded to my angry e-mail. We set a place to meet for lunch, and they discussed the issue with great kindness and patience with me.
Perhaps my experience is not so unique. Anyone who grows up in a conservative environment, and then, when growing up finds themselves struggling against many of the ideas, inevitably finds themselves in a conflict between the ideas they’ve grown to resent so much, and the people who have treated them with so much love and kindness.
Two Christmases ago I experienced the same feelings. I returned from Japan with some of my students, my students were eager to meet Americans their own age. I brought them to the High School Sunday school, and was very touched by the outpouring of hospitality my church gave to my students and me. At the same time, as I sat in on the high school Sunday school class, I found myself strongly disagreeing with everything that was being said.
The Youth pastor was doing a class on comparative religions, which, of course, in a conservative Christian environment is always code for, “let me tell you how wrong the other religions are.” We were talking about Hinduism, and the youth pastor brought up the point about the caste system in India. “Of course the caste system isn’t officially part of Hinduism,” he said, “But if Hinduism was genuinely a religion based on love, then how could such an awful caste system develop in a Hindu country?”
I was very tempted to raise my hand and point out that the holocaust and slave trade had happened in historically Christian countries, but I reminded myself that I was a guest in this class, and that they were doing a huge favor to me by accepting my Japanese students into their class. Although at the end of class, I did feel the need to apologize to my students because their religion of Buddhism was also condemned in harsh terms. Struggling with my limited Japanese so that I would not be understood by the people around me, I managed to tell them not to worry about anything that was said, just regard the whole thing as an interesting cross cultural experience.
But I digress. Back to the lunch.
After some preliminary discussion, my pastor and youth pastor informed me that the church’s official position was that homosexuality was a sin. I debated this with them for a little bit, but nothing was resolved. I was trying to avoid my excesses of earlier, so most of the objections I raised were very timid, and I don’t think I did a good job of articulating myself. Not that it would have mattered anyway. They were standing by the church’s position, and that was that.
In the end we all parted on good terms, respecting each other’s differences. I can’t say I ever became good friends with Nick, but we were on somewhat friendly terms after this. As with Giessel and Waddilove, it’s weird how arguing with someone can make you become friends with them. (I think Matt Lind could comment on this as well).
Reflecting back on the whole incident I find, as with many of things I did in this period of my life, that I could have handled things a whole lot better, but I’m proud I took the stand that I did. At Calvin I knew few homosexuals, but since I’ve gone into the larger world and met and befriended many homosexual people, I’ve always been extremely proud of this incident, even if I handled it with all the tact of an angry child.
But before I pat myself on the back too hard, I should mention that half a year later I was doing my student teaching at an extremely conservative Christian high school, much more conservative than even the one I grew up in. While I was there I heard a lot of “Fred Phelps” style hate talk against homosexuals, but I didn’t speak up because I didn’t think it was my place as a student teaching. I was more concerned with getting through my student teaching than I was about standing up for what I knew was right.
I am pretty sure Nick, who I gave such a rough time for not being as progressive on the issue as I was, would have at least stood up for his beliefs and spoke out against the hate talk if he had been there.
Joel--thanks for the shoutout! Pluralism is hard, well said, my brother.
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