Jesus & Alinsky

Jesus' Third Way

Seize the moral initiative.

Find a creative alternative to violence.

Assert your own humanity and dignity as a person.

Meet force with ridicule or humor.

Break the cycle of humiliation.

Refuse to submit or to accept the inferior position.

Expose the injustice of the system.

Take control of the power dynamic.

Shame the oppressor into repentance.

Stand your ground.

Force the Powers into decisions for which they are not prepared.

Recognize your own power.

Be willing to suffer rather than retaliate.

Force the oppressor to see you in a new light.

Deprive the oppressor of a situation where force is effective.

Be willing to undergo the penalty of breaking unjust laws.

It is too bad Jesus did not provide fifteen or twenty more examples since we do not tend toward this new response naturally. Some examples from political history might help engrave it more deeply in our minds:

In Alagamar, Brazil, a group of peasants organized a long-term struggle to preserve their lands against attempts at illegal expropriation by national and international firms (with the connivance of local politicians and the military). Some of the peasants were arrested and jailed in town. Their companions decided they were all equally responsible. Hundreds marched to town. They filled the house of the judge, demanding to be jailed with those who had been arrested. The judge was finally obliged to send them all home, including the prisoners.

During the Vietnam War, one woman claimed seventy-nine dependents on her United States income tax, all Vietnamese orphans, so she owed no tax. They were not legal dependents, of course, so were disallowed. No, she insisted, these children have been orphaned by indiscriminate United States bombing; we are responsible for their lives. She forced the Internal Revenue Service to take her to court. That gave her a larger forum for making her case. She used the system against itself to unmask the moral indefensibility of what the system was doing. Of course she "lost" the case, but she made her point.

During World War II, when Nazi authorities in occupied Denmark promulgated an order that all Jews had to wear yellow armbands with the Star of David, the king made it a point to attend a celebration in the Copenhagen synagogue. He and most of the population of Copenhagen donned yellow armbands as well. His stand was affirmed by the Bishop of Sjaelland and other Lutheran clergy. The Nazis eventually had to rescind the order.

It is important to repeat such stories to extend our imaginations for creative nonviolence. Since it is not a natural response, we need to be schooled in it. We need models, and we need to rehearse nonviolence in our daily lives if we ever hope to resort to it in crises.

Maybe it would help to juxtapose Jesus' teachings with legendary community organizer Saul Alinsky's principles for nonviolent community action (in his Rules for Radicals) to gain a clearer sense of their practicality and pertinence to the struggles of our time. Among rules Alinsky developed in his attempts to organize American workers and minority communities are these:

(1) Power is not only what you have but what your enemy thinks you have.

(2) Never go outside the experience of your people.

(3) Wherever possible go outside the experience of the enemy.

Jesus, like Alinsky, recommended using your experience of being belittled, insulted, or dispossessed in such a way as to seize the initiative from the oppressor, who finds reactions like going the second mile, stripping naked, or turning the other cheek totally outside his experience. This forces him her to take your power seriously and perhaps even to recognize your humanity.

Alinsky offers other suggestions. Again we see the parallels:

(4) Make your enemies live up to their own book of rules.

(5) Ridicule is your most potent weapon.

(6) A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.

(7) A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.

The debtor in Jesus' example turned the law against his creditor by obeying it, following the letter of the law, but throwing in his underwear as well. The creditor's greed is exposed by his own ruthlessness, and this happens quickly and in a way that could only regale the debtor's sympathizers, just as Alinsky suggests. This puts all other such creditors on notice and arms all other debtors with a new sense of possibilities. Alinsky's list continues:

(8) Keep the pressure on.

(9) The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.

(10) The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure on the opposition.

Jesus, in his three brief examples, does not lay out the basis of a sustained movement, but his ministry as a whole is a model of long-term social struggle that maintains a constant pressure. Mark depicts Jesus' movements as a blitzkrieg. His teaching poses immediate and continuing threats to the authorities. The good he brings is misperceived as evil, his following is overestimated, his militancy is misread as sedition, and his proclamation of the coming Reign of God is mistaken as a manifesto for military revolution.

Disavowing violence, Jesus wades into the hostility of Jerusalem openhanded, setting simple truth against force. Terrified by the threat of this man and his following, the authorities resort to their ultimate deterrent, death, only to discover it impotent and themselves unmasked. The cross, hideous and macabre, becomes the symbol of liberation. The movement that should have died becomes a world religion.

Alinsky offers three last suggestions:

(11) If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through to its counterside.

(12) The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.

(13) Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it. Alinsky delighted in using the most vicious behavior of his opponents-burglaries of movement headquarters, attempted blackmail, and failed assassinations-to destroy their public credibility. Here were elected officials, respected corporations, and trusted police, engaging in patent illegalities to maintain privilege.

In the same way, Jesus suggests amplifying an injustice (turning the other cheek, removing your undergarment, going the second mile) to expose the fundamental wrongness of legalized oppression. The law is "compassionate" in requiring that the debtor's cloak be returned at sunset, yes; but Judaism in its most lucid moments knew that the whole system of usury and indebtedness was itself the root of injustice and should never have been condoned (Exodus 22:25). The restriction of enforced labor to carrying the soldier's pack a single mile was a great advance over unlimited impressment, but occupation troops had no right to be on Jewish soil in the first place.

Jesus was not content merely to empower the powerless, however. Here his teachings fundamentally transcend Alinsky's. Jesus did not advocate non-violence merely as a technique for outwitting the enemy but as a just means of opposing the enemy in such a way as to hold open the possibility of the enemy's becoming just as well.

...read it all: Jesus & Alinsky by Walter Wink

Ten reasons why justice is essential to the gospel

by Ross Langmead

Someone asked me recently why justice-seeking figured so strongly in my approach to mission. I think they meant “as distinct from evangelism.” We were talking about asylum seekers.

I said something about the integration of the word (evangelism) and deed (loving our neighbor). I quoted Matthew 25, saying that for me one of the best ways to love God is to defend the voiceless.

I left the conversation stunned that a Christian should wonder why I keep talking about justice. But then I realized that ever since the time of the prophets we’ve needed to spell out for each generation the call to justice.

So, here are my 10 top overlapping reasons for being passionate about a gospel where justice is close to the centee. I reckon I could double the list without trying.

1. The Bible’s full of it. If we were to take to a Bible with scissors and cut out the thousands of verses about justice and the poor, we’d have a mangled mess of holes. In the Bible, our relationship to God is always tied to our relationships to each other.

2. We’re all equal before God. From Genesis 1 to Galatians 3, the story is the same. Humans are made in God’s image and stand equally before God in our great variety. This biblical truth is one of the pillars of the human-rights movement. Staying with asylum seekers for the moment, to those who are “nobodies” because they are stateless and homeless, this is Good News.

3. It’s part of shalom. When Jeremiah urged the Israelites in exile to seek the welfare of the city they found themselves in, he was using the term “shalom.” The Hebrew vision of shalom in relationship with God includes peace, well-being and justice, and is the same peace that Jesus promises us (Jn 14:27). Christian mission is living for shalom.

4. God is a God of justice. In the Hebrew Bible, God is always acting in history to set relationships right, defend the poor, the weak and the oppressed. In fact, God is the very manifestation of justice and mercy.

5. It’s part of God’s Commonwealth. Jesus’ favorite topic was the Commonwealth of God (or the kingdom of God), the new, upside-down order in which human relationships are upturned by God’s radically inclusive values. The social reversals that happen in his parables are amazing. A kingdom-centered mission will always point at the socio-political implications of conversion.

6. It’s part of the Good News. Jesus’ manifesto in Luke 4 suggests that the Good News is especially for the poor, the blind and the captive. His life and teaching backs this up repeatedly. It seems that what is good news to the poor seems like bad news to the rich, unless they see it is really good news for all.

7. Righteousness flows into justice. A missionary to a Spanish-speaking country discovered to his amazement that the Bible is full of talk about justicia. The English word “justice” doesn’t occur in the King James Version of the New Testament; the Greek word for justice and righteousness is always translated as “righteousness.” I guess the translators knew they were being paid by a king! Better to talk about being righteous than seeking justice. But the two can’t be separated.

8. Evangelism flows into social action. Billy Graham was asked once why he preached only personal salvation and not peace and justice. He said that as people become converted, they would be peacemakers and justice-seekers. He was pressed further. How come he’d been converted, and wasn’t more upfront about these things, then? From that day, to his credit, Graham included more of the dimensions of the Good News in his preaching. Following Jesus, we’re called to make visible the Good News, and that means both putting it into words and showing by our lives what it means in terms of justice and love.

9. Justice is structural love. Justice is fairness embedded in the structures of society. Biblical justice goes further than strict justice, and is imbued with grace, mercy and forgiveness. It is structural love.

10. No peace without justice. The Good News is all about reconciliation, the setting right of all relationships. But there is no peace without justice, as is clear in international relations. In the cloth of the gospel, God’s justice and forgiveness are seamlessly interwoven. It’s a wonder, then, that churches are not far more prophetic.

True, we have spoken up often, but for many churches, the order of priority seems to be: inward-and-upward-looking worship, education and groups for members, some care for others, and then, just occasionally, a tentative foray into the world of policies, rights, war and government directions.

There’s so much happening in the world to arouse our passion for justice that we ought to be standing up and shouting. But it will only happen if our vision of the gospel contains justice at the heart.

Ross Langmead is professor of missiology and director of School of World Mission at Whitley College, the Baptist Theological College of Victoria, Australia.

[originally published at EthicsDaily.com]

the Bible tells me so

"Most of the people in nut houses are religious because most Americans are religious," said Rodney Stark, a social sciences professor at Baylor University. "We know what causes schizophrenia and it isn't going to church. It's biochemical." ....in some fundamentalist environments, symptoms of mental illness can appear normal: Obsession over a religious leader can be interpreted as religious fervor, and delusions can be interpreted as religious visions....while religion doesn't cause mental illness, he believes existing conditions can be inflamed by religious environments where leaders demand absolute obedience and claim to speak for God. People with schizophrenia, personality disorders and a host of other mental disorders may be drawn such faiths for their structure, he said. "This kind of culture, religious atmosphere, group dynamic can set up a situation where that person is more likely to act out in aggressive ways under tremendous pressure," Olson said.

...read it all: Moms who kill children have religion in common

Genesis 22:

Then God said, "Take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains I will tell you about."

waiting for the light . . . in Baghdad

BAGHDAD - 10 December 2004

A member of the Christian Peacekeepers Team in Iraq sends this report

Last week I read a news report that said up to seven Iraqis are kidnapped every day. Today I found out that CPT's neighbour might be one of them. He was driving from Baghdad to Kirkuk when he disappeared. Sometimes kidnappers ask for ransom, sometimes thieves kill the victim and keep the money, phone, and car. It has been seven days since my neighbour disappeared.

He has three children: *Mohammed (8) and Esam (6), my two miniature bodyguards who always insist on walking me down the street, and their sister Fatima (2). When I visited, their mother Um Mohammed sat on the living room floor and wept. The boys smiled hesitantly at me and did not know how to comfort her.

TheBy have always welcomed me to their home. Now they are shattered. "Allah Kareem, Allah Kareem (God is generous)," whispered Um Mohammed's elderly mother. She begged CPT to pray for them. All they can do now is sit by the phone and wait.

These past days, large explosions have shaken our apartment. On Saturday we ran up to the roof to assess the damage. Black smoke billowed across the river. I have become numb to explosions, but this time I started weeping because I could tell from its size that people were dying. In fact, 70 people have died in Iraq these past three days.

Why is everything falling apart? From the perspective of the Western countries, it is easy to point at the Iraqi resistance, the foreign terrorists, the common thieves. And they surely cause terrible damage with the use of violence. But from the perspective of those who are bombed, what is the difference between an insurgency bomb dropped on my street and a US bomb dropped on a Fallujah clinic? An explosion is an explosion is an explosion.

There is rhetoric of "good guys" and "bad guys," but from here it all feels meaningless in the rubble of a home bombed by US fighter jets, a school shattered by a terrorist attack, a kidnapped father, a child accidentally shot by Coalition soldiers. Violence begets violence begets violence. It is all starting to blend together.

It is difficult to find hope. But I hear that a sheikh in a violent Baghdad neighbourhood is gathering people to do nonviolent resistance. Another Iraqi human rights worker and friend is building a network of local peace activists. And tomorrow I will visit Noor and Abu Zayneb to cuddle their three-month old treasure, baby Hamsa. She will be hope for now.

What can we do in the West? Try to break the pattern of greed and fear. Tell young people they can resist registering for the draft. Listen to a soldier's story and learn what war is really like. Find a peace community and try to build it, step by step.

It is a dark time now. We live in constant Advent, waiting, waiting in the darkness.

Advent reflection from Baghdad, Independent Catholic News

what we must do

We will continue to need brave and self-sacrificing religious and political leaders who will endure the coming fury which will not soon subside but likely increase. We need religious and political leaders from every community who will thrust the best of their progressive traditions into the limelight without timidity.

Religious leaders must shine the spotlight on the best teachings of the great prophets and the sacred texts. We Christians must emphasize the prophetic principles of Jesus which have been submerged by Christian fundamentalists.

We religious nonconformists must take the offensive and call all fundamentalists to account on their own misuse of Scripture.

We followers of Jesus must not be ashamed to speak about his demand for a morality that values integrity, liberality and justice in the social sphere.

We cannot hide behind our commitment to the separation of church and state as an excuse for not being prophetic in the halls of Congress, in the church or in the marketplace.

We must protect the fortresses of higher learning and not be afraid but proud of being labeled as a liberal.

We must confess that we often prefer the label moderate because it is safer, not more moral.

. . . read it all: Are These the New Dark Ages?, by by G. Michael Greer, EthicsDaily.com, via Jesus Politics.

surprised to hear there is a Christian Left?

In the late 1960s, the concept of Christianity as a liberal or even hippie religion didn't seem as foreign as it does after two decades of vocal fundamentalism. Nowadays, the word "Christian" more often than not summons up images of people like Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell, men who have built franchises by preaching extremist positions.

"People are usually pretty surprised to hear there is a Christian Left," says Mark Thomas, a Denver hospital chaplain. "If you ask some of the very educated and spiritually sophisticated people in Boulder what Christianity is about, you'll often hear it's about abortion and gay marriage, two issues that Jesus and Gospels don't have a single word to say about. What Jesus does have a lot to say about is taking care of the most vulnerable among us, loving our enemies, turning the other cheek—these sort of teachings."

....Ehrich, too, urges progressive Christians to avoid answering the strident right wing with a similarly strident list of issues.

"What I have been encouraging is let's get focused," he says. "I think there's a tendency on the liberal perspective to take every issue that anyone has ever cared about and offer it up as a platform of issues. We can't do that. We've got to get focused. We've got to name the one or two issues that are truly worth pursuing."

To decide which issues those are, Ehrich suggests looking at the focus of Jesus' teaching and taking up the issues that concerned him: the abuses of money and power.

But Ehrich also urges Christian clergy to begin listening to the spiritual needs of their membership. He cites a survey he conducted on his website, in which he asked people to share what they would ask God if they had a chance to speak with the Almighty. The results might surprise people.

"The questions are down-to-earth basic," he says. "They have nothing to do with liturgy, nothing to do with who gets ordained, nothing to do with sexuality. The questions were all about faith: How do I believe? Where are you? Who are you? When I die, will I see my wife in heaven? Why did you let that disease kill my child? I just think the leadership of mainline denominations has been plowing a different field. If we would just listen to our members, we would know what to say, we would know what to preach."

The first step to offering an alternative Christian voice is simple, he says.

"We need to talk to each other and we need to listen to each other. It really is not much more complicated than that."

...read it all: Saving Jesus: In the aftermath of the election, the Christian Left searches for its voice by Pamela White, Boulder Weekly

carrying the crosses of Christmas

Carrying the crosses of Christmas
by J. James DeConto

"There was no room for them in the inn"

As you drive south on Route 18 across the northernmost swath of Allegheny County, North Carolina, you'll encounter a roadside sign, "Welcome to Sparta, N.C." If your eye catches the sign, you probably won't have time to notice two drab, gray buildings that lie just beyond this welcome. Potholes mar the driveways. Empty beer cans, cigarette packs, fast-food wrappers, and even an old car battery litter the grounds. Electrical wires and television cables run in and out of windows, some with torn screens, broken glass, or crinkled black garbage bags where the glass once was. When I called about renting an apartment there for me, my wife, and two daughters, the landlady said the complex would not be suitable for us, but for the same price - about $400 a month - she could rent us a single-family house with a yard.

Upstairs in one of the buildings, three Christmas tree workers share a single bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen. Like many of the men and teenage boys who travel far from their families to cultivate and harvest North Carolina Fraser firs - the Cadillac of Christmas trees - these three have found shelter, but not much hospitality. They cram into single-wide trailers or basement apartments, two or three to a bedroom and a few more in the living room, often at $50 a month per person. Consuelo Hall, a Colombian who hears the workers' stories at her popular market and taco bar, tells one eerily similar to the Advent story these workers help Americans to celebrate: A fellow Latina literally considered moving her family into a barn to escape the claustrophobia of living in the same house with a group of male farmworkers.

Another woman, whom I'll call Carmen, lives in an old farmhouse with her partner and several of his male co-workers surrounded by evergreen fields. She says the house is very old, but has few complaints save for the airborne pesticides that sometimes make it hard to breathe inside. "I say my husband, ‘Maybe if I asleep you can bring me to the hospital,'" she says. "I felt really bad." Because he provides the house for free, this farmer pays $6 an hour. Others pay $7 an hour for greenhorns and up to $12 for the most seasoned veterans who've worked in their fields a decade or more. A recent court decision exempts the growers from paying overtime, though workers typically put in 50 to 70 hours a week, enabling them to send money home to their families in Mexico.

"Christ suffered in his body"

On a mountainside in neighboring Ashe County, a dozen Mexican men wield 18-inch knives and pairs of snips, shaping hundreds of Fraser firs into that classic Christmas cone. From the roadway far below, dressed in sweatshirts or flannels and jeans, they look like finger puppets of red and blue mistakenly conscripted into a massive army of toy soldiers. They circle each tree, oscillating their blades from behind their ears down toward their knees, lopping off stray branch ends to carve the perfect Christmas tree. The seedlings are ready for harvest in seven to 10 years, and they go wild if they're not trained to look prim and proper with annual trimming from age 3. Unless rain keeps the men from their work and their wages, they trim hundreds of trees, working 10 hours a day, every day but Sunday, through the summer and early fall. With an errant swing, the razor-sharp machetes sometimes cut into their knees, and the repetitive motion of trimiando, as they call it in Spanglish, leaves every new recruit with sore forearms.

The hardest work comes during the harvest season that runs through November and early December, when the trees are shipped to market. Mexican men - and some women - often work 70 or more hours a week, carrying hundreds of Christmas trees a day from their beds to the trucks that haul them. Some trees weigh more than 300 pounds, and even five men have trouble snaking them through the rows of tender trees waiting to be cut in subsequent years. Back and forth they walk, over hillside fields that span hundreds of yards. The hardest work comes when their bodies are the most weary. After feeding the trees through bailing machines, as the sun sets, the workers must lift them onto trailers, staggering under the weight of the heaviest trees. As the pines pile up on the flatbed trucks, the workers have to heave them higher and higher, until the packers, standing on 10-foot stacks of evergreens, start to pull on the trees while more workers push them upward from the ground.

Harvesting would be hard on the balmiest of May days, but, as veteran worker Felix Alvarez says, in late fall "it's extremely cold in these mountains. ... I used to get really sick, that I missed two or three weeks of working sometimes." Low temperatures in November and December range between 20 and 30 degrees. The workers find little relief from the cold over the course of eight- to 14-hour days spent outdoors, and frequent illness is common. "You know the cold takes a toll on a person who's working outside all day long," says Dr. Georgia Latham, a physician who provides discount services to Sparta's Hispanics. "When people live in very close quarters, communicable disease in general is much more prevalent."

More worrisome for the workers is the long-term effects of handling pesticides, herbicides, and chemical fertilizers. Experts disagree on the impact of agricultural chemicals on the overall health of the region, but even North Carolina State University extension specialist Jill Sidebottom, who downplays the risks for the general population, acknowledges "the people who would be most at risk are those with the most exposure - those who are applying the pesticides." Though they now understand the danger, experienced farmworkers like Alvarez worry about the long-term effects of having worked with potentially lethal pesticides without the safety equipment now required by law.

"Carrying his own cross"

A devout Catholic, Carmen begins to cry as she considers the parallels between her life and the biblical story. Not only did she cross the desert for new life in a land of plenty, but once there, she bore heavy trees on her back, just like the man whose birthday we celebrate at Christmas. As she tells of carrying 200 Christmas trees a day across a distance as long as a large shopping plaza, her thoughts turn toward the sad irony of the immigrant experience: Mexicans are willing to do the backbreaking work that no else wants to do and on which American society depends, yet their illegal status makes them outsiders who live in fear.

"Latin people come here for (do)ing the hard work," she says. "It's very hard work, too hard work."

J. James DeConto is a 2004-05 Phillips Journalism Fellow and has worked as a newspaper writer and editor in New Hampshire and Ohio.

...from Sojourners

Baptists & AIDS

MEMPHIS, Tenn. (ABP) -- Motorists in Memphis are getting a prominent reminder of the AIDS pandemic's human toll -- and the grace that God offers -- from two Baptist churches situated on one of the city's busiest corners.

For the fifth year in a row, the corner of Poplar Avenue and East Parkway was covered with thousands of white stakes with red ribbons attached. Members of Memphis' First Baptist Church marked World AIDS Day by erecting the markers on the stately church's lawn after morning worship Nov. 28. The markers represent the approximately 3,000 Shelby County residents who have died of AIDS since 1983, when county officials first began tracking its statistics.

And, for the fourth year, the members of the predominantly white church were joined in the marker project by hundreds of African-Americans from Greater Lewis Street Missionary Baptist Church, their neighbors across the street in Memphis' Midtown neighborhood. Greater Lewis Street became involved in the project beginning in 2001.

....Kim Moss, executive director of Friends for Life, said in an e-mail statement that the partnership between the racially diverse churches and his organization is providing a powerful example to the community. "The issue of AIDS provides a real challenge for churches to experience the meaning of unconditional love," he said.

The churches' effort, Moss continued, is an example of "the healing that can take place when people set aside prejudices and focus on the message of hope, love, understanding, and compassion for all."

…read it all: Black, white Memphis congregations confront barriers on World AIDS Day by Robert Marus, Associated Baptist Press

academics + evangelicals = ?

Most of my Christian friends have no clue what goes on in faculty clubs. And my colleagues in faculty offices cannot imagine what happens in those evangelical churches on Sunday morning.

In both cases, the truth is surprisingly attractive. And surprisingly similar: Churches and universities are the two twenty-first century American enterprises that care most about ideas, about language, and about understanding the world we live in, with all its beauty and ugliness. Nearly all older universities were founded as schools of theology: a telling fact. Another one is this: A large part of what goes on in those church buildings that dot the countryside is education -- people reading hard texts, and trying to sort out what they mean.

Another similarity is less obvious but no less important. Ours is an individualist culture; people rarely put their community's welfare ahead of their own. It isn't so rare in churches and universities. Churches are mostly run by volunteer labor (not to mention volunteered money): those who tend nurseries and teach Sunday School classes get nothing but a pat on the back for their labor. Not unlike the professors who staff important faculty committees. An economist friend once told me that economics departments are ungovernable, because economists understand the reward structure that drives universities: professors who do thankless institutional tasks competently must do more such tasks. Yet the trains run more or less on time -- maybe historians are running the economics departments -- because enough faculty attach enough importance to the welfare of their colleagues and students. Selfishness and exploitation are of course common too, in universities and churches as everywhere else. But one sees a good deal of day-to-day altruism, which is not common everywhere else.

And each side of this divide has something to teach the other. Evangelicals would benefit greatly from the love of argument that pervades universities. The "scandal of the evangelical mind" -- the title of a wonderful book by evangelical author and professor Mark Noll -- isn't that evangelicals aren't smart or don't love ideas. They are, and they do. No, the real scandal is the lack of tough, hard questioning to test those ideas. Christians believe in a God-Man who called himself (among other things) "the Truth." Truth-seeking, testing beliefs with tough-minded questions and arguments, is a deeply Christian enterprise. Evangelical churches should be swimming in it. Too few are.

For their part, universities would be better, richer places if they had an infusion of the humility that one finds in those churches. Too often, the world of top universities is defined by its arrogance: the style of argument is more "it's plainly true that" than "I wonder whether." We like to test our ideas, but once they've passed the relevant academic hurdles (the bar is lower than we like to think), we talk and act as though those ideas are not just right but obviously right -- only a fool or a bigot could think otherwise.

…read it all: Faculty Clubs and Church Pews by William J. Stuntz, Tech Central Station