Original post at http://stephenrankin.com/choking-the-pipeline-for-older-clergy/

Those darn Texans!

I arrived home yesterday evening to find my copy of the latest United Methodist Reporter and read of the Texas Annual Conference’s consideration to discourage ordination by potential clergy candidates over the age of 45.  As you might imagine, this proposal has struck a nerve.  I may be weighing in too late, but, hey, I’m trying to be a blogger, so here goes.

According to the UM Reporter, the proposal does not ban older candidates.  In other words, they’re not trying to get rid of older people serving in ministry.  It just discourages them from going through the full ordination process.  These are a few of the details they appear to be considering:

1. Encouraging a person considering elders orders who is older than 45 to seek licensed local pastor ministry rather than going through the full candidacy and ordination process; or to pursue other forms of ministry like certified lay speaker.
2. Likewise, encouraging deacon candidates over the age of 45 to pursue other expressions of ministry, rather than deacons orders.
3. Making similar suggestions for people over 60 or 70, to choose avenues of ministry other than, presumably, Course of Study and licensed local pastor status.

Various conference officials stress that they are by no means denying someone’s call, but rather are attempting to deal appropriately with the annual conference’s long-term needs, in view of the time and monetary investments necessary (by both conference and candidates) to complete the process.  On the other side of the debate are people saying what a bad idea this is and that it is tantamount to age discrimination, against the law and the Book of Discipline.

A few of my own scattered observations:

As Kevin Watson has recently pointed out (vitalpiety.com), ordination is not a right, but a rite of the church, a calling and something that the church discerns with the one called.  As a matter of general principle, then, annual conferences not only have the authority, but also the responsibility to make strategic decisions about candidates’ suitability.  None of us likes being told “no,” but sometimes “no” is the right answer.

On the other hand, who will serve the many UM congregations that it seems only these older clergy will serve?  Generally (and I emphasize that word), younger people are not as willing to go to low income, lonely (for young people), often rural, appointments.  Our younger generations have been schooled in group forms of collaborative education.  They are more comfortable with team efforts.  Young people also think of and engage their social lives differently than us older folk.  They’re much more likely to do social things in groups (yes, like Friends or Big Bang Theory).  While statistics show that young people hunger for and appreciate interaction with older generations, they still need age peers.  To put a young seminary graduate in a place where there are no other young people around for miles can feel to them like being consigned to the outer darkness.

Again, who’s going to serve the under-served and under-resourced and aging parishes?  Often older candidates.  Out of sheer love for God and the call, they’ll go to that low income isolated parish.  I can imagine someone from the Texas Conference saying to me, “That’s exactly what the licensed local pastor track is for.”  And that person would be right.  But I wonder about the increasing appointment stratification that would seem to happen inevitably.  Yes, it happens already in other ways, but I think the move the Texas Conference is considering will add levels.

Which brings me to the (at least) two-tier ministry we have going right now.  For a very long time – partly because my Dad was a Course of Study graduate who served small rural parishes and partly because I have taught some really gifted people in the Course of Study – I have been troubled by the clerical class system in United Methodism.  I won’t chase this rabbit now, but the sometimes open disdain by elders for licensed local pastors is shocking and disheartening.  As long as we have the delivery systems in place for theological education that we have now, we will continue to endure this problem.  And it is a problem.

Even though the proposal does not intend to deny anyone’s calling, it surely will have a dampening effect on older folk going into the ministry.  It is almost impossible for people in this age group not to hear, “We don’t really want you.”

Worse, this proposal – driven as it is by a version of supply-and-demand – also seems to predict the future.  First the economic model.  As I noted above, conferences rightly must think carefully about the investment of resources.  If we think just in essentially economic terms, we’re looking at cycling older folk through the system at a much more rapid rate than younger clergy, which means that the church is investing significantly more resources in a person compared to the return relative to length of service.  The church also constantly has to “reload.”  Younger clergy, all other things being equal, have longer to serve.  It makes sense to invest in them.  There’s simply more bang for the buck, most likely.

And here is the problem.  Isn’t this the kind of economic model that we tend to decry in other quarters?

Now my point about predicting the future – and this thought looms very large in my own mind as deeply important – I can tell you about a friend who, after a long and distinguished career as a high school teacher, entered seminary in his 50s.  He has had a very significant ministry, including (take note!) nurturing the call of a number of people who entered the ranks of clergy themselves.  John  and I knew each other in seminary.  I was young and green.  I learned a lot just from talking to him in our dorm rooms after classes and over the years as clergy colleagues.

This real-life example illustrates both the metrics and the intangibles of the problem of making age an issue.  An older clergy  person may help many young people (as did John) hear a call and enter ministry.  The church, by putting a damper on the possibilities of that person serving as an elder in the church, maybe effect the supply of pastors in unintended, but no less tragic, ways.  Furthermore, had the Texas Conference policy been in place, it is exceedingly unlikely that John would have gone to the United Methodist seminary that we both attended, and my life would have been poorer by a magnitude.

Finally, an obvious point, but one I cannot resist making.  Choking the pipeline to ordination for older clergy will not cause a larger influx of younger clergy candidates.  I’m confident that the Texas Conference knows this.  They have some really good things going for young people in their conference, so the likelihood is that they won’t have to worry as much as other conferences about recruiting young candidates.  But for the other reasons I’ve named, I have to admit (now that I’ve thought “out loud” with you) that I’m worried by the implications of the move that those darn Texans seem to be making.

Aiming at the Right Target

All in all, then, I must say, I think the Texas Conference move is a bad idea.  I appreciate the difficult problem they face and that the whole church faces.  This is not an easy thing to solve, so I’m by no means casting aspersions.  Still, I think we need to trust God to call the people whom God wants to call, trust our boards of ordained ministry to oversee the candidacy process to discern gifts and fitness for ministry (and no more) and trust the Spirit to send us the candidates we need.

And for the rest of us, let’s focus on the fundamental problem.  We United Methodists are not doing a very good job at nurturing the faith of our young people.  We are not effectively catechizing them.  Therefore, we have fewer young candidates for ministry than we need.  Older candidates are not the problem.  The lack of younger candidates is the problem.

The post Choking the Pipeline for Older Clergy Candidates: The Larger Problem appeared first on Rankin File.

Original post at http://stephenrankin.com/college-ministers-its-time-to-talk-about-the-fear-of-god/

College campuses have become zones of utter moral ignorance.  Not “immorality,” but ignorance.  (Moral ignorance is not the same as intellectual ignorance.  Think of the Greek word “moros,”  which means “fool.”)   This post will be no screed against immorality.  We have a much more basic problem.  To act in “immoral” ways one has to know the moral system that one is offending.  We mostly don’t.  And college ministers generally are ill-prepared to address this problem through the current forms of their ministries.

Just because campuses are zones of moral ignorance does not mean that there is no moral system operating on campus.  In a recent blog post I tried to describe the party culture as a moral community.  I touched on points that I’ll try to develop a bit more now and then get to why I think we in college ministry are not handling matters particularly well.

To my task by way of a recent experience: I recently participated in a conversation with some students and school officials surrounding an alcohol-related near tragedy.  Thankfully, it was only a near-tragedy.  The conversation we had was very revealing.  As I listened to the students talk about their motives related to the actions that led to the incident, the operative moral system became crystal clear to me.  In relation to the party scene, students generally do a kind of informal cost-benefit analysis.  The potential risks of the extreme partying scene are worth the payoff of the experience they have.  It’s even worth the risk of getting caught and getting in trouble.

That last point is a very, very important one.

Cost-benefit analysis.  Sound familiar?  It is part and parcel of the moral system that we teach students in a variety of ways, on campus and beyond campus in the larger culture.  It has several important components:

1.  The benefit is happiness (subjective wellbeing), experienced in some particular way through the extreme social scene.  Happiness is the main goal of life.

2.  On the happiness question, the individual reigns supreme.  Each individual gets to decide what makes her/him happy.

3.  The cost – hangovers, getting sick, alcohol poisoning, unwanted sexual experience – is worth the benefit of a great time, a good feeling with people who seem like good friends.

What we have here is a utilitarian ethic enmeshed in a system that teaches us all that we’re consumers.  In this case, students are consuming a certain type of desired experience.  This is not news, I realize.  What is news is just how deeply our young people have accepted this moral vision and how desperately they pursue it.

(I just learned of a new book from Cascade (wipfandstock.com) by Bruce Rittenhouse, Shopping for Meaningful Lives: The Religious Motive of Consumerism.  The blurb and endorsements refer to the very problem I’m trying to name here.  I can hardly wait to read this book.)

The utilitarian ethic makes social behavior like partying a “private” matter.  What you do on your own time, with your friends, is your business as long as you don’t hurt yourself or others (notice the utilitarianism).  Precisely here, we start to run into difficulties that make all our institutional attempts to improve on the terrifying scenarios that have become a normal part of college life largely ineffective.  Colleges and universities are filled with faculty and administrators who care deeply about helping students avoid these problems, yet we are essentially helpless and hapless.  Why?

Because this utilitarian ethic is as much our assumptive world as it is our students.   It is the water we all swim in.

Back to the conversation with the  students.  Their rationale for the extreme partying plays out like this:

1.  College is about having a good time, going crazy, and partying.  It is like a four-year summer camp with no adults around during off hours.  Minus the crazy partying, we adults (including parents) talk about college as if it were this golden period in a young person’s life.  They come to us already primed for a great time.  I’m not making this up.  I’m describing it how students do.

2.  A “good time” almost always entails vast quantities of alcohol and ready recreational sex.  When you define “good time” by these criteria (and many students do, though not all), then anything less seems like a downer, as if anyone who tries to get students to slow down a little are bent on taking away the whole college experience.  They can almost talk about this good as a “right to party.”

3.  When school officials try to take away this vision of college life that students are determined to pursue (remember, this vision entails a good in the classic moral sense), students move into cost-benefit mode: how do we party without getting caught?  How much are we willing to risk in order to realize the good (the pleasure, the sociability, the happiness of the party scene)?

We (the grownups) have taught them this moral vision.  Keep in mind, nobody means to encourage extreme behavior.  I am by no means accusing anyone of moral lassitude here.  Because we have essentially stopped talking about morality, we don’t recognize the moral vision as such.  This blindness (and ignorance) has all kinds of unintended consequences.  The only system students (and we) know – utilitarianism – they know in an unexamined way.

Now to the role (or lack thereof) that college ministers play: students function as consumers.  It’s about their individual plans, their goals, their majors, their happiness.  We teach them to get involved in campus activities, along with their majors, in order to help them realize their goals and develop their personalities.  The fundamental criterion thus becomes this question, “What should I do with my time to make sure I’m happy while I’m in college?”

We college ministers play right into that scene.  We dangle shiny experiences in front of them while using terms like “discipleship.”  We offer them a cool mid-week worship service so that they don’t have to bother with getting up on Sunday to go to church.  We tell them that being Christian is not about “being religious,” but “having a relationship” (with Jesus, of course).  We try to entice them in a variety of ways to give us some of their precious weekly schedules.  And whenever they see anything better come along that matches the moral vision they have of themselves, they drop us and move on.

Just like college administrators, nobody in campus ministry intends for things to be this way.  Most definitely, I can name you wonderful exceptions to my generalization.  Still, the culture of individual prerogative – the student-as-consumer – dominates campus ministry culture as much as it does the rest of campus culture.

What do we do?  I think it’s time we re-introduced the notion of the fear of the God.  ”Fear” is a bad word (see Don Saliers’ perceptive analysis in his book, The Soul in Paraphrase, p. 50).  Like Saliers, the term does not mean the emotion of fear, as if we have to worry that God is going to lose his temper and knock the heck out of us.  The fear of the Lord starts with recognizing that our lives are not our own – precisely the opposite direction that the current expression of individualist utilitarianism says – that we belong to God and we’re here to serve God’s great purposes.

I think students will hear us if we start talking this way.  They are hungry for truth.  Much of what is happening now is because they don’t really see anything better.  College ministers, we can show them.

The post College Ministers: It’s Time to Talk about the Fear of God appeared first on Rankin File.

Original post at http://stephenrankin.com/what-a-church-bookstore-tells-us-about-us/

Grabbing a cup of coffee and waiting for Sunday School to start this morning, Joni and I noticed a “50% off” shelf of books outside the bookstore/coffee bar.  I love snooping around in bookstores.  Today’s excursion produced this moment of reverie:

It’s a little bit like the church (not just our church) has a collective case of ADD.  Yes, Attention Deficit Disorder.  We seem attracted to (or distracted by) whatever shiny product or hot author or cool new thing comes along next .  That’s what gets our attention…for the moment.  As soon as the shine fades, we move on.

I filed this thought, promising myself I’d come back to it later.  As I think about it now, I was right and wrong at the same time.

I’ll start with the wrong first.  The wide variety of topics suggests the range of heart hungers that Christians feel.  I rejoice any time any Christian makes an effort to grow in respect to some part of her life.  That motive motivates people to write that wide variety of books.  People trying to help other people grow; not just grabbing at the next shiny thing, but a real desire to grow…

But it’s also true that shiny things catch our eye and American Christianity has its share of shiny things: bestselling authors and conferences and big events with celebrity Christian speakers and all manner of workshops and weekend experiences.  I still can’t get over the first time I saw one of those “5 minute devotional” books in a Christian bookstore.  Now I notice that sort of silly thing all the time being sold in Christian bookstores.  I guess a five minute devotional is better than nothing, but five minutes with the Lord is like taking one bite at a banquet.  It may have its momentary effect, but it does not accomplish its intended purpose.

Honestly, when you stop and think, with the flood of books on all manner of spiritual life and discipleship topics, we Christians ought to be among the most mature, wise, put-together people on the planet.  Yet, we are not.  Why?  Is it because we are so easily distracted by the latest, greatest Christian whatever?  Maybe.

What if we are chasing a certain type of experience rather than Christian character?  We spend much effort (and money?) seeking momentary exaltations and mistake them for actual encounters with the living God.  This is not a killjoy comment, nor dour rationalism.  Thank God for emotionally intense moments, but they are just that: moments.

Every one of us can name glorious moments.  I’m old enough to remember well Lay Witness Missions.  (Google it.)  For a while for men, it was Promise Keepers.  For young folks, it’s a Passion Conference.  I’m not gainsaying these ministries or the great experiences we have participating in one of their events.  I believe God is present at them and works his purposes.

But they are still just moments.  And God is interested in making a lifetime of godliness.  The goal of the Christian life is mature Christian character.  Most of discipleship is taken up with practicing, learning how to die daily.  It’s about daily prayer, corporate worship, searching the scriptures themselves,  not reading some “Bible study” about the Bible.  It’s about loving one another, our neighbors and our enemies.

What are you reading right now?  What books are on your bed stand?   I’d guess they express your characteristic interests and our interests vary.  But it’s not just about what interests us.  It’s about what God intends to do in the life of his people.  And that means stretching beyond our narrow interests or our own sense of need, important as they are.

Here’s the deal, friends.  God will judge the quality and fruitfulness of our lives.  Whatever you think about heaven and hell or eternal destiny, that’s not my point here.  My point is simply that we are accountable to the One who created and redeemed us and is now in the process of sanctifying us, to serve his purposes.

Hopping around from one topic to another; dabbling in various parts of the Christian life won’t get it done.  Your life matters and it matters that you grow into the disciple our Lord envisions you to be.  Commit.  Persevere.  Daily.  When you get distracted by shiny things, by God’s grace turn your attention back to God’s purposes.  Stay with it.  Don’t quit.  Don’t give up.  There is truly no other way.

The post The Church’s Version of ADD appeared first on Rankin File.

Original post at http://stephenrankin.com/a-better-narrative-religion-contributes-much-good-to-the-world/

The Big Narrative in American (and Western) society is that religious faith is:

1.  dangerous (notice in the most recent Boston Bombing tragedy how stories about the bombers revolve tightly and consistently around “radical Islam”).

2.  irrelevant (This is a version of the secularization thesis, that, as the world modernizes, the need for religious faith declines.  This view has received serious criticism, but it is so ingrained that it continues to circulate widely, especially on college campuses.)

It troubles me how much The Big Narrative has a corrosive effect on the spiritual and moral formation of our young people.  It’s the main reason why I’m bothered enough to keep talking about it.  I’m not engaging in “the sky is falling” hysteria.  I am calling for a change in approach, especially on college campuses, toward general attitudes about the public expression of religious faith, even about large-scale social problems.  I’m pleading for the “keep your faith to yourself” attitude to soften and maybe even disappear.

As a follow-up to yesterday’s blog, I offer this affirmation: religiously committed people contribute much good to the Common Good.  They are motivated to serve others precisely because of their religious faith.  This statement runs exactly counter to The Big Narrative.

Robert Putnam and David Campbell in their recent book, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (2010), are among the most recent of students of American religion to identify this fact:

Controlling for all standard background factors…we find that people who became more closely involved with religious networks between 2006 and 2007 became better citizens and more generous neighbors.  They volunteered more, they gave more to secular causes, they went to more public meetings, they were more likely to vote in local elections and more likely to pitch in on some community project.  Conversely, those people whose ties to religious social networks slackened somewhat over this year reduced their civic involvement in all these ways. (p. 476)

Furthermore, religiously active people are more likely to get involved in community projects outside their religious circles.  (p. 477)  This is as true of conservative (evangelical) Protestant Christians as it is of any religious group.

By the way, don’t worry about the narrow time frame referenced above.  These sociologists are doing what good social scientists do.  They set up a well-designed research method that allows for generalizable conclusions.

Authors Douglas and Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen in their most recent book, No Longer Invisible: Religion in University Education (2012), quote another sociologist, Robert Wuthnow:

In nearly all of the comparisons, people who are more actively religious or traditionally religious are more likely to be engaged in charitable or service volunteering than those who are less actively or traditionally religious.  Furthermore, Among Christians, the largest difference is between those who read the Bible regularly and those who do not, and there is also a large difference between those who pray or meditate regularly and those who do not (p. 117).

Look at this claim: If you read your Bible regularly and pray regularly, you are more likely to get involved in social service than if you don’t.  Reading one’s Bible is more likely to lead to social good than to violence.

None of these authors is saying that religious people are “better” than anyone else.  That is a silly, fruitless comparison.  They are simply pointing to consistent visible patterns of behavior, to demonstrable qualities of religious people, then doing a comparison with non-religious people.  Remember, my concern has nothing to do with “who’s better,” but with the misleading, spiritually debilitating influence of The Big Narrative.

I come from small-town America (the great State of Kansas).  If you’ve ever lived in a small town, you know how important churches are to the community.  I was tickled, years ago, to find Ram Cnaan’s et. al. 2002 book, The Invisible Caring Hand: American Congregations and the Provision of Welfare.  It gives a telling picture of what never makes it into The Big Narrative.  In the authors’ words, these congregations strengthen the “social fabric” of communities.  One of the towns they mention is Council Grove, KS and the dozen or so congregations working together to meet local needs.  God bless you, Council Grove.

I have no intention to cover up Christian sins.   We Christians have done and said things that hurt people, that harm our witness and wound the Body of Christ. It’s much better that we admit, without the slightest hint of self-vindication, when we do wrong.  Acknowledging this sad fact, we still need to recognize just how helpful, how involved, how open, how caring, how loving, how committed and socially engaged, many, many Christians truly are.  I could say the same about people of other religious faiths, but the truth is, I don’t read much in The Big Narrative about Hindu, Buddhist or Jewish hypocrisy, narrowness and cruelty, so let me focus on my own spiritual fellow-travelers for the moment.

The Big Narrative – that religion is by turns dangerous and irrelevant – is itself dangerous and misleading.  That is why, for instance, “spiritual but not religious” (a prominent theme in higher education) needs scrutinizing.  Most importantly, that is why colleges that enthusiastically promote honest, risky public engagement, dialogue and even debate about religious faith in public life offer a much better education and a vastly more enriching environment for students than do the schools that, for whatever motive, ignore faith.

The question then becomes, “How?”  As religiously diverse as American society has become, how do we realize this vision of open engagement and religious involvement with competition and conflict?  How do we keep from lapsing into either sectarian squabbling or lowest common denominator generic “religion?”  I have a few ideas.  They’re coming, slowly…

The post A Better Narrative: Religion Contributes Much Good to the World appeared first on Rankin File.

Original post at http://stephenrankin.com/the-power-of-a-flawed-narrative/

Something does not add up.  Bear with me while I try to sort out these recent news stories.

Three days ago I read an NPR story about Egyptian activists calling for the removal of religion from the identity card that all Egyptians have to carry (“My Religion is None of Your Business”).  Aalam Wassef has produced and distributed a video with these lyrics: “The racist republic of Egypt, the sectarian republic of Egypt.  It’s ingrained on your ID, and this is where the trouble starts.”  ”Sectarian” is the article’s operative word.

Tim Tebow was cut by the New York Jets and apparently no other NFL team is interested in him.  One pundit’s reason for the lack of interest?  Organizations don’t want the media circus that comes with Tebow’s publicly-displayed Christian faith.  If only Tim just kept it to himself.  What does it have to do with his playing football, anyway?

Yesterday’s Christianity Today blog (“The Beltway Believer”) by Timothy Dalrymple tells of Michael Cromartie and the Faith Angle Forum.  Cromartie has been working to help the nation’s elite journalists interact in face-to-face conversation with evangelical Christian leaders.  Dalrymple observes how their interacting with the likes of Rick Warren and Tim Keller is changing their opinions and the tone and content of their articles.  So, good news here, but what I noticed was how ignorant those journalists were of people like Warren and Keller before this Forum began.  They only knew the Pat Robertsons and the Jerry Falwells.

I’ve been puzzling over what happens to teenagers’ faith between high school and college.  Various surveys have shown high schoolers generally expressing positive opinions about their faith and church experience back home.  But something happens on the way to college.  Many of those same students almost entirely stop practicing their faith once they get here.  What is that about?

We can make partial sense of the phenomenon by reference to their newfound freedom.  Nobody is making them get up and go to church, so they don’t.  Another cause has to do with MTD (Moralistic Therapeutic Deism).  I take these answers as helpful, but partial.  Something else is going on.

So, four different stories but with a sub-text: religion is divisive and dangerous if held too strongly.  Better to downplay it, marginalize it, tame it, sanitize it.

Still, I have questions.  What makes sectarian violence “sectarian?”  The answer seems obvious: Combatants combat because of competing orthodoxies.  From this angle it looks like orthodox belief is the problem.  Since religious orthodoxies deal with alleged ultimate truth and destiny, some people are determined to control other people and this is where the problem starts.  The solution is to  mute or even hide religious identity.  This strategy can appear in many ways under many guises.

We have here what I think of as an attribution error in these narratives.  The problem is attributed to something inherent in religion.  Whatever that something is, it should be avoided.  It is no wonder, then, that college students quickly catch on to the notion that their faith is an optional accessory, therefore can be easily laid aside or modified to suit their private, particular needs.

The attribution error reveals the bias that must be named and corrected.  Religion is often portrayed as somehow the cause of the problem when the real problem is more fundamental: people are tempted to abuse power.  We can do it through religious teachings or we can do it through entirely secular ones.

The post The Distorting Power of a Flawed Narrative appeared first on Rankin File.

Original post at http://stephenrankin.com/party-culture-as-moral-community/

(For the next few weeks I’d like to intersperse blog thoughts on college students and church related higher education along with other topics that catch my attention.  I’m working on a writing project and would appreciate the feedback.)

One of the most enduring and troubling features of the college student experience is the party culture.  Even though college students have always engaged in drinking and partying, the significant difference between “back then” and now is the intensity of the activity and the hardness of the alcohol involved.

Scholars tend to approach this problem from one of three perspectives: public health, mental health or sociological analysis.  The first two are self-explanattory.  The health risks associated with the kind of hard drinking students do these days are well known.  The third category (the sociology of partying) is relatively unexplored, according to Thomas Vander Ven whose book, Getting Wasted (New York University Press)  offers an example.  Dr. Vander Venn came to our campus a couple of weeks ago and led us in thought-provoking conversation.

http://www.amazon.com/Getting-Wasted-College-Students-Drink/dp/0814788327/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1366405135&sr=8-1&keywords=Vander+Ven%2C+Thomas

Dr. Vander Ven’s book provides important insight.  He is deeply concerned about the seriousness of the endeavor and is trying to help us understand what is going on with extreme partying.  He explores the social benefits of partying, like “drunk support” (you take care of me when I’m drunk and I’ll take care of you when you’re drunk).  He reflects on the possibility that hard drinking and the attendant risks give students opportunity to practice adult responsibilities.  When you’re friend is drunk and you have to take care of her or him, you are in the role of parent, bearing responsibility for and acting as if you’re taking care of a child.

Even being hung over together has social benefits.  If you and others are hung over together, the shared pain is “fun.”  (No kidding, this is how interviewees describe it.)  There is a sense of belonging experienced in the shared suffering.

I think Dr. Vander Ven is really onto something.  What is missing altogether from attempts to understand and improve this problem is the moral quality of the community (even if shaky and temporary) that students form in the party culture.  I have brought up this point here and there in previous posts.  I have also said that peer pressure is moral pressure.  Let’s consider how and, more importantly, why it seems so hard for people who work with college students to recognize the moral dimension of this issue.

But first one important set-up for what follows: Various authors have noticed a reductive quality of most college ethics courses and broader attempts to think ethically.  The emphasis falls almost exclusively on rules or principles governing behavior: what ought I to do or not to do in a given situation?  What is the moral obligation in terms of behavior?  Taking this approach leaves out the question of desire and motive altogether and numerous arguments have been put forward to justify it.

How Do We Recognize the “Moral” in the Partying?

But ethics and moral philosophy are not only about “oughts” with regard to behavior.  Morality also has to do with the good(s) which I (we) pursue.  One of the reasons it has seemed more important to ethicists to concentrate on rules governing behavior is that the goods we pursue are so vastly different from one another and based on such varying religious and ethical systems, that we need a kind of clearinghouse-type set of rules to provide common procedures in a diverse environment.

For example, two roommates get into a disagreement over visitation rights of boyfriends/girlfriends.  One roommate wants the freedom to have lover over  all night if he/she chooses.  The other wants privacy and does not want sleepovers.  How do you adjudicate this disagreement, given that each roommate is operating from her own set of moral values?  The Resident Assistant (RA) is asked to step in and help work through the disagreement.  But the RA officially takes no position herself regarding the morality of sleepovers.  The goal is to provide guidelines for dispute resolution while leaving substantive moral concerns aside.

With regard to partying (and I use the sleepover example because partying and recreational sex – not to mention unwanted sex and sexual assault, go together), a school can have no official moral position, other than what the law says.  If you’re under 21 years of age, it is illegal for you to drink, therefore you should not drink (wink, wink, nod, nod).  If you’re of legal drinking age, you should “drink responsibly.”  And, by the way, if you’re under age, we know you’re going to drink anyway, so please “drink responsibly.” Notice the focus on behavior.

Now we turn to the moral community that is the party community.  I have spent hours talking with students about this issue.  They do a cost-benefit analysis (notice the economic utilitarianism at work).  The benefits of sociability, fun, hookups, release from the pressures of college, etc., far outweigh the risk of getting caught and getting in trouble and of getting too drunk, getting sick, having alcohol poisoning or a terrible hangover the next morning.

College students thus pursue a good when they party.  They are part of a community committed to pursuing that good.  It is a good based on their background beliefs (“college is about partying and having a good time”).  Many of them come to college knowing that partying is “just what college kids do.”  Many of them go against their personal values and get swept up in the extreme behavior because, as Vander Ven has shown, there is a social benefit to joining the action.  What is not clear and which needs to become clear is that this is students’ version of a moral community, a community of goods, that our procedural, rule-based efforts simply do not touch.

And the campus ethos is totally complicit.  Partly because of the erosion of liberal arts curricula and partly for other reasons, students have virtually no experiences that encourage deep moral reflection.  Colleges and universities also do almost nothing to give students intellectual resources to recognize moral systems as such so that they can do the personal reflection they need to do to become truly well-educated.

Our institutional moral duplicity in this matter is alarming.  We do not want to meddle in what we consider students’ private lives.  We don’t want to seem moralistic.  We talk as if the way we operate is the fairest and most neutral with regard to individual private beliefs, but the truth is, we have capitulated to a particular moral system (ad hoc as it may be) that epitomizes individual autonomy and subjective wellbeing as the ultimate measures for good.  Not neutral, but actually committed to the same set of goods to which students recur in order to party!  We teach them this moral system, then wonder why they act the way they do.

The best (and maybe only) way forward is for colleges to come clean about our entanglements that contribute to the problem.  For the sake of our students, we must re-enter moral conversations with our students.  While some people will likely resist this call for fear of imposed religious doctrines, we must remember that some version of somebody’s view will be imposed.  There is no way around it.

There is a de facto moral community on our college campuses right now, driven by students’ commitments to the goods associated with extreme partying.  It is a moral community, to be sure, even though it is not one we typically associate with the word “moral.”

What do you think?

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