Another Take on “Red Books”: Greg Schneider Responds
by Gregory Schneider
Thanks for the review, Julius, and also for the invitation to bring my overlong response to the already richly supplied potluck table that is your blog site. I too feel a good deal of discomfort over trying to talk about something I’m so deeply involved in. The character that bears my name in the script has, under Eryck Chairez’s direction, turned out to be a dark, angry, abrasive, and cynical character whom I’ve wanted to believe is much different from me. But then my friend and colleague and bike-riding partner, Bill Mundy, showed up in my office a few days ago to remark on the play. He tossed off the observation that I must not have had to memorize my lines very much because my character said stuff he’s been hearing me say for years. Ack!For the record, I was never formally interviewed for this play, and no one utters a word in it that anyone got from my mouth. Nevertheless, I’ve found it easier than I thought possible to become the Greg-Schneider-meets-James-Dean-Rebel-without-a-cause character that Eryck has pushed for. With that confession I leave the following remarks wide open to being taken with several grains of salt. You did tell me a few years ago, smiling that “cheesy smile” all the while, that you thought me “paranoid” about the issues the play deals with. I’ll come back to that. By the way, I don’t know what “cheesy” means, and I’ve always taken the smile to be genuine.I take your review to be a perceptive and fair account, overall, and I am grateful for your contribution to the substance of “Red Books” as well as to its dissemination. Nevertheless, I dissent from your effort to portray church administration and scholar/historians as somehow equal powers, equally victimized by the conflicts of the 70s and 80s. I am also puzzled by the interpretation—you are not the only one to make it—that the play makes the scholar/historians into heroes and martyrs. The interpretation moves me to speculate that those who see the play this way harbor a prejudice that is accustomed to villainizing the historians of that era and is therefore unsettled by any effort to treat them sympathetically.It seems to me that no heroic stories emerge anywhere in “Red Books,” though several sympathetic ones do. Sympathy is extended, in fact, to parties who would disagree with one another intensely if they did come to the metaphoric potluck and sit down for a talk. The “Firing Line” scene is intended not to glorify anyone, but to convey the suffering academics underwent when they were punished for doing their jobs, as well as the relative indifference of the official church both to the suffering it inflicted and to its own loss of the gifts of these teachers and college administrators.I would draw a parallel from my limited experience in human rights advocacy. (You may remember that I am faculty sponsor of the Pacific Union College chapter of Amnesty International.) People punished by governments for non-violently expressing their views in the public sphere are just people doing what they have a right and obligation to do in an open civil society. Human rights organizations like Amnesty International take up their cases not because they are heroes nor because they are right—especially not because they are right. Freedom of expression in civil society, like academic freedom in educational institutions, cannot mean you must be free of error before you can speak or even that you are nice, clean, polite, or otherwise free of personal vice. It can only mean that you have the right to participate in the debates that civil society and academia are designed to foster. Human rights advocacy is for the purpose of protecting the integrity of such spheres of debate from people whose positions tempt them to use their power to violate those spheres. Human rights groups pursue their tasks not for the purpose of glorifying heroes or celebrating martyrs, though some of each emerge, but for the purpose of resisting the punitive impulses of power.The only parties to the dispute in the SDA church in the 70s and 80s that had power to punish were the administrators in the bureaucratic hierarchies of the church. The academics had, at best, power to resist, to slow down and deflect the onslaught. The church administrators directed their power to punish almost exclusively against academics who were just doing their jobs. The academics were and are not heroes, but they were victims, and the victimizers were the church leaders responding to pressure from the lynch mob mentality of certain segments of their constituencies, a spirit that demanded scapegoats in troubling times. To be sure, the pressure from those constituencies was intense, and the times were full of stress and confusion not just within the SDA subculture but in the country at large. Leadership, never easy, had to be particularly burdensome and perplexing under the circumstances. Nevertheless, people who have sought and attained positions of leadership in local conferences, unions, divisions, and the like have the responsibility to be politicians in the best sense of the term. Politicians are public servants who specialize in the arts of compromise in order to reconcile conflicting interests for the common good of the peoples they serve.Our church leaders largely failed on this score, siding mostly with the mob. Our union conference president at the time was a case in point. Soon after Glacier View, he was reported to have declared, from the pulpit in a local conference workers meeting no less, if he had his way at PUC, “heads [were] going to roll!” He changed his orientation somewhat over the next couple of years, for complex reasons, and eventually helped deflect the worst of the mob’s agenda. I don’t regard him or people like him as villains, though there were church leaders at the time to whom I would be willing to apply the label. Villains or not, the result of their failures of leadership was that we had a lot of what we called the â”walking wounded” around PUC in the aftermath of Glacier View, and eventually most of them did what they were told church leadership expected them to do: they walked away.Thus when I watch the “Firing Line” scene, I see my PUC colleagues as much as I see the historians you name. Among the “dead” bodies on the floor I see the PUC college president of that era, who became a permanent pariah within SDA educational circles and never exercised his gifts in our colleges again. I see my mentor, Gordon Madgwick, who also became untouchable for a time. I had also seen him shot from the saddle by a mob-inspired set of church leaders back in the 60s at Columbia Union College, so this reprise I personally found especially bitter. I see another mentor, the chair the Behavioral Science department who interviewed and hired me for the job I still hold, the man with whom I team-taught courses in Psychology and Religion. It was made very clear to him that because of the “baggage” he carried, his career in Adventist academia was on hold, and that he should be thankful to be tolerated. He became one of the refugees given asylum in the Adventist health care system, enjoying the “revenge” of living well on much better pay. So what was the harm? This man might easily have become an effective academic vice president or president of one of our colleges; his gifts were lost to the higher educational ministry of the church. It is not as though our little subculture of Adventist higher education has ever been brimming with such talent, so I think the harm was considerable.I have alluded to only the older generation of colleagues who became casualties. Among those of my generation, two lost their marriages in the maelstrom. Of course marriages end for complex reasons, but it is impossible to imagine that the strains of the time had no role in their domestic tragedies. The loss to me professionally was a set of colleagues with whom I had begun open, enriching, and useful conversations about the issues we were called to teach, including the nature of inspiration, the authority of Scripture and Ellen White’s writings, etc. My undergraduate and graduate education is primarily in religion (and history), and these were my intellectual peers. Their wounding and banishment inaugurated my own effective banishment from the conversations located in PUC’s Religion department. I must be swift to add that my sojourn in the Behavioral Science department, now Psychology and Social Work, has been blessed by thirty years of near ideal collegiality, but that has been no substitute for the loss of the conversations that were cut off by the firing line.One of the most obnoxious elements of that conflict was the allegation that the wounded merited their wounds because of assorted defects of personal character. It was repeated to many of us in many forms and contexts, but I heard it most virulently when I was trying to talk college administration down from a process that was leading toward the outright firing of one of the younger religion teachers. He had been caught in a public dietary indiscretion that would have earned him no more than a private reprimand from administration had he been in any other position than that of a Religion teacher with “baggage.” In my conversation with college administration, this point about inconsistently applied standards was overtly denied, but tacitly granted by the further, earnestly argued charge that this teacher had made his position untenable by a long record of incidents that proved him abrasive and arrogant in the classroom and other contexts of teaching. He was one with whom I had spent many hours preparing and team-teaching a Sabbath School class. I knew him and his teaching style pretty well, and I refused to yield the point that he deserved to be dismissed because, in effect, he was not nice. My interview with a particular college administrator went on for hours because of my refusal to yield him that point. I still refuse. Indeed, the more I contemplate the implications of this effort to resolve a public issue by attributing it to the personal moral failings of those the powerful wished to punish, the more outrageous and contemptible such an argument becomes.
I have attempted to convey here a small whiff of the poisoned atmosphere under which we labored at PUC in the early 80s. Of course we should also recognized that there were parallel stories in other parts of the church, as evidenced by the first questioner in our Act III Talk-back at the premiere you attended. He seemed to think that the play’s depiction of “The Crash” was actually a bit weak in comparison to his memory of the carnage that happened in the Oregon Conference. I know a former SDA preacher who did his undergrad work at Southern Missionary College in the late 70s and was tainted ever after by his association with religion teachers who were purged there. He is currently running a small business in California’s central valley. His kids and my kids formed friendships in academy and college.In your review you use the metaphor of people turning the gun on themselves and checking out of the community. For a great many such people it was either that or an indefinite sentence locked in the metaphorical village pillory with their “baggage” hung round their necks. I think a strong case can be made that under such conditions, “checking out” was a coerced choice. We had a set of options constructed by anxious church and college administrators quite ready to sacrifice expendable subordinates for the sake of what they no doubt told themselves was church harmony, a peaceableness that also, conveniently, protected their own careers. Thus when I read your words where the “elitism and arrogance” of ” dissident academics” somehow is balanced against the mere “dogmatism” and “insecurity” of church leadership, I am torn between admiring your labor to promote reconciliation and my own revulsion at a hint of the old gaseous stench that drove the powerful to blame the victims.As my colleague and former student, Aubyn Fulton, has observed in the forum, any account of the 70s and 80s needs to take full account of some brute social facts. The academics, by the very nature of their positions in the institutional structure of the denomination, did not have anything like equal countervailing power to protect their interests. The institutional structures that ought to have protected them, the boards of the colleges and universities, were so dominated by churchmen holding ex officio board memberships that what should have been the fortresses defending academic freedom instead became the battlegrounds. As in any social conflict, those with the greater power did not win all they set out to win, but they did a great deal of damage, and I am unaware that any local conference, union conference, or North American Division official suffered any disruption of career or lost any power, prestige, or income as a result of their participation in these conflicts. There’s a long list of academics, both teachers and college administrators, who did. The college administrators who took the place of the casualties had few options but to ratify and, in some cases, complete the purges that church leaders and their angry, frightened constituents demanded. So when you speak of bullets flying from both sides in a guerrilla war with people getting cut down in the middle, I find myself asking, “What guns or bullets did the academics have? Who of their enemies actually got shot?” The emotional and spiritual anguish experienced on both sides is another matter, of course. I do not know how to measure its extent or depth. In the more empirically available dimensions of damage, however, it seems obvious to me that there was only one side that suffered much.
Guerrilla war, by the way, seems hardly the metaphor for church leadership; they were regular army. They marched across academia in a series of actions that violated and well-nigh wiped out the sphere of discourse in which Ellen White could be openly and honestly discussed. All that was permissible was the old hagiography and iconography, with all its moralistic brutality not only intact, but reinforced by leadership’s police actions. These actions were, I believe, a major reinforcement of a process already well underway: the abandonment of Ellen White by a significant segment of the baby-boom generation of “born Adventists.” As parents, teachers of Sabbath Schools, elementary and academy teachers I think they “just stayed away,” from Ellen White, to use the words of one of the “mothers” in the first act of “Red Books.” I have been teaching the children of these baby boomer SDAs for nearly 20 years now, and I can testify that their knowledge of and attitudes toward their church’s founder is much like those of the student actors who say, in the introductory scene of the play, that before their involvement with the play they did not know much about her and did not care—that for them Ellen White = Void.The rising generation’s ignorance and indifference, often tinged with a vague hostility, leads me to judge as premature your proclamation that the staging of the play at PUC “shows the level of maturity North American Adventism has reached.” Mature communities, like mature people, do not forget their past. They recall and reintegrate it with every advance in stage of growth. It very much remains to be seen whether North American Adventism will manage to mature in this manner. Institutional patterns of triumphalism and denial are well entrenched in our midst. Maybe the 70s and 80s saw the church through a “huge learning curve with regard to ecclesiastical authority and academic freedom” as you claim. I think it is at least as true that oppressions of that time created a case of arrested development in the consciousness of the rising generations of college-educated SDA young people.Nevertheless, I signed on for this play because I saw it as a chance to help us move beyond our pathological denials and fixations and help me get on with the business of my calling, which is in part the handing on of our heritage in a truthful and healthy way. Given the risks the play takes, I think I can say I am hoping, indeed betting, you are at least partly right about the maturity of our subculture. If you are wrong, and the “paranoia” you teased me about turns out to be realistic after all, then PUC is in trouble once again, the cycle of truth-seeking, reaction, and retribution will repeat, and the circle of death will be unbroken still. You and your blog would not be far behind in the cycle either, though LLU provides stronger fortifications against the mob spirit than most of our institutions.As a sober warning of what could still happen, I would remind you that the old scenario of power and punishment played out more recently in the 1990s when the North Pacific Union Conference president, with encouragement from the then GC president, took it into his head to “clean up” the Walla Walla College Religion Department. He and his church administrator colleagues did a great deal of damage, though, again, they did not win what they set out to win. The academics who suffered under the onslaught, moreover, are among the most pastoral, responsible, irenic, and least arrogant of our religion colleagues in all of North American SDA education. Indeed, some of them were held up to me by my college administration years ago as examples of what my young colleague who was in trouble ought to have been. It gave me no pleasure at all to have my assessment of church leadership under the influence of the spirit of the mob confirmed, i.e., when the church community becomes agitated for whatever reason, punitive impulses will rule the times, and leaders will seek for the scapegoats their noisiest constituencies demand. These are facts of history and social power in the SDA church in North America. Any effort to recall and reintegrate our past that ignores them and attempts instead to portray academics and church administrators as equal parties to a tragic conflict in which there are only victims and no perpetrators falsifies reality and will thus produce false healing, false reconciliation.
I would end with Scripture: “But each of us was given grace according to the measure of Christ’s gift. . . . The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ” (Ephesians 4:7,11-13 [NRSV]). I hope for the day, which I think is not yet, when the apostles and pastors of Adventism will recognize that the teachers are equal partners with them in ministry, partners whose gifts have their own integrity, worthy of full and mutual respect. My experience with Adventist ecclesiastical leadership from the time I was in college in Takoma Park in the 1960s to the time of the recent push to institutionalize academic repression in the IBMTE [International Board of Ministerial and Theological Education] has led me not to trust them to understand and act on this simple, profound truth. Perhaps a new day is coming, and perhaps “Red Books” is one of those rosy fingers of the dawn. I’ve wagered my hopes that it is.Greg Schneider is professor of religion and social science in the psychology and social work department at Pacific Union College. He is the author of The Way of the Cross Leads Home: The Domestication of American Methodism (Indiana University Press, 1993). He plays several characters in Red Books and has acted in several PUC drama productions including the highly acclaimed musical production of Fiddler on the Roof as Tevye.
Comments on this post can be made at the ongoing discussion on Red Books at the Forum.