Until we unapologetically reassert ownership over our heritage and nation unto a counter stigma, where we shame what is shameful, we cannot expect renewal nor, indeed, peace. Far from cruelty, the construction and assertion of stigma is heroic, an undertaking on behalf of civilization. 

For a long time past, the chief mischief of the legal penalties is that they strengthen social stigma. It is that social stigma which is really effective, and so effective is it, that the profession of opinions which are under the ban of society is much less common in England, than is, in many other countries, the avowal of those which incur risk of judicial punishment […] Our merely social intolerance kills no one, roots out no opinions, but induces men to disguise them, or to abstain from any active effort for their diffusion… [T]he price paid for this sort of intellectual pacification, is the sacrifice of the entire moral courage of the human mind.—John Stuart Mill, On Liberty.
Freedom, absolute freedom, especially of thought unto expression, is constrained by social custom, of cultivated, collective disdain. And as Mill notes, the construction of custom is bolstered by, if not downstream of and more powerful than, legal sanction.
We live in a Millian world, one geared toward the erosion of natural association and custom. For these vectors of “social intolerance” constrain independent, individual self-actualization. This, Mill despised. Which is to say, Mill hated what is natural and necessary in every well-ordered society. If we would have order ourselves, we must recover what he shunned and shun what he coveted.
The punishment for the violation of custom is stigma, or social judgment and pressure to conform. Paradoxically, and contra Mill, the suppression of stigma “induces men to disguise” opinion and discrimination. It is social pacification. Worse, forced inclusion and neutrality negates man, his natural diversity and sensibility. While a Millian frame might liberate, for a time, the individual from all constraints, it is diametrically opposed to its opposite, viz., communal self-determination, i.e., that to which sociable man wants to belong.
Stigma is another way of describing the social function of shame. Rationale or justification for shaming what is shameful are usually unthinking, engrained, and uninterrogated. Plato (Republic) describes the worthy guardian of the city as one who will “praise fine things, be pleased by them, receive them into his soul, and, being nurtured by them, become fine and good,” and, in turn, will “rightly object to what is shameful, hating it while he’s still young and unable to grasp the reason.” Cultivation of right preference and taste is a prerequisite not only for exercise of authority—the good ruler must always feel the spirit and mood of his people—but the exercise of mature reason as well because the affections are oriented toward honor and achievement rather than material gain. Self-mastery requires fear of judgment, as Roger Scruton put it in his essay on stigma in City Journal nearly 25 years ago (“Bring Back Stigma”).
Therein lies the power of stigma as a natural social instinct. It is everywhere, always and already, present. Indeed, Mill’s dream cannot be recognized without the operation of stigma. That is, the intolerance of intolerance or shunning of restriction. But this is always a fantasy because a view from nowhere is impossible.
Every society designates things, behaviors, and practices that are shameful contrasted by what is honored. (The extent to which public or social shame corresponds to internal scrutiny is out of scope here.) Whatever is shameful is marked not only by punishment—often it is not overtly or legally punished—but, perhaps, more importantly by mockery. In a thick, healthy society the outlandish and unimaginable is humorous even as it is offensive because it lacks presence and, thereby, remains undesirable. No one is offended by the mockery of what is shameful and deserving of stigma because no one is practicing it, or at least those who are know that they should not and, therefore, dare not object to mockery of objectionable things.
The sacred and the blasphemous are perennial societal elements. Each is determined by the ruling element which is, in fact, the most powerful element. Majority opinion is not an actual thing. It is allusive and fickle. But a conception—a belief, really—of what is fashionable, accepted, sacred governs sociality whether it is objectively measurable or not. Perception rules.
This is the politeuma, the unwritten constitution of the community exemplified in great men or role models, in personification of virtue. And, contrary to colloquial belief, this dynamic governs more thoroughly and effectively than written, positive, civil law insofar as it dictates and compels behavior more immediately. What is shameful is always unlawful anyway. Law codifies and affirms what is already accepted.
What tells a society that cowardice and retreat are shameful actions? Why was the death of Achilles “beautiful”? Who enforces chastity and modesty at scale? In both cases and many more besides, it is stigma. “Principles,” supposedly timeless, develop to reinforce or rather summarize these things. Today, “equality” and “fairness” serve as taglines for acceptance of all manner of levelling and licentiousness today, but for all their promise of “freedom,” they operate as custom and stigma.
Shame corresponds to the law of fashion—literally, what is in style. Locke, in the Essay on Education, observes that it is not good and evil that most powerfully directs men but shame and esteem, that is, fashion. Likewise, Aristotle (Ethics), determines that a virtuous member of society is one who grasps what is shameful and honorable and acts accordingly.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Wednesday, December 15, 2021
Even in the last three weeks, I have taught classes on campus criticizing the Supreme Court’s gay marriage decision and Bruce Jenner’s gender transition—career-damaging lectures at almost any other institution of higher education in the United States. And I have for many years been one of the most vocal opponents of the way in which identity politics, particularly that of the LGBTQ+ movement, has damaged our culture and public life. I have received nothing but support from the college administration as I have continued to speak up on such matters.

“Do I teach at a woke school?” was not a question I seriously considered until one evening last week when I received an email from a friend assuring me of his prayers for me in my workplace. The reason was an article he had just read on a website, The American Reformer, entitled “Wide Awoke at Grove City College?”  The background to the article was a petition launched some weeks ago by parents of Grove City College (GCC) students and alumni concerning what they perceived as a woke drift on campus. The GCC president had responded to the petition in a way that I myself had thought was solid but American Reformer dismissed as “limp” and, by implication, disingenuous. I do not know if the author of the article has ever set foot on the campus which he writes about, but I confess that had he not told me he was writing about GCC, I might have struggled to recognize the ethos of my institution in the way he described it.
Now, wokeness is surely a serious problem in American higher education. Parents and alumni of all schools are right to be concerned about how various institutions are responding. I am not persuaded that petitions are ever the best way to address such problems but I can certainly sympathize with those anxious about their children or about their beloved alma maters. I myself am passionately committed to saving education from wokeness. I am a member of the James Madison Society at Princeton University and the National Association of Scholars, both of which have a keen interest in maintaining the importance of academic freedom and excellence on campuses. I am a contributing editor at the decidedly anti-woke First Things and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, one of the best-known conservative think-tanks in Washington, D.C. I am acutely aware of the struggle many friends face at this difficult time and I understand why parents and alumni are disturbed when they hear stories (or, in this case, mostly misguided rumors) about their institution. They are right to ask questions and raise concerns. They need to know if the colleges that take their money are providing the education they claim to be doing.
At the heart of academic institutional excellence is, of course, academic freedom. That can be tricky at a school that holds a stated religious position, such as a Christian college like Grove City College, but it can be done. The way a Christian school can hold to its beliefs yet give students a good education is to hold faculty to a standard of belief but then ensure that they engage other viewpoints in the classroom, host speakers from a variety of political and philosophical traditions, and encourage students to wrestle honestly with the great ideas and the hard questions of the past and the present. For example, as I recently told the Religious News Service, I declare my classes to be free-speech zones (something none of the more progressive figures interviewed said about their classes). I do not require students to agree with me in order to get a good grade. But if they dissent from my view they need to do so respectfully and give me an argument as to why I am wrong. For me, education is not about cloning myself intellectually in the classroom (as it is becoming at so many woke schools); it is about giving the students the skills to think for themselves.
At the center of the storm surrounding GCC was an invitation to Jemar Tisby to speak in chapel. Hindsight is 20/20, of course, and in retrospect inviting Tisby to give a chapel address may have been a mistake. A chapel address carries a certain institutional imprimatur that a simple guest lecture does not, though inviting guest lecturers to campus to engage our students on critical topics such as race, in this current culture, is an important role of any college or university. But that is not a criticism of my colleagues who invited Tisby to speak in chapel. One of the hallmarks of wokeness is cultural amnesia—the swift forgetting of what was true the day before yesterday in order to demonize those who still hold, say, to the importance of biological sex for gender. Conservatives need to be careful not to play their own version of the woke-amnesia game when it suits them. Tisby is a good example. He was first given a platform by Reformed Theological Seminary where he had been a student on its Jackson, Mississippi campus. That is a flagship conservative reformed institution. Indeed, as recently as 2015, he was appointed director of the African-American Leadership Initiative at RTS. He was described at the time by the RTS Chancellor, Ligon Duncan, as follows: “a man I trust … a dear friend … an educator and a churchman…. His commitment to the inerrancy of Scripture, the Reformed faith and the gospel ground all his efforts towards our honoring the image of God in all people.” Ligon Duncan is no woke progressive, as anyone who knows him will attest.
Duncan’s eulogy is a reminder that Tisby has been on a long journey, from RTS poster child in 2015 to working for Ibram Kendi’s outfit in 2021. Indeed, even The Color of Compromise, a book with which I have some stated disagreements, is surely not representative of where he is today. The fact is, the summer of 2020 appears to have been a radicalizing watershed for Tisby as for many others on both sides of the political divide. The college can hardly be blamed for failing in 2019 to predict the radicalization of the RTS graduate who had recently been seen as the emerging African American bridge-builder in conservative reformed Presbyterianism.
In an email exchange, the editor of The American Reformer expressed concern to me that Grove City College was platforming Tisby while not platforming faculty like me on woke issues. Well, Tisby came to campus for one day and (I believe) spoke twice. Then he left and has not returned. As for me, I lecture for several hours every day on campus to classes that are full. I speak in chapel every year. I write things almost weekly at places like First Things and World that whack wokeness. The college launched its Great Lectures series by showcasing me on identity issues as they culminate in today’s identity politics. The college arranged for me to speak to a Washington D.C. group of Capitol Hill staffers twice in the last 18 months—once on sexual-identity issues, once on race. Even in the last three weeks, I have taught classes on campus criticizing the Supreme Court’s gay marriage decision and Bruce Jenner’s gender transition—career-damaging lectures at almost any other institution of higher education in the United States. And I have for many years been one of the most vocal opponents of the way in which identity politics, particularly that of the LGBTQ+ movement, has damaged our culture and public life. I have received nothing but support from the college administration as I have continued to speak up on such matters. And from my vantage point, the same could be said of my colleagues who share my support of GCC’s Christ-centered mission, but do not come down on every hard issue where I do.
That makes Grove City College, even with all of its mortal failings and human flaws, a remarkable place. My wife and I recently hosted students at our house for a dessert evening. One of them asked if I hoped to stay at Grove City College until I retire. I responded yes, because I love the college and, more significantly, because my writings and lecturing have made me likely unemployable almost anywhere else in this age of the woke. As evidence, I told them about a Christian college where I gave a lecture by Zoom in the last year. The professor who invited me to speak asked if he could record the session because he expected to be the subject of a complaint that he had created an unsafe learning environment by having someone of my views speak. And that was a Christian college. A Christian college. That would not happen at Grove City College.
Is Grove City College perfect?  No more than I am. But I am a conservative and a Christian and that means that I believe certain things are true. For example, I believe that no institution can ever make no mistakes and do the right thing every time. And the larger the institution, the more likely it is that issues will arise. With nearly 200 faculty, a large staff, a student body of more than 2,000, and more than 800 courses taught each semester, GCC is too big for even the most perfect administration to micromanage. Built from the crooked timber of fallen humanity, Grove City College, like all institutions, reflects our own failings and weaknesses. But if the test of people’s character is not whether they live a perfect life but how they handle their mistakes and failings, then the test of an institution’s integrity is how it addresses those things which have not gone as planned or have proved unexpectedly counter-productive. GCC’s management of this continuing challenge is smart and effective. It strives to hire excellent scholars with solid Christian convictions. There is no tenure; everyone gets a one-year contract requiring affirmation of the college’s mission and values. When occasional issues arise, direct and constructive conversations take place with the expectation of missional alignment. That is why it is sad that the college’s recent statement about its commitment to addressing the matters raised by the petition has met with such cynicism from an ostensibly conservative Christian source.
I do appreciate my friend praying for me. I hope that he prays that all of us at Grove City College will stand firm for God’s truth, academic freedom, and intellectual integrity in this storm of wokeness that surrounds us. But above all, I hope that he gives thanks that I and my colleagues work at a place where we have the freedom to be faithful in our callings, a freedom that exists in few other institutions of higher education today.
Carl R. Trueman is professor of Biblical and Religious Studies at Grove City College. This article is used with permission.

When we are “put” somewhere we don’t like or don’t find comfortable, it can be tempting to ask for a change of location. But what if God wants us in that very place to advance the gospel?

I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that what has happened to me has actually served to advance the gospel.Philippians 1:12
I am writing this reflection from Gifu in central Japan. I am here for the 7th Japan Congress on Evangelism, a gathering of Japanese church and ministry leaders and missionaries. In advance of this Congress, a survey was carried out to get an up-to-date picture of the state of the church in Japan. The findings were published in May, and humanly speaking there is cause for real concern. The number of believers remains at less than 1%, the church and its pastors are aging and the future is not looking bright. If there ever was a time for leaders to come together to think about evangelism in Japan, then it is now.
While it is good and helpful to get facts and figures about the state of the church, however, we must not allow those to be the only things we consider. I am currently writing devotions for my Japanese church on the book of Philippians, and last week was considering verses 12-14 of Chapter 1. Paul is in prison, in chains, because of the gospel. I wonder how the Philippian believers were praying for him. Perhaps they were praying that he would be released quickly. After all, the Philippian church knew from personal experience that God could indeed open prison doors (Acts 16:25-28). It would make sense that they would want Paul to be released so that he could continue his work of sharing the good news about Jesus in various towns and cities.
Paul’s perspective, however, is quite different. He reassures the Philippian believers that what has happened to him, namely the fact that he is in prison, has actually served to advance the gospel. The word “advance” here means to move forward, overcoming obstacles in the way. Some people no doubt saw Paul being in prison as an obstacle, something getting in the way, but Paul says that instead it has advanced the gospel.
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