An Argument about Teaching, Technology, and Being a Tool-Using (and Tool-Consuming) Species

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Joel Mathis, a fellow Kansas writer and friend, recently reflected on joining what may be something of an anti-AI bandwagon, and what it may mean for him professionally. Those who know me know that I’ve been on the bandwagon for a while (I don’t continue to use a flip-phone and occasionally wear a t-shirt celebrating the Butlerian Jihad—“Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind”—from the Dune legendarium for nothing.) As a teacher, I’ve converted most of my essay-writing assignments into in-class Blue Book journaling assignments (which, of course, had never truly disappeared) over the past two years, and I’m mostly happy with that change. But with the start of the fall semester, with many of my fellow academics sharing their thoughts about how, or to what degree, their lessons plans are (or are not) incorporating the incredible advances in artificial intelligence, I figured I ought to think through and put down my position about it all as well. Thus, the following long statement, which I included at the end of all my course syllabi this year.

 A Manifesto on AI

In this course, you are strongly urged, and assignments are designed to require you, to avoid ALL use of generative AI tools (that is, those which generate usable images, summaries, or written statements in response to prompts) insofar as your reading and writings assignments are concerned. Let me explain why.  

Your education here at Friends is likely made possible by, and guided by, several things: parental support and expectations, athletic or artistic or academic scholarships, social pressure, personal or religious motivations, and more. I would like to add one more element to the mix: the ideal of humanitas. It is because I, as the instructor for this class, take this ideal seriously–and I want you to take it seriously too–that I am imposing the rules regarding AI mentioned above.

The term humanitas goes back to ancient notions about education, focusing on how a person can become a responsible, virtuous, independent human being. It is the origin of the word “humanities,” which includes history, literature, philosophy, language, and what are sometimes referred to as “the liberal arts.” Over the millennia, the notion of humanitas has been revived and re-interpreted many times. In this class, the ideal stands behind what is taught in the sense that I believe that one of the core elements of being a responsible, virtuous, independent human being is understanding the nature of, and the operations of, our shared civic life. Gaining that understanding, however, will be undermined if you make use of AI tools to avoid the assigned reading, or to avoid the struggle of communicating what you have learned from your reading in written assignments, because the kind of understanding relevant to both the liberty and the liberality of the humanities in a practical and a practiced one.

Reading AI-generated summaries of the assigned reading is therefore NOT an acceptable way to prepare for class or to engage the class material. This class isn’t about providing you with information to regurgitate. It’s about getting you to closely read and wrestle with hard questions asked by the text: questions that have challenged people for thousands of years, and questions that are (or ought to be) central both to how you conduct your private life and to how we organize civic life. Relying on an auto-generated summary of a text inevitably leads one to miss out on details of the thought processes that led the author to put their conclusion the way they did, and thus to miss the opportunity to think alongside the author’s arguments and to critically interrogate them. 

Using generative AI tools to create all or part of your writing assignments is also, therefore, NOT an acceptable to way to demonstrate your engagement with the class material. Class writing assignments are not busy work. They are there to force you, through the labor of choosing words and connecting sentences, to figure out not only how to communicate the understanding that you have come to of whatever author or problem you have been asked to study, but also exactly what your understanding of that author or problem actually is. A civic environment of responsible, virtuous, and independent people will be one filled with inevitable disagreement and discovery; developing the skill of communicating, through writing, one’s own understandings is essential to being able to both engage with disagreements and learn from others’ (and one’s own) discoveries.

AI tools are obviously of enormous benefit in all sorts of practical fields, and learning how to make use of them in certain research contexts may well be vitally important to your professional future. Just academically speaking, while using AI tools to answer specific research questions, build research bibliographies, or check research citations has some real limitations, developing the skills necessary to do so will likely soon be as routine an expectation as knowing how to use Google Docs or Word. But for this semester, in this class, you are invited, as unusual as it may sound, to take the ancient ideal of humanitas to heart. Here, you will be expected to wrestle with terms and concepts, and to learn to discuss them and write about them, without too much reliance upon powerful technologies which can do, seemingly more quickly or comprehensively, things which you already have—or already have the need to develop—the ability to do. I hope you will embrace this expectation and gain from it.

A Debate over Being Human

Michael Austin, an old friend of mine and another academic, currently the provost at Snow College in Ephraim, Utah, shared a very contrary perspective in a two-part essay of his, humorously subtitled “How I Learned to Stop Worrying about Skynet and Love ChatGPT.” It starts with him confessing that, though an “Enlightenment humanist” at heart, someone whose most important work of scholarship presumes a worldview into which AI probably has no place at all, he had, as a university provost, “a professional responsibility to implement both classroom AI policies and curricular guidelines.” And so he, being the brilliant pragmatist I’ve always known him to be, dove into the latest pedagogical literature, and figured out a way to integrate AI tools into the teaching of the liberal arts, a way that he found both personally fulfilling and filled with intellectual potential. As he concluded his essay:

When AI extends our ability to do things that were previously beyond our reach, it also requires us to acquire new competencies to turn those possibilities into finished work. When teachers understand this, and when students grasp what they can actually accomplish with the help of AI models, classroom assignments can become a gateway to releasing human potential, unlocking knowledge locked away by limitations AI can help us overcome.

As a longtime writing teacher, I am quite sure that AI will be the end of the thesis-driven five-paragraph essay assignment. I do not mourn its loss. Five-paragraph essays do not occur in the wild, and thesis statements were never anything more than rhetorical training wheels. Teachers who still give such assignments deserve the AI-generated drivel they will almost certainly receive.

But look what we can now put in its place. How about a final assignment to write a full-length opera or a symphony, or a history of a nearby town? With AI, freshman English students might create a graphic-novel version of Moby-Dick or Great Expectations. Or how about a full video version of The Iliad or Dante’s Inferno? AI can help students do things like this.

I don’t begrudge my friend’s enthusiasm (AI enabled him to achieve his long-abandoned goal of being a political cartoonist, after all). And like him, when it comes to teaching essay writing, I also don’t feel the need to mourn any particular pedagogical form, or really any particular teaching instrument. But unlike him, I look at the idea of giving my students—especially beginning ones—AI-dependent assignments and incentives in the name of encouraging them to produce whole histories or symphonies, or create whole videos or graphic novels, as an approach that misses the very foundation of a liberal arts education.

At its heart an education in the human arts and sciences involves, I think, a very present, very embodied, very non-automated engagement with art, ideas, and the written word. To fail to go through an educational formation characterized by such interpersonality is to be diagnosed by a doctor who never actually sees or speaks with you, or to eat a meal prepared by people who never actually handled the dough, the meat, or the vegetables. Obviously, such formational or educational—or diagnostic or nutritional—processes are not entirely all or nothing, entirely black or white. As a college professor, I’ve long since made my grudging peace with (though thankfully I’m still mostly available to avoid) distance and online learning as an unfortunately necessary compromise, thanks to the undeniable good of increasing access on the one hand and dealing with the challenge of affordability on the other. Similarly, we’ve all found ways to accommodate speaking to a nurse on the phone or cooking with canned food from a grocery store. Still, when you talking about as important an ideal as humanitas, I think the reflections and warnings of such thinkers as diverse as Amy Gutmann (who presented education as involving participatory social reproduction) or Michael Polanyi (who presented education as depending upon tacit exchanges between the teacher and student) or John Dewey (who presented education as a “continuing reconstruction of experience”), or Martin Heidegger (who presented a “real or genuine education” as reflexively engaging students in those practices and understandings wherein they already dwell) need to be taken to heart. Whatever compromises the rival goods of our heavily technologized world require of us, AI-enabled steps away from carefully helping students construct and make responsible, virtuous, and independent use of those cognitive and cultural competencies already present in their lives would be, I think, a failure of teaching.

Michael and I ended up going back and forth about this issue at some length. Initially our dispute focused on the issues of scale—it is one thing, he correctly observed, to restrict the use of AI tools in a particular classroom in the name of maintaining an environment of closed and close instruction, something that may be, depending on the circumstances and the pedagogical aims of the teacher, perhaps even admirable. (Michael, to his great credit, has regularly taught classes at Central Utah Correctional Facility—a prison, in other words—and admits that the controlled reading and discussions possible in such environments allow for some superb educational outcomes). But one professor’s preferences, he insisted to me, can’t speak to the needs of an entire institution, especially one dealing with state mandates in regards to the integration of AI into teaching practices. I don’t disagree with any of that; as I emphasized in my manifesto, I was speaking to my students solely about “this semester, in this class.” I freely admit that I am developing this argument solely with my own particular instructional stewardship in mind.

But before long our argument had become one of fundamental assumptions about what it means to become an educated human being. Michael took the position that, since human beings are, evolutionarily speaking, essentially tool-making animals, to make the project of education one that requires, in the name of some humane ideal, the exclusion of whatever tools happen to be part of the world we and our students actually inhabit is actually “profoundly anti-humanistic.” My position was, to say the least, quite different.

I agree that human beings are, evolutionarily speaking, tool-making and tool-using entities. But why does it therefore follow that attempting to construct a learning environment that explicitly rejects the employment of any particular set of contemporary tools which humans have invented is unhuman? That would imply that any construction of the human—and, I would say, of the humanitas ideal as well—has to be solely centered on the evolutionary process itself. But that is simply not the case. Human beings are tool-using animals, yes, but they are also dialogic, discerning, distinguishing, debating animals. The whole history of human civilization may not be reactionary and Luddite in character, but throughout the history of human civilization there have nonetheless been innumerable instances of resistance to, reconsiderations about, and reform of our tools and the processes that have been or are being constructed through and with them. Sometimes we construct forms of intercourse and learning and development that are consciously, even aggressively, progressive in that they seek to transcend the forms that came before. But sometimes we also construct forms of intercourse and learning and development that purposefully embrace what are understood (sometimes, I would argue, correctly) as the accomplishments and virtues of previous forms and therefore strives to preserve them.

For example, I doubt anyone who lives in the wake of the Enlightenment can believe that the restrictive Chinese imperial examination system was the peak of human educational development—I sure don't. But by the same token, it’s not as though those 1000+ years (which gave the world Luo Guanzhong’s Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the poetry of Li Bai, and the development of Neo-Confucianism) were all "anti-humanistic.” So while I am happy to acknowledge the validity of many of the criticisms of the pedagogical choices I and others are making, to so firmly stipulate the evolutionary and cognitive centrality of relying upon tools so as to label the decision to reject AI as a learning tool (and thus the decision to pedagogically control its role within the classroom) as therefore anti-human goes, I think, several steps too far. It is as much a humane reality to seek new tools for engaging with art, ideas, and the written word, as it is to decide that some tools inherently disrupt the practices necessary to understanding, and to therefore avoid them.

Tools and Technology, Within and Without

I’m comfortable with the position that I’ve taken—which, it’s worth noting, is completely independent of perhaps even more immediate environmental and ethical and apocalyptic arguments against the normalization of AI in schools (and our lives generally). But Michael wasn’t wrong to push me very specifically about tools and their place in education—or indeed, just developing the competencies that I would consider essential to the project of humanitas in the first place. Plato attacked writing, after all, as a tool that would disrupt the memorization and orality he understand as essential to learning. Would I attack wearing eyeglasses because they are a hack, a short-cut, an augmented engagement with art, ideas, and the written word?

I think it’s possible to come up with a distinction between AI and eyeglasses that doesn’t just depend upon the later having been present and in ordinary use throughout human societies for a millennium, while machine-learning models, the core of artificial intelligence, are—depending on your definition—less than 50 years old. Among other things, I believe one can rigorously defend the construal of this distinction as being between a tool that the individual uses to do a thing the person has learned how to do (using eyeglasses in order to better see the paper or the screen upon which one is drawing or using software to construct comic strip panels) and a tool that the individual uses to do a thing that the individual has explained to the tool how to do for them (explaining to ChatGPT, perhaps through an admittedly demanding and potentially engaging and creative learning process, exactly how do draw or construct comic strip panels). But this distinction, like any distinction made in reference to human processes of educational development, will likely always have to be subject to regular reconsideration. As, for example, I’ve reconsidered—if not entirely changed my mind about—GLP-1s.

Listening to a discussion about GLP-1s (Ozempic, etc.) conducted by Ezra Klein a few months ago is what put me on the path of n at least partial reconsideration of these even-newer-than-AI technologies, pharmaceuticals that control appetite and otherwise “hack” certain receptors in our brain. Originally, I was profoundly critical of these drugs; I was deeply, philosophically, hung up on the idea that there is something essential to our ability to think and reason and feel as human beings that cannot be extricated from our spatially and socially embodied experiences. Consequently, I was just plain suspicious of technological interventions into our embodiment for the sake of exercising some kind of control over it, partly because such "control" seems to me an attempt to actually escape the labor of our embodiment, to instead statically align it with some given set of utilitarian advantages or procedural expectations or economic demands or cultural preferences rather than anything actually ongoing and human. Nearly two decades ago I pontificated about this, comparing using marijuana to elective cosmetic surgery, the former positively and the latter negatively. At the time a friend of mine pushed back against that framing, using nearly the exact same eyeglasses example—would that tool be a "technological intervention"?—that Michael used on me. I thought I could make that distinction at the time, and I still think I can make it today—but the surety of that distinction is not beyond ongoing debate.

Another friend of mine, Damon Linker, a fine writer who has struggled with some health concerns, recently reflected on his doctor-recommended use of this miraculous new technology, specifically Wegovy, which has helped him lose 55 pounds:

I learned to think about the world using categories of moral analysis descending from the traditions of classical philosophy and Christian theology. To speak very roughly, both view obesity as following from gluttony, which the first describes as a vice and the second describes as a sin. . . . To avoid the vice of gluttony one must practice and demonstrate the virtue of fortitude or steadfastness, which involves an act of self-mastery, the overcoming of one’s craving for the pleasure of eating for the sake of both the intrinsic psychological rewards of self-mastery and the consequential good of bodily health.

Looked at in these terms, my failure to lose more weight on my own, even after I learned about the threat my obesity posed to my cardiovascular health, was a defect. I was incapable of mastering my craving for the pleasure of eating. This is quite common, especially in our time and place, with its abundance of hyper-palatable and unhealthy processed foods. . . .

That’s where the Wegovy comes in. Suddenly a portion that would have left me craving more food left me feeling fully satisfied and not at all tempted by the thought of eating more. In fact, the thought of eating more made me feel vaguely ill. Which is just another way of saying that the drug removed my craving for more food—the very thing that needs to be overcome and mastered in order to resist the vice of gluttony.

This means that a world in which everyone who’s overweight or obese has access to a GLP-1 will also be a world in which this kind of self-mastery and self-overcoming no longer need to be cultivated. Is that a bad thing? I suspect it is. . . .

Those are the troubling thoughts that have come racing into my head these past few months when I’ve glanced, smiling, at my noticeably smaller self in the mirror.

Damon’s experience sat alongside Klein’s and the provocative discussion he had conducted about the human body and brain, about how the best way to understand GLP-1s is to see them in terms of a tool that intervenes in our own evolved programming, in my mind for weeks. It is undeniably the case that our industrialized and financialized agricultural and food production systems have ended up creating environments which are profoundly unhealthy for our bodies, and profoundly difficult for our evolved mental scripts to deal with. And when we think about that problem in a world characterized by questions about artificial intelligence, questions that force us to struggle with what we think we know about consciousness, about genetic inheritances, about our own ability to make decisions which distinguish ourselves from the tools we make, use, and bring into our lives, I’m just not sure we can avoid—or at least, I’m not sure I can avoid—acknowledging that we may not have a good grasp of what “self-mastery” today actually means. I am confident that I can distinguish between eyeglasses as a tool that enables individuals to seek mastery in tasks that they do and AI as a tool that enables individuals to seek mastery in getting a computer to do tasks for them. But am I just as confident that GLP-1s are a tool to avoid constructing virtues that we should be bodily striving to master? Might they instead be tools that enable individuals to pursue a mastery over the multitude of ordinary virtuous tasks that our gluttony-enabling and incentivizing world would interfere with? I’m not sure I’m convinced, but I genuinely wonder.

Stumbling Forward Technologically

The easy, and avoidable, rejoinder to this kind of meandering quasi-Luddism is pointing out that I wrote it on a computer (one of which, so far as I know, Wendell Berry still doesn’t own). I use a laptop, my wife and youngest daughter regularly use an e-bike, and I don’t go anywhere without my blood pressure medication and my Excedrin. I appreciate my arguments with my friends over technology, because being reminded of my own existence as a tool-using creature is a good thing. Among other things, it indirectly emphasizes to my thinking that my own creatureliness, and the humane and tactile work I hope to do in an embodied way in the classroom, is itself mediated by the intervening and augmenting technological tools that I unthinkingly (zuhandenheit, if we prefer Heidegger’s term) use every day. And this recognition leads to humility, some of which I hopefully express humorously.

For example, this semester I have embraced as a supplement in all my classes a new version of Turnitin, the ubiquitous plagiarism-spotting electronic paper submission system, called Turnitin Clarity. The idea behind this supplement is that I can, by requiring students to use this as their word-processing program for essays and response papers, police any AI use they might engage in (and distribute consequences accordingly). By letting them know all about this beforehand, my hope is that they’ll be incentivized to accept the ideals I’ve put in my Manifesto and avoid making use of any generative AI in their work. What will be the outcome of this restriction? I don’t know, but I’m anxious to see. The idea of using a technological innovation to stand in the way of another technological innovation may seem counterintuitive, and certainly in some cases it would be so (that’s where the in-class Blue Book assignments come in!). But as the new semester begins, I’m happy to attempt to make my way through all these challenges which stand in the way of achieving some kind of humanitas as best I can. What else can we do except continue to engage, assess, and re-assess as necessary? After all, wasn’t it the temptation to make use of tools that would allow us to skip over, even for seemingly excellent reasons, all this constant (yet constructive) work of technological (re)consideration which got us here in the first place?

On Warren Farha, Cultural Renewal, and the (Too Few) Bookish Places Where It Happens

Last week Warren Farha—a devout Orthodox Christian, a soft-spoken descendent of Lebanese immigrants and merchants, a lifelong Wichitan, and most relevantly, the founder of the marvelous Eighth Day Books—passed away after a sudden illness. News of his death ricocheted throughout numerous churches, groups, and communities—religious, literary, cultural, ethnic, and more—both locally and far-distant. In retrospect, that kind of interconnectedness is a manifestation of his whole ecumenical and intellectual vocation, a manifestation that was made real yesterday evening.

Starting at 6pm, people started to gather at Eighth Day Books, at the corner of Douglas and Erie east of Wichita’s downtown. Who was there? Well, among the dozens I talked with, there were Orthodox priests, elementary school teachers, devout young entrepreneurs, Catholic nuns, burned-out hippies hawking exercise and acupuncture manuals, published poets, families with young children running around, former and current musicians, self-described socialist Jews, older folks sharing memories of their days with Warren in the Jesus Movement in the 1970s, before he returned to the Orthodox faith of his family heritage, and many more. It was simultaneously three things: a deeply pious religious honoring of Warren’s legacy and faith (complete with a public reading of the Paschal Sermon of St. John Chrysostom, a favorites of Warren’s); an ecumenical gathering of people who shared a common history with and belief in the power of God as something which can be experienced through the written word; a social celebration of a man and the friendships that emerged in the literary space he had built over nearly 40 years.

It was through the last one that I knew Warren best. Not that I knew him especially well at all—I didn’t have the church connections so many had with him, and since my wife has worked at Wichita’s Watermark Books, Wichita’s premier general independent bookstore, for nearly 15 years, the connections I have to Wichita’s many overlapping literary and educational groups and associations have gone through that store, rather than Warren’s. But that doesn’t mean I was a stranger to Eighth Day Books. It was there that my education in the Church Fathers and Mothers began, and whenever I was in the mood of searching through idiosyncratic classics of theology, mythology, history, or more, the crammed stacks of Eighth Day Books always invited me, and the advice of Warren or whomever was behind the counter was always valued. More importantly, Eighth Day Books, and the Institute which it inspired, has produced some of the most valuable gatherings I’ve ever been part of here in Wichita, whether they were large conferences (some of which I’ve presented at) or small reading groups.

Who attended, and still attends, these gatherings? Admittedly, it’s mostly people from religious traditions that have, at the very least, profoundly ambivalent feelings about my own Mormon Christian faith, as well as mostly people whose politics, especially when it comes to various “culture war” topics, are profoundly different from mine. In our present moment, with Christian nationalist ideas and Trumpian devotion having poisoned far too many sources of what ought to be voices of peace and inclusion and justice, I can understand how some might look upon the Eighth Day Institute, an organization of lay believers who take “cultural renewal” as their central conviction, and see it as a problem for the life of the mind, if not an actual threat.

“Renewal,” though, doesn’t have to mean anything reactionary, though obviously it can include such things. In my view, “renewal” when it comes to matters of culture is best understood as a continual recommit to, and a continual re-appropriation of, that which one has already been given. Such an interpretation doesn’t exhaust cultural renewal of all ideological content: nihilistic libertarians and individualists who insist they are entirely self-taught and self-made are pretty much outside the bounds of any kind of renewal sensibility. But anyone who recognizes that we are constituted by, and that our lives are an ongoing negotiation and evaluation of, all the inputs that we have known—spiritual, parental, educational, cultural, and more—can, I think, be moved to action by this conviction, and want to share in it.

In the space that Warren created, and in the connections those associated with him built both within and out from that space, those inputs were primarily presented in terms of God’s gifts, and the Christian writings and traditions which articulated them, and for people who struggle with conservative elements of such writings and traditions, there’s bound to be tension. But Warren himself once defined “ecumenism” as “a turning toward one another, looking one another in the eyes, recognizing each other as human beings made in the image of God, loving one another, and discussing our differences with respect and love”; once, when I was talking to him about the challenges of keeping Eighth Day going during the pandemic, he commented—and pointedly emphasized to me that his words had more than just an economic meaning—that when it comes to creating spaces for ideas as well as commerce, “the door has got to be open so that people can come in and be part of something larger than themselves.” In this way of thinking, I cannot imagine a better metaphor for, and a better invitation to, the forming and renewing of cultural connections and communities, than bookish places—libraries and, of course, bookstores.

I’ve always loved bookstores, both new and used. I love being able to go into well-curated spaces for readers, thinkers, and people who wish to share what they’ve learned from and experienced through all that they’ve read and thought about. When I was an undergraduate at Brigham Young University in the 1990s, people like Don Fossum and Linda Brummett ran a bookstore that sold not only the textbooks which professors assigned us students, but maintained an active—if subtle—presence in the intellectual life of the university, hosting talks and issuing newsletters and keeping books that challenged the university’s religious mission available behind the Information Desk for those who knew who to ask. Sadly, by the early 2000s, university bookstores were going the way of the dodo, as cost-cutting imperatives and internet delusions convinced most colleges and universities to use their bookstores primarily as a way to sell merchandise to visiting alumni and prospective students, and to move most of the actual business of placing books in the hands of those who need them online. The bookstore here at Friends University was never large, but Michael Sullivan oversaw it successfully for years with a wry and knowing attitude (knowing, in particular, what to say and what not to say, and when); when Friends finally closed it—turning the space into an exercise room for students—in 2022, Michael recognized the move as inevitable, but still tragic all the same.

 [Don Fossum, BYU Bookstore (L); Michael Sullivan, Friends Bookstore (R)]

The tragedy of a bookstore closing, and the reason why various trends suggesting that the brick-and-mortar bookstore may have weathered the worst that the online world can throw at them are a cause for celebration, is assured not because bookstores are the only place one can find collections of writings on whatever particular topic interests you. Rather, it is because bookstores have often been—and in hands loving readers like Warren, absolute were—places where one can find collections of people: people reading, yes, but also seeking, learning, sharing. Warren assuredly understood such connectivity as an instantiation of ecumenical Christian grace—the spirit moving through and among us all, building chains between living people and thoughtful observers of the human experience and God’s work long dead. But if that’s not your sort of acculturation, if that’s not how you experience renewal, it takes nothing away from the simple necessity of spaces where people, and books, can find one another, and that which is out in God’s creation—in all its scientific, poetic, historical, literary, and cultural glory—can be taken up by a reader once again…and, of course, recommended to any of the readers sharing that common space together. That, in the end, was, to my mind anyway, the true secret of Warren’s Eighth Day Books, and of any great library or bookstore: it’s a space where everyone, even the oddest and most oppositional of persons, can find someone to recommend to them a book to read and be renewed by. Warren did that better than most, and for that I, like thousands of others, am grateful.

From Collective to Individual: Easter Thoughts on Constantine, Carrie Nation, and Changes in Christian Influence in Kansas (and Everywhere Else)

[A meandering and marginally holiday-appropriate extension upon my latest Insight Kansas column.]

Decades ago, the Christian theologian Stanley Hauerwas—a man who has made his name articulating, in his voluminous writings, a radical, pacifist, vaguely-Anabaptist political theology, one which is suspicious of Christians understanding themselves as a force for justice or morality in the modern world, but instead sees Christianity as a call to form communities which reject and propose a complete alternative to our world of competitive economies and militarized states— wrote an essay in which he made an odd confession. In recounting he and his wife’s honeymoon in Ireland back in the late 1980s, he talks how they stopped to shop in a small village near Kerry named Sneem. It was a Thursday in mid-May, and to his surprise the shops all started to close around 11am. When he asked a shop owner what was going on, he was told that it was the Feast of the Ascension, and the traditional day for first communion in that part of Ireland. Leaving the closing shop, he watched as “little boys and girls appeared from everywhere fitted with white suits and white dresses,” marching to the local church for Mass, after which they would come out of the church, circle the fountain in the center of the village square, “while everyone in the town cheered and clapped.”

Unsurprisingly, given his theological views, Hauerwas acknowledges, in writing the essay years later, that he’s pretty suspicious of the Catholic doctrines he was seeing entwined with the social life of the town. But he also wrote “I could not suppress the thought: ‘If this is Constantinianism, I rather like it.’”

My personal take on Christianity is far more compatible with Hauerwas’s radical writings than it is the village of Sneem, at least as it existed in 1988. I didn’t grow up with any familiarity with the traditional calendar or liturgy of Christian history, and thus have no nostalgic connection to any of it; Mormonism was and remains, for all its internal structures, bureaucracies, and hierarchies, a decidedly low Christian church. Even though Melissa and I have informally brought many Christian traditions and holidays into our family life over the decades, and even though my own communitarian sensibilities have led me to be a lot more sympathetic to civil religion than most of my religious community, I still can’t say that I feel any sympathy whatsoever for Emperor Constantine, who wedded the Roman Empire and Christianity into one politico-theological whole, and thereby changed the movement began by Jesus forever. And yet, I can understand where Hauerwas was coming from nonetheless. Because here in Kansas, for all my liberal Christian (and liberal Mormon)—to say nothing of outright leftist bona fides, there is one vaguely Constantinian-ish figure I kind of like nonetheless.

Carrie Nation is a figure of folklore in Kansas, but a rather stunted one. Her work on behalf of the poor and prisoners, her marches in support of women’s rights, and much more from her remarkable life are not part of her cultural legacy, in the same way that the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, which supported so many vital progressive causes and social reforms, is mostly reduced in America’s national memory to one thing alone: the drive to prohibit liquor. In the case of Nation, that’s not entirely unreasonable; if someone engages in violent “hachetations,” destroying the property of saloon-owners and getting herself arrested on the regular, the fact that she’s doing it in part as a protest against predatory capitalism is likely to get a bit lost in the noise. Still, while I have no great desire to live in the strict Protestant Christian world that Nation imagined as normative, and haven’t ever been inclined to take a hatchet to those establishments and interests that I might be tempted to sign up in support of a new Prohibition against, I still respect where she was coming from. The prohibition against the sale of alcohol for consumption was the law in Kansas at the time (the Sunflower State actually held to Prohibition longer than any other state, only ending it in 1948, and Sunday liquor sales only became legal here in 2005), so wasn’t she really just expressing a legitimate small-d democratic frustration at business owners (and those who patronized those businesses) for rejecting a popular majority of Protestant Christians across the state had demanded through the ballot?

This is where this conversation becomes one that dives deep into the meaning of democracy, and specifically the power of democratic majorities in pluralistic environments. The fear of the tyranny of the majority is central to liberal democratic formulations, of which the American Constitution is at least nominally one such; it is for that reason, or at least partly for that reason, that contemporary liberals in America are quick to see any kind of moralistic majoritarian movement as, by definition, a threat to liberal rights. I don’t think they’re wrong to hold to that fear; the threat (and now the damage) which Trump has brought against our constitutional order has made me a lot more sensitive to the “bourgeois ends” that constitutional protections provide. But ultimately, I remain a participatory democrat (along with being a Christian socialist and left communitarian); I think that a false idolization of and an obsession with protecting individual sovereignty can, and does, get in the way of collective civil expressions that ought to be taken seriously when it comes to defining—and, perhaps, even improving—our shared common life. The fact that those collective expressions might be—as they were in Sneem, and as they were in the mind of Carrie Nation—rooted in broadly (if not universally) accepted religious principles doesn’t strike me as an obvious argument against them.

Which, at last, leads me around to some current news from Kansas.

Recently Senator Chris Blasi (my own state senator, elected—though not with my vote—from our district in west Wichita) proposed an amendment to an education bill in the Kansas state senate. The amendment would have changed the law to mandate that Kansas schools never schedule games or other activities on Sundays, or on five days around Christmas, or on the four days of Holy Week beginning with Maundy Thursday and continuing through Easter, or on the week around the 4th of July—or on Wednesdays. Since the Kansas State High School Activities Association, a private body that has been licensed by the state to coordinate policies across Kansas’s public school districts, already functionally does nearly all of the above, it is that last mandate which drew the most attention.

The ideas behind the proposal were grounded in serious arguments over the time demands piling up in the lives of students, and I take those ideas seriously. Long experience has taught me that I am hardly alone in being constantly frustrated by the expectations which both competition over students (and thus state and scholarship dollars) and our tragically internalized meritocratic obsessions have done to what are supposed to be curricular complements to in-class education: sports and debate and theater and music and the like. And yet, when looked at in terms of its practical implications, the facts were immediately obvious: the proposed amendment would primarily serve the interests of churches (again, primarily Protestant ones, even though one of the originators of the proposal was a Catholic priest) and parents that want their children and students attending religious activities on Wednesday nights.

I’m familiar with that want—one of my first teaching jobs was at Arkansas State University in Jonesboro, AR, and I quickly learned there that keeping Wednesday evenings free for Bible study (including cutting back on mid-week homework assignments) was a local imperative. Perhaps not coincidentally, Jonesboro was also a dry community; alcoholic beverages were illegal throughout the city (as of 2019, they started to allow alcohol to be served in restaurants, but retail sales are still banned). Such—dare we call it…”Constantinian”?—social structuring around broadly shared religious principles obviously isn’t unknown in Kansas, given all I said about Carrie Nation above. But times have changed—mostly for the better, I think, but changed nonetheless. Hence my sympathy for state Senator Caryn Tyson, who commented “It’s a sad day that we have to legislate this….Years ago, it wasn’t even an issue. It was a standard and acceptable. But here we are.”

The movement of American society—or even just Kansas—towards a mostly more secular, and definitely less collective, way of thinking about religious influence in the context of democratic representation is, of course, not absolute. For example, here in Kansas, the Republican party has used its super-majorities in the state legislature to push harsh anti-transgender legislation, which have impacts on as ordinary functions of daily life as access to public bathrooms, high school sports, or using drivers licenses as a form of identification. This can absolutely be understood as a moralistic crusade that attacks individual rights. But completely aside from what I see as the serious flaws (indeed, arguably the evils) in the religious reasoning behind the justifications for these attacks is the methodological orientation of the attacks themselves.

In some ways, it is evidence of the way in which most religious majorities in my state and across the country—at least those associated with the politically conservative Christianity that has shaped so much of Republican politics over the past half-century—understand their democratic responsibilities. After all, the overall aim of these laws isn’t so much about transforming society through shared, legally mandated practices, but rather a clearing away from society (or from their preferred vision of it) those individuals whose personal actions of identification or participation or sanitation they see as a violation. Again, focusing solely on the how this thinking approaches the structures of social life, t would be as if Carrie Nation hadn’t attacked saloons, but instead had stood respectfully outside their door, and contented herself with chasing down individual drinkers after they left. Not much collectivity there.

So perhaps, given its incompatibility with how American Christians think about their place in civil society today, it wasn’t surprising how quickly the legislature abandoned this Wednesday restriction proposal. But then came another proposal, one even more revealing.

Overriding a veto by Governor Kelly, Republican majorities in the Kansas legislature guaranteed income tax breaks to those who join “health care sharing ministries.” These are private health care cost-sharing pools, ones usually organized by churches and not legally obliged to cover the conditions which publicly supported and regulated insurers must (this was the main reason for Kelly’s veto). They often restrict participation on the basis of one’s religious behavior as well.

In our late capitalist, neoliberal world, the idea that people will try to carve out for themselves, their families, their neighbors, and—yes—their churches a space wherein they can create their own alternative forms of mutual support is something I can only celebrate. All praise for decentralized, interstitial action, says I! And yet, the idea that such inter-personal associations ought to receive state support lands in my mind basically the same way other Kansas, GOP-led legislation has, such as their successful push to guarantee that students attending private religious schools and home schools will have the exact same access to publicly funded school resources that public school-attending children across the state. The goal, upon reflection, isn’t about working through shared institutions to find compromises that improve them (by their own moral and religious lights, obviously) for everyone. Rather, it seems mostly aiming to enable those living in accordance with what they understand their faith to require to escape the costs and complications of doing so in the religiously diverse America (and Kansas) of today.

So in the end, put it this way: once, Christians—which include up to 70% of all Kansans—would regularly argue and vote in ways that took seriously the shaping and the improving of the daily routines of our shared social life. But now, it’s more typical to argue and vote so as to make certain that believers can be included in all the benefits of that social life, while still maintaining some separateness from it. Call it a shift from collective aspiration to individual protection, perhaps. This is a shift which is entirely predictable, given the atomization and privatization of so much of American life. Why shouldn’t we accept that our political disputes over matters relevant to the living of a Christian life need to be—and, given the pluralism of American life, ought to be—expressed in terms of individualistic choices, rather than anything collective?

So yes, it’s a reasonable change. But still, this Easter, I’m not sure Carrie Nation would be entirely pleased.