dismissed as lacking religious faith and being “secular.” We fall back on labels, labels, labels—speech codes to distract from the true issues at hand that deserve to be discussed and debated.
In a sense, the PC movement hasn’t done anything other than make itself more diffuse across pockets of American culture. Hypersensitivity and supercharged responses to the slightest of perceived transgressions are now the norm. What Jefferson Morley wrote in the
Washington Post
in 1995 in assessing the PC movement is an apt description for almost any subclass of Americans who see on the horizon the destruction of their own brand of American-ness by whatever version of heathen they imagine: “Among the less attractive results is the emergence of America’s newest victim class: the P.C.Wounded. Their aggrieved insistence that the injustice done to them is more recent, more unfair, more un-American than that suffered by other groups is just another one of those exercises in comparative victimization that are so common a feature of fruitless political debates.”
This remains the case even if it’s hard to keep track of who is claiming to be the victim in the latest attempt to stifle free speech. A prime example of how the tables can turn is provided by Mark C. Taylor, a professor at Williams College. In 2006, writing in the
New York Times
, he described how a revival of religious groups on his campus, more than at any time since the 1960s, seemed to signal a reversal of the liberal, politically correct insistence that intellectuals wear suspicion of all religion, especially evangelical Christianity, as a badge of honor. Conservatives have long been critical of hostility toward organized religion at top colleges as part of their defense of values and traditions. But what looked like an end to the politically correct embrace of a campus free of people talking about their faith was a new, dangerous phenomenon that amounted, Taylor wrote, to “the latest version of political correctness.” Under the new rules, Taylor said, “the more religious students become, the less willing they are to engage in critical reflection about faith.”
Taylor recounted how an administrator at the college insisted he apologize to a student after the student complained that Professor Taylor had “attacked his faith because [he] had urged him to consider whether Nietzsche’s analysis of religion undermines belief in absolutes.” Taylor refused to apologize. “My experience was not unique,” he wrote. “Today, professors invite harassment or worse by including ‘unacceptable’ bookson their syllabuses or by studying religious ideas and practices in ways deemed improper by religiously correct students. Distinguished scholars at several major universities in the United States have been condemned, even subjected to death threats, for proposing psychological, sociological or anthropological interpretations of religious texts in their classes and published writings. In the most egregious cases, defenders of the faith insist that only true believers are qualified to teach their religious tradition.”
It is generally accepted that the liberal PC movement and the anti-PC backlash in the eighties and nineties, as well as the conservative wedge issues that emerged in the early 2000s, are all now safely in the rearview mirror as elements of what we remember as the culture wars. But what is clear—from Taylor’s case at Williams to my firing at NPR—is that the tactics first used by the Left to impose political correctness and by the Right to emphasize divisive wedge issues are the very same tactics that remain at play in nearly every debate in America. Those tactics are now pushing too many of us to be silent, to play the part of the smiling bartender or risk losing tips. The rules are not nailed to the wall, but everyone seems to know voicing an honest opinion, even expressing a feeling, comes with the danger of being fired, being shunned, having
In a sense, the PC movement hasn’t done anything other than make itself more diffuse across pockets of American culture. Hypersensitivity and supercharged responses to the slightest of perceived transgressions are now the norm. What Jefferson Morley wrote in the
Washington Post
in 1995 in assessing the PC movement is an apt description for almost any subclass of Americans who see on the horizon the destruction of their own brand of American-ness by whatever version of heathen they imagine: “Among the less attractive results is the emergence of America’s newest victim class: the P.C.Wounded. Their aggrieved insistence that the injustice done to them is more recent, more unfair, more un-American than that suffered by other groups is just another one of those exercises in comparative victimization that are so common a feature of fruitless political debates.”
This remains the case even if it’s hard to keep track of who is claiming to be the victim in the latest attempt to stifle free speech. A prime example of how the tables can turn is provided by Mark C. Taylor, a professor at Williams College. In 2006, writing in the
New York Times
, he described how a revival of religious groups on his campus, more than at any time since the 1960s, seemed to signal a reversal of the liberal, politically correct insistence that intellectuals wear suspicion of all religion, especially evangelical Christianity, as a badge of honor. Conservatives have long been critical of hostility toward organized religion at top colleges as part of their defense of values and traditions. But what looked like an end to the politically correct embrace of a campus free of people talking about their faith was a new, dangerous phenomenon that amounted, Taylor wrote, to “the latest version of political correctness.” Under the new rules, Taylor said, “the more religious students become, the less willing they are to engage in critical reflection about faith.”
Taylor recounted how an administrator at the college insisted he apologize to a student after the student complained that Professor Taylor had “attacked his faith because [he] had urged him to consider whether Nietzsche’s analysis of religion undermines belief in absolutes.” Taylor refused to apologize. “My experience was not unique,” he wrote. “Today, professors invite harassment or worse by including ‘unacceptable’ bookson their syllabuses or by studying religious ideas and practices in ways deemed improper by religiously correct students. Distinguished scholars at several major universities in the United States have been condemned, even subjected to death threats, for proposing psychological, sociological or anthropological interpretations of religious texts in their classes and published writings. In the most egregious cases, defenders of the faith insist that only true believers are qualified to teach their religious tradition.”
It is generally accepted that the liberal PC movement and the anti-PC backlash in the eighties and nineties, as well as the conservative wedge issues that emerged in the early 2000s, are all now safely in the rearview mirror as elements of what we remember as the culture wars. But what is clear—from Taylor’s case at Williams to my firing at NPR—is that the tactics first used by the Left to impose political correctness and by the Right to emphasize divisive wedge issues are the very same tactics that remain at play in nearly every debate in America. Those tactics are now pushing too many of us to be silent, to play the part of the smiling bartender or risk losing tips. The rules are not nailed to the wall, but everyone seems to know voicing an honest opinion, even expressing a feeling, comes with the danger of being fired, being shunned, having
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