The Soul of Schoolwork
A persistent quest for grace in a secular society
I teach an advanced class called “Lives and Times”—the fall semester focuses on biography (Phillis Wheatley, Abraham Lincoln, et. al.) and the spring semester on decades (the twenties, the seventies, the nineties). We start off with Anne Hutchinson, the Puritan dissident who was forced into exile and ultimately killed by indigenous people. As a fan of Puritan fanaticism, Hutchinson is right in my wheelhouse. But I know this is a tough sell for adolescents, and spent the last weeks of the summer trying to figure out how to parachute into the seventeenth century in a way they could get their bearings—and be remotely interested.
As you may vaguely remember from your own high school history classes, Puritanism is one of many offshoots of the Protestant Reformation. One of the key arguments across many Protestant sects at the time turned on the millennial-old question of a covenant of faith versus a covenant of works. Basing one’s salvation on the latter was particularly offensive to many Christians because of its dangerously transactional potential: people would try to do good things simply as a means of ensuring their salvation. The most hated manifestation of this idea was papal indulgences, whereby sinners could literally buy forgiveness for their sins—a corruption of everything true belief was supposed to be about. Instead, salvation came from a covenant of faith: belief, in the form of (irresistible) grace. Good works would naturally follow from such grace, a reflection of one’s inner light (to use a term that itself became controversial in the eighteenth century, but that’s another story).
In brief, Anne Hutchinson was a militant believer in an uncompromising commitment to a covenant of faith, and in her skepticism that most of the ministers she encountered were really saved. The very intensity of this commitment—with its subversive implication that sacred and secular authority figures could be safely ignored if one had reason to believe they were inept or satanic—is what got her into trouble. The fact that Hutchinson was female was certainly part of this story, but her ideological position, not her gender, was at the center of the controversy as far as her contemporaries were concerned. (There were also men who got into trouble for such views, among them her brother-in-law, who was also banished.)
So: How to translate this? I chose two students—we’ll call them Cody and Chris. And I was a teacher at the lunch table discussing students, as teachers sometimes do. Cody, I told my colleagues, was a good student who did everything right. But Cody was something of a grade-grubber: it was all means to an end. Chris, by contrast, had an evident love of the game: you could see it in class comments, or chances taken in essays even when they didn’t quite work. It would be easy to write a letter of recommendation for Chris.
Then I was a college-admissions officer. Same dynamic: I’m looking at two transcripts. Cody and Chris have similar grades. But Chris has that je ne sais quoi that I’m looking for in the entering class I’m trying to build. So Chris gets in. Then I’m an HR person at a tech company, trying to figure out who to hire. And of course Chris is the one. You get the idea; so did they.
When I was thinking through this idea, I kinda thought that most students would object to the premise: how much does it really matter how you got there? An A is an A, no? But this notion of grace—translated here as a fusion of talent and commitment—is something they seemed to readily accept, even take for granted. Instead, their objection, reasonably enough, was on the gatekeepers. What the hell does je ne sais quoi mean? Does the college admissions offer really know what she’s doing? I explained that she’s a consummate professional. Don’t you trust her?
The faces in the room suggested dubiousness. This of course goes to the heart of what Hutchinson was talking about: just because someone is a minister doesn’t mean he knows what he’s doing. (Catholic priests? Most of them were idiotic, corrupt, or both, which is why the Congregationalists of Massachusetts hired—and fired—their own ministers.)
I was working a very secular room among a group of people who were avowedly ignorant of the theological issues in question. (I considered it a very good sign when one of my students decided at the end of the class that she simply didn’t know how she felt about Anne Hutchinson; we’ll see where she is about a week or so from now when this story comes to its climax with the Hutchinson River Parkway that runs near my home.) But the underlying dynamics of the situation were surprisingly recognizable. Instead of grace, we have merit. Our ministers are the credentialed professional classes. And on any given day, our salvation teeters between giddy assurance and imposter syndrome.
That’s not exactly because it’s true of people in all times and places. Actually, I think that the Puritan mindset, though localized in New England, did make a significant imprint on American life as a whole. So did opposition to it. Trumpism, for example, is a rejection of the culture of expertise and the underlying confidence that those who embrace it are on the side of progress—what might be termed secular grace. The argument continues.