(11:36 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

Two Things That Are Bothering Me

1. I just got my rejection letter from Vanderbilt. I'm frankly not as upset about this as I would have been, say, a month ago, but it is upsetting in terms of reducing my options for places to study. I'm still waiting to hear from New School, DePaul, and U of C Div School. I have already gotten into a couple places (Nottingham and CTS), so any comments to the effect of "I'm sure you'll get in somewhere" are unnecessary.
   
   New School sent me a small envelope a couple weeks ago, but it was just confirming that they had received my full application and were going to review it. The policy of sending out such letters strikes me as unnecessarily stress-inducing.
   
   
2. Rumor has it, Olivet bought my house in September. I only found out about it by accident in December because Richard's uncle was the former owner of the house. I assume that Richard's uncle was just passing the rent money along to them, but apparently once we found out about the underlying reality of the situation, they purposely decided not to contact us so that they could kick us out for non-payment of rent. I set up my old phone number to have a message telling people to call Jesse's mom, since he had some resumes out that he thought people would be calling on, and apparently Olivet is now calling pretty frequently, looking for "Adam... Kat..ski? Jared Sinclair, or Jesse Bridges."
   
   This does sound a little cynical even for Olivet, but I recall a party at which an Olivet employee was sitting in a golf cart at the corner, just watching, and an occasion when the police were called despite the fact that everyone was of legal drinking age and no one was being especially noisy. They supposedly send enforcers into the bar across the street from the school, and having a private residence just around the corner where Olivet students were regularly enabled to violate the Lifestyle Covenant was probably something of a standing insult for them.
   
   It doesn't particularly bother me or surprise me that they wanted us gone -- in fact, at a certain point, I seriously thought about buying the house in order to gain some control over the situation and hopefully to gouge Olivet when I moved away and they inevitably wanted to buy it. Sadly, I did not have the financial means, so it never became more than a "Hey, what if I..." type of thing. What does bother me is that their way of handling the situation was so thoroughly Nazarene. Last night I read a summary of the Nazarene Church's century-long difficulties of maintaining and rendering intelligible their distinctive doctrine of "entire sanctification" as a second work of grace, but if they're worried about distinctiveness as such, I think I've found their solution: nowhere else in the world are such passive-aggressive, dishonest methods used to get rid of undesirable people. Direct confrontation is impossible -- instead, the offending person is made to feel uncomfortable using a variety of indirect ways, until they leave "of their own free will." Usually, the relevant authorities are even able to get a more or less official statement from the offending person that he or she is leaving voluntarily, even though anyone who's been paying any attention at all knows that that was not really the case. (I can give a couple examples in comments or via private e-mail if anyone cares.)
   
   Gossip, far from being "worthy of death," as Paul declares in Romans 1 (a very important chapter for some of the other sins it reportedly "condemns"), becomes a powerful tool for institutional administration. Note the first line of this story: "Rumor has it...." The only way for the truth to come out is through rumors, through off-the-record remarks. The official story is usually a work of such massive obsfuscation as to verge on outright falsehood. In fact, I had a personal conversation with the president of Olivet about changes in the religion department, a matter of personal concern to me since I had been prepared to invest another chunk of my life in Olivet getting a master's degree in that department, and while I can't fairly accuse him of lying outright, he made several unequivocal statements that later turned out to have been false. The intention of the conversation seemed clear -- since I was something of a public figure on campus, with notable influence over many of the religion students, I was being recruited as a potential ally in the quest to get people to assume a "wait and see" attitude toward the changes in the department. And in pursuit of that goal, some misleading, "technically true" statements were much to be preferred instead of frankness.
   
   So I'm not surprised. How could I be, based on how I had seen others treated? Based on how I myself had been treated time and time again? I'm not even going to try to get the straight answer from the relevant authorities -- it would be impossible. The Nazarenes have an unshakable devotion to their policy of decision-making through gossip, indirection, and passive aggression. To ask them to abandon that would be to abandon what is apparently the entire reason for the Nazarene Church's existence.
   
   I am studying John Wesley right now and loving it. I think that if Christianity is going to make a real difference in the world, it's going to have to look a lot like what John Wesley was doing. I can't imagine how completely different my life would be right now if I had seen Wesley's teachings practiced while I was devoting a good chunk of my life to the Nazarene Church. I'm sincerely grateful for the friends I've made and for the education I received. I also understand that there are undeniable pressures put on those who have to maintain institutions and that it's not as though anyone was covering up for child molestation here. It's just that, based on the official teachings, based on the specific traditions out of which it grew, I've always somehow expected better. But now it's official: I don't anymore. I wish nothing but the best for those who still do, but I don't.

| permalink | Main Page