A Come To Jesus Moment

Vanderbilt University is a chimera of North and South. Founded in 1973, just 8 years after the end of the Civil War, in Nashville, Tennessee, the founding Vanderbilt spoke of an institution where the youth of both sections of the country, North and South could intermingle and learn from each other. Until recently few children of the North took him up on his offer. But when Gordon Gee became head man of the university, he directed his admissions officers to seek out bright students from New York City, Washington, DC and Chicago, to bring a better mix of ideas and viewpoints to the campus.

What had been a frat boy/ sorority girl good ol' Southern campus slowly, but inexorably transformed into a campus where a sizable minority of students and a substantial majority of the faculty hailed from the North.

It is in this setting that a faculty member with an Ivy League education called on one of his students, who grew up in Dallas, and asked for an analysis of a knotty ethical/ philosophical problem presented by a passage the class had read.

"What would you do, in this situation? How would you discern the proper course of action, balancing these countervailing moral imperatives?"

The student replied, brightly, "Well, I would ask myself: What would Jesus do?"

Sitting next to this responder, a student from Washington, DC, pulled at the neck of his own Grateful Dead T shirt over his head and groaned, "That's it. I can't take any more."

And that is where this sort of exchange between sophisticated, urban people from the Northeast and their more earnest, if somewhat less rigorous countrymen from the bible belt often ends. Both parties are offended, neither can control emotions well enough to do much more than sputter.

But let's for a moment imagine you are the professor--how do you get the class by this moment?  On the one hand, you recognize the responding student had simply used what he thought would be a perfectly socially acceptable dodge to avoid having to face the thorny issue. So this sweet and commonplace response is really a lazy man's substitute for thought. And what's more aggravating to the Northerner is that simpering smile on the face of the bible thumper, who expects everyone to applaud his dodge as some sort of brilliant and commendable effort.

From the point of view of the bible thumper, his was an honest and earnest response, an attempt to ground his approach in a bedrock tradition and to move forward from there.

As the professor you might ask, "But how on earth would you know what Jesus would have done in this situation? Here you have a man who asks a surgeon to perform an operation to transform him into a woman, while the surgeon has good reason to believe the patient would  commit suicide once the deed is done and the patient now has to live with the result. And the surgeon has very solid basis for believing that  before, and even more after, the patient  would be a high suicide risk.  Now did Jesus ever confront a dilemma like this? Did anything he ever faced or said offer any guidance in such a situation?"

Or, you might say, "Well, what makes you think Jesus is such a moral authority that you would abandon all of your own individual capacity for drawing moral conclusions and simply say, 'Well, whatever Jesus says, I'll go with that. Ditto that for me,' Why would you abrogate your own individual capacity to decide the right and wrong by ceding the decision to someone else?"

And if he says, "Well, because I believe the source of all goodness is God, and Jesus is my Lord and so I go back to Him for all decisions when it comes to right or wrong."  Then what do you say?

But how do you know the mind of God?

And if he says, "From reading the Bible."

And if you ask where in the Bible is there a passage about transgender surgery, he responds there are parallel parables to inform you, and you ask which ones, then you at least get to the problem of trying to look to sources of authority for answers, whether it's a holy book or a Nobel Laureate or a parent or anyone other than yourself.

At least, you have had a substantive discussion about a process and a set of values.

Not to say all the pre packaged drivel comes from the right.

Look at Bernadine Dohrn and the Weathermen and the SDS. The Weathermen said they worked for a world in which U.S. imperialism was destroyed and a classless society would emerge.  As if there can ever be a classless society, with its implication people will be able to live without looking down on someone and up to someone else.

And, of course, when you think you can make a perfect world, that there is some imperative for you to try to make a perfect world, what sort of action do you wind up justifying?  For Bernadine Dohrn, it was saying the murder of the pregnant Sharon Tate by Charles Manson's clan, who stuck forks in Tate's belly, "Dig it!...Far out." For Bernadine, it meant placing a bomb at a non commissioned officers' dance and killing unsuspecting, defenseless people is a laudable act of revolution.

And that's where the revolutionaries of the 60's lose me. They were the jihadists of their time and these true believers were not much different than the guys on the airplanes who were interested in claiming their seven virgins in heaven. 


They were just coddled white kids who were just playing at life.

They were English majors, or political science majors, kids who never had to compete in those high stakes organic chemistry classes for a spot in medical school, kids who had time to sit around dorm rooms for all night bull sessions, talking  about life and the suppression of the underclass or the third world.  

They were sitting at tables, doing drugs, having group sex, which is fine, but not exactly difficult. 

Pre medical students,  and engineers did not have time for such games. 

Kids who were not in college at all, but who worked the third shift at the factories did not have time for these children of privilege who were so concerned about the pigs who suppressed the factory workers. 

The SDS and the Weatherman were doing  revolution from the top down, and since they really didn't have any skin in the game, because they could (and eventually did) go back through all those doors which their lawyers opened for them, the doors back to their townhouses or ranches or suburban sun lit lawns, they were just play, make believe revolutionaries. They were suburban housewives riding on the back of motorcycles pretending to be rebels.


I think it's the language which is the give away: Dig it? When you have undergraduates from the University of Chicago saying "Dig It, Far Out, " you have a phony. You have someone slumming, playing at her new identity.


Now, if you have people who say, you know, how different are we from those Germans, who knew millions were being killed just out of sight, when we can see people on TV every night, being killed by American soldiers and we do nothing to stop it?  But we can speak out. The issue is how much do you have to do to feel your conscience is clean?


I hated Lyndon Johnson and those he was a war criminal. But what I could I do? Set off a bomb at the capitol? If I were really convinced it was my responsibility to end the war or I would be complicit, would I have not been required to try to assassinate him?  And how effective would that have been? Did we not have an election which over turned the government? And the new government, under Nixon, widened the war and invaded Laos and Cambodia.


The reason the Germans were guilty was not that they did not succeed in overthrowing Hitler. The reason was they were shouting Zeig, Heil, and raising their arms to him and singing Hosanna! It was not that they remained silent; they were screaming, "RIght on!"

When did the Weathermen ever do anything really difficult?

How difficult is it for the bible thumper to smile beneficently and say, "Well, I would just ask what Jesus would do." 


I suppose that's my complaint. My Come to Jesus moment.  When you are in a position where you are in rebellion  because you have nowhere else to go, then you are a revolutionary; when you invoke Jesus, after you have considered all the options, then you are a true believer. 


Being real is almost always difficult. It usually means doing the hard thing. That's my rant, and I'm sticking to it.