Charity For All | Faculty Commons

James C. Carper,
Social Foundations of Education,
University of South Carolina

[Dec. 12, 2010] —

As we grade our last exams and participate in celebrating Advent, my Christmas wish is for a bit more of what Lincoln said in his second Inaugural Address: “Malice toward none, with charity for all.” It is the lapse of this during one of our South Carolina summers that has come to mind this semester.

It started when James T. Sears, at the time a colleague in our College of Education, announced that he would be teaching a course entitled “Christian Fundamentalism and Public Education” whose stated purpose was “to assist school practitioners and others in understanding the fundamentalist phenomenon and combating its challenge to public education in a secular democracy.”

Hollering Louder

Columbia’s newspaper The State broke the story on its front page. To say that Christians were hollering louder than a stuck pig would not be an exaggeration. His frequent espousal of homosexual causes had already provoked their ire. They protested both with letters to the editor and phone calls to the university’s administration. Neither the tone nor the words of many of these Christians were what I would term respectful.

I decided to take a different tack. I believe that the best thing to do when one person has a grievance with another is to go to that individual personally before yelling at department heads, deans, trustees or the president of the university.

I saw Jim soon afterward in a grocery store and he kindly agreed to meet and discuss the content of the course. When we met, he conceded that he may have used a poor choice of words in the course description. He then invited my suggestions, including guest speakers and reading assignments, since the course hadn’t begun.

I went directly to my office and spent about three hours typing up a selected bibliography, along with recommendations as to persons I would like to see involved in the course and how they might contribute. Jim took my recommendations seriously and included lectures by several outstanding Christian scholars and included readings from a conservative Christian perspective.

A Fair And Balanced Portrayal

Later I was able to listen to taped lectures and was impressed by Jim’s fair and balanced portrayal of the arguments in the course. He didn’t dominate the discussions but only helped to facilitate them. Two of my graduate students took the course and said it was extremely well done, probably one of the best intellectual exercises they had ever had.

I gained from this, and I hope Jim did as well. I was put in a situation in which I literally had to interact face-to-face with someone with whom I radically differed, and yet treat him with respect. He showed that same respect toward me.

Diplomatic Truth Tellers

Sometimes I wonder if this might have been one of the few times Jim has been treated civilly by those who proclaim the name of Christ. He has since left our university.

Unfortunately, stereotyping of people on both sides of the culture wars remains a fact of our public life. Instead of drawing battle lines, we Christian faculty members can be model diplomatic truth tellers. Our cause on campus could benefit if believers listened carefully, spoke softly, and, yes, loved unconditionally.

Merry Christmas!