Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
I lead the church that funded New College. DeSantis’ actions aren’t our vision of faith.
I am a Christian.
I serve as the president of the United Church of Christ, a Christian denomination that, in 1960, provided the initial funding for New College of Florida.
This week I traveled to Sarasota to stand with other defenders of this four-year liberal arts college, now part of Florida’s state university system. Our church recognizes in Jesus a radical love and embrace of all God’s children. We believe he loved all regardless of their race, creed, gender identity or anything else humans use in our game of identity politics to establish “otherness.”
Our belief in what we refer to as a “Still-Speaking God” leads us to say, “No matter who you are or where you are on life’s journey, you are welcome here.”
It is in this spirit that some of my forebears in faith followed the Union troops in the Civil War and founded and funded schools and colleges to educate those freed from their enslavement. It is certainly in this spirit that, almost 100 years after the Civil War, they kept that tradition alive by founding and funding New College. Their founding documents stipulated that the “college shall be open to all students qualified for its academic program. Race, creed, national origin or cultural status shall not be considered as a basis for denial of admission.”
That was one way we saw of working out our faith in one whose love for all was unconditional. We believe he embodied and incarnated that love as a way of showing us the kind of love God intended for all of us, a love those who called themselves his disciples would emulate.
I don’t write that as a way of saying our religion is superior, or even necessary. I view my experience with Christianity, and my now 35 years of practicing ministry within it, as merely one pathway to the kind of love, compassion and kindness God intends for all of us.
I write that to say I don’t recognize the Christianity espoused by, and used as a defense for, the actions of Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is changing the New College leadership to restructure the school’s curriculum and culture. Whatever is being done to twist the teachings of Jesus into a defense of his actions at New College is, from where I sit, an egregious perversion of Christ’s teachings and intent.
Any resemblance between what has been done at New College and the Christianity I know is merely coincidental.
The United Church of Christ envisioned a school where thought would flourish, even when it challenged currently accepted perspectives, norms and philosophies. I am a graduate of a liberal arts college, and I learned there to release my mind from pedagogies that constrained my imagination. While there, I read texts of Black liberation theology, books and plays by existentialist philosophers, womanist and feminist authors, LGBTQ scholars — all of whom helped erode the foundations upon which my perspectives as a white heterosexual male were built.
To be perfectly honest, what DeSantis is doing looks and feels to me more like the reestablishment of a white privileged world he feels slipping out of his grasp.
It truly galls me to see him turning the principles upon which New College was founded into a defense of his re-centering white male pedagogy. I am not sure the irony is lost on him that he can use his Harvard and Yale education to transform his abandonment of the founding principles of racial, religious and gender diversity into this crusade to appease his largely white voting base.
I think he knows full well what he is doing and quite frankly, it sickens me.
Racial discrimination and the confinement of divergent thought are not the likely outcomes of the Christian faith I know and practice.
One can’t cloak indefensible racism and fascism in the mantle of faith. I just can’t sit idly by while others do so. For so many of us, that’s unrecognizable as an authentic expression of Christianity.