Mark Banker — More thoughts on another controversial matter

In the March 2021 issue, Cristopher Rufo shared his now widely-known critique of critical race theory that influenced our state legislators to prohibit the teaching of “divisive concepts.” Twenty-one months later, Hillsdale President Larry Arnn declared education a “battleground.” Perhaps you will recall Arnn’s sweeping, disparaging remarks about teachers in a meeting last spring with Governor Bill Lee or how Hillsdale might benefit if Lee’s charter school plan is enacted.

I do not disagree with everything in the two columns. Like Arnn, I believe our schools have hired too many administrators in recent years, and I even share his concern about the quality of some teachers and the schools that train them. His and Rufo’s charge that “woke teachers” teach students to “hate America” is not completely unfounded. But it is misleading.

Indeed, you need only read their unnecessarily inflammatory articles to know that hubris is hardly limited to the left. Too often all of us fail to acknowledge that our preoccupation with the “speck in our neighbor’s eye” blinds us to “the beam in our own.”

Still, personal experience undergirds my overall negative responses to Rufo and Arnn. After teaching approximately 5,000 students in 40+ years in the classroom, I expect that some of my views took hold. But reality cautions my optimism. In my occasional visits back to New Mexico, I regularly encounter former students who do not share many of my views. Navajo Maria Pino Benally, who never forgets my birthday, is an ardent evangelical and pro-lifer. She shares neither my Presbyterian progressivism nor my stance on abortion.

At Webb School, where a large percentage of my students were birth-right Republicans, my influence was mixed at best. But among alumni who became formally engaged in politics, I taught a future intern in the George W. Bush White House, a one-term Republican congressman, at least three aides for other Republican Congressmen, and many outspoken conservatives. If they are even a bit “kinder and gentler” than some GOP firebrands, I am pleased.

Preoccupation with history and religion that began in conversations with my father before I even started school also informs my responses to Rufo and Arnn. That interest continued in formal and informal educations that followed a circuitous, unlikely course that brought me home with a P.D. from the University of New Mexico after Dad’s passing. Repeated offerings of the US history survey over four decades and teaching comparative world religions near the end of my career informs my take on today’s merger of Faith and patriotism.

The ideals of both Christianity and of our American founders are lofty and elusive. Jesus’s admonition that “we love our neighbors” was so radical that Christians ever since have taken less-fundamental scriptures out of context and drawn from secular “wisdom” to evade that calling.

Similarly, one need be neither “woke” nor cynical to acknowledge that for 247 years we Americans have found similarly devious excuses as we dodge the implications of our Founder’s assertion that “all [of us] are created equal.” The likes of Rufo, Arnn and our historically ill-informed state legislators would have our students overlook rather than learn from these shortcomings. Our annual celebration of Martin Luther King reveals how reform and religion intertwine but also how that radical amalgam can be cynically co-opted.

The historians I most respect and who influence me strive to place each generation’s record in its own historical context. As human beings, aware of our own shortcomings, we empathize with similarly-challenged forebears who reflect the flawed mindset of their own times.

None of this excuses our ancestors’ land grab at the expense of Native Americans nor slavery and its enduring effects. But it makes those and other past-wrongs understandable even as it calls us to ameliorate their legacies.

On countless occasions students asked me how our forebears (including leading Christians) could have allowed slavery to exist. After responding, I inquired if future generations might find similar “skeletons” in our “closets?” Yes! And this is how a republic strives to become “more perfect.”

There are “woke” historians, teachers, and writers who encourage their audiences to criticize their forebears. Just as there are others who deny our nation’s shortcomings. This simply affirms that none of us is immune to the humbling “specks and beams’ ” message.

Moreover, my experience is that bright, inquisitive young people find sweeping assertions by both camps suspect. Good teachers equip students to discern that for themselves. Informed by their values, they can respond accordingly.

The Almighty surely has a design in diversity. While none of us discern that vision clearly, scripture clearly rebukes demeaning, disparaging, much less destroying those with whom we disagree.

All of us should jettison sweeping negative generalizations and engage in respectful discourse. This would model for the next generation our greatest inheritance as Americans and equip them for their greatest duty.

If that sounds foolish, so be it. The lofty, elusive aspirations of my Faith and our republic demand nothing less. Thanks for the nudge Bob.