Churches in Public Schools and the Robot Apocalypse

BY LAURA FERRIS

Last week, I saw a link on my Facebook newsfeed to a Wall Street Journal article about a recent ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit that would ban churches in New York City from using space on Sundays to hold services, going counter to a Supreme Court decision in 2001 (Good News Club v. Milford Central School) that opened the way for something like 60 schools in New York City, at least, it seems to become houses of Christian worship on Sundays. They did so because they thought churches holding services at public schools was a credible threat to the separation of church and state, and that there was a difference banning an activity from a public space that contained the expression of a certain viewpoint and banning the viewpoint itself, and that the latter, not the former, was something called “viewpoint discrimination.” At first, I thought this ruling was mean.

I thought this ruling was uncalled for because I was thinking about my experiences attending churches in California that met  or have met in local public schools. The churches I was thinking of were Bayside Church (a Covenant Church) in Granite Bay and Oakland City Church in Oakland (a Reformed Chruch). As far as I knew, or know, these churches were local to the community, paid rent for the facilities or the city itself waived rent, they cleaned up or paid the custodial fees, and it was very clear that meeting at a public school was a temporary solution during the church plant phase. Bayside moved into their own campus while I was still in high school, and OCC only used the school for a month as part of a summer tour to different venues so the congregation could experience different areas of Oakland while they tried to find a more permanent location. I think beyond perhaps offering up a prayer for the children or school generally during the service (though I don’t remember that happening), there was no particular encroachment into the educational world of the school and I know that Bayside, at least, has always taken an interest in the educational well-being of schoolchildren in greater Sacramento area, and often bought school supplies for poorer districts, possibly related to the schools they originally met in. Bayside, actually, has so many charitable community outreach programs that it’s kind of hard to keep track of when or why they started any particular endeavor, other than the fact that some congregant saw a need and spoke up. I thought of schools meeting in public schools as this positive expression of Christian charity and participation in the local community, a way to put their best foot forward, and give to everyone in town, the good news in action.

So I assumed that the churches in New York City had behaved in a similar manner, and that perhaps the court had over-hastily barred a potentially great community asset out of an over-zealous application of the separation of church and state at the expense of what the actual communities actually wanted. I gave them the benefit of the doubt in my mind, and had an extensive argument with someone when I reposted the link myself and opined, in which I argued that it was probably good for children to be vaguely aware that a church met at the school, just because it was good for them to be aware of the politics of the greater adult social world of their community, and that there were a lot of different groups of people who made up their town or neighborhood who had different beliefs. Then, my companion in this argument found and shared the following link with me, an editorial from The New York Times.

I suggest reading the editorial, but briefly, the author writes about her personal experience and research about churches who meet in NYC, how they in fact don’t pay rent, make use of photographs of the children at school to “pray for their salvation,” and use their position to approach schoolchildren during the school-week, and use the facilities beyond Sunday mornings, confusing one child, who asked her father if the church “was part of her school.” These churches, furthermore, aren’t even necessarily local church plants, but evangelical groups who came to take advantage of the Supreme Court ruling and NYC’s rent-free policy. I’m shocked, though not surprised. Mostly, though, I am furious. I mean, I hope there are some churches that meet in NYC public schools that actually respect the school as a school and actually contribute positively and concretely to their local community, but shame on the churches who took advantage of their judicial leeway and very understandably, from the judges’ point of view, ruined the arrangement for the rest of the churches! Still, some might say that this ruling is too harsh, as it may mean the actual closure and end of somewhere around 50 churches.

To which I say: Good!

Unless there’s even more information I’m missing about this ruling, I don’t see how on earth the churches could have justified their behavior. They have no right to assert some sort of privilege for themselves when it comes to local public facilities, either as the dominant religious group in the U.S., or, weirdly, as some sort of outcast “sticking it to the man,” undermining that nasty government that advocates teaching children to think according to something that isn’t a totalizing reading of Christian scripture and a reductionistic view of human or at least western history. You know, the heathens. I think a lot of this clearly inappropriate behaviors stems from a bizarre attitude I see in Christian communities or churches, where they seem to believe themselves somehow fundamentally outside and estranged from their larger local, historical, and sociological contexts, and therefore beleaguered, when in fact they represent the most dominant strain of a very, very long history of a western ideology of values and beliefs the invocation of which still remains the shibboleth of choice in the halls of American political and economic power. I mean, like, “God Bless America”? You have to be able to convince the public you mean that in order to be the president. Everyone knows that, but somehow Christianity is an excluded minority group in the public sphere and can therefore cut corners due to its “persecution,” ignore the rules that have been set up to privilege them if they become inconvenient? Come on!

As Jesus once asked in the Sermon on the Mount, “Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not what I say?” (Luke 6:46). Reciting a statement of belief, even if you close your eyes and look soulful about it, is not the same thing as preaching the gospel, and just because you identify yourself with the name of Jesus Christ, that doesn’t necessarily you have aligned your life in accordance to a growing, personal understanding of the Christian gospel, the message, the revelation of God Christ represents, which no one really gets fully. That’s why Christians go to church services and read the Bible, and have Bible studies, right? Just saying and doing stuff and getting other people to say it and do it too doesn’t necessarily mean you’re contributing a positive good to the world that should be privileged by the tax-paying members of the school district. You have to look at the consequences, or as, again, Jesus said: “No good tree bears bad fruit, nor does a bad tree bear good fruit. Each tree is recognized by its own fruit. People do not pick figs from thornbushes, or grapes from briers. A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of” (Luke 6: 43-45). What great fruit, exactly, have these churches been seeing from their violations of the spirit of the law? I’m not seeing it. If I were Stephen Colbert, I would give the NYC churches a wag of the finger and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit a tip of the hat. Way to justice it up, that was some solid lawyering.

There’s something else, though, that caught my eye about this whole ruling, and that was the use of the term “viewpoint discrimination” as a new form of invidious discrimination. Or at least, it was news to me. What the court meant was there was a difference between a church service at a public school and a conference of religious studies professors presenting papers and seminars on Christianity at a public school, I think, and that allowing the former was a violation of the separation of church and state, and banning the latter would be “viewpoint discrimination.” This seems a fairly straightforward, common-sense distinction to me, but I think it’s very, very important to note that the term used was “viewpoint discrimination” and not “freedom of thought” or “freedom of speech.” That what I would assume would usually or formerly being seen as a matter of infringing or violating freedom of speech and freedom of religion has become conflated with the idea of invidious discrimination. All of these are unconstitutional, but are unconstitutional in different ways that I think shouldn’t be confused.

The reason why is that the concept of “viewpoint discrimination” has implications for the future robot apocalypse. You think, you hope, I kid, but I’m not really, though I am really having fun using the phrase “robot apocalypse” in this post. Maybe it’s not the robot apocalypse, but there is a strong strain of thought at the moment that has been building in the twentieth century and especially since the creation of the internet, and especially since the beginning of so-called Web 2.0 technologies and platforms that a time is coming when the machines or certain ways information is being concentrated on the internet, called “clouds,” will become something like sentient or at least self-organizing and self-sustaining, if the time hasn’t already come, partially, and this will have huge implications for the rights and self-experience of human beings who depend on robotics, robots, and cloud computing.

The reason why the idea of “viewpoint discrimination” is potentially sinister is because it suggests that a viewpoint can exist independent of a human being, that viewpoints can exist from which no one is viewing. Think about this for a minute. Or, think about a security video camera near an ATM. This security camera has a “viewpoint.” We use footage from security cameras as evidence in criminal trials. The “viewpoint” of an inanimate object can be used to incarcerate a living human being. We have, in our dark genius as a species, created devices that can simulate an organic point of view, either as a visual or audio-visual representation, or as a self-organizing system of information as in the case of cloud computing, which can, like any person with a point of view, focus in or focus out on various trends and details. (Think about the ads on the side of your Facebook profile, or how Gmails tailors advertisements to the contents of your private and professional correspondence.) However, unlike a human being, the cloud’s organizing principles, like those of a video camera, are static and fixed, no matter how accurately they may simulate the workings of the human eye and brain (which they don’t very), they aren’t the same thing because they can’t grow, change, suffer, and die. They just continue doing what they are programmed to do and update themselves according to some very, very simple principles that were locked-in at the beginning of the internet fairly arbitrarily and haphazardly in great geekish enthusiasm to get the information superhighway up and running. (For more on this, check out You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto by Jaron Lanier, which I’m currently reading.) But, being people, we tend to assume that the machines and virtual eyes and ears we encounter have human-like qualities, because the reality is too alienating and scary. It’s more comforting to believe the machines are like us, that the human brain is like a computer too, or our governing principles and assumptions can be fixed and static, that our psychologies can be programmed like software. Because otherwise we are forced to consider the possibility that our lives are governed in very concrete direct ways by forces that frankly aren’t of this world, of the world of human people, that can adapt, reflect, and understand our needs.

Like, you know, the economy, and how no one’s running it? Eesh. It’s especially creepy, because as Augustine once speculated, evil is the absence of good, or, as C.S. Lewis describes horrifically in his science fiction novel Perelandra, the demon-possessed man tempts and torments the hero, Ransom, by calling out “Ransom! Ransom!” and when Ransom finally asks “What?” in irritation, the un-man, as Lewis terms him, always answers, “Nothing.” And then giggles. And then continues the torment for hours so that Ransom cannot sleep. At least in this case, however, Ransom can kill the one man who Satan has possessed. How do you save a whole generation of people, of which I am a member, from our unintentional, currently ideological and psychosocial but nonetheless real and increasingly embodied cybernetics? (Smartphones, anyone?)

Anyway, it’s a little disquieting to think that someday the judicial system may be forced to recognize the rights of viewpoints as though they’re equivalent to the rights of people. This may seem a little paranoid, scifi, or a tangent from the issue of churches at public schools, but I think it is deeply related to what fruit these churches are bearing, what they are revealing about the state of things in this day and age. They’re treating Christianity as though it’s a viewpoint, a point of view, with fixed principles that demand conformity and can sanction the sort of slides and slips on the ethical frontier of privacy and hitherto common-sense separation of personal/public/private spaces that are elsewhere reflected in our “Facebook stalker” culture, and odd expressions of admiration such as “I was just creeping all up on your wall and thought I’d say hi!” when really such information was apparently in plain sight, as though the attention given to a certain piece of public information is what is to be judged, when usually “creepy” behavior has referred to a clear and physical transgression of privacy. Such as, someone actually following you low to the ground: creeping and stalking is a physical, attacking behavior from behind (“the cat stalks the mouse through the high grass”), not seeing or even seeking out someone’s online “face” and reacting internally or externally. That’s something else. Something even, dare I say, positively human, even if it ends badly. One may be scared, terrified even, in a fight or assault, but one is rarely creeped out, a new word, by the way. We get creeped out by the un-manned viewpoints that watch us, which is why the specter of the stalker is the man with a camera hiding in the bushes, and why, when you, the TV detective, find “the shrine” of stolen images in the man’s house, he’s rarely there. The real villain is the wall of images watching you, the truly vacant eyes of a woman watching him when you’re not there, a viewpoint from which no one is viewing, that which will necessarily require of him some nefarious deed within our imaginary and sometimes true narratives of crime and transgression, and why obsession originally, in the middle ages, referred to the condition of a person possessed by a demon.

The use of the childrens’ photographs, their access to these images, and the almost totemic power these images hold for the church-goers and the author of the editorial, therefore, is particularly telling. What could and perhaps should be a straightforward matter of freedom of religion and freedom of speech has become a matter of who can be where and who can see what. Who. It’s not a matter of viewpoint discrimination. It’s a matter of the discrimination and social control of kinds of people and their behavior: who can do what where. People cannot be alienated from their viewpoints! People only have one set of eyes and one brain apiece! Controlling information, whether as an evangelical or as an educator, is not the same thing as doing something good! Or bad!

Morality is silently and not so silently shifting to mean seeing the right thing and reacting the right way, to being an effective and harmonious cloud accessory. People are judged good or bad based on their interpretations and reactions, not their actions, because this brave new world of ours is too cowardly to stop and think about how to develop a positive ethics of viewing, a positive internet ethics, and this laziness is bleeding into every aspect of our lives and creeping us out. Do this, don’t do this, or you’ll look “like an undesirable whatever” from some abstract viewpoint from which no one is viewing, which will then come attack you in some scary way, scary precisely because your bad end is left up entirely to your own imagination. Comport yourselves as though the demons are always watching and as though the angels have left.

The demons are watching, this is true, but so are the angels. They always were, since the human race began imagining things and became human. But that’s all beside the point. The point is to love your neighbor as yourself, and not trouble yourself, overmuch, about the end of the world. Maybe Jesus came to save us cyborgs too.

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