Friday, September 23, 2005
Frozen in Faith: Religion At Convocation
Dartmouth’s new Student Assembly president, Noah Riner, volleyed silver oratory at Convocation—the official opening of the academic year—on Tuesday. The usually-unobjectionable event provoked at least a few murmurs as Riner invoked God and Jesus Christ as he invited freshmen to discover, lifting a famous phrase, the content of their character. It is scarcely necessary to provide the context: Dartmouth is an elite university with a disproportionate number of liberal secularists.
Some passing plaints are hardly surprising.
But in this case, Riner’s speech seems to have engendered something of a minor contretemps. Like most “You Mentioned God” frivolities, the ‘controversy’ part of the situation seems largely a conjuration of the local media. The Dartmouth published a story inexplicably declaring that Riner was “defending” his “controversial” speech—despite the fact that no critiques had yet been published anywhere on campus.
In that same issue of the paper, Brian Martin, who ran against Riner last Spring for the position the latter currently holds, had an editorial denouncing the speech. He wrote:
…I was appalled and disappointed at Student Body President Noah Riner’s fire-and-brimstone remarks at Convocation. Riner’s decision to turn Convocation into a religious pulpit was a disservice to Dartmouth. Instead of welcoming the community and offering up the nominal subject of his speech (“character”), Riner focused on how “Jesus … is the solution to flawed people like corrupt Dartmouth alums, looters, and me.”Here is Noah Riner’s speech. And here is the first mention of Jesus. Note the offensive fire-and-brimstone:
Character has a lot to do with sacrifice, laying our personal interests down for something bigger. The best example of this is Jesus. In the Garden of Gethsemane, just hours before his crucifixion, Jesus prayed, “Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.” He knew the right thing to do. He knew the cost would be agonizing torture and death. He did it anyway. That’s character.Hardly inflammatory. And indeed, Riner goes to great lengths to keep his comments universally apt and eminently peaceful. Yet Martin ends his critique this way:
The theme of the remarks, overshadowed by his sermonizing, was character. Challenging the new freshmen to develop their character is important. But Jesus would not have wanted to make new students feel unwelcome, to make faculty feel uncomfortable or to make alumni question whether this was the same Dartmouth that they had attended.A professor emailed me today and requested my comments on the situation. Below is my response, edited for posting.
I didn’t see Riner’s speech in person, but I did read it the next day. I will say, first, that I took no offense, even though I’m an atheist. Though to be fair, I am not in the habit of taking offense in general. But I think people need to realize that this is a private nonprofit corporation, not the House of Representatives. There’s no separation of Church and Parkhust. A lot of the same people who didn’t like Riner’s speech purely because of some broadly-conceived conception of the establishment clause also don’t want the federal government getting involved in free speech issues or in fostering ideological diversity. They are the same people who are more likely to oppose military recruiting on campus. The common argument for both of those traditionally liberal positions is the fact that Dartmouth is a nongovernmental organization with full corporational sovereignty.
Their arguments against Riner’s speech—the yelps of “inappropriate!”—strike me as hypocritical. Riner has every right to invoke Jesus Christ as he sees fit, and indeed he ought to be encouraged to do so; both in the interest of academic inquiry and within the much-vaunted framework of affimative action. If we are listing minorities that merit subsidy at Dartmouth, religion is high on the list.
More irksome are the calls of “offensive!”. I think everyone needs to calm down. Getting outrageously offended at the utterance of another person’s religion is Osama bin Laden’s game, not ours. Most people understand that, I think. The question we face now is the choice between living in a community where religion at large is absolutely silenced, and one in which everyone is free to express his religion without worrying about being arrested or harmed or hissed. I think the founding fathers pretty clearly wanted the latter: and I speak of both Washington and Wheelock.
UPDATE: The Student Assemby’s Vice President for Student Life, Kaelin Goulet, has resigned, saying Riner’s speech was “reprehensible and an abuse of power.”
I suppose the whole “tolerance” ideal went out the window…
MORE: Dartlog rounds up criticism.
Posted on September 23, 2005 12:05 AM. Permalink 