Deconstruction Novel -- chapter 9.1

Jerry Pattengale wrote a bit of a review of the novel on higher education that Erin Crisp and I wrote, How Angie Saved Chicken U. It has an ISBN but is not quite up on Amazon yet. Since he mentions the long-term novel I have been writing on Fridays/Saturdays, I thought I would give continued proof of concept. :-) Here's from this morning:

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Matt had met with Dr. Baine. Now it was Brad’s turn to meet with Dr. Todley, the history professor. As before, the group came up with some questions for Brad to cover. As with Dr. Baine, I would go too as a second witness.

Brad wanted to know more about why he shouldn’t vote for a third-party candidate or why he had to vote at all. April wanted to know more about the “separation of church and state.” Dr. Todley didn’t seem too concerned about it to her. Jessica wondered if there were any scenario when he might vote for a Democrat.

Matt didn’t really have any questions. He just wanted Brad to get Dr. Baine into trouble about abortion.

Dr. Todley was happy to meet. He did not yet have any of the group in class, but he saw these issues as extremely important and wanted to influence as many students as he could to vote Republican. For him, the future of America as a Christian nation was at stake. 

“So your ‘lunch bunch’ has some questions about the debate?” He took the lead.

“Yeah, we wanted to follow up with both you and Dr. Baine to hear more about your thoughts on the election. I come bearing questions,” Brad said.

“I hope they’re not Trojan questions,” he said with a completely straight face. Brad did not realize he had echoed the Greek story of the Trojan horse. It leaped out of his subconscious like the Greeks hiding inside the horse.

“No, my questions won’t jump out and attack you by surprise,” Brad smiled. He looked down at the paper where he had written down the questions.

“Why don’t you just give me the paper and I’ll go down the list?”

“Sure, if you can read my handwriting,” Brad said and handed him the paper.

“Separation of church and state,” his eyes fixed on the second question. “No such thing,” he said firmly.

“You all need to take my American history class next semester. There are all kinds of lies they teach you in the public school about American history, and that’s one of them. The phrase ‘separation of church and state’ appears nowhere in the Constitution or the official founding documents of the United States.

“In fact, as late as 1877 the state of New Hampshire required that all state representatives be Protestants. Until 1833, any elected official in Massachusetts had to confess their belief in the Christian religion.”

“So where does the idea come from?” Brad asked.

“It’s a misinterpretation of the first amendment. What it says is that ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.’ It’s about there not being an official religion of the nation as a whole. It was never meant to cut religion out of all public life. And nothing in the Constitution prohibits the individual states from having Christianity as their official religion.”

Brad didn’t really know enough about it to ask detailed questions or what pushback a different history professor might make.

“So is there any limit to what Christian laws the government might make?” ...

Deconstruction novel continues...

Just wanted to say that I continue the discipline of writing the Deconstruction novel on Friday nights/Saturday mornings. But I don't think I'll continue putting excerpts here.

In other news, Erin Crisp and I wrote a fable in 2 days this week: How Angie Saved Chicken U. I was inspired by the fable, How Stella Saved the Farm. I think my company, Campus Edu, is going to publish and distribute it. It captures my sense of what might happen to save the struggling Christian college. I am more doubtful about whether such colleges will end up taking much of the advice. 

Deconstruction 7.1 -- After the Debate

My discipline of writing a novel called Deconstruction continues, the story of several young people at a Christian college in the years 2016-2020. Here was the last post.

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The next day at lunch, our group debriefed from the debate. Jessica hadn’t gone. Such things were far too boring for her. Matt thought that Dr. Todley was the obvious winner. April thought the same about Dr. Baine.

Brad wasn’t sure, nor was I. Dr. Todley’s best arguments had to do with abortion, it seemed to us. But Dr. Baine had made us realize something that had never even occurred to us—America’s past seemed a lot brighter to us because we were white than it probably did to someone of color.

All of us agreed that we would have liked to have heard responses to some of the points the other side made. Matt didn’t feel like Dr. Baine had been clear about when human life began. April wanted to know what Dr. Todley would say about abortion declining more under Democratic presidents. Brad was curious about what Dr. Todley thought Jesus was really like.

A scheme emerged. Matt would have coffee with Dr. Baine, and Brad would do the same with Dr. Todley. We as a group would collect our questions for each one and commission them to ask them. Then we would regroup afterward and share the results.

Deconstruction 6.1 -- The Debate begins

I continue to write a novel called Deconstruction, set in a Christian college in the years 2016-2020. Here's the previous excerpt.

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The chapel was packed to the brim the evening of the debate. Dr. Todley had a podium on the right and Dr. Baine was on the left. If anyone missed the symbolism, Dr. Todley pointed it out as an opening joke.

A senior named Todd was the moderator. He was president of the Young Republicans club. April found out there was no Young Democrats club on campus because the administration wasn’t sure it would be appropriate for us as a Christian college. And besides, they couldn’t find a faculty person willing to be its advisor.

Both professors gave an opening statement. Then Todd asked them three questions each, with a chance for each to respond. Then they gave closing remarks, followed by an open Q & A session.

Dr. Todley went first. His basic argument was that although candidate Trump was not a perfect candidate, he was 75% on the right path while Clinton was 100% on the wrong path. The Republican platform was godly while the Democratic one was not. A vote for anyone else but Trump was a vote for abortion. That issue alone meant a Christian had to vote for Trump. It even ruled out not voting or voting for a third party candidate. Meanwhile, Trump was surrounding himself with good people who would help him grow as a baby Christian. He would get better and better. A solid round of applause greeted the end of opening remarks.

Then Dr. Baine tried to argue that the situation wasn’t quite as black and white as Dr. Todley had made it out to be. He claimed that Democratic values aligned pretty closely with Jesus’ values. For example, he claimed Democrats do more to help the poor and the marginalized, while Republicans tend to give the rich massive tax breaks. He argued that abortion had decreased more under Democratic presidents than Republican ones because Democrats address the root causes that lead women to get abortions in the first place. He concluded that Trump had a hateful spirit and a lawless attitude that was dangerous for democracy. The response was significantly less enthusiastic.

Todd proceeded with his three questions. Given Clinton’s stance on partial birth abortion, how could a Christian vote for her? Given recent revelations about Trump and grabbing women, how could a Christian vote for him? Finally, which candidate was more likely to “make America great again”? ...

Deconstruction 5.2 -- lead up to the debate

I continue to work on this novel as a discipline on the weekends.

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The climax of the election frenzy on campus in the fall of 2016 happened the week after the “grab them by the p* video” surfaced. That came out on a Thursday, October 6. The history professor, Dr. Todley, was worried that the students might not vote for Trump after the video. For him, a Christian could only vote for the Republican. There was never any other choice in a presidential election.

He was from Indiana. He wasn’t quite as much a Yankee as someone from New York, but there were definitely times you could tell he was an outsider. The South was a little more complicated on the “you can’t vote for a Democrat” line. Most of our grandparents and before had been staunch Democrats. Now our parents were Republicans.

The big change came after the whole desegregation mess of the 60s and 70s. President LBJ may have been a Democrat, but our grandparents thought he was a traitor. In the Reagan years, some of those old-time Democrats started to change parties.

I’ve decided that people come up with all sorts of different reasons for why they vote the way they do. Most of them aren’t the real reason. Although he was a smart man, Dr. Todley would always find a reason to vote for a Republican. Even down-ballot, where abortion wasn’t at stake, he would find a reason to conclude the Republican superior.

Several of us took his US History class that spring. In a moment of weakness, he admitted that he had only ever voted for a Democrat once for county council. The candidate was one of his neighbors. But he went on to regret it.

I had an interesting conversation with my grandfather about Trump. In the same conversation, he both ripped on Reagan as an awful president and then gave his unbridled praise for Trump. Wow, I thought to myself. I’m looking at an archaeological dig here. I’m seeing the Democrat layer that was still in place in the 80s and the Republican layer of the 2000s. Each corresponded to a different wife.

So Dr. Todley was right to worry that some professors and students might vote for Clinton. They might be Republican of late, but there was a deeper history of voting Democrat in their families hiding in there too.

For an opponent, it was hard to find a professor on campus who would admit they planned to vote for Hillary. The biology professor, Dr. Baine, finally agreed because he felt there needed to be a counterbalance. He had already admitted to our table that he was voting for Clinton. So Matt was quick to call him a liar when he said he hadn’t decided who to vote for yet. The position he took in the debate was that a Christian couldn’t in good conscience vote for Trump. The only real Christian choice, he argued, was to vote for a third party candidate, Clinton, or not to vote at all.

Deconstruction Novel excerpt from chapter 5

For the previous post, see here. Each weekend I am writing on a novel about some students at a Christian college from 2016-2020 and the current phenomenon being called faith deconstruction.

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... For Matt, the Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage was one of the worst moments in American history. “Obama has brought so much judgment on America because of his sin,” he said once.

“But he isn’t even on the Supreme Court,” April responded in frustration.

“Doesn’t matter,” he continued. “He supported it. We’ve got to elect Republicans as president so we can stop these activist judges and reverse Roe v. Wade and Obergefell. There’s just no other choice. You can’t be a Christian and vote for a Democrat.”

April looked at him in disbelief. Her parents had always voted for the Democratic candidate for as long as she could remember. Her dad was a Methodist pastor.

Brad represented the fourth type of student. They agreed with April and Jessica that Trump was a deeply immoral man. But they believed Hillary was worse. More than anything, they were worried about her stance on abortion. That issue more than any other would keep them from ever voting for a Democrat in a presidential election.

As he put it, Brad would “hold his nose" and vote for Trump. There were some professors who seemed like that. Most of the ones in that category either didn’t vote at all or voted for the Libertarian or Green candidate. April believed that this group of Christians cost Clinton the election.

I didn’t know who to vote for. I listened intently to the lunch debates of my friends. They didn’t really even notice that I was there most of the time.

Once, out of the blue, Jessica blurted across the table, “Hey, David, who are you voting for?” I was startled that I would be put on the spot like that, but glad that she knew my name.

“I don’t know yet,” I quietly answered a few seconds later. But by then their argument had continued...

Deconstruction Novel Excerpt 4

The beginning of chapter 4... Here's the previous excerpt. I hope everyone has a blessed Christ day!

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Two big things happened in the fall of 2016 for our little group. One was the election, which is still echoing through history as I record these memories. The second is that Brad got a “call to ministry.” A “call to ministry” means God wanted him to become a pastor.

Brad was clearly a smart guy, at least in a book kind of sense. He was smart enough to wait to the last minute to write a paper and then stay up all night and get an A on it. He seemed horribly unfocused most of the time.

I would typically be in my single room studying in the evening. He would allegedly be studying out in the common space of our suite. Except he wasn’t. He would read a little, then get distracted by some Google search. Then he would go see what was going on in the hall. Sometimes he wouldn’t get back for an hour.

Come ten-thirty he and Matt sometimes would drive off to Huddle House. Allegedly they were going to study there. They’d get a “late key,” since we all had a midnight curfew. But they would have some waffles or a burger and change their plans. “Let’s go back and study at my suite,” Brad might say. (By then I was usually asleep.)

But it wouldn’t happen. By the time they got back, Brad's glucose level was calling him to slumber. Sometimes Matt would stay up, but Brad almost never did. The next day would come and he would start the whole cycle of getting nothing done again.

Meanwhile, Matt’s demon was video games. He often wouldn’t come back and study. He would come back and get involved in Call of Duty or something along those lines. Like Brad, he was somehow smart enough to pull out that paper or test. April and I didn’t know how they managed to get through.

I ran across Brad at 4AM one night by chance in the suite. I had gotten up to use the restroom. “Why do you do this to yourself?” I asked him.

“I know. I know. I always hate myself at about this point,” he said. “It’s really stupid. I never intend to. I just can’t seem to get it done any earlier.”

“How can you even think at this ungodly hour?” I asked.

“Not very well,” he said. “I was really interested in Beowulf three hours ago, but not so much right now.”

He got so far behind his first semester that he tried to pull two all-nighters in a row during finals week. It didn’t go so well. During one of his final classes—a fairly small one in fact—he woke up with the lights out and his face smudged by his desktop, in a puddle of his own drool. Thankfully that class didn't have a final. Apparently the professor and students had very much enjoyed leaving him there after the class time was finished.

He shared at lunch that day that all reality had become one for him at about 5am. He jokingly said he had become a Buddhist monk. He had become one with the Oversoul and he had joined the whole universe in perfect harmony.

Brad was smart, but he probably wasn’t as smart as the college thought he was. They gave him credit for all his first-year courses in math and chemistry on the basis of his AP scores. He took third-semester calculus and second-year chemistry his first semester at college. He was able to make it through the calculus, but the chemistry killed him.

It was a course called inorganic analytical chemistry, with only three students in the class. There were a couple tests but the bulk of the class was a series of ten experiments in which Brad had to figure what mystery substance the professor had given him. The kicker was that these experiments didn’t have to be turned in at any particular time. They just all had to be done before the end of the semester.

This was death for Brad. His skill at procrastination left him with half of the experiments still to go in the final week. He was also supposed to submit to his Old Testament professor how much of the Old Testament he had read that semester. He and Jessica were supposed to read the whole Old Testament. (The rest of us soon realized not to take that professor for Old Testament.)

Jessica more or less lied. Most students did even though it was a Christian college. It was on the honor system. You just said, “Yes. I read it.” A few fudged by telling themselves, “I will finish reading over Christmas,” and then put down 100%.

Not Brad. His conscience wouldn’t let him--at least not to lie that blatantly. The first of his all-nighters was spent desperately trying to read the Old Testament. The odds were against him. He had managed to read maybe half by the time he got back from supper the night before. Then the heaviness of the evening began to settle in. He had two finals the next day to study for as well as a final paper to write for World Literature.

Thankfully, he had read Crime and Punishment in high school. The paper bit the dust by midnight. Not his best work, but it would have to do. He remembered enough from class discussions with his twelfth-grade high school teacher to sound really smart. The teacher actually put the word "Brilliant" in her feedback.

The hours from 12-5am were all reading. He was not a good reader. He had a horrible time focusing. He told me he often read the same sentence over and over and over. Sometimes it went in. Often it didn’t. "I can honestly say, 'I've never read a book I couldn't put down,'" he once told me with a smile.

He would stand and read. He would pace back and forth with book in hand. Sometimes he would read to himself aloud. Every sentence was like a runway to somewhere else.

Eventually, he decided not to worry whether he really didn’t fully comprehend what he was reading. He just moved his eyes across the lines. Maybe he missed a line or two. By the time he diverted to study for biology, he had managed to say he had read 75% of the Old Testament with a slightly shaky conscience...

Novel start -- Deconstruction: A Novel

Last week I started writing a novel, Deconstruction: A Novel. I've edited the first chapter several times this last week, trying to find the right characters. I'm posting more extensive stretches on Patreon, but thought I would put some excerpts here as well. Here is a little from the first chapter. Post-edits will certainly happen.

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We met on the first day of college. Matt was a Southern Baptist from just over the Georgia border. April was a Methodist from Beaufort, South Carolina. Brad was a Pentecostal from Kings Mountain, just into North Carolina. Of course, they say we’re all just different flavors of Baptist in the South.

We all thought ourselves Christians. We all believed in the Bible. We each in our own way wanted to see the defeat of sin and injustice in the world. We all couldn’t wait to go to a Christian college, where we thought everyone else would be just like us. We were going to learn more about God. We were going to have a lot of fun. Welcome to Ebenezer College in the fall of 2016!

It was a strange and unique time in American history. Our first semester saw the election of President Trump. Our time there ended with COVID. None of us were expecting to struggle with our faith. None of us had any real sense of how much a person could change in three or four years. You see it looking back. They tell you it’s going to happen. You’re going to transition from teenager to adult. But it’s hard to see what that looks like from the front end.

They have a word for what some of us experienced. Deconstruction...

Deconstruction is the idea that, as you build something, it falls down under its own weight. The very building of it brings about the unbuilding of it. The principles that construct it lead to its un-construction. It unravels in the very process of trying to sow it together.

We all had different personalities. Matt was a firebrand. At one point we all thought he should have been the preacher. He was always fighting something. The world for him was a never-ending boxing match, with enemies out to get us around every corner.

Brad was funny. He never missed an opportunity to treat a subject lightly. We didn’t realize for a long time that he spent the other half of his time depressed. Looking back, it was really his search for God’s presence that drove a lot of our discussions.

April was more practical and far more organized than the rest of us. She was someone who kept a calendar of what to study each day to get her homework done and be ready for the test. It really annoyed her when Brad would ace a quiz or paper he had only worked on one night, while she had actually read the material and studied a little each day.

Meanwhile, Jessica and I pretty much looked on and watched the show. Jessica was April’s roommate. I lived in the same suite as Brad in the nicest dorm. Jessica came for softball, not paying any attention to the fact it was a Christian college. Required chapel really took her by surprise, as did the rules about not drinking. She hadn’t quite figured out what to major in. She wasn’t really there for the classes.

I thought I came to be a doctor. I found myself that first semester in the same biology and chemistry classes as Matt and Brad. But a lot of things change in college. Most students change their major at least once. The same would be true of me.

An Ode to Derrida

Once upon a pan'cras churning
Went the Da to death a learnin'
Over the under takers he received the endless snore

Derrida went over the hill
To fetch beyond the pale
Death fell down and up he went
or down to the hereafter

Cancer comes without a care or bias
Can Sir Derr be present though he's gone?
All that's left is traces chasing traces
The dog is gone and only left a tale

So live that when your summons comes
Comes summons so that you no longer live,
Ol' Jacques had lived in Lethe,
For Lethe now he pines
As his pine box remembers
What in life he had forgot

Because he would have stopped for death
Had no effect on her
So buy some kind of presence here
Lest absence hear and kindly stop by in life, leaving a kind of emptiness.