Looking to the Interests of Others in a Polarized Classroom
Jordan Ryan, Ph.D., Associate Professor of New Testament
I came to the United States from Canada in the summer of 2016. This means that the politically polarized United States is the only one that I have ever known. As New Testament faculty, I have seen how political polarization has a direct impact on theological polarization in our classrooms. There will always be disagreement and discourse whenever biblical interpretation or theology are concerned. This is generally a crucial part of the process of learning. However, I have also noticed that central New Testament themes like care for the poor, ethnic unity and equality, setting the oppressed free, and the upside-down Kingdom of God can become uncomfortable and charged topics. The combination of increasing biblical disengagement in the US with political polarization is a dangerously explosive cocktail.
For the most part, fostering open and free discussion in classrooms and assignments is crucial for both academic and theological formation. It is important that students feel free to disagree with me or with anything that we read, so long as the disagreements are reasonable and charitable. In fact, they should approach all secondary source readings with a degree of critical thought and in so doing they should and will disagree with much of what they read. However, I am also concerned about the cost that a certain kind of free discourse exacts. Indeed, the Epistle of James exhorts those of us who teach to be conscious of our speech, calling the tongue a “restless evil, full of deadly poison (3:8, NRSV).
I am half Filipino with brown skin. I have experienced direct racist harassment, most of it directly related to racialized anti-immigrant sentiments that are tied to political rhetoric and discourse in this country. One incident was observed by a student journalist in this article. It is abundantly clear to me that divisive political rhetoric has a cost, particularly in the mental and physical health of minoritized people.[1] I am a faculty advisor for Koinonia and I have also advised several other groups that serve minoritized students. I have seen so many gifted students, many of them campus leaders, who have experienced genuine trauma as a result of the words of others. I have seen racially minoritized student leaders leave our institution with damaged faith and damaged mental health. I acknowledge that some outrage and indignation at the views of others is performative and rhetorical, a problematic way to attempt to control a conversation. However, I also know from experience that vulnerable students can carry trauma due to harmful views being entertained as though they are valid intellectual positions.
How should Christian teachers and learners aim to foster discourse and genuine exploration that has the ultimate telos of God’s truth, which is by nature good, right, and just? The Apostle Paul teaches us that being of one mind requires us to act in humility, to “regard others as better than yourselves” and to “look not your own interests, but to the interests of others” (Philippians 2:3-4). The nature of Christian freedom is not the freedom to do whatever we want, but the freedom to do what is right (e.g., Gal 5:13-15). Taming the tongue (as James calls it) is not surrendering freedom, it is living into the sanctified freedom of the resurrected life. The beauty of Christian discourse is that when we speak, we speak most freely when we consider the interests of others above our own and consider how what we might say will affect our fellow image bearers.
[1] E.g., Lee, S., & Waters, S. F. (2021), “Asians and Asian Americans’ experiences of racial discrimination during the COVID-19 pandemic: Impacts on health outcomes and the buffering role of social support,” Stigma and Health, 6(1), 70–78; Chen, S., & Mallory, A. B. (2021), “The Effect of Racial Discrimination on Mental and Physical Health: A Propensity Score Weighting Approach,” Soc Sci Med, 285, 1-26.