I recently heard a big name in Evangelicalism say that public education, colleges, and universities are “the modern Babylon” because “that’s what Babylon was known for, their schools and educational system.” They lambasted the role of diversity, equity and inclusion. They railed against tolerance of that old chestnut, “the liberal agenda!” All of the greatest hits from political pundits like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham were present, targeted against “the evils of Babylon” in the American educational system and those of Sweden, Europe, and “other ungodly countries.”
When I heard all of this, I laughed. I always do. The caricature of Babylon from Evangelical pulpits and podcasts is a funhouse mirror, a warped reality that only makes one queasy and sick if it is viewed for too long. “Sermons” like the one I listened to, like the ones that continue to sell ad space on the Fox News Network, the ironic requests for money and support from the most self-righteous are an assault to the system really, but some things are so ridiculous that they still shock you to the point of laughter.
I’ve noticed that sometimes I will laugh an inappropriate times. A therapist once told me that this made sense to her; people immediately swear and cuss when something bad happens or they are offended. It is a way to respond to an extreme circumstance, a liminal space between fight and flight where you’re not sure which response is most appropriate. You take a deep breath to enlarge your chest and, in a fraction of a second, either begin attacking or releasing it with laughter. The body is trying to release endorphins to regain control of the nervous system, to stabilize, to reduce pain, to process the shock. You laugh because, in that moment, you know something has gone wrong and you feel tremendous pain but are not able to fully process it yet. So you laugh.
When my father had a heart attack, I laughed. Does that seem strange? When I was told what had happened to him, I was torn between worlds. I felt like a little kid. I felt like a grown man. I felt it was inevitable. I felt anything and everything must be done to set him right and get him healthy. But I also felt anger. And sadness. I felt like I was about to lose someone who had hurt me and loved me, who I had hurt and who I had loved, and like we were about to lose the possibility of setting things right between us and apologizing. I felt helpless. So I laughed.
I’ve written elsewhere about the day my brother was diagnosed with Autism, how I laughed for reasons I am still trying to understand. The shock is still trapped somewhere in my body, two and a half decades later, mingled with sadness and still excruciating pain that has only been compounded with time. I often smile at my brother not because I am a simpleton, but because I hold the tension of those memories within my own body. I smile when I should cry because I am still tender and sensitive about him. I am still tender because of that day, recalling where I was standing and the play of the light through the windows and the color of the doctor who gave this diagnosis to my mother and I, seated in faux leather chairs. I still hold all of these memories in my mind, cornered like a feral cat trying to protect his brother from further harm. But whenever I look at him or when someone brings up the topic of Autism with me, I smile a tight smile and try to keep all of those feelings and memories securely boxed away in the corner of my mind. I do not attack. If pressed, I will laugh.
I’ve been thinking over the last few weeks about that minister. How popular they and their family are in my home state. The impact they have had across the last seven decades on radio, television, and the internet. The albums they have sold. The camp meetings and conferences they have held on their ministry campus. The number of people they have influenced and impacted, the cadence of their voices singing and speaking and repeating similar messages long before “political pundits” took over talk radio.
Their ministry has a grade school attached to it, K-12. As a college instructor, I’ve met students from their school. I’ve handed them exams as they have applied to college and for scholarships, picked up their exams, graded them, greeted many of them in my own college classrooms and passed even more in the hallways without ever knowing it. The ones I know, to their credit, have consistently been some of my brightest students. They have also been some of the most wounded. The ministry that once funded the school is now, to a great extent, funded by the school. A few years ago, they began to rebuild and reinvest in their Bible College, which had almost become a major seminary in Baton Rouge. Recently, the Bible College began pursuing accreditation to become an institution of learning not exactly on the same level as LSU but certainly aspiring to become a tributary to them. The founding minister’s grandson is very publicly and diligently making efforts for the schools, K-12 and the seminary, to become known for their “academic excellence.” And, as I just admitted, their students test well and are bright inside my classrooms. I would love to see this come about.
Which is why in light of all of this, their comment about education and “modern Babylon” is so remarkable and strange, so laughable. And sad. It is, for me, a missed opportunity to rise to the occasion, to do what is right, to encourage rather than threaten. It was instead a moment of shame and twisting, a perversion of important things like education and experience, life and the choices people make. I laughed because there I was, a grown man, once more being accused of something wildly inappropriate. I teach for a university myself. Am I part of Babylon? Am I also complicit in evil, as this minister was saying? I laughed but then I got angry.
I remembered that I had heard something like this when I was in college. And again in graduate school for my first Master’s degree. And then again when I chose to go to seminary, of all places.
“Babylon” in the Evangelical mind is any place – even a seminary like the one I attended – where I was no longer restrained by intuited rules about right and wrong. When I was in my twenties, I felt guilty for a while getting an education. I was so eager to be a good person, to do what was “right” and “good.” In many ways, I am still that person, just more private about it. Yesterday, when my wife and I got into an argument, she began to cry and she said that I had hurt her feelings. Whatever sense of pride and right-ness I felt thirty seconds earlier began to collapse. I am still, privately now, the same person who prayed diligently (for decades) a reversed version of the prayer of Jabez in 1 Chronicles. Jabez prayed that he would be kept from harm and not experience pain, but since my twenties, I have prayed that I would not cause harm to or pain for others around me.
Pain exists. It is unavoidable. This is the First Noble Truth of Buddhism. But I have never wanted to be someone who causes pain to others, to be the source of their pain. Which is why, I suppose, it has been so confusing that sharpest and most enduring source of pain for me has always been Evangelicalism. Even when I tried do good, I was “evil.” When I tried to help others, I was mocked and ridiculed as “some kind of social justice warrior? Jesus never called us to that!” When tried to educate, I was part of “Babylon” and “worshipping Satan,” True story, that.
The well-intentioned people who claimed that they wanted to save my soul were the same ones whose words, actions, and behaviors insisted on damning me and the people I loved for believing that what God was doing in the world was still good even in the midst of pain. I learned to pray things in reverse as a result, to change Jabez’s prayer of self-protection to instead protect others. To see things differently. To go in the opposite direction any time I saw crowds with pitchforks and torches assembling.
In 1999, I began college. I had just turned seventeen. The year before, I got my GED or General Equivalency Diploma. Before that, I attended a Christian school where the principal wrote a Letter of Recommendation for me to a state-run advanced education program. She wrote that I would “never amount to anything” since I was “a child of divorce.” When my mother read this, she was livid. Absolutely livid. Eyes wide, teeth bared, and ready to eviscerate anyone who got between her and the principal until I convinced her it didn’t matter anyway. “These people,” I told her, “don’t know any better. You can’t hold it against them when they act like this.”
I was thirteen, sitting in my mother’s Mercury Capri, explaining that her anger was valid but we shouldn’t hold ignorance or malice against people who simply didn’t know better. “This is who they are,” I said. It was prophetic. At the time, I thought it was this particular church and school. Little did I know what the next decade would bring expose underneath the veneer of kindness and Christianity. My teacher Tanya Raines, had laughed when another student pulled my pants down that year, when he roped my ankles, and humiliated me by demanding I moo like a cow. My class laughed at me when I said Dr. Seuss’ “The Lorax” was about environmentalism. I was told I was stupid regularly, despite getting the highest grades in my class. This was who they were, I told my mother. “They don’t know any better.”
For the next few years, I “attended” home school by reading my mother’s college textbooks, and teaching myself to sketch and use watercolors. I went to local plays and concerts. I read ceaselessly. And when I was allowed to sit for the GED, I did. I applied to college and got in a year earlier than I would have had I continued to attend public school. For those years in between, I knew that getting an education was important to me and that it would be the only way for me to dig myself out of poverty and the traumas, plural, of my childhood.
In college, I did what many young people in a post-9/11 America did. I joined a church. Two years later, I joined the staff. I built a radio and television ministry division for them. I helped raise funds when they wanted to build a school, even as I kept going to college because it was important to me. I did this because, I have come to realize, I never fully trusted the Church. They were too quick to condemn “those people” – “over there” and even here, down the street. They condemned one another. They condemned their own. They never stopped praying terrible, inhumane things in the name of God. Whatever my future would become, I knew I could never trust the Church. I felt safer within public institutions of education, because they are not at all like my religious education. Public education was accepting and affirming and welcoming of discussion. In a Philosophy class, I told my instructor he didn’t know what he was talking about and instead of condemning me to Hell, he welcomed me to share my own views. Yet, even then, successful and diligent and leading Bible studies and occasionally preaching, despite all my commitment to the church, the other staff members and the majority of the congregation let it be known loudly and publicly that I was doing “an evil thing” by “submitting” myself to “these ancient gods of Babylon” as I attended the local university.
The church, at that time, was part of the Assemblies of God denomination. The “AoG” has always allowed diversity of opinion and interpretation. In South America, for example, churches have a stronger emphasis on social justice whereas in North America, personal spiritual experience is emphasized. One church might hold to a limited view of atonement, that Jesus’ death secured salvation but only for certain people (ex: those who speak in tongues) while another just down the street might have a more open and expanded view (ex: speaking in tongues is not a prerequisite for salvation and, more than that, God wants to save everyone including gay people). For my church, this meant welcoming visiting ministers who called themselves “prophets.” Those familiar with Pentecostalism or Pentecostal-adjacent religious experiences like those that occur in Assemblies of God churches know what this means. For someone like my wife, who grew up on the Mainline of Pennsylvania attending the Presbyterian churches where her mother pastored, people like this would have been seen with pity as experiencing delusions and hallucinations. For my church, it meant an annual visit from Bill Norton, a self-proclaimed “prophet to the nations.” On one occasion, Norton claimed – quite publicly – that God had revealed to him that I would be “gifted” and “favored with the power of the Babylonians.” I knew what he meant instantly, and I think this is the moment when many of my fellow congregants began to view me with suspicion. Similar language had already been used to denounce me and the “so-called wisdom” of the “Babylonians” I continued to imbibe at the university.
I wish I could say that this experience unlocked something for me or even that I shared the gift of insight into the ways of God. None of what he said that night was “revealed” to me, you understand. If I ever become a “prophet to the nations” it will not be the kind of prophet that Norton claimed to be and these many years later, I’m not sure what it means to be “favored with the power of the Babylonians” even though I work for a Modern Babylon, a state university that is the sister school of the one I attended. Instead, Norton’s “declaration” left me confused and a little ashamed. In the weeks and months that followed, church members regularly brought it up. I was “called to be a spy in the enemy’s camp” they insisted. God had revealed it to them in a dream. I was encouraged to “be separate and apart from their [the university’s] wicked ways” and not “fall prey to the wiles of the Devil.” I was shunned, uninvited from events. Sidelined. Looked down on. After all, I was already “one of them”, wasn’t it?
The final straw for me was in 2006. The pastor, who would soon admit repeated “moral failures” to the staff of the church, asked me to research something for him. I built a ten-page report, compiling different views for him to consider. When he saw the report, he scoffed. “Brother Scott,” he said, using my middle name, “You think too much.” The Bible was simple, he said, and it was made for simple people. “It doesn’t need to be understood, it needs to be felt.” Something changed in me that evening and when he admitted his failures to the staff a few weeks later, I wasn’t surprised. If anything, I was disappointed in myself for believing what I knew intuitively, in my bones, to be a con. The pastor was a con man. So was Bill Norton. The entire thing had been one long con.
Theology & the City 