The Road to Reconciliation
| Photo courtesy of the Interregnum Committee
The opinions reflected in this OpEd are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of staff, faculty and students of The King's College.
In April, The King’s College participated in Interregnum. Its 2021 theme was reconciliation. The event was designed to give students a break from the monotony of school, and, most crucially, form fraternity with the other members of their houses. Interregnum also serves to help students learn about the people their houses were named after.
My house — that of Sir Winston Churchill — has had multiple events this semester glorifying Churchill and the work that he did to protect Britain and the rest of the western world from the German invasion.
I have loved being able to participate in events with men who have similar values as me. My house is the first place that I’ve truly felt like I belong.
Despite those feelings, a nagging question always sits in the back of my head as we participate in these events: Would I feel like I belonged if I wasn’t a white man?
It’s a nearly impossible concept for me to accurately understand. After all, I have never had the same experiences as a Black man or woman. Theoretically, I know what behavior is problematic, but I will never be able to say that I know what it feels like to be a victim of that behavior. I do not want to speak on behalf of the Black community at King’s, but simultaneously, I do not want to leave the burden of speech on them either. However, I do feel confident that a problem exists.
I’m not the only one to see a problem. I spoke with Shá Sanders, who heads The Table, a Black and Latinx student org at King’s College. She told me that last year she wrote an op-ed on what her King’s experience had been like. In one line, she mentioned how certain namesakes made her uncomfortable. Ultimately, she argued that “political correctness” is simply following Jesus.
Sanders spends a lot of time thinking about the namesakes ー she has to as people at King’s look at the organization she leads and expect her to take a stance. Discomfort alone, however, is not enough to force a change upon the school. Why does Sanders say what she does?
Winston Churchill has a troubling past. He made several horrifying racist comments such as his opinion that he “did not really think that black people were as capable or as efficient as white people.” This statement, along with others like it, should not be held up as an example for a subsection of its students to follow. For a Christian school to hold up Churchill as an example of what 40 of their young men should act like seems counterintuitive, if not unchristian.
Indeed, many at King’s recognize those failings. Last spring, the House of Reagan was temporarily renamed in favor of the House of Honor. In April, the house was reinstated with plans to create a process for namesake removal in the 2021 calendar year. These actions prove that the administration at King’s recognizes that a problem of some sort exists.
The behavior of those who aim to protect the house system as it is often aligns with a failure in Christianity as well.
Sanders told me that after her op-ed, “the storm that ensued was not something I expected. One alumni on Twitter attacked me, calling me ‘wilfully stupid.’ Parents talked about me on a private Facebook group. Peers sent me aggressive messages. They were more focused on defending a person they never met than caring for the person in front of them.”
These behaviors are not Christian, and they do not behoove those who claim to represent a Christian college. Ultimately, however, through all of the personal attacks, some of these people make a good point.
All men, after all, have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, as Paul points out in Romans 3:23. I suspect that none who support the current namesakes would defend Churchill’s racist comments, but rather argue that the contributions he made to the world outweigh his problematic characteristics. Indeed, Churchill accomplished many great things, which I learn about at every house event. For example, without Churchill to lead Britain against the Nazi invasion, the world would look vastly different today. And Churchill did not work from a selfish perspective. In fact, he seemed primarily motivated by either British patriotism or altruism for the world as a whole. That, at face value, seems like a good thing. But those driving goals miss the heart of what The King’s College is attempting to accomplish with the namesakes.
King’s is not primarily attempting to create men and women who are patriotic. Instead, the house namesakes are meant to be men and women who are “confessing Christians with a verifiable commitment to the historic Christian faith.” The state is important, and the school recognizes the great work to be done within it, but it is not the end goal of the college.
This disconnect between the college’s goal and what it actually ends up attempting leads to a consistent difference between house namesakes that followed God for His glory and house namesakes that used God for their own glory. Some of the house namesakes put their focus primarily on God and others put their focus primarily on the state. Men and women like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, C. S. Lewis and Clara Barton made a difference in the world out of a desire to reflect God’s grace towards them. Meanwhile, people like Churchill, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher made a difference in the world through the lens of the country they served. While that patriotism was sometimes admirable, it led to moral failings as their ultimate values did not align with God’s moral values. The namesakes who did not focus on God are the ones who have consistently been found guilty of racism and xenophobia.
Some might ask whether these character failings matter enough to change a namesake. I remember saying inappropriate and racist things as recently as the 9th and 10th grades. I doubt that I’d be able to compare myself against a man like Churchill and feel comfortable about deigning myself as having a more moral character than he. Look closely enough and even Lewis, Barton and Bonhoeffer sinned against God. Why then are some namesakes inappropriate and others acceptable? In my eyes, there are three significant criteria we could use to discern those who focus on God and those who do not.
The first criteria is that some of the namesakes were willing to repent of their sins. Lewis grew up an atheist, not wanting to do what was reflective of God’s will before he converted to Christianity. After he did so, he was deeply sorrowful for the sins he committed against God, mentioning it in books such as Mere Christianity and Surprised by Joy. Churchill, on the other hand, never apologized for the racist comments he made, instead either ignoring them or overlooking them. As a Christian college that believes that we are sinners saved not by our actions but instead by God’s forgiveness when we repent of our sins, a willingness to repent makes a deeply fundamental difference.
Secondly, only some of the namesakes love and respect people of color. As Christians, we believe that we are all created in the image of God (Genesis 1:27) and thus that our brothers and sisters of color should be included in that group. This should be a moral issue. When we either fail to acknowledge the sins of our namesakes or — even worse — acknowledge those sins and fail to change as a result of them, we show students of color at our school that hatred against them is something we are willing to accept. One way to stand up for them is to show them that we care about racism and are willing to stand up against it.
Thirdly, only some of our namesakes are people whose values align with the values of King’s. Some of the namesakes, such as Churchill or Thatcher, did not make Christianity a focus of their lives. Instead, they thought of Christianity as secondary to their primary work in life. In opposition to that perspective, as King’s reflected on the namesakes, it concluded that, as a Christian college, it’s fundamentally important that namesakes have a “verifiable commitment to the historic Christian faith.” In the past, that was not a primary focus when choosing the namesakes, meaning that the criteria for a namesake shifted over the past few decades. In this case, choosing namesakes who demonstrated a commitment to faith during their lives would likely enhance our witness to the outside world.
The ultimate goal of this discussion of namesakes is not meant to attack the houses that reflect a discordance with the values at King’s but instead to ask that we think with intentionality about the people we are attempting to become. We have the ability to model ourselves after so many good and Christian men and women. We have options such as William Wilberforce, Augustine of Hippo and Mother Teresa. These people impacted the world so deeply that if they were held up as namesakes for us to model ourselves after it would seem wrong not to attempt to reflect God in our actions. Why would we continue to model ourselves after men who put the state first, when we could put God first?
In the words first of Malcolm X and later quoted by Sanders, “You’re not to be so blind with patriotism that you can’t face reality. Wrong is wrong no matter who says it.” When it comes to our namesakes, let us not fall into the trap of traditionalism but instead attempt to honor God rather than the state.