As you probably know, it is decently popular in academia today for people to share their pronouns in their email signature (the place you declare your Party membership, as I think it was Colin Wright said recently). In fact it seems possible to me that my own institution will eventually mandate that everyone do this, and I’m not sure how I will respond if and when that happens - but I can tell you that I definitely won’t be participating unless I am compelled to do so.
Why not? You could make the case (and indeed it would be true), that you aren’t saying anything false if you include a line that says “and, I’m a man” in your email signature. So if the first filter on Christian speech is “don’t say anything that is immediately false”, sharing your pronouns passes that filter. But the problem is (and thankfully, most Christians have figured this out), sharing your pronouns implies things that are false - indeed, that is almost the whole reason people want to mandate the behavior. You are giving implicit endorsement to the idea that your sex (or gender, we are rather vague on even that distinction these days) is either a choice, or something you discover or construct that is detached from your body.
And this is how the world usually works. It doesn’t usually force you to say something that is false, at least not at first. That provokes rebellion and engages the conscious reasoning faculties of the mind to an undesired degree. Rather the world forces you to behave as if you believed such-and-such a thing was true, or makes your life easier if you’ll behave as if you believe it is true, and harder if you won’t (even just in terms of mental strain, it requires mental effort to resist). Let that go on for a little while and more and more people will believe the “message” even if it is rarely preached with words. It amounts to a sort of secular liturgy.
I would suggest to you (and I direct this message especially at Christian institutions that have the power to set their own policies on this matter), that distancing and mask requirements function in exactly the same way - just by participating in them, you are helping to preach a certain message, and requiring other participants to help preach the same message. Actually we’re preaching a medley of overlapping messages, things like “other humans are dangerous disease vectors” or “health concerns are the most important concerns” or “masks are effective in controlling COVID”. And we ought to think about, one, whether those messages are even true (and that could be a whole other post or series of posts, but I’ll refrain for now1). And two… what world are we helping to create by preaching those messages?
Although it has been a concern of mine for months, I am happy to see more and more realization lately that, even if COVID was somehow entirely eliminated tomorrow… the world would not immediately return to how it was. And one major reason it would not is because months of liturgy now have quite effectively taught many people to be afraid of normal human interactions, and that’s not something that can be just undone. (And this is all to the disrepute of our public health authorities, who have been thinking two-weeks-ahead for eleven months now, entirely unconcerned about the long-term consequences of their orders.) I have seen comparisons to your grandmother, who lived through the Depression and hoarded cans all her life, even when she was wealthy and living in plenty, because she just couldn’t get over the psychology of what she had experienced. What might be our equivalent of that?
Because micro-local circumstances vary, I would be disinclined to almost ever say “this is exactly what you need to do”. But this sort of reasoning certainly needs to factor in our thinking and planning. What messages are we teaching just by our behaviors? Consider the liturgy.
But we could start with the fact that several surveys have found that people are massively, massively, overestimating their own personal risk from COVID - just saw another one this morning. And why wouldn’t they, when everywhere they go, everyone is engaging in behaviors that say “we are all in grave danger right now”?
"I would suggest to you (and I direct this message especially at Christian institutions that have the power to set their own policies on this matter), that distancing and mask requirements function in exactly the same way - just by participating in them, you are helping to preach a certain message, and requiring other participants to help preach the same message."
Exactly right. Personally, as Christians, I think we should refuse to do this.
Great article, David.