Welcome to The Square Inch, a Friday newsletter on Christianity, culture, and all of the many-varied “square inches” of God’s domain. This publication is free for now, but please consider clicking on the button at the bottom to become a paid subscriber to enjoy this along with Monday’s “Off The Shelf” feature about books and Wednesday’s “The Quarter Inch,” a quick(er) commentary on current events.
Dear Friends,
Before I get going today I want to remind you of something I wrote when I launched the paid subscription model for The Square Inch.
As it stands right now, with a paid subscription you’ll be getting on the order of twelve different pieces of writing from me in a month—stop! I know exactly what you are thinking: Brian, I can’t read twelve essays from you in a month. I barely get to all the Friday newsletters! I know. Trust me: I know. One of the outlets I subscribe to very quickly overwhelmed me with the number of newsletters they were sending my way. But consider two things: (1) they are there if you find yourself looking for something to read. (2) You may not need to read a certain essay, but maybe that essay you are skipping this time around is exactly what somebody else really needs to read. See, it isn’t all about the individual subscriber. It’s about a community of like-minded people. So maybe that Off The Shelf didn’t do much for you, but it delighted and enriched someone else. Your subscription helps make that happen. I’d like to think subscribing is an act of loving yourself, but, failing that, think of it as loving your neighbor.
I’ve been at this elevated production level for nine months now, and I thought it might be good to circle back around. A few people have expressed to me that they “feel bad” that they cannot keep up with my output. They are “falling behind.” Please, please, please: stop. The Square Inch is not a race—one does not have to “keep up.” Nor is it required reading for a class with a test at the end—one does not have to read every single thing I write. Do not feel burdened one bit if you can’t get to a newsletter. Somebody is benefitting, even if it isn’t you. And that brings up the second important thing: I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t unsubscribe your $5 a month just because you feel you’ve fallen behind. Your support is helping this publication stay alive, and thus is a benefit to others!
Thank you to those of you willing to buy me a latte each month in exchange for twelve essays, whether you can get to them all or not. I’m grateful for you.
One of the tried and true themes for a great horror story is the one about the scientist who plays God and tries to create a “perfect” humanity. Only, of course, to have the creation stop taking orders from its maker.
Classic example? Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. Another? The Island of Dr. Moreau, by H.G. Wells. The Terminator. Jurassic Park. The list could go on.
Recently Compact Magazine published an entirely non-fiction installment to this genre: “A Black Professor Trapped In Anti-Racist Hell,” by Villanova Professor Vincent Lloyd.
You really should stop now, click over, and read the whole thing. Just come back, okay?
It begins, as all such stories do, with a science experiment. In this case, not the “hard” sciences with beakers and bunsen burners. This is an experiment of the “soft” sciences—the humanities. The Telluride Association, a low-profile yet highly elite organization, offers full scholarships for high school students to attend six-week seminars for college credit. The acceptance rate is 3%, making it a highly exclusive program.
And it sounds so grand. Twelve highly diverse and unique high school students gathered for six weeks to study, discuss, and learn about “Race and the Limits of Law in America” from Professor Lloyd. He describes how the experience began:
The group reminded me of the heroes of the Mysterious Benedict Society books I was reading to my daughter: Each teenager, brought together for a common project, had some extraordinary ability and some quirk. One girl from California spoke and thought at machine-gun speed and started collecting pet snails during the pandemic; now she had more than 100. A girl from a provincial school in China had never traveled to the United States but had mastered un-accented English and was in love with E.M. Forster. In addition to the seminar, the students practiced democratic self-governance: They lived together and set their own rules. Those first few days, the students were exactly what you would expect, at turns bubbly and reserved, all of them curious, playful, figuring out how to relate to each other and to the seminar texts.
Ah, to quote Jack Black in School of Rock, “just give me minds to mould!” It sounds like a dream experiment: to take twelve students of all backgrounds, have them live together in a communal society, and to see if one might mould them into a kind of enlightened human person—fully alert to structural racism and to be exceptional practitioners of Critical Race Theory and paragons of social justice. Following the George Floyd protests, you see, Telluride had pivoted to only offering seminars on “Critical Black Studies” and “Anti-Oppressive Studies.” Dr. Lloyd’s seminar was classified as the latter.
And his seminar did not last the full six weeks.
He explains:
Four weeks later, I again sat in front of the gathered students. Now, their faces were cold, their eyes down. Since the first week, I had not spotted one smile. Their number was reduced by two: The previous week, they had voted two classmates out of the house. And I was next.
Each student read from a prepared statement about how the seminar perpetuated anti-black violence in its content and form, how the black students had been harmed, how I was guilty of countless microaggressions, including through my body language, and how students didn’t feel safe because I didn’t immediately correct views that failed to treat anti-blackness as the cause of all the world’s ills.
One might be tempted, and perhaps even justified, to make light of Dr. Lloyd’s fate. After all, from my vantage point, anyway, it seems entirely predictable that an experiment that by design arms students with the smug superiority of weaponized (and often imagined) victimhood will not produce enlightenment, virtue, or healthy community of any kind. It seems it took less than a month for their little “democratic” society to devolve into William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.
But one mustn’t simply be amused at Professor Lloyd. One should pity him. He is as earnest as they come, a true believer in anti-racism workshops. Even after his hellish experience he seems to believe that the trouble with the seminar was environmental and methodological—the students (and Telluride) wanted a “workshop” instead of a “seminar.” The seminar version, he explains, takes time to develop, and the students were just too impatient. “If the seminar is slow food, the anti-racist workshop is a sugar rush.” He describes the content of the Telluride workshops thus:
From what I gleaned, they involved crudely conveying certain dogmatic assertions, no matter what topic the workshops were ostensibly about:
Experiencing hardship conveys authority.
There is no hierarchy of oppressions—except for anti-black oppression, which is in a class of its own.
Trust black women.
Prison is never the answer.
Black people need black space.
Allyship is usually performative.
All non-black people, and many black people, are guilty of anti-blackness.
There is no way out of anti-blackness.
And then, incredibly, he identifies the problem this way: “The seminar form pulls against the form of the anti-racism workshop, and Telluride was trying to have them both at once.” He appears to be saying the problem is not the content, the dogmatic assertions he had just listed, but rather the pace at which and in what manner the students absorb the dogmas.
If that is, in fact, what he means, I am thunderstruck. I know they call this “wokeness,” but it seems more like a case of blackout blindness. The problem is not the form, nor the “crudity” with which the content is conveyed; it is the content, period. Teaching victimology, the moral superiority of victimhood, and, more alarmingly, how to weaponize that victimhood for social change is pure, unadulterated poison and will never, ever arrive at the goal of an enlightened humanity. The creation will devour its creator—sometimes, as Dr. Lloyd discovered, in a matter of just four weeks. Again: this black professor, a devotee and practitioner of Critical Race Theory, was tried by his own students and found insufficiently pure and exiled from his own seminar. A classic Marxist cautionary tale.
The Bible could not possibly be more clear that among the fruits of the flesh are “hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions, and envy” (Galatians 5:20). And stirring up precisely those things is, for all intents and purposes, the mission of Critical Race Theory—the theory being that exposing and provoking such (allegedly latent and structural) conflict will somehow bring understanding, unity, and healing in its wake, like a phoenix from the ashes.
There is no healing to be found in such a Manichaean world of power struggle between the Oppressors v. the Oppressed. What you get is Dr. Lloyd’s anti-racist “hell,” and it isn’t because of the close-confines environment or the methodology of how the theory is conveyed. There is no gospel, no hope, no atonement, no redemption, no forgiveness in the theory at all, much less actual justice. After all, “There is no way out of anti-blackness.” Sinners are forever stained. Humiliation and eternal Sisyphean self-torture is the sentence.
C.S. Lewis had their number in his essay, “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment:
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
I have before mentioned the following passage from Herman Bavinck (Reformed Dogmatics, Vol. 3: 124-25), and I am sure this will not be the last time, for it remains profoundly insightful and relevant for our own moment:
It is truly not Scripture alone that judges humans harshly. It is human beings who have pronounced the harshest and most severe judgment on themselves. And it is always better to fall into the hands of the Lord than into those of people, for his mercy is great. For when God condemns us, he at the same time offers his forgiving love in Christ, but when people condemn people, they frequently cast them out and make them the object of scorn.
Cancel-culture, anyone? He goes on:
When God condemns us, he has this judgment brought to us by people—prophets and apostles and ministers—who do not elevate themselves to a level high above us but include themselves with us in a common confession of guilt. By contrast, philosophers and moralists, in despising people, usually forget that they themselves are human.
It is hard to believe that by “moralists” he wasn’t specifically referring to 21st century practitioners of Critical Theory. Finally, with that dogma ringing in your ears, “There is no way out of anti-blackness,” read on:
When God condemns, he speaks of sin and guilt that, though great and heavy, can be removed because they do not belong to the essence of humanity. But moralists frequently speak of egoistic animal tendencies that belong to humans by virtue of their origin and are part of their essence. They put people down but do not lift them up. If by origin we are animals, why then should we live as children of God?
Dr. Lloyd’s experience has him clearly conflicted, and at moments he seems to grasp the reality of what is happening. “In a recent book, John McWhorter asserts that anti-racism is a new religion. It was an idea I quickly dismissed. Last summer, I found anti-racism to be a perversion of religion: I found a cult.” But it is still unclear to me whether he thinks the cult he found was a perversion of Critical Race Theory or the predictable fruit of Critical Race Theory.
A lot rides on that question, and I believe the right answer is the latter.
Thank you for reading The Square Inch Newsletter. Please consider upgrading your subscription to receive additional content. Have a wonderful weekend!
“A few people have expressed to me that they “feel bad” that they cannot keep up with my output. They are ‘falling behind.’ Please, please, please: stop. The Square Inch is not a race—one does not have to ‘keep up.’”
Gee thanks. Now you tell me … 873 articles later.
Read the linked article. I don’t like your conclusion. Anti-racism as a school of though is no more universal in its practice than male eldership churches, complementarían marriages, or reformed churches. I believe that the author of the article is more normative in my experience than those who took him to task.