“This is Not Normal” March 24, 2024 Dr. Roger Ray
Jimmy Carter was still in the White House when I started grad school at Vanderbilt. I chose Vanderbilt because it was the most liberal school I had access to in the south and I thought of myself as a liberal, although, I was not prepared at the tender young age of 24 for just what it meant to be “woke” forty years before people started talking about being “woke” as either a good or a bad thing.
At orientation, we entering students in 1980 were rigorously indoctrinated into gender inclusive language. It was a brand new concept to most of us and it was controversial on two fronts. We had all used the pronoun “he” to reference either a man or a woman in any non-specific sentence. It was correct grammar at the time to say something like, “The next voter in line must present his ID.” Now, we were told, we must say it, “The next voter in line must present his or her ID.” It seemed to be unnecessarily cumbersome and there was no small amount of grumbling about it but the other issue was considerably more powerful.
We were, after all, grad students in theology, we were ministry students, future biblical scholars, and the Bible clearly referenced God as “Father,” and Jesus, who, in our minds, could hardly have been wrong, called God “Father.” We, however, were no longer to call God “Father,” and if we did in any assignment, the paper would be returned for correction and if left uncorrected, the paper would be given an “F.” That struck us as being arbitrary and heavy handed.
Vanderbilt, as a liberal school, even in 1980, accepted women and men, gay and straight, and all races of students. We had believers and atheists, biblical literalists, Catholics, and Unitarians. In fact, we were free to believe anything we wanted to believe, there was just one thing, there could be no references made to God using male centered language. So, we invented pronouns; rather than “Himself” we would write “Godself.” And we stumbled and fumbled around with how to relearn how to speak our native tongue until, after a few years, it would have been jarring to hear someone reference God with male language.
The point of the Divinity School faculty was that words do more than just communicate. Words, in fact, create categories in our minds. Words don’t just convey what we are thinking, they can help to shape what we are thinking. In 1980, women were allowed to go to seminary in most mainstream denominations. They could apply for ordination, but, sadly, they almost never got hired. Or if they did get a church job, it was to be in charge of Sunday School, children’s ministries, or to be a women’s minister or chaplain. It was rare, very rare, for a congregation to accept a woman as a preacher.
Of course, tradition formed most of that barrier but at least a part of it had to do with language. Religion was a male bastion and laws that made gender discrimination illegal in the workplace did not and could not, and still do not, apply to churches. Churches can legally discriminate all day long because of the separation of church and state.
So, with insight that was initially difficult for me to believe, changing the language eventually began to change the prejudices that made churches think that religious leadership always had to come from a man. When I started in ministry, only about 2% of American preachers were women. 30 years later, nearly one/third of preachers were women. I suspect that the current statistic would be a lot higher, especially if you factored out the Catholic Church, which, in most matters that require thoughtful reflection, I always do dismiss the Catholic Church.
We are often asked to take care about matters of language, especially as it pertains to race. We call people from Asian countries “Asian,” even though it was common a couple of generations ago to just as easily call them “Oriental.” Initially, there was no insult intended by calling someone from what was called “the Orient” “Oriental.” But it came to imply an object more than it did a person. A tea set might by oriental, a rug can be oriental, but my Korean daughter is an Asian.
The “N” word that no decent person would now use was not especially insulting when Mark Twain used it in his novels. The word “Colored” was in common usage when I was a child and it is still enshrined in the NAACP which is, as we know, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. There have been members clamoring for a name change for 50 years but the title has stuck, just as the word “Negro” is still a part of the United Negro College Fund though it would be a rather insensitive person who would use common speech today.
As Blacks in America have continued to suffer from racial discrimination, people who are trying to advance civil rights are regularly trying to massage our terminology to affirm the full humanity of black citizens in this country. And, I would say, albeit cautiously, that there has been considerable progress, even though it isn’t time to pull out George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” banner.
The trans community has been asking us all to adapt our use of pronouns to be more inclusive of those who do not want to be tied to either gender. Many registration forms now ask us to include with our name and address, our preferred pronouns, “he, or him,” “she, or her,” or “they, or them” using they and them as a singular pronoun…. Which is as awkward to me as avoiding calling God “Father” was in 1980 but I am determined to get the hang of it because I want violence and discrimination against trans people to stop and I know from experience that changing the way we talk can change the way we think.
The grammar change can seem trivial, but the desired outcome is a crucial issue. What is common language can become the barbed wire fence of the status quo. When a concept gets rooted in acceptable language norms, then the idea, itself, can be difficult to uproot.
Those of us who dream of a more just world, a friendlier, more loving, more safe world, often find ourselves being gatekeepers on dangerous ideas that are trying to edge their way into normal ways of speaking and thinking. Look at how the anti-vaxers during the pandemic managed to normalize and anti-science mentality so that people who made C’s and D’s in high school biology could assert that they knew more about virology than Dr. Anthony Fauci.
In fact, the governor of my newly adopted state used Dr. Fauci’s name in place of the more common “F” word vowing that the government wouldn’t get to “Faci Florida.” And, thanks to Gov. DeSantis’ anti-science policies, Florida had one of the highest death rates from Covid-19. . . a fact that the anti-vax crowd likes to call, “fake news,” because they still think that math is a matter of opinion.
And now independent presidential candidate, Robert Kennedy, Jr. is leaning towards an anti-vax running mate, and if he chooses the New York Jets running back, Aaron Rodgers, he gets both anti-vaxer and someone who claims that the Sandy Hook School shooting was a hoax.
A conspiracy theory that you might of thought would have lost popularity after the talk show host, Alex Jones, was ordered to pay nearly a billion dollars to victims’ families by a Connecticut court. If Aaron Rodgers has any friends, I hope that they can talk him off the ledge before he loses whatever he has left from his pro football earnings.
Maybe I should be more worried about RFK and Aaron Rodgers but they seem to be enough out on the fringe to be a minor concern but what has really been chewing on me was an election that was reported on “Super Tuesday.” Not the Trump or Biden votes which were entirely predictable but rather the election in North Carolina for a gubernatorial candidate.
North Carolina, voters will elect a new governor this fall and the candidate who won the GOP battle on March 5th was their current Lt. Governor, Mark Robinson.
Four years ago, Robinson prevailed in a field of eight candidates to become the first black Lt. Governor in the state’s history and now he is poised to become the first black governor of the state.
But Robinson’s nomination is no cause for celebration. This is not an instance of progress in racial diversity. Robinson is a fascist who claims that the Nazis were “not that bad,” that the accounts of the holocaust are just “hogwash,” and he is radically opposed to gay and lesbian rights, abortion rights, and, well . . . this is a frightening man whom Donald Trump has described as being “Martin Luther King on steroids.” Of course, Donald Trump is, and I must beg your forgiveness for using technical psychological terminology here, but Trump is a racist moron who can only see that Robinson is black and would have no way of understanding that Robinson is the opposite of everything that King was.
I have spoken in churches in North Carolina. I have vacationed in North Carolina. I believe that some of the most beautiful places on earth are in North Carolina, but, folks, North Carolina has become fertile soil for some of the most dangerously crazy ideas in America. Robinson won the GOP nomination by a margin of 43 points, a landslide. Even though he does not believe that women should be allowed to have an abortion, or, for that matter, he doesn’t think that women should be allowed to vote. He has threatened to use his AK-47 against the government. He also believes that Sandy Hook was a hoax, that 9/11 was an inside job, and that the music industry is run by Satan.
North Carolina has tended to be a purple state, passing the office of governor back and forth between the parties. If Robinson is elected, he will be the state’s first black governor. However, this holocaust denier is running against democrat, Josh Stein, who, if elected, will be the state’s first Jewish governor. You would think that this wouldn’t be a tough choice for North Carolina, but current polls indicate that the two are in a dead heat. Which means that for nearly half of the citizens of North Carolina, ideas such as antisemitism, misogyny, homophobia, and even disrespect for families with children slain in the nation’s worst school shooting, are now part of the acceptable status quo and that, I submit, is horrifying.
Please, listeners in North Carolina, get me booked into your churches as a guest speaker as soon as possible. I would like to say in your pulpit what your permanent pastor may not want to have to say. These sick ideas did not become part of mainstream language in North Carolina or in other conservative pockets in America over night. They slip into office chatter, into conversations at church pot-lucks, and between pickleball matches at the senior center. And what is worse, most of Robinson supporters are under 50. How have younger voters become so vulnerable to the most insane and idiotic conspiracy theories?
Somehow, this violent, prejudiced world view crept into the language until it became sufficiently normative that now, the next governor of North Carolina may be even more dangerously sociopathic than the GOP’s nomination for president in this fall’s election and that, men and women, is a mouthful.
You can’t see it in the video but the caption on this banner behind me, the banner we had made for our church when we started in 2008 is a quote from Elie Wiesel. It says, “Thou shalt not stand idly by.” Wiesel said that the holocaust would never have happened if only the people of that time had not stood back, even in horror, but they stood back and allowed it to happen.
Now, in 2024, racism, antisemitism, anti-women’s rights, anti-gay rights, and anti-science thinking is threatening the western world, it is threatening liberal democracy, it is threatening all of us with a world we do not want to live in. You cannot stand idly by in this time of crisis. Speak up. Get involved. And please share this video with your crazy uncle who needs to know where you stand before those family cookouts start up this summer because it is going to be a long, hot, election year!
