The recent controversy over Noah Riner's convocation speech has inspired many Dartmouth students to raise their guard and insist that a speech defending absolute truth and encouraging a change of beliefs is inappropriate.
Although we claim openness, we are actually deeply committed to a particular view of reality, which we affirm in others who share it and oppose in those who do not.
William Willimon, the chaplain of Duke University, recently spoke to a group of Canadians who questioned his conviction that Christians should attempt to convert unbelievers to Christianity. He writes, "The assumption is that you've got these innocent, untainted North Americans wandering around, then you've got these pushy, arm-twisting Christians who want to corral everybody, converting them into our narrow, culturally bound point of view."
But, he explains, this assumption is wrong. Everybody stands somewhere and has been "baptized" into some culture. It may be a culture that we celebrate and inculcate around 11:00 am on Sundays, or it may be the more officially sanctioned culture of consumerism or the culture of the modern nation state, but be well assured that everyone has been "converted" into something. In the words of Bob Dylan, "everybody serves somebody."
The issue is not, "will I be converted into a culture?" but rather, "which pushy, arm-twisting culture will have its way with my life?" In short, you can't divide the world into two groups of people: those who adhere to an ultimate set of acquired beliefs and those who don't. We all do.
Willimon continues, "I told my Canadian friends, 'I don't know why we should abandon everybody in Nova Scotia to the clutches of late twentieth century North American capitalism. Why must Jesus defer to that? Let's go ahead, put our stuff on the table, argue, demonstrate that Jesus really has the capacity to make human beings more interesting than The Spice Girls and see who's left standing at the end.'"
In spite of its claims to tolerance on campus, he explains, "everybody's in the proselytizing business. It's all conversion, baptism, persuasion, enlightenment (to use some of our words) and why should Christians and Muslims be excluded from the transformative fun?"
Hence, all of us have belief systems, (and a belief in the wrongness of trying to convert others is one of them) and we frequently try to change our peers' minds.
And this is as it should be at a liberal arts college: a free exchange of ideas and a level playing field for all. Yet, as Noah's speech has demonstrated, this ideal is seldom realized.
A brilliant piece in the "New York Times Magazine" last week further addresses our postmodern dilemma. Author Mark Lilla, a religious skeptic, describes his recent response to a friend investigating questions of faith. He writes, "I felt a professional lecture welling up in my throat. I wanted to warn him against the anti-intellectualism of American religion today and the political abuses to which it is subject. I wanted to cast doubt on the step he was about to take, to help him see there are other ways to live, other ways to seek knowledge, love, perhaps even self-transformation. I wanted. . .to save him."
He continues, "The curious thing about skepticism is that its adherents, ancient and modern, have so often been proselytizers. In reading them, I've often wanted to ask, 'Why do you care?' Their skepticism offers no good answer to that question. And I don't have one for myself."
Deep within Lilla's religious skepticism and fashionable denial of the absolute lies a contradiction. Only after much questioning does he realize that in spite of his apparent openness, Lilla, like the religious absolutists whose views he disdains, frequently and passionately tries to convert others. In spite of his relativistic refutation of absolute truth, which would suggest that conversion would be unnecessary at best and dangerous at worst, he does so anyway.
Lilla and others of like ilk would be wont to dismiss people of faith precisely because they rest some of their claims on scientifically improvable premises. We are, in the secular humanist's words, people of faith and not reason. In the continuation of human progress lies science, not religion. Humanists preach that our salvation lies within our collective minds, not in Jesus.
Of course, Christians are perfectly comfortable with hearing such statements expressed and are quite accustomed to it. In fact, were next year's convocation speaker to express the humanist's sentiments, there would be nary an outcry. "The Dartmouth" would not receive any letters to the editor from angry Christians offended at the closed-mindedness of humanists. Christian comic artists would not draw cartoons mocking Nietzsche and Darwin.
Christians and others of faith are not asking the campus to agree with our viewpoints or even to tolerate them--but we humbly ask that there not be an inquisition-style uproar every time someone mentions the name Jesus in a public setting, as was common practice during most of Dartmouth's history.
An atmosphere of openness ostensibly but superficially enshrouds Dartmouth. When voices like Riner's arise, we as a campus are outraged. We have no idea how to deal with contrasting beliefs, such as Christian faith, with respect and tranquility. We try to suppress the beliefs of others, yet, hypocritically, do so in the name of tolerance.
Let's be honest about our objectives. Those who believe Riner had no right to deliver such a speech are attempting an ideological power play at the same moment that they accuse him of doing so.