More Sensitive Than Thou

Among passages highlighted in the Times’ story was one from an Elie Wiesel essay, “What Really Makes Us Free.” The noted Holocaust survivor and author had written: “Man, who was created in God’s image, wants to be free as God is free, free to choose between good and evil, love and vengeance, life and death.” The Regents omitted “who was created in God’s image” and “as God is free,” emasculating Wiesel’s point.

Another example was from Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. She had written: “Whoa . . . they’re not getting married after all! She’s gay! And you had no idea!” The sentence, “She’s gay!” was not in the test. Incredibly, works by Isaac Bashevis Singer eliminated all mention of Judaism. A phrase “most Jewish women” became “most women” on the Regents.

Within two days a totally embarrassed New York State Education Department had capitulated and ordered the practice stopped. (Now this is a revolution!) The next day an op-ed piece in the Times by an historian of education, Diane Ravitch, said the censorship of tests and textbooks is not merely widespread across the nation, but actually institutionalized. Tests and textbooks, she said, undergo what is called “bias and sensitivity review” so that nothing in the tests could possibly upset any student.

At JFK Airport in New York the familiar lines from Emma Lazarus’ “The New Colossus” are on a wall in the international terminal: “Give me your tired, your poor . . . .” But “the wretched refuse of your teeming shore” has been replaced with an ellipse. God forbid any immigrant should be upset on arrival by the real Emma Lazarus.

Does this sound familiar? Our congregation uses the 1992 Presbyterian Hymnal, which had “sensitivity” as a guideline. In Henry van Dyke’s beloved “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee,” the stanza with “Thou our Father, Christ our Brother, all who live in Love are Thine, teach us how to love each other” is notably missing. That is a loss. In the same hymn the nicely alliterative “dark of doubt” has been changed to “gloom of doubt,” probably because “dark” is now considered insensitive. Is this a bit loony? In “Be Thou My Vision,” the words “High King of Heaven” have been changed to “Great God of Heaven” and the next stanza’s “High King of Heaven, my victory won” has been omitted. So much for Christus Victor.

When Nelson Mandela visited the U.S. after his release from prison in South Africa the congregation of Riverside church greeted him with James Russell Lowell’s powerful “Once to Every Man and Nation.” It was extremely moving. But they couldn’t have used our new hymnal to sing it.

At the 1988 General Assembly I was on the Directory for Worship committee. In our draft, Philippians 2:11 closed with “every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God.” I noted that “the Father” was missing. (“The Father” is definitely on the endangered list, though it occurs some 128 times in the Gospel of John alone. We sometimes now get “Father-Mother,” a posthumous coup for Mary Baker Eddy.) On the Assembly floor I questioned blue-penciling the Bible. At least a third of the Assembly disagreed and voted to go on clipping and pasting Holy Writ. A majority of commissioners, however, bravely opted for the unexpurgated version (W. 7-7000).

We are talking of the church of John Milton, whose “Areopagitica” opposed censorship. We ought to be mounting the barricades with people like Jeanne Heifetz in defense of authors and truth, but instead, like the New York State Education Department, we can’t wait to rewrite everything. Soon we’ll have “Moral Humanity and Immoral Society” and “The Nature and Destiny of Humanity.”

One example of how theology itself is sacrificed on the altar of sensitivity is the increasingly common substitution of “Hebrew Bible” for “Old Testament,” while illogically retaining “New Testament.” The use in seminaries and churches of the puzzling “BCE” and “CE” is in this same category. We are all familiar with changing the wording of the Trinity. Fortunately, the Directory for Worship holds the line on that for the Sacrament of Baptism (W-2.3010, W-3.3606), but how often that rubric is violated is anyone’s guess.

The nadir was reached two decades ago with An Inclusive Language Lectionary, which did for the Bible what Thomas Bowdler did for Shakespeare in sensitive Victorian England. Bowdler cleaned up the Bard’s naughty sexual references. The Lectionary, with “The Human One” for “Son of Man” and stilted “Sovereign” for the more personal “Lord” (viz., “Then the disciples were glad when they saw the Sovereign”), has met the same fate as Bowdler. People want the real thing, not an insipid, sanitized version.

What is said in the new catechism about biblical criticism is true also of sensitivity: it is a good guide but a poor master. Let us encourage sensitivity in our use of contemporary language, but not at the price of censorship. Let us teach that God is above sexuality, but let us not mold Scripture or old hymns accordingly. It wouldn’t hurt to develop thicker skins. And let us stick up for authors and truth, in the spirit of John Milton of England — and Jeanne Heifetz of Brooklyn.