God and Woman at Cornell

This essay is adapted from a public conversation at Cornell University with Elizabeth Lyon Hall, head of the COLLIS Institute for Catholic Thought and Culture, in association with Chesterton House, on April 10. 

Hall: Mary, we’re super excited to welcome back a Cornell alumna. Since you have a feel for the school and our ethos, can you talk about your trajectory from student at Cornell to becoming a Christian apologist and public intellectual? Did you ever think when you were a student that you would come back here speaking about faith and secularization?

Eberstadt: I sure did not. Home for me was a series of hamlets and small towns within a hundred miles or so of here. My family’s background is blue-collar, and I always felt so fortunate to have ended up at Cornell. For some time as an undergraduate, I didn’t really have opinions about burning issues of culture; most of my time was spent just trying to catch up with all the smart people around. But something happened here in my sophomore year that took a while to sink in, and which probably has more than a little to do with the subsequent trajectory of my thoughts. 

One evening, there was a debate on campus about the subject of abortion. On one side, taking the pro-choice position, was a very well-known feminist professor who taught here about Freud, Marcuse, Marx, and the like. I can only assume that no one on campus wanted to take the pro-life side, and so that night they invited a Baptist preacher who was from some fifty miles away from here. (That fifty-mile number, heard somewhere, sticks in my mind.) There were a thousand or so students at this debate, and it rapidly devolved into a Colosseum-like spectacle. Every time the Baptist tried to talk, he was shouted down. And I’m sorry to say I didn’t speak up. I was just sitting there watching this mob scene, feeling increasingly uncomfortable, and thinking. Afterward, I couldn’t get the image out of my head of this man driving home through the dark hills of rural New York, and later telling his family how he had been treated at the great Cornell University. The image fastened itself into my mind, and stayed there.

That was the beginning of what became a kind of systematic rethinking of reality as it was purveyed at Cornell. There was “common wisdom” then on campus and elsewhere among “enlightened” people that I started to wonder about one by one—for example, the idea that women were victims. This notion made no intuitive sense—because coming from where I came from, I didn’t feel like a victim. I felt like the luckiest person anyone knew. 

There was also a related idea going around that men were bad, that men were real or potential rapists—a blanket condemnation of the intentions of all men. This, too, was falsified by my own experience: I grew up with a bunch of brothers. Good men shaped and guarded my life. I had a wonderful mentor here: the late professor Norman Kretzmann, one of the world’s authorities on medieval philosophy, whose intellectual and civilizational influence went deep throughout my four years and beyond. And little by little, piecemeal reconsiderations of the ideas that were dominant here led me to another heretical thought—that maybe religious faith wasn’t off the table, either. And so, I started looking again into Christianity.

There’s a perennial idea that religion is responsible for the worst in the human record. In my 2010 dark novel The Loser Letters, and elsewhere in my writing, that notion is disputed—because it’s the easiest of the atheist objections to push back against. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said: “The line between good and evil runs through every human heart.” In other words, it is not religious faith, per se, that causes division among people. 

Our deepest divisions are caused instead by ideas—bad ones. Ideas like “the most important thing about me is the color of my skin,” or “the most important thing about me is my sex/gender.” Christianity teaches that essential and accidental differences have a place in the order of things—but that the most important fact for any of us isn’t difference, but sameness: that we are all brothers and sisters, united under a single God. 

Saying that we can’t understand each other unless we are members of a group with exactly the same grievances is another divisive idea that doesn’t come from religion. It’s not the only destructive tenet out there. But imagine we got rid of all religious expression tomorrow, as happened under communism (and pretty effectively, as I saw riding through East Germany right after the Berlin Wall came down, passing church after church where the crosses had been ripped down from steeples decades before—because those were forms of religious expression). Even without Christianity, people would still bite each other. It’s human nature. 

Thus, avoiding talk of religion at Cornell, or anywhere else, is not going to help people get along. Now more than ever, speaking openly about religion and understanding some of the basics of religious history are mandatory for anyone who thinks. With the rise of secularism, a lot of people don’t know much about the Christian intellectual tradition, or the Christian tradition of sacred art or music. People are studying anthropology who don’t understand—to give one example of what Christianity decrees to the world—the idea that consent by men and women is required for marriage. More specifically, that consent by the woman is as crucial to valid marriage as is the man’s. This is an idea that comes from Christianity, and it’s an idea that probably most people would say was a good thing. But it is not an idea that people associate with that religious tradition, and they should. 

As for the flip side, the question arises: Why does secularism flourish on college campuses? Earlier today, some of us were talking about the philosopher René Girard, who had an idea that sounds simple, but isn’t: We figure out what we desire by seeing what other people desire. That’s part of what happens with students on campus, and it’s why even those raised in a religious home tend to become more secular—because they don’t see a lot of people like themselves in a place like Cornell. The idea dawns, even subconsciously, “Well, maybe there’s a reason why they all think differently from me. After all, we’re in a very sophisticated place with highly educated people, so maybe I should be like that.” That’s the relatively benign force that drives people who were raised religious toward secularism. 

There is another force, more malevolent: intimidation, the chilling effect of being surrounded by, or perceiving oneself to be surrounded by, people who think your belief system is ridiculous. There is also the fact that college is famously the place where a lot of young people break free from the constraining Judeo-Christian rulebook about sex and marriage. These realities together conspire to drive college kids away from faith.

There’s an interesting stereotype in play that education itself leads to secularization. I believed it, too—until looking into the data. The notion that more educated people are less likely to be religious might hold in a highly rarified situation: say, here at Cornell. But it does not obtain more generally across societies. In the example of Mormonism, for instance, people are more likely to practice faith and participate in religion the higher up the educational ladder one goes. This was also true in Victorian England. There’s a trope about the holy poor outshining the upper classes—but the reality is often instead that people are more likely to be religious if they are both better-off and well-educated. 

For religious students at secular universities, my advice is: If you are in a minority, get used to it—here as elsewhere. Whether you go into finance, law, academia, or any other profession, you’re going to find times when you’re outnumbered. You’ve got to practice holding your own against people who think differently, and the more that muscle is exercised, the better for you.

But beyond that practical point, hold onto the fact that you never know when your example is having an effect on some anonymous soul who’s watching. I think back again to the Baptist preacher. To my regret, I never took the trouble to figure out who he was—or to tell him what a difference it makes to see one example of courage on the part of someone so outnumbered, who nonetheless refused to back down.