Why Evangelicals Suck at Sociology and Other Musings about Faith, Race, and the Way Forward

 The other night, I was on the phone with my best friend who was telling me about how she pissed off a bunch of rich white people in a Sunday School class at a suburban Baptist church which shall remain nameless.  How did she manage to piss folks off?  She suggested that acting like Jesus shouldn’t require folks to “pray about it.”  It should require people to, ya know, Act. Like. Jesus.  Either you believe that Jesus said to help the poor, visit those in prison, and care for the widow and orphan or you don’t.  No prayer necessary.  

The “Let’s pray about it” of it all gave rich white folks an excuse for inaction, to escape discomfort.  And so my best friend called them on it.  I told her (after I nearly fell off my couch laughing because...of course her Enneagram 8 self couldn’t keep her damn mouth shut) that I would have given anything to be there--if only to shout a hale and hearty “Amen!”  Needless to say, she hasn’t been back.

After a semester in which I walked my History of Religions class through the history of White American Christianity from the colonial era to the present, I have come to several conclusions--all interrelated.  I hope by the end of this blog post, all of these conclusions will coalesce into an explanation of why one group has a serious problem with the idea of “critical race theory” whatever they think THAT means (spoiler alert: they don’t have a clue) and why literally no one else does.  It’s an answer that applies to all sorts of issues--poverty, church sex abuse scandals, racism, xenophobia, etc.  

This blog post is directed at White Christian Americans.  It examines the history of White Christian America.  I don’t want anyone to get the impression that this is a condemnation of Christianity as a whole; it is not.  What it is is a call to repentance from White folks who have overwhelmingly benefitted from 400 years of American history which have overwhelmingly privileged those with light skin.  But first, a few threads to pull….

Premillennial Dispensationalism and Evangelical Fatalism

Uh oh….I just introduced a couple of $64,000 words into the discussion, didn’t I?  Fear not!  They aren’t quite as scary as they seem...except I have to introduce another $64,000 word now too.  Oops….Eschatology (the study of the end times) has always played an interesting role in American Christianity.  Prior to and, in places, after the Civil War, postmillennialism was de rigueur in most of the United States.  

Postmillennialism assumes that Jesus instituted his Kingdom on Earth before his death and through preaching, conversion, and evangelism Christians could create an environment in which Christ would return AFTER a millennium (1000 years) of Christ’s perfect Kingdom on Earth.  This was a pretty positive view of society--Christians living in harmony with each other.  So it’s easy to see why postmillennialism died off pretty quickly after the Civil War.  After all, the whole point of the Civil War was the DISharmony among people.  

After the Civil War, a wave of pessimism swept through American Christianity and premillennialism took over as the eschatological position of most American Christians.  Premillennialism argues that the world will continue to deteriorate (as it is a result of a sinful and fallen humanity) until Christ comes back to implement his millennial Kingdom.  One of the most popular iterations of premillennialism is dispensationalism.  Dispensationalism was popularized in the United States by C.I. Scofield and his Scofield Reference Bible.  

In essence, dispensationalism argued that God’s people had moved historically through a number of eras or dispensations (the number varies, though Scofield himself held to 7 dispensations).  Regardless of how many dispensations one acknowledges, everyone agrees that we are in the 6th dispensation--the age of grace.  At the end of the age of grace comes the Rapture (the bringing of all believers to Heaven) and the Tribulation (the earthly era of chaos and calamity for all non-believers in the hopes of bringing them to Christ).  Only once God’s wrath has been visited upon the non-believers will Christ’s 1000 year reign come.  Everyone with me so far?  Okay, good.

Premillennialism sees the problems of our current times as proof of an inherently fallen world that no one can fix because they are beyond humanity’s ability to fix; only divine intervention will set everything to right.  Because of its preoccupation with the sinfulness of man, it’s no surprise that many premillennialists are also Calvinists since Calvinism holds to the doctrine of original sin--that is, that Adam and Eve’s sin in the Garden of Eden has been visited upon all of humanity and so only God’s grace which we do not deserve and cannot earn can save us.  More on this later….

The problem with premillennialism and Calvinism is that they both lend themselves to a certain degree of fatalism when it comes to confronting social issues--things are bad because people are sinful, and we can’t make them better so why try?  During the Civil Rights movement, Billy Graham exemplified this position when asked for his reaction to Martin Luther King’s speech at the March on Washington in 1963 (the “I Have a Dream” speech).  Graham said, “Only when Christ comes again will little white children of Alabama walk hand in hand with little black children.”  

When “a personal relationship with Christ” Becomes an Idol

Much of White American Christianity, and definitely White American Evangelicalism, maintains the importance of being “born again.”  The idea of a conversion experience (first mentioned in John’s Gospel and perhaps most famously portrayed in Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus) is at the heart of many a church narrative.  Indeed, this is one of the four parts of the so-called “Bebbington Quadrilateral” which lots of folks point to as the defining characteristics of evangelicalism.  

I don’t put much stock in the uniqueness of any of the 4 things on Bebbington’s list to the evangelical experience, so we won’t go into them here.  But the idea of “asking Jesus into your heart” and Jesus as a personal savior is rampant in American Christianity.  Fun fact, as an aside: I do not consider myself “born again.”  I was never “saved.”  I simply don’t remember a time when I didn’t believe Jesus was important, so there was no reason to ask him into my heart when he was already there.  Just another reason I make a TERRIBLE evangelical.  But I digress….

The idea of a personal relationship with Jesus is not bad on its face; like most idols, it only becomes problematic when it assumes an outsized place in a person’s life.  Here’s the problem, then.  When one’s Christianity becomes about “my” salvation and “my” personal relationship with Christ, any outside factors become unimportant.  “My” sins have been forgiven, so I’m good, but the rest of you?  Yeah, you’re on your own.  AND, as we’ve already discussed, humanity is inherently sinful and we can only save ourselves by accepting God’s undeserved grace.  So when any social issue is raised, the response is typically, “Well, I’m not a *insert social problem here* so this isn’t my problem.”  

This response assumes that each of us lives in our own little bubble and that the problems outside of the church mean nothing to those in the sanctuary.  This insular way of thinking is a big part of King’s critique of his White Christian brothers and sisters in “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”  A “personal relationship with Christ” is the theological brother of “rugged American individualism.”  As long as people see their actions as divorced from the consequences of those actions on those around them, they can absolve themselves of any necessity to take action to solve social problems.

Evangelism vs. Evangelicalism

So, I’ve snuck in another $64,000 word…which might actually be the root of a $64,000 question: what the hell is evangelicalism?  Well...no one really knows.  Or at least, no one can really define it.  The aforementioned Bebbington Quadrilateral lists being born again, activism, a belief in the Bible as the ultimate authority, and a belief in the importance of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross to redeem mankind.  George Marsden, one of the preeminent historians of American Christianity, once glibly defined an evangelical as “anyone who likes Billy Graham.”  When I was in Cairo, an evangelical was anyone who wasn’t Orthodox or Catholic.  However, lately evangelicalism has taken on a political tinge: An evangelical is a white person who votes Republican.  By the way, the literature review it would take to look at all of the definitional issues on evangelicalism would take PAGES.  Go Google it.  You’ll find all sorts of sources to walk you through the various approaches to defining the word.

I have this thing about definitions.  I think they’re important.  But defining evangelicalism is no easy task.  The problem is that different groups, different points of view result in different definitions.  At its heart, evangelicalism should be about the evangel (Greek for “good news”--what we would call, in English, the Gospel).  And, in the early history of evangelicalism, that is what it was about.  Jonathan Edwards and George Whitfield are considered some of the precursors to modern evangelical movements in the United States.  However, with the ascension of religious folks into public, often political, life since the mid-20th century, the term has taken on an irredeemably political meaning as well.  And--precisely because I believe definitions matter--this means that evangelicalism should now be viewed as a political movement, not a religious one.  

What I believe should take precedence here is not evangelicalism which is an increasingly ideological and troublesome term, but evangelism.  “Go ye therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”  If this is the backbone of the Christian witness, then let’s get back to that.  Let’s also remember that the whole purpose of calling ourselves “Christian” is to follow Christ, to live out his example.  That’s the whole point of our baptismal covenant (“Buried with Christ in baptism; raised to walk in the newness of life.”).  We are followers of Christ.  We should look to his example in the Gospels (the evangel) to show us the way forward.  

Care for the least of these, be peacemakers, help the poor, the widows, and the orphans.  THIS is the way of the Lord.  Preach the Gospel all the time; when necessary, use words (NOT a quote from St. Francis of Assisi, to whom it is often attributed.  He also, while we’re killing St. Francis quote dreams, did not come up with the so-called “Prayer of St. Francis.”).  The evangel was--and is--revolutionary.  The last shall be first, and the first shall be last turns the balance of power in society completely on its head.  If we stick to evangelism, we might just get a lot farther as Christians than getting stuck in the constant cycle of arguing about whether Jesus was a Republican or a Democrat.

Why Evangelicals don’t do Sociology

A couple of weeks ago, one of my fellow teachers posted on Facebook, regarding all of the anti-Critical Race Theory legislation being passed around the country, that as history teachers, we cannot, nor should we shirk our responsibility to teach the good, the bad, and the ugly of our nation’s heritage.  One of the pastors at the church she attends commented (predictably) that racism was about the inherent fallenness of mankind and anything that looked at class-based theories put kids on a slippery slope toward Marxism.  

It was at this point that I realized that the primary disconnect between evangelicals and sociologists such as myself.  When people who have made an idol of a personal relationship with Jesus, who believe that all of the bad in the world is the result of the fallenness of man, only see social problems through an individualistic lens, they cannot, will not, see the social forest for the individual trees.  As a sociologist, I don’t have the time to look at each individual’s actions, beliefs, or level of sinfulness.  It’s simply impractical.   Sociology is the study of society, of social groups.  Sociologists must necessarily transcend the individual level in order to get anything accomplished because 7 billion case studies would be...a LOT.

When evangelicals look at racism, they see their own lives: “I’m not a racist.”  But individual racism is only the tip of the iceberg.  Restrictive housing covenants, criminal codes regarding drugs that unfairly target minorities, literacy tests given only to Blacks trying to register to vote, redlining and predatory lending practices, food deserts, underfunded schools, and the hyper policing of Black and Brown communities are among the things sociologists talk about when we talk about structural or institutional racism.  Falling back on the individualist view of sin and social problems absolves evangelicals of looking at how generations of white folks have benefitted from policies that not only helped them, but actively hurt minority communities.

This individualist vs. structural divide informs a number of social debates in the United States.  Sex abuse scandals are a result of the sin of those who have abused their power, not the misogyny that permeates complementarian doctrine or the structures and institutions that enabled that abuse to happen in the first place.  Gun violence is the result of the sinfulness of the individual gunmen, not the structures of toxic masculinity, the glorification of militance as manliness, and the idol of “individual protection” that lead people to act out in such ways.  Poverty is the result of individual choices, not the generational passing down of wealth (or the lack thereof) that affects an individual’s starting point in life.  Evangelicals simply cannot see the world in sociological terms because they have a blind spot to the interconnectedness of people groups, social problems, and the very real fact that nothing, not one thing, in life exists in a vacuum.  

When my best friend pushed back against the idea of “praying about it” before helping the poor (the context of this particular discussion in Sunday School), she was challenging the idolatry of a personal relationship with Jesus.  Before anyone can act or address an obvious social problem, they should pray about it as an individual because their salvation, their sin is paramount.  This is a total subversion of the Gospel message.  Jesus didn’t pray about whether he should help the poor; he just helped the poor.  Jesus didn’t pray about whether he should heal the leper or help the lame to walk or the blind to see; he simply did it--even when doing so was sure to irritate the religious leaders of his day.  A more truthful response would be “I don’t want to do this because it makes me uncomfortable.”  Not spiritually satisfying, but certainly more truthful.

Furthermore, the obsession with the inherent sinfulness of people (the Calvinism of it all) and the fact that said sinfulness is so deeply entrenched that only the second coming of Christ can serve as a corrective (the premillennialism of it all) means that evangelicals can simply throw up their hands and say, “See?  We can’t do anything about it!”  Again, this is a complete subversion of evangel, the Good News of Jesus Christ.  Jesus said “Blessed are the peacemakers.”  He didn’t have a lot of patience for those who wanted to preserve the status quo.  He wanted his disciples to go and change the conversation.  He upended the status quo just as surely as he upended the money changers’ tables in the Temple.  At no point in his ministry did Jesus throw up his hands and say, “Oh well….Guess that’s just the way it is.”  If we claim to be followers of this Jesus character, we shouldn’t do that either.

If White evangelicalism is a corrupted movement, then what should we do?  How, then, shall we live?  We should live out an example in the image of Christ.  We should love our enemies, pray for those who persecute us, upend the status quo when it inhibits progress (which is almost all of the time), and confront structural factors that maintain White supremacy.  We should be comfortable with discomfort, ready to confront our own biases, and accept that life has been unfairly good to people who won the genetic lottery.

Comforting the Afflicted…or Not: On Donald Trump’s Failure to Prop up the American Civil Religion

Anyone who has followed any of my blogs or heard my rants about the Pledge of Allegiance or patriotic worship services knows that I have quite the love-hate relationship with the American Civil Religion.  In the worst of times, it can be used to perpetuate jingoistic, often xenophobic, nationalism.  However, in the worst of times, it can also be used to unite the country when faced with a major crisis.  Unfortunately, under President Donald Trump, this is not happening.

So, what exactly is the American Civil Religion?  In the immortal words of Inigo Montoya, “Let me explain.  No, there is too much.  Let me sum up.”  The American Civil Religion is the lowest common denominator faith that allows us, as Americans, to create a national identity.  It has its own priests, prophets, sacred symbols, hymns, holidays, and scriptures.  Furthermore, there are two types of civil religion: the priestly and the prophetic.  The prophetic civil religion is my favorite!  This is where non-conformists who push the envelope and press this country to live up to its higher ideals spend all of their time.  The bad news for the prophets of the civil religion is that their life expectancy is not terribly long: Bobby Kennedy, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. would have all been considered prophets of the civil religion. 

The priestly civil religion, on the other hand, is the semi-official embodiment of the civil religion.  Its primary purpose is to unite the country in times of national crisis.  The president is the head of the priestly civil religion, and in normal times, the priestly civil religion’s most frequent expression comes at the end of presidential addresses when the president says something like, “God bless you, and may God continue to pour out His blessing on the United States of America.”  However, the priestly civil religion truly shines in the darkest of times.  Turing times of trouble, times of tragedy, presidents become "consoler-in-chief."  If it is the prophetic civil religion's job to afflict the comfortable, in times of national crisis, the president's job as the high priest of the civil religion is to comfort the afflicted.

Examples of the president using his office to unite the country during times of tragedy are legion and cut across partisan divides.

President Reagan after the Challenger explosion:

President Clinton after the Oklahoma City Bombing:

President Bush after 9/11:

President Obama after Newtown:

So ubiquitous is this function of the American presidency that it even shows up in fictional White Houses, including the Barlet administration in The West Wing:

All of these speeches have one thing in common: the presidents giving them were speaking at times of great tragedy or crisis in the United States.  These speeches are not political, but spiritual.  They are meant to bring Americans together, to reassure in times of uncertainty.  Past presidents have excelled at this function of the presidency.  President Trump?  Eh, not so much.  I have worried about the status of the priestly civil religion since his inauguration.  The results have been mixed at best.  During wildfires and hurricanes, President Trump's reaction has largely been predicated on whether the locations afflicted by such natural disasters supported him.  Florida?  Plenty of sympathy to muster.  California and Puerto Rico?  Maybe not.  However, nowhere have President Trump's deficiencies in this area been quite so clearly evident as his response to our current national, indeed global, crisis: the coronavirus pandemic.

From the beginning, the president has struggled to provide moral leadership in this crisis.  Focused more on the economy (at least as far as it affects his reelection prospects) and self-aggrandizement, President Trump has not shown much in the way of empathy or unity.  He has occasionally said the right things in briefings, only to return to attacks on political opponents or the media on Twitter later in the day.  However, nothing so starkly brought the president's inability to fulfill the role as high priest of the American Civil Religion into focus as today's Coronavirus Task Force briefing.  Peter Alexander asked the softest of softball questions of the president.  For any other president, the result would have been similar to a Sam Show at bat last season for Cowgirl Softball:

However, President Trump saw the fat curveball hanging up in the zone over the heart of the plate and...whiffed.  Big time.

As my high school debate coach, and now colleague, Michael Patterson would say, "A trained monkey could do this."  Any response would have been better than this response.  Hell, a "No comment" would have been better.  A normal president would have taken this opportunity to offer sympathies to those who have lost loved ones due to this virus, or even to offer condolences to Alexander who lost a colleague at NBC News today because of the virus.  He might have highlighted the ways in which Americans are coming together to help each other.  He could have used his platform offer his appreciation to the doctors, nurses, grocery stockers, and other ordinary Americans who are the heroes of this pandemic.  Instead, President Trump lashed out at Alexander, calling him a nasty reporter and mocking NBC News at large.  Y'all....A. Trained. Monkey. could have done this.  President Trump could not.

One of the things I'm interested in regarding this presidency is the health of the American Civil Religion when it's all over.  I fear the patient may be on life support right now.  At the very least, the priestly civil religion is in very real trouble.  While I have major misgivings about the civil religion, I can nevertheless say that I recognize its worth--when applied well.  The civil religion can galvanize the nation, especially in times of hardship.  Especially when the president succeeds in his role as the high priest of the civil religion, which is...usually?  Until this president.  While I believe the prophetic civil religion is alive and well during the Trump presidency, I'm unsure of its staying power without the priestly civil religion as its inevitable foil.  One cannot truly exist without the other because they keep each other in check; it is the nature of things.  Donald Trump cannot fulfill the expectations of the priestly civil religion.  What's more, I'm not sure he even knows such expectations exist.

Right now, the nation needs a high priest more than ever.  These are uncertain times.  Coronavirus hospitalizations are testing a health care system already stretched too thin.  Social distancing and self-quarantining are causing major sectors of the American economy to teeter on the brink of collapse.  Churches, mosques, and synagogues have closed their doors.  Schools are closed indefinitely.  American society, American life as we know it, has disappeared--overnight, it seems.  We NEED a national leader who can reassure the people that we're in this together, that all of this uncertainty won't last, that we will come out of this crisis stronger and more united than ever before.  President Trump had the opportunity to do that today.  Instead, he chose the lowest of low roads, becoming the anti-priest of the American Civil Religion.  We may still achieve all of the things the high priest might have reassured of us.  But if we do, it will be in spite of, rather than because of the influence of the president.  And from the standpoint of the civil religion, that might be the real tragedy.

It’s Not Me, It’s You: How I (Finally) Broke Up With the Professoriate

It was around this time last year that I was told my contract at Oklahoma State University would not be renewed for the upcoming school year (read: this academic year).  This was not a surprise to me.  I had a pretty good idea of what was happening.  Oklahoma’s budget crisis is pretty well-documented, and when you get right down to it, I was a victim of that crisis.  While I was a visiting professor (non-tenure track), I was still salaried with benefits which means I was more expensive to employ than the lecturer who replaced me and is considered contract labor which means he’s paid by the course and OSU doesn’t owe him any benefits.

While I knew I wouldn’t be teaching at OSU this year, I was still *kind of* attached to the idea of being a professor.  I applied to a bunch of jobs, and I got a couple of Skype interviews, but as time passed, I started to doubt whether that was what I really wanted to do.  Part of the reason for this is that, frankly, there are few job markets as terrible these days as the academic job market.  Consider:

•        According to the American Association ofUniversity Professors, over 75% of all university faculty are adjuncts (paid by the course with no benefits, sometimes teaching at 2-3 different institutions in larger cities)
•        If you didn’t go to the “right” school, your chances of getting a tenure-track job diminish significantly
•        There are far more newly-minted PhDs than tenure-track job openings
•       In religious studies (my field), it’s estimated that there are an average of 150-200 applicants for every tenure-track job available.

The flip side of this, especially for non-tenure track folks of all stripes, is that to be competitive in this horrendous job market, one must have a full CV—journal articles, a book proposal accepted by a major publishing house if not a book, presentations at major academic conferences.  However, when you add the teaching and student interaction piece to the puzzle, there aren’t a lot of extra hours in the day.  Just take my life for the past five years.  During the school year, I spent: 

•       10-13 hours per week lecturing, depending on whether I had three or four courses to teach
•       8-12 hours preparing for class (lecture preparation, creating Power Points, finding ice breakers, making sure I had what I needed for students with learning disabilities, tracking attendance in upper-division courses)
•       6-8 hours in office hours
•     2-4 additional hours of meetings with students who couldn’t make it to my office hours
•        5-8 hours trying to wrangle my e-mail inbox—more when I had 400-plus students in a semester

 So, without any craziness or unexpected problems, that’s 31-45 hours per week just dealing with teaching responsibilities.  37-40 hours was pretty standard for me.  That means that any research, publication, writing, etc. I needed to get done would have to be done at night or on the weekends.  AND….we don’t get paid for journal articles; we barely get paid for books; and because most places can’t pay for travel expenses, conference attendance ($2000-3000 per conference for the big ones) has to come out of a professor’s own pocket. 

It was at one of those big conferences that my perspective actually began to change.  I was at the contingent faculty breakfast at the American Academy of Religion’s annual meeting in San Antonio last November sharing stories about the crazy things college students do (because war stories are always a thing when you get a bunch of professors in a room together), and Whitney Cox, a delightful religious studies professor from the University of Houston, looked at me and said, “Why aren’t you working with student-athletes?”  While I had privately entertained the notion, I had yet to give voice to such an idea, so I was curious as to why she mentioned it.  She told me that not only had all of my stories been about student-athletes, but I seemed to genuinely enjoy working with them.  She was right.

However, change came slowly.  Spending five years in a PhD program, reading and absorbing and spitting out again all of the knowledge you can about a subject, writing a dissertation in which you take an original stance on a topic, teaching from a position of authority about a particular subject—all of it creates the illusion of “scholar” as self.  Having that taken away from me at OSU created a bit of an identity crisis.  If I’m not a scholar of Middle Eastern political movements, of Islamism, of the world’s religions, then what am I?  I gradually came to see that “what” I am was actually pretty immaterial; the more important question was “Who am I?”  And once I arrived at that conclusion, it unlocked a whole new set of possibilities.  Who I am is someone who enjoys walking beside college students as they try to figure out what they want to be if they grow up.  I am someone who loves to see the light come on for college kids—academically, vocationally, relationally.  And I am someone who has a soft spot especially for student-athletes, an underestimated and underappreciated segment of every college campus. 

I started working with student-athletes as an undergraduate tutor at Academic Services for Student-Athletes at OSU.  This is a group that either grabs you and doesn’t let go, or annoys the living daylights out of you—there isn’t much in between.  They grabbed me.  I tutored student-athletes at Wake Forest and Baylor during graduate school.  I’ve had over 300 of them in class in the five years I taught at OSU.  They are a microcosm of a college campus—some are first generation college students; some have parents with graduate degrees.  Some are lazy; some have great work ethics.  Some know what they want to do if they grow up; some don’t have the slightest clue.  Some come from two-parent households; some grew up with single parents.  But they are all far braver than I could ever hope to be because their every success and failure is splashed on the sports page for everyone to see and critique.  They have big personalities, but also big insecurities, especially about their academic abilities.  They were often allowed to skate by in high school and thus don’t have the tools necessary for success at the college level.  But they are just competitive enough to rise to any challenge placed before them. 

So, I’m sorry, professoriate, but we’re done.  And believe me, it’s not me.  This is all about you…you with your terrible job prospects and soul-sucking free labor; you with your complete absence of a work-life balance; you holding me back from what I really love.  I’ve found a better place, a better fit.  I’ll be over here hanging out with student-athletes, helping them navigate college and adulting.  Don’t get me wrong, it was fun while it lasted, and I learned a lot, but this relationship had grown toxic and it’s time to part ways.  No hard feelings, I hope, and I know I’ll still see you around, but we’re through. 

All the best,

Stephanie

Why I Don't Do "Patriotic" Worship Services

I call myself a politically incorrect patriot.  It’s a much easier designator that “someone who has studied the American civil religion and finds it a dangerous thing with which to engage.”  There are a number of reasons why I have taken a stance that is often at odds with the prevailing expectations of patriotism in the United States.  Admittedly, one of those reasons is that I’m a contrarian at heart and coming of age during the “War on Terror” has made me weary of blind patriotism.  However, there are also theological and sociological reasons for my stance.  The theological becomes especially important around this time of year when worship services on the Sunday closest to the July 4 holiday take on a certain patriotic tone.

I want to be clear about something from the outset here: this is not a new thing.  It’s not some grand political statement about our current president.  If I want to make grand political statements about our current president, I do it on Twitter.  You can check; I’m not shy.  I was against patriotic worship last year (and the year before that and the year before that, etc.) when Barack Obama, who I voted for, was president.  I’m anti-patriotic worship this year with Donald Trump, who I definitely DIDN’T vote for, in the White House.  The conflation of the American civil religion with Christian theology is troubling, and I really don’t want anything to do with it.  Let me explain.

Last fall, I taught a seminar course on the American civil religion.  In the description for the course, I invoked Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous statement about pornography: I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.  The term “American civil religion” only really finds traction in an academic setting.  Try to explain it to the average American, and you’re likely to get a blank stare until you start describing the sorts of things included in the civil religion:

• Priests and prophets: Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Lincoln, King, Kennedy—either one
• Sacred places: Gettysburg, Arlington National Cemetery
• Hymns: the National Anthem, God Bless America
• Holidays: July 4, Memorial Day, Flag Day  

At this point, most folks will start nodding along when I describe the civil religion, but it’s not just what the civil religion is, but what it does that can be problematic.

The difficulty with the civil religion is that it often has been and continues to be conflated with actual religion.  This problem started at the very founding of the colonies in the New World.  The Massachusetts Bay Colony, founded in 1630, included, as did the Motherland of Britain, an established church.  What that means is that the state and the civil magistrates were able to enforce church discipline and tax monies collected in the colony went to the support of the church.  Thus, the religion and the civil religion were, for all intents and purposes, one and the same.  The continued into the colonial era when eight of the 13 colonies had established churches.  After independence, the Constitution would include only two references to God: forbidding a religious test for federal office and, more famously, protecting the free exercise of religion and forbidding the establishment of a national religion in the First Amendment.  However, the individual states were allowed to maintain their established churches, and Massachusetts did until 1831 when it formally disestablished the Congregationalist church, making it the last church to disestablish.

We still see vestiges of this historical mixing of religion and civil religion throughout our places of worship, however.  Many churches have an American flag at the front of the sanctuary along with the Christian flag (and woe betide any minister who attempts to remove said American flag).  Churches offer patriotic-themed worship around Memorial Day and the 4^th of July.  My theological problems with this are two-fold: first, if Pentecost taught us anything, it’s that the message of Christ is available to everyone, everywhere, of every language, tribe, and nation.  To plant our flag (literally and metaphorically) on the mountain of American Christianity does a disservice to that message.  Second, idolatry becomes a real problem.  Wrapping Jesus in an American flag often bastardizes the message of Christianity and sets up the flag, the country, and the leaders of the country as objects of devotion at best, worship at worst. 

"Anthem" by Five Iron Frenzy, from the album Upbeats and Beatdowns

Don’t believe me?  Allow me to share what Robert Jeffress, one of the “court evangelicals” as John Fea calls them, has been up to lately.  Last Sunday, his church (First Baptist) in Dallas hosted “Freedom Sunday.”  I’m not sure exactly what was being worshipped, but I don’t think it was the risen Christ.  Yesterday, he and his merry band commandeered the Kennedy Center for an uber-patriotic celebration of the July 4 holiday that included—no kidding—the First Baptist Church-Dallas choir singing a song called “Make America Great Again.”  While this is obviously the marriage of God and country taken to an extreme conclusion, it is not abnormal.  In fact, according to a survey done by Lifeway, the Southern Baptist Convention’s research outfit, 53% of Protestant pastors said they think that their congregations sometimes seem to love America more than God.  Love or devotion to something other than the Almighty is the very definition of idolatry.

Is it any wonder, then, that someone who has studied the American civil religion would be squeamish about it?  The sociological implications of the civil religion are equally difficult to stomach.  It is often weaponized against those who don’t follow the party line (like politically incorrect patriots).  This has been seen as recently as last fall when Colin Kaepernick’s decision to kneel during the National Anthem before San Francisco 49er games as a protest against the state of race relations in this country drew outrage from all over.  In fact, it may have killed his football career, proving that violating the civil religion is more injurious to a public figure than domestic violence or other criminal activity.  Furthermore, minorities in general have been left out of the civil religion.  Richard Hughes’ book Myths America Lives By lays out the various myths that have informed the civil religion as well as Black critiques of those myths.1  Such critiques are easy to find because the civil religion is so often blind to its own faults.

So about my own politically incorrect patriotism.  I don’t do patriotic worship services, for one.  I also don’t say the Pledge of Allegiance (or put my hand over my heart while it’s being recited).  For one thing, I don’t pledge allegiance to a symbol, regardless of what that symbol stands for.  My true allegiance is to my faith, though I am eternally grateful to have been born in the United States.  I’m also not wild about the “under God” of it all.  It wasn’t in the original, it only reinforces the “America is a Christian nation” trope, and it was really about the Cold War.  Nor do I put my hand over my heart when I sing the National Anthem.  This is where my contrarian side really comes out.  After 9/11, this became one marker among many of who was a “true” patriot and who wasn’t.  That’s stupid.  First, I don’t really feel the need to prove my patriotism to anyone.  Second, this is a ridiculous standard by which to judge one’s patriotism.  If Muhammad Atta and the other 9/11 hijackers could have done it to blend in and avoid suspicion, it’s not a great measure of patriotism.  Does it have meaning and value to people?  Yes, of course, which is why I don’t lecture others on what they should do.  It just doesn’t seem particularly meaningful to me.

This is but one politically incorrect patriot’s attempt to explain why I don’t do patriotic worship services without getting into the weeds too much.  Far be it for me to tell others what they should do.  My church had a partially patriotic worship service today.  That’s fine.  Plenty of others did too.  I just choose not to participate.  Because I’m a contrarian.  Because the civil religion gives me pause.  Because the slide to idolatry is far too easy.

“And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.”—Romans 12:2

****

1 Richard T. Hughes, Myths America Lives By (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2004).

If It Were Easy, Everyone Would Do It: The Definitive History of My PhD Journey

So, today marks the six-year anniversary of the successful defense of my dissertation.  But the journey to that point was not without its speed bumps, potholes, and curve balls (and those are the NICE things I can say about the process).  This blog post has been brewing for a while now, but I wanted to frame this story in a constructive way—one that doesn’t unnecessarily cast aspersions on the players involved, however much they might deserve it, but instead serves as a lesson to aspiring doctoral students so that they can learn from the infuriating, maddening, insanity-inducing experience.

Let’s start with comprehensive exams.  Ya’ll, I don’t have the personality for comprehensive exams, or at least, not the way they were administered to me.  That might explain why I failed them the first time.  We had three reading lists, 8 hours in a room with a computer and not much else per reading list, then an oral exam combined with a defense of our dissertation prospectus.  Can I just say that I can’t do 8 hours in a room doing something I actually enjoy, let alone having to create word vomit about a given subject?  That is a fate worse than death to me. 

I’m also a believer that brevity is the soul of wit, and it seems rather superfluous to spend 8 hours typing 20 pages using a gazillion sources when 4 hours and 12 pages will do just fine.  So, yeah.  I realized, after the first time, that one cannot simply BS your way through comps.  By the way, hear me when I say this, PhD students—if you have failed your comprehensive exams, you are not alone.  In fact, if your experience is anything like mine, you realize that a bunch of folks you know with PhDs also failed comps and all lived to tell the tale.  I did better, but not great, the second time and passed by the skin of my teeth.  Good thing, too.  If I had failed again, I doubt I would have kept going. 

I realize that this is how comps are done in many departments, but I have a humble suggestion, one that is being used by many other departments: E-mail the question or questions for each reading area to the student at 8:00 AM on the scheduled day.  Give the student 24 hours to complete the exam.  It MUST be e-mailed back by 8:00 AM the next day—no exceptions.  Yes, this would be an open book, open note exam, but to answer the questions completely and with a higher level of rigor would be impossible without advance preparation. 

That would allow students to pick their poison: if someone does better in a quiet room with no distractions, they can do that.  If it’s someone like me who does better with background noise (I made it through the PhD process by watching The West Wing multiple times on DVD), it’s a chance to listen to or watch whatever we want to, take breaks, go for a walk or a bike ride, etc.  The quality of the work would be higher and the sanity of the students would be more intact.

But in the midst of studying for comps the second time, more fun happened.  Three weeks before I took my comps for the second time, my dissertation committee called me in for a meeting.  They liked my dissertation topic (at the time, exploring the relationship between religious literacy and militancy among Islamists), but thought it might be biting off more than I could chew.  So they suggested another topic—whether Islamist groups would moderate if fully incorporated into the political process.  Three. Weeks. Before. Comps. 

So, I don’t have a problem with the new topic—in fact, the new topic became a boon for me (more later).  I have problems with two things here: first, they did this THREE. WEEKS. BEFORE. COMPS.  I had failed comps, had to wait six months to take them again and they waited until three weeks before I tried again?  Really?  The timing was terrible.  Which leads to the second problem: I got no guidance from my committee.  In fairness to them, I should have advocated for myself more strongly, another issue I’ll come back to soon.  However, I also don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect the grad school version of Colin Powell’s “Pottery Barn Rule”: You break it, you own it; or in this case: you change the topic, you help start the new lit review.  That didn’t happen. 

So instead, three weeks later, I (barely) passed comps, but got blasted because my prospectus was not what they wanted on the new topic.  I was given an out: a Master’s degree instead of the PhD and we could call it all good.  I was livid—like, had to leave and walk around campus for about 10 minutes so I didn’t say unkind things livid.  It was a Wednesday, and that night, I went to church for dinner and choir practice.  I attended a church with a lot of professors and one of them asked me how things were going.  I asked him if it was weird that I was having recurring dreams about throwing members of my committee out of a plate glass window, the higher up the better.  He laughed and said, “Not at all!  Let me know if you need help hiding the bodies.”  It may have been the kindest thing anyone said to me during the process.  While we’re on the subject of church, let me add here that for about three weeks after this, “It Is Well (With My Soul)” was the song that sustained me, especially the second half of the first verse: “Whatever my lot, thou hast taught me to say, it is well, it is well with my soul.”

My favorite version of "It Is Well (With My Soul)" by Audio Adrenaline with Jennifer Knapp

After the disaster that was the oral defense of my prospectus, one of my professors finally decided that helping me with the lit review would be a good idea, and the finished product was actually pretty damn good.  So, after a couple of attempts at comps, a couple of prospectus drafts, and way more frustration than was strictly necessary, I was finally ABD.  Did I mention that my PhD program was on shaky ground?  Because while all of this was bad, things got worse—for everyone in my cohort.  My program was a political hot potato on campus on a good day.  By the time I got to the ABD portion of the process, there weren’t many good days.  It didn’t help that many on campus perceived our program director to be a raging narcissist, and his sins were often visited upon us.  There were endless personality conflicts between him and even our other major professors, which made putting committees together a fraught process. 

But the real chaos started with a meeting in which we were promised “Exciting news!” in January 2011.  The news was neither exciting to many of us, nor particularly good: the university was doing away with our degree programs.  An interdisciplinary program such as ours was believed to be surplus to requirements since all of the disciplines covered by our interdisciplinary program now had graduate programs of their own.  We were, however, promised that no services would be held back and we would have everything we needed to finish in a timely manner.  Heh.

We now interrupt our regularly scheduled tale of the people in the process to insert this bit of unexpected drama: I accidentally wrote a dissertation about the Arab Spring.  As I mentioned earlier, when my dissertation committee changed my topic…Three. Weeks. Before. Comps. (I’m done, I swear), they actually did me a favor.  The topic they suggested, the applicability of moderation theory to Islamist movements, became unexpectedly timely when one of my three case studies, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, suddenly became front page news.  Moderation theory asserts that when extremist parties (defined a number of ways) become fully incorporated into the political process and thus, responsible to the entire electorate, they will lose the more extreme parts of their platforms and moderate.  Very few folks had written about moderation and Islamism for a whole host of reasons, but suddenly it was a little bit important to start thinking about. 

I finished my chapter on the Brotherhood in the fall of 2010.  I started revising in early January 2011; then I had to stop.  It’s hard to revise something when you don’t quite know what the ending is going to be, and once the protests began in Cairo on Jan. 25, 2011, I no longer knew what the ending was.  So I spent the next five months waking up every morning and asking myself, “Oh, God….What do I have to re-write today?”  This part of the craziness was nobody’s fault.  It was an issue that others have had to go through before, though not to this degree since, probably, the fall of the Soviet Union.

Okay, now back to the personal drama.  By January 2011, I had replaced our program director as my dissertation committee chair, in part because he was impossible to get ahold of and in part because I, like many on campus, found him difficult to deal with and had grown tired of the whole mess.  We no longer had new members of the tribe coming in.  I was accidentally writing a dissertation about current events.  It was a fun time, really.  Then, the program director, the one no one could get along with, just disappeared off the face of the earth.  He was never in the office, never responded to e-mails.  And while no longer my chair, he was still on my committee.  In April, we found out that he had left the university under a cloud of personal drama.  He posted about his departure on his university-sponsored blog, which was updated so infrequently that none of us ever checked it.  Luckily, one of my favorite professors was able to jump in to his place, but that wasn’t the end of the committee make-up drama.

A couple of weeks before my dissertation defense, I got a call from our office manager.  It seems what had been conveyed to us regarding how many people were supposed to be on our committees and from where was not in accordance with Graduate School policy.  As the grad student responsible for keeping the website, I knew what we were told, because I was the one who typed it all out.  Turns out, it was one more thing the program director thought he knew better how to do than the administration.  So, while I had five people on my committee, one was an outside reader, and I needed five FROM the university, then an outside reader if I wanted to add to that.  Thankfully, because our office manager was a rock star, she had already reached out to the interim program director who volunteered to be the fifth person from the university and essentially go along with whatever the other five decided. 

There was one part of this whole process that was drama-free, and that was the defense itself.  This is as it ought to be.  Any dissertation committee chair won’t let a student defend an unpassable dissertation.  I figured out about 20 minutes into the process that I was going to pass, and it became a much less stressful situation.  Of course, the fact that I brought homemade snickerdoodles may have helped.  It’s not always this way.  One of my colleagues had a terrible experience with his dissertation defense.  I’ve heard story after story about two professors getting into screaming matches during a defense or one member of a committee hating another so much, they failed the student out of spite.  Please, fellow professors, don’t be THAT guy (or girl, though I’ve never heard of a female professor being so petty).  So after praying the prayer of all PhD students, I was finally Dr. Wheatley. 

Things got worse from there for the rest of my cohort.  Resources were taken away, defenses became mine fields, and people left bitter and hurt.  Furthermore, none of us got any real help in terms of job searches.  Because we were an interdisciplinary program, all of our major classes were cross-listed with other departments, but no one told any of us that to teach in higher ed, for accreditation purposes, you have to have 18 hours in the subject you want to teach.  The only reason I knew is that I got to see what a job search was like when the school I got my M.A. from was looking for a new professor.  We got very little about job talks and how to write an application letter.  Nor did we get any help with non-academic job searches.  While I haven’t asked around much, my guess is that this is not uncommon.

So what lessons are there to be learned here?  First, grad students: your cohort is your tribe.  No one understands your experience like your tribe does.  Nurture your tribe, lift up the members of your tribe.  Do it because one day, your tribe will be the ones lifting you up and helping you through the bad times.  My cohort was awesome and multiple members of it saved my sanity on more than one occasion.  Second, and this one cannot be stressed enough: ALWAYS be nice to the ladies in the office.  They are the ones with the real power—not your graduate program director, not your department head.  They know everyone and everything.  If they don’t like you, they’ll eventually get your request handled.  But they’ll accommodate everyone who treats them better than you do before they get there.

The biggest takeaway as a graduate student was this: YOU have to be your best advocate.  Don’t ever be afraid to ask for help or demand assistance, especially if your committee does something crazy, like change your dissertation topic Three. Weeks. Before. Comps. (Okay, so I wasn’t done.  I’m sorry.)  It’s not that your committee doesn’t care—most of them do.  It’s just that they have a lot of other things to care about, too.  You only have you.  So ask for help and expect it.  Seek guidance on that which you don’t quite understand.  If you don’t advocate for you, why should anyone else?  I learned this lesson the hard way.  But I did learn.

Faculty, you aren’t exempted from some guidance too.  I can sum it up in two words: Be. Better.  That’s it.  Just be better.  Be better than your experience.  Be better than the torture you endured.  Be better with students even if you hate their professors.  A PhD is hard.  And it should be hard.  But rigor and psychological warfare are not the same thing.  One of my colleagues today, who was also one of my professors as an undergrad, has said many times that the most powerless person in academia is a doctoral student on the eve of their dissertation defense.  He’s not wrong.  So be better at guidance, at mentoring, at compassion. 

If getting a PhD were easy, everyone would have one.  There are a million reasons why it shouldn’t be easy.  The proudest moment of my life to this point was the moment my chair came out of the conference room in our offices and extended his hand and said, “Congratulations, Dr. Wheatley.”  That should never be cheapened by making the process less rigorous.  But it shouldn’t be unnecessarily difficult just because that’s how it’s always been.  While my experience was stressful, sadly, I don’t think it was atypical.  We need to work to change that. 

Throwing Troops at the Problem is No Solution: Whither Afghanistan?

If news reports are to be believed, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis is expected to announce that the Pentagon is planning to send an additional 4000 troops to Afghanistan in an attempt to defeat the Taliban and curtail the threat of ISIS in the eastern border areas.  I have a few problems with this idea, but the biggest one is the report that President Donald Trump has all but ceded his authority on this matter to General Mattis.  On the one hand, I am, frankly, more comfortable with the general’s grasp of the issues at stake in Afghanistan, but on the other hand, I’m not a terribly big fan of the president voluntarily giving up his position as Commander-in-Chief of the United State military.

The biggest problem with an AWOL president on a matter such as this is that there is no strictly military solution to this problem.  Let me say it one more time for the people in the back: The conflict in Afghanistan cannot and will not be solved using only the military.  And yet, by giving virtually all of the decision making power to the secretary of defense, that’s the only option being placed on the table right now.  To be fair to the Trump administration however, the mess they’ve inherited from their predecessors has left them with few good options.

If I had to identify the single biggest obstacle to United States success in dealing with Muslim-majority countries, it would be this: we do not now nor have we ever had a grand strategy for dealing with such countries.  This is not a new problem—it existed during the Cold War when the prevention of Soviet expansionism was a greater strategic goal than worrying about the internal problems of a country.  However, the Global War on Terror has fundamentally changed the way we fight wars, we interpret wars, and we make policy for wars.  Which is precisely why 4000 more troops is likely to do very little to increase the possibilities of success in Afghanistan.  Let me explain.

Political scientists and many military and foreign policy analysts have long since abandoned a dualistic, win-lose paradigm for evaluating military action.  Unfortunately, the public and the vast majority of policy makers have not.  To them, you either win a war or you lose a war.  But that assumes that wars are fought between nation-states and one eventually surrendered.  The war on terror has turned that paradigm upside down.  The war in Afghanistan began as a war to oust al-Qaeda from its hiding places and eventually expanded to include the overthrow of the Taliban.  However, these are two entities that are essentially non-state actors, even if the Taliban was the de facto ruler of Afghanistan.  Neither was truly representative of the will of the people of Afghanistan as a whole, and neither was recognized as the “true” representative of the country and its interests.  When wars are fought against non-state actors, “victory” will likely not equate to an unconditional surrender.

Since Augustine, Christian ethicists have been contemplating what war ought to look like when fought justly.  Aquinas added immensely to our knowledge of Just War Theory, and then the threat of nuclear annihilation brought about a new spate of just war theorists, including the inimitable Paul Ramsey began to talk about the morality of weapons of mass destruction.  However, to this point, the foci of Just War Theory had been jus ad bellum (the conditions for going to war justly) and jus in bello (how to wage war justly).  Over the past decade and a half, a new facet to Just War Theory has emerged: jus post bellum (how to end a war justly).  One of the leaders in formulating jus post bellum has been Brian Orend, a philosophy professor in Canada.  Orend argues that there ought to be a new Geneva Convention centered around the post bellum principles with one principle objective: the creation of a minimally just society, one that is peaceful and non-aggressive, run by a legitimate government (locally and internationally), and vindicates the human rights of its people.1

By that standard, the international community has failed Afghanistan (and Iraq, frankly) terribly and continuously for over 15 years now.  If “victory” is a minimally just regime that is self-sustaining and no longer requires international intervention, we are nowhere near “victory” in Afghanistan, and 4000 extra US troops will do nothing to move us closer to that goal.   This is the central problem with handing over this decision to Gen. Mattis.  This is not a military problem.  Sure, it has a military component, but it also includes important political, economic, educational, and agricultural (hello, poppy fields) issues that must also be dealt with in order to ensure the minimally just regime that Afghanistan so deserves.  This is not simply a Trump administration problem.  After all, whatever the man’s faults, he’s just inherited the mess that his predecessor inherited from his predecessor.  That said, throwing troops at Afghanistan will not make things better.  In fact, it could make them worse.  Occupying troops are often the object of scorn in the countries they occupy.  They enliven opposition, some of it jihadist and nihilistic in the case of Afghanistan.  It’s possible that more troops will only exacerbate existing problems.  

Obviously, 15 years into this mess, it’s difficult to do things “the right way” because we’re 15 years too late.  However, if the international community has the political will to actually work out a solution for Afghanistan, it can be done.  While a just solution is more work a decade and a half into an intervention, it is possible.  The only question is whether there is the will to make things better.  I have my doubts, particularly given the fragmentation of Western leadership and the emergence of a recalcitrant Russia, but if enough of the parties involved (NATO, the United Nations, various international NGOs) can get together and discuss the situation, a resolution or, something closer to resolution than a few thousand extra troops, might be possible.

*****

1. Brian Orend, “Justice After War: Toward a New Geneva Convention,” in Ethics Beyond War’s End, ed. Eric Patterson (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2012), 187.

On being a Luddite, or: How to survive writer's cramp and emerge with a decent bit of writing

On occasion, I have been known to my students as the "Footnote Nazi."  I come by such a name honestly and wear it with pride.  I believe it is integral to their college experience to teach them how to properly cite their papers and, as mostly political science majors, that means learning Chicago/Turabian citation.  Another part of writing papers is finding a system that makes sense to them for cataloging and organizing information.  This both enables them to gather a substantial amount of research without having to duplicate their efforts by looking at the same books multiple times.  I encourage them to ask all of their professors how they do it so they can throw several things at the wall and see what sticks.  I also warn them that I'm quite the Luddite when it comes to these things, but unapologetically so as it works for me and that's really the only thing that's important.  So without further adieu, here is one humble technologically averse approach to cataloging, compiling, and organizing research.

Step 1: The research itself

I still mostly use the old school approach many of us of a certain age learned for compiling research in high school.  That is to say, I start with a stack of lined 5x8 index cards.  I begin with a card denoting the source and listing all of the important citation material in both Chicago "Works Cited" format and Chicago "Footnote" format.  This idiot-proofs my footnoting process.  More on that later.  Each source is given a number, whatever the next number in sequence is.  The number is noted in the upper right hand corner of the note card.  The end result is this:

Each note card containing research from this source will likewise carry that number in the upper right hand corner.  I try to group research on note cards by topic.  This makes organization of the information easier later.  Each bit of information or quote has the page number noted.  Thus, note cards with research look like this:

I preserve all of my notes cards in two places: first, the cards themselves are kept in extra-large note card file boxes with third-cut tabs separating each source.  Second, I have an Excel spread sheet listed by source, author, and title.  It is thus searchable when a new project begins.  Once I've determined that I have sufficient research to begin the organization process, the real fun begins.

2. The Lego Method

I often describe my process as the Lego method of writing papers.  This is why.  Once all of the research is finished, I separate all of the bib. cards from the actual research and, keeping the bib. cards in numerical order, set them aside for fun at a later date.  Then I take the notes cards with all of their actual information, find a nice, comfy spot on the floor, and start sorting them into piles by topic (broadly).  The subject of each pile differs depending on the project at  hand, but these can be thematic, chronological, regarding primary sources, or some combination of all of the above.  Each pile is then organized into a seemingly logical stream of consciousness according to my vision for the project.  Each pile is then added to the stack, again in a (hopefully) logical order.  The final stack is often quite large and, at the outset, often intimidating.

3. The Outline

Once the stack is ready, I'm ready to start outlining the project.  I prefer top-bound spiral notebooks with college-ruled pages.  Yes, I'm picky, but there's something to be said for knowing what works. From here, the outline emerges much as you would expect (I., A., 1., a., i.).  The Roman numerals are often few, and the capital letters and Arabic numerals many.  Each bit of information recorded on the outline is accompanied by a number circled (the source number) and a page number.  This is the most time-consuming and tedious part of the whole process.  However, I've tried going from stack straight to computer and it actually took me quite a bit longer than the outline did.  And yes, for the record, I highly recommend caffeine to fuel this process.

Because of the level of detail in my outlines, they are often quite lengthy.  The outline for the first chapter of my dissertation was 19 pages long.  The chapter was 39 pages.  The writer's cramp is real with this step.  The final product makes the actual typing of the thing quite simple, however.

4. Typing (Yea, technology!)

Finally, some technological assistance.  I do love me some Microsoft Word.  Some...not all.  Ever. Now, we bring the bib. cards back to the party.  Remember, they are still in numerical order.  I create a cheat sheet for myself with each source's number and a quick hit for the author or author, short title: Anything so I know what's what.

This enables me to check off sources once I've used them initially since, after all, the initial footnote and subsequent footnotes are cited differently in Chicago style citation.  Once I have used the bib. card for an initial citation, it goes in a new stack, this one organized alphabetically as for a Works Cited section.  While the typing of the thing is (blessedly) done on Word, I do not use any citation software like Zotero or Refworks for my citations.  I insert footnotes in Word and type them myself. It's just not that hard or annoying to do them the old-fashioned way for me to want to bother with learning a new way.

5. Editing

Some things emerge into the world relatively decent and undeserving of the scorn of the person who wrote the thing.  And some things are complete crap and deserving of all of the scorn.  I number and track changes in Word files as you would software versions.  For example, the first draft of anything will be 1.0.  A mild revision will earn a new file name with the path 1.1.  However, in the event of total crap in need of a complete overhaul, the new designator of overhauled thing will be 2.0.  That allows me to track what changes were made and where and, if necessary undo them.

Is this an incredibly time-consuming method for cataloging information, organizing research, and writing papers?  Yes.  Absolutely.  I'll be the first person to admit it.  However, I do it this way for several reasons:

1. Given how my outlines are marked, I do not worry about plagiarism--ever.  It's simply too hard to inadvertently plagiarize when one is THIS obsessive-compulsive about citation.
2. I need the tactile, Lego-style sorting method to organize my thoughts.
3. I've simply never found a more technologically advanced method for doing all of this that makes sense to me or, more importantly, that I'm comfortable with.
4. For all of the front-end time required for this method, the back end of the process moves quickly.  When I'm in a groove, I can type up to 5 pages an hour.  The front-end organization makes that possible.

This method is, perhaps, not for the faint of heart.  If you love technology, you will likely not love this method of writing papers.  Most of my students, however appreciative of the process, find another way.  I understand, and I am never offended.  As I tell them, how you research, how you write has to make sense to you and no one else.  However, I have a system and many of them don't, so, if nothing else, I encourage them to start here and innovate from this point.