During my third and final year in seminary I was the president of Student Council and, therefore, had oversight of the student-run bi-monthly journal publication. One of my best friends was a stay-at-home at the time and clearly had nothing to do with her life so I roped her into being the editor of the paper. Without knocking the previous editions of the school's journal, I think our publication was the best during my time at school. My friend, who I'll call Alice, had the good sense to hand over design work to someone who knew how to design. That simple decision to delegate made us look amazing. We also worked hard to solicit and incorporate submissions from students normally not given a voice in the paper, particularly foreign students who weren't always comfortable with their grasp of English. In my biased opinion, all went swimmingly for the first three or four months. Then disaster struck.
Some students had, that first semester of the school year, decided to launch an experiment called "Bobby the Beaver." You might already hear in the name the intention to copycat Smoky the Bear, except for a seminary. Rather than prevent forest fires the intention was to keep the dormitory community living on campus grounds clean.
Soon there were signs above the sinks in our kitchens of Bobby the Beaver relying on you to wash and put your away your own dishes; above urinals and toilets to make sure you flush; around entrance doors to make sure you closed the door (to protect us from stranger danger); and other similar warnings. These posters usually carried the message, "Shame on you if you don't listen to Bobby the Beaver." Not long thereafter Bobby had his own Facebook page on which people were encouraged to post pictures of shameful behavior where, indeed, people commented, "Shame on whoever did this! How could anyone be so careless?!"
From the beginning I wasn't a huge fan of Bobby the Beaver. The idea of encouraging generosity and consideration to our dorm mates, of course, was and is a good one. Yet the execution itself seemed lacking in either generosity or consideration. What if someone ate a quick breakfast and had to run to class, planning on cleaning their dishes later? Shaming that person for being late to class, or getting an emergency call about their dying grandparent, or whatever it may have been, didn't seem the appropriate response.
Plus, I always wondered at the choice of Bobby's targets. For instance, there wasn't a single Bobby the Beaver poster reminding people to shut off lights when they left a room or in the hallway or to turn off the TV in the common room. Saving the environment was strangely absent from Bobby's hopes for our community, particularly strange given that Smoky the Bear was, so to speak, Bobby's uncle. Likewise, the insistence that the toilet be flushed was out of concern for cleanliness--cleanliness for whom other than the originators of Bobby the Beaver. One of the masterminds was a self-described germophobe. I understand that, I do, but my rejoinder was always that he could then flush the toilet before using it if he was concerned about germ splash. Why must the rest of trying to save and conserve water take an environmentally destructive action for one person's sake? Oftentimes in households that care about the environment yet still flush the toilet even when the water is yellow, the choice to not let it mellow stems from a concern for the one who has to do the cleaning. Not regularly flushing a toilet does sometimes result in more work for the household janitor. That would be even more true for a dorm. I never heard a concern expressed for Luis or any of our other janitorial staff, however.
The (im)moral reach of Bobby the Beaver quickly spread to cover everything and anything thought to be wrong by those who participated. Why couldn't the student body, made up of natives of all different backgrounds, communities, and nations, see the obvious common sense that a handful of students shared? Notes were left all over the place anonymously expressing Bobby's disapproval, whether because someone put their sweaty and smelly shoes outside their door to air dry or because someone accidentally tracked in some dirt from their bike. Until one day a student used lipstick on Alice's car to draw an unhappy face on the windshield with Bobby's mark.
You should know that parking at my seminary was notoriously difficult during the day. There were barely enough parking spots for the students who lived on campus so when you added professors, staff, and commuting students to the equation, cars often had to be parked in illegal sports in the lot, down the driveway, on the street, or somewhere in the posh nearby neighborhood where no one liked cars to be parked. It was a constant challenge. An added challenge was that if you had to park along the sides of the driveway, there were two service entrances you had to avoid, one for the dorm and another for the refectory (seminarian language for dining hall). Oftentimes, after circling the lot and neighborhood a few times, those sports would be the only ones left if you had the courage to parallel park where there wasn't any room. You should also know that, for some strange reason, some students had taken up the habit of parking by the service entrance to the dorm since that entrance had not been used by any service vehicles in anyone's memory, though there was a sign making it clear that parking down the little service road was as illegal as anything could be on a seminary's campus. The last thing you should know is that, in a rush one day between returning home from work, needing to pick up her youngest child from the apartment so her husband could go to class and so she could pick up her other kids from school, Alice parked blocking the service entrance to the dorm. Though technically and officially no one was supposed to be parked in the service entrance anyway, one Bobby the Beaver advocate found it necessary to chastise Alice for her tight motherly schedule with lipstick that took Alice an hour to remove--an hour she did not have before picking up her kids from school so they saw the consequences of a shame culture.
In comes the school's journal to the story. Alice wrote an editorial describing and reflecting on her encounter with Bobby the Beaver. She had come to realize, she wrote, that the whole idea, while good in its intentions, was flawed in execution for two reasons that I hadn't thought of myself: first, the majority of our foreign student population hailed from South Korea, where shame is often used to extremes, and many of them, if anyone took the time to listen, would tell how they hoped to learn a different way of raising kids by attending seminary in this country; and two, use of Bobby the Beaver may teach a form of ethnocentric license, as in, "my way or the highway, get with the program." Neither seemed to Alice to be lessons we wanted to promote as Americans or as pastors-in-training.
Next thing we know, before the publication of the piece, word gets around to the masterminds of Bobby the Beaver and they are sitting in my dorm room yelling at us. Their demands were simple: we couldn't run the piece because "everyone" knew who was behind Bobby the Beaver, including the pastor mentor of one of them, and the piece would ruin their reputation. After a little while, two of them realized that the yelling was a bit much and was entering insulting territory and tried to calm down the third, but the third of them went right on yelling and screaming. Sometimes she would leave the room, ostensibly to cool down, only to return louder than before. Alice and I, I'm proud to say, never raised our voice, tried to hear and understand, ask questions, but hold firm and explain our position as to why an opinion piece that questions the appropriateness of a concept and practice without condemning the people behind it shouldn't be censored regardless of who wrote it. Unfortunately, I'm less proud to reflect that perhaps the reason we kept our cool had less to do with, you know, Jesus, and perhaps more to do with the nagging thought that surely people were out in the hall with popcorn listening to the whole exchange.
Why, I wondered, were they worried about people's perception anyway? If this person's pastor mentor knew about Bobby the Beaver, surely, as a good pastor, they had already thought through the possible consequences and reactions others may have towards the little rodent. If others on campus knew and approved of the beaver, how would one person's opinion suddenly sway them to the contrary view? Besides, is one's reputation really something a Christian is supposed to worry about? I wondered if, truthfully, their strong response to the forthcoming editorial had less to do with their reputational anxieties and more to do with the Spirit's convicting. Maybe the fun they were having at the helm had been chipped away by some as-yet unfinished self-reflection and prayer. While it would have been nice to theologically and pastorally pursue these ponderings of mine, we had no opportunity. The berating ended in a storm.
The next day Alice and I were both called into the dean of student life's office for questioning. Well, it wasn't so much questioning as telling. The previous night had been fun for me because I got to sit around for about twenty minutes receiving the brunt of Bobby's fans' attacks waiting for Alice to make her way over after putting her kids to bed. This day, Alice got to return the favor, as I saw she had already spent some time alone with the dean when I arrived after class. I knew how awful the feeling was--though, to this day, I can't imagine dealing with such foolishness in the midst of working full-time and caring for two young boys with one on the way in a very large belly. We were told why we thought publishing the piece wasn't an abuse of Alice's power as editor. That may sound like a question to you but it wasn't. After an hour of explaining to the dean that editors of newspapers across the country are daily expressing their opinions in editorials, that such a piece didn't come anywhere close to infringing upon the journal's policies or standards by not targeting, name-calling, condemning or judging (or even naming) individuals, and that had any other student in the student body written such a piece she can't possibly have had an issue with it, the dean finally left her office to ask other staff members if they believed the piece violated an editor's power and authority. She returned to inform us that she'd allow us--allow us--to run the piece. Apparently plenty of other mature, working adults saw the light of day.
Alice and I had won a victory. A completely hollow victory, however, because it was sad to us that fellow pastors-to-be would have treated the situation as they did and that the dean of student life at a seminary immediately and without question sought to assuage the hurt feelings of entitled young adults, who clearly felt that no one should have the right to disagree with them or question their practices or seek to engage in dialogue, and didn't bother to take the time to understand all sides of the equation. Are Christians now meant to ensure that no one's feelings are hurt ever? Or are we meant to engage in disagreements in love and understanding to, hopefully and prayerfully with the Spirit's guidance, discern what is good and right? Within minutes of our "victory," Alice decided to withhold publication of her editorial and resign from her position and I concurred.
Two related but separate lessons emerge from this story. The first is perhaps obvious as we ask the question, how should Christians act toward one another? In Matthew 18:15-20 as well as in other places in the gospels and epistles Jesus and the apostles encourage brothers and sisters in the faith to reconcile with one another through peaceful dialogue, confession, forgiveness, and understanding. After reading Archbishop Desmond Tutu's reflections on his time leading South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, No Future Without Forgiveness, it becomes clear that the world expects winners and losers. Varying disagreements and mistreatment of others must, according to the world, be resolved by reversing the power dynamics. If black South Africans were once oppressed, then their coming to power must mean that white South Africans will reap what they sowed. Yet that is not only unhealthy for a country it is also not Christian. Bobby the Beaver fans need not have perceived the duality that they did: either they are right and well-liked or they are wrong and disliked. The goal is not for one side to win and the other to lose; one side to be cheered and the other to be disparaged. The goal is understanding, reconciliation, confession, forgiveness and compromise.
It is true that in 1 Corinthians 6, where Paul teaches the wayward Corinthians not to bring brothers and sisters to court and instead resolve disputes within the church as people who love one another, Paul writes, "I say this to shame you." I'll come back to this passage in a bit but for now it's worth pointing out that things like shame, guilt, and judgment have their time and place, Jesus himself does little of any. Rather than shaming people for what they have done wrong, Jesus calls his disciples to something higher and better. Indeed, shame often works to keep people down. Having worked with kids before becoming a pastor, I remember one child who often, whenever he did something naughty, would walk over to a corner on his own, knock on his head a little and, if anyone went over to talk to him, would say, "I know, I'm just a bad boy. I can't do anything right." His parents and teachers and other adults in his early life had told him over and over again how he was a bad boy. Shame had been the parenting tool of choice each and every time. Shame may prevent a person from doing wrong but it doesn't teach or empower anyone to do good, to do better.
Whatever we may think of President Obama, I love what he said about "woke" and "cancel" culture. Here's the video: The Guardian. "That's not activism," Obama said. "If all you're doing is casting stones, you're probably not going to get that far." How right he is. There needs to be compassion and understanding of the person or institution that we're trying to change and not only ideological purity or comedic shame and canceling of the other. I fear, however, that the Bobby the Beaver episode reveals that even our pastors-to-be (who are now themselves clergy) would rather cancel the behavior of others while patting themselves on the back--as Obama says, "Look at how woke I am"--than do any prayerful transformation work through Christ's spirit. Just as the idea of Bobby the Beaver had good intentions and could have been executed well, so, too, the precepts of "woke" culture have solid foundations in tolerance and acceptance. Too often, however, those of us who firmly believe we are on the right side of history make no time to tolerate or accept or welcome or understand or confess to or forgive our neighbors, our brothers and sisters, on the other side.
When we fail to approach our brothers and sisters with the intention of understanding and reconciliation, and instead seek to win, whether we admit that's our aim or not, we not only lose an opportunity to share in the good news of Christ but we also bring the stain of sin upon ourselves. I loved the fact that Alice and I took the high road. On some level I felt that we had gotten back at everyone who acted as if and portrayed us as somehow evil in the whole charade. After Alice resigned, the journal went downhill fast. The Vice President and I hired a new editor who can't possibly have had the design and editorial credentials she claimed to. Trust me, this isn't bias talking here. While the journal continued on, it no longer had the quality it did prior to Alice's tenure. The new editor said she couldn't possibly produce the journal without a certain sum as payment, well above our budget, so that I had to use my own stipend to pay her. Even so, the submissions and design were inferior to anything I had seen in my three years at the seminary. I felt good about that. I hoped everyone involved noticed what their foolishness brought about. The dean of student life said she'd start reading each publication more closely to monitor. Well, she had a front row seat to the consequences of her actions.
Therein lies the problem, though. I should not have felt good that the journal's quality sank. My goal should have been to ensure that each and every issue of the journal was as good if not better than the last. Instead, I found myself thinking and feeling in terms of winning and losing. I won the moral battle, I told myself. Today I know that I lost the moral battle, if ever there were one, because the best resolution would have been to follow Jesus's advice in Matthew 18: to continue meeting with Bobby's fans and find reconciliation. Meeting with some outside authority figure, a judge, to rule who won or lost did no one any favors.
That brings us to the second lesson of this story, namely what our relationship as Christians should be to authority. Again, Paul says in 1 Corinthians 6 that Christians should not bring disputes to judges, particularly because those judges are often non-believers. We who know how to live rightly through Christ, whether we're living that way or not, are capable of resolving and reconciling on our own. The way I read the passage, I hear echoes of 1 Samuel 8 in which God, through Samuel, tells the people of Israel that they should not want a king. God alone should be their leader and ruler. The problem with kings, God says, is that even if they are born and raised in and as one of the people of Israel, they always corrupt the governing office as well as the people they rule. Much of the reason why scholars argue that the books of Samuel, telling the story of King David, were written well after that period is that God's warning unfortunately rings true king after king. Even Solomon, the celebrated king of wisdom, had glaring faults that directly led to the division of the kingdom into two. God didn't coin the phrase, "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely," but He could have. Why in the world, then, would a seminary handle the Bobby the Beaver situation by giving an authority the power to judge? If that authority figure had used her position to mediate, as talked about above, then well and good, but instead she judged our case while the prosecutors remained absent. If our actions barely constitute justice how can they possibly constitute discipleship?
Knowing full well that I am not being quite fair to Bobby the Beaver's originators nor to the dean of student life, particularly when I call them "entitled," but it seems equally clear that we must question our relationship to authority. Simply deferring to authority to adjudicate rather than relying on our power to love and reconcile is a position of privilege, and therefore entitlement. Who are the ones most likely to receive "justice" when we hand responsibility over to authorities? As Paul noted, dating all the way back to Leviticus, and as our own recent history has confirmed again and again, the wealthy and powerful usually win. Those who rely on authoritative adjudication are usually in the habit of getting their way and so repeat the process as often as they can. Hence the yelling, hence the subsequent poor handling of the situation. As I write this piece I acknowledge that I am not exactly being fair, especially concerning my own role in the story, but it is to make sure an appropriate point is made.
Another unfair target in all of this, of course, are seminaries everywhere. It is hard to be honest about seminary life without also painting the place as a brood of vipers. I'll probably do so again. Yet it is important to remember that seminary is a place where pastors and theologians are trained. Seminary is a place of learning. While there we do not only learn who wrote what but also what the daily ins and outs of Christian living, of being a pastor, may look like and should look like. Hopefully we have all learned from this story. Learned how best to use Smoky the Bear and his relatives and learned how to reflect on the ways our Christian witness is impacted by our small and large choices.
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