Posting upon Denny Burk's recent and frankly awful attacks upon Beth Allison Barr (discussed in my previous post), Stephen Young helpfully linked to this 1957 article from Christianity Today by E. Earle Ellis. It's behind a paywall, and such tripe is not worth paying any money. Fortunately, the teaser material alone gives us lots to work with, and is in fact very instructive. Writes Ellis:
Most of the integrationist press treats the question as if all segregationist thinking stemmed from emotional, ignorant or ulterior motives. Religious periodicals, with some exceptions, tend to identify integration with Christianity and segregation with the forces of iniquity. This attitude is not just an oversimplification; it is a basic distortion of the issues. It identifies the principle of segregation with certain evils in segregation-in-practice. It illogically leapfrogs from the proposition, “Integration is concordant with Christian race relations,” to the contention, “Integration is necessary for Christian race relations.” Finally, it ignores the injustices present in integration-in-practice in the North, and the evil implicit in a consistent integrationist philosophy.
This is incredibly insightful, although not for the reasons that Ellis intends. It's insightful because of what happens if one substitutes any hot-button issue of recent years. Interestingly enough, the paragraph will look awfully familiar. It's in fact exactly the same play book used to deal with LGBT rights, misogyny, vaccines, etc. You have the same tropes:
1) The "liberal" media misrepresents segregationist/homophobic/transphobia/misogynist/anti-vaxxer thought;
2) In so doing, they oversimplify and distort the issues;
3) Integration/queer rights/women's equality/vaccination is (at least wholly or in part) unjust.
It's just the big bad media that one-sidedly ignores the issues.
Now, in fairness, Ellis is correct in suggesting that segregationist thinking stems from more than emotional, ignorant, or ulterior motives; likewise homophobic, transphobic, misogynist, and anti-vaxxer thinking. They stem from a distorted anthropology, and in fact the same anthropology in each case. It's an anthropology which holds that the white, male, cis-identified, straight-identified life is more important than the not-white, not-male, not-cis-identified, not-straight-identified life; and that as a result, there is no greater injustice than to ask a white, male, cis-identified, straight-identified person to alter their lifestyle in even the smallest way to improve—sometimes dramatically—the lives of not-white, not-male, not-cis-identified, not-straight-identified persons. And we see the consequences of this distorted anthropology, in ways that compromise the fabric of our entire social life. Just this week, a lawsuit was filed against Harvard University for failing to act when presented with reports that the anthropologist John Comaroff was a prolific sexual predator. Right now, a bunch of angry white folks have taken over downtown Ottawa—right at Parliament Hill, the seat of the Canadian government—and are blocking the critical Windsor-Detroit crossing...simply because we've asked them to take the reasonable, safe step of getting a couple jabs in the arm in order to limit the spread of a horrific disease that has been overwhelming our health care system for almost two full years. There are no ways to justify these sorts of actions, apart from a distorted anthropology that privileges not just the needs but the most ill-informed and demonstrably false beliefs of people who are publicly identifed as white, male, cis, and heterosexual. Such a distorted anthropology means that the most whackadoodle ideas held by a white straight dude are treated as more important than the most urgent needs of, well, everybody else.
But the above discussion also reminds us that fundamentally Ellis is very wrong. In fact, he's so wrong that we can only describe what he's doing as gaslighting. People of goodwill intuitively recognize that there is something profound and irrational about segregation, or homophobia, or transphobia, or misogyny, or opposition to life-saving medications that have been shown to be safe. People of goodwill might have to spend a lifetime unlearning the irrational views that they were taught on these matters, but they intuitively know unfairness when they see it. It grates at them, forces them to reevaluate, to rethink, to repent. What Ellis is trying to do is confuse such persons by calling evil good and good evil. It's vile. It was vile sixty-five years with regard to segregation, and it's vile now with regard to racism, homophobia, transphobia, misogyny and anti-vaxxer nonsense. It seeks to hide the fact that there are positions that are inherently and inescapably unreasonable, that one can hold these and one can be a reasonable person but never at the same time. And this is deeply problematic, because in the final analysis it's very hard to be a decent and responsible person when one actively resists being a reasonable one.
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