Over the past few years new stories have appeared about something called trigger warnings and microaggressions. College students, they report, were increasingly demanding that material they deemed offensive or “triggering” be removed from classrooms.
In September 2015 The Atlantic published a cover story entitled “The Coddling of the American Mind” by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt that detailed instances of these controversies. Harvard law professors, for example, were apparently being asked to not teach rape law or even use the world “violate” because of the emotional reaction it could trigger in students. Some campus guidelines banned phrases such as “America is the land of opportunity” as a microaggression and require alternative assignments for literature containing racial violence or sexual abuse.
The Atlantic article not only describes the problem but attempts a kind of psychological diagnosis. Coddling and pandering to students’ inability to handle challenging material is not just bad for the future of academic discourse; it is bad for the students’ mental health. And of particular concern is the way in which many institutions rush to support what Jonathan Haight argues is a pathological exaggeration of perceived offenses.
I read the article with interest, but thought this was more of an issue facing elite liberal universities than my little school in Idaho. But then I thought again. I have found myself in the hot seat for material I have required in my class. I have faced the problem of self-censoring, and I had been witness to materials being removed or sanitized in the name of minimizing offense.
In these cases it was not a matter of hyper political correctness. Instead it’s what could be called extreme “religious correctness”—or what I will term spiritual hypersensitivity—to any material or subject matter that does not meet a certain standard of purity.
I would like to use the Atlantic article as a kind of springboard or framework to discuss spiritual hypersensitivity and its potentially stifling effects on the quality of instruction. Haidt and Lukianoff use concepts from David Burns book “Feeling Good” as well as the second edition of Treatment Plans and Interventions for Depression and Anxiety Disorders, by Robert L. Leahy, Stephen J. F. Holland, and Lata K. McGinn.
I don’t want to dwell too much on whether the issues of trigger warnings and microagressions amount to a mental health problem (I believe they overstate this aspect of their argument) but a few of the psychological concepts used in the article provide a helpful way of understanding spiritual hypersensitivity.
The first concept they discuss is “emotional reasoning.” From the article:
Burns defines emotional reasoning as assuming “that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: ‘I feel it, therefore it must be true.’ ” Leahy, Holland, and McGinn define it as letting “your feelings guide your interpretation of reality.” But, of course, subjective feelings are not always trustworthy guides…Therapy often involves talking yourself down from the idea that each of your emotional responses represents something true or important.
From our earliest days in Primary we are taught various versions of the statement, “I feel it therefore it must be true.” Negative or confusing feelings mean something is wrong, and good feelings indicate truth and goodness. There is, of course, some truth to this statement, and learning to discern spiritual feelings is part of discipleship. Yet it can also be misleading. Our feelings do not always reflect truth. Feeling uncomfortable does not mean the object of discomfort is the source of that discomfort.
Another useful concept discussed in the Atlantic piece is “mental filtering.” Mental filter is “pick[ing] out a negative detail in any situation and dwell[ing] on it exclusively, thus perceiving that the whole situation is negative.” Leahy, Holland, and McGinn refer to this as “negative filtering,” which they define as “focus[ing] almost exclusively on the negatives and seldom notic[ing] the positives.”
Notice how mental filtering is the exact opposite of the 13th Article of Faith’s charge to seek out that which is lovely and virtuous and praiseworthy. Spiritually hypersensitive people flip this injunction on its head. Instead of seeking the good, such individuals are on high alert for anything that does not conform to their standards of purity. They can spot a supposed sin from a mile away, and once identified, it becomes the sole object of attention. It’s a level of negative focus that is able to dismiss the wisdom and insight of a 1500 word essay because one or two of the words are deemed offensive.
Our charge is to seek out the good, to wade through and sift and find the pearls of great price. I believe that too often instructors are expected to do the seeking beforehand and then deliver a perfectly sanitized curriculum. But the true education is to instead teach the process or the skill of seeking the good and true without getting derailed by things deemed unworthy.
I should make it clear that I do believe in standards when it comes to what we choose to read, watch, and teach. I do not believe that just because something is labeled “art” that it automatically gets a free pass and deserves our reverence and attention. It would be irresponsible for a professor to subject students to gratuitous depictions of sex and violence for shock value, or out of some misguided notion of introducing students to the “real world.” Certainly there are boundaries and we must be at least charitable when taking into account sensitivities.
The task at hand is more difficult than simply banning material that might trigger offense on the one hand or promote an anything goes approach on the other. It involves managing an inherent tension between the need to remain “unspotted from the world” and to fully comprehend the breadth of human experience, the good and the bad. As Brigham Young said:
Can people understand that it is actually necessary for opposite principles to be placed before them, or this state of being would be no probation…we cannot obtain eternal life unless we actually know and comprehend by our experience the principle of good and the principle of evil” (qtd in England 79).
To what extent and in how much detail must principles of “evil” and “opposition” be placed before us in order to learn the lesson?
Much has been said in the secular version of this debate about the creation of “safe spaces” where students can be shielded from uncomfortable ideas. Similarly, I have heard a few students express their belief that a Church school ought to be a campus-sized spiritual safe space. But safety doesn’t need to be about protection from ideas. Safety can mean being exposed to ideas in the relatively regulated and protected environment of the classroom. About the above quote, Eugene England argues, “If Brigham Young’s ideals cannot now be fulfilled through direct confrontation of ideas and actual experience, then we must find ways to use the power of art, literature, film, and drama, where experience is less direct because it is filtered through a moral imagination, to achieve those crucial purposes having to do with salvation”(79).
There is a difference between reading such material to get a second hand thrill and reading it to more fully comprehend the depth and breadth of human experience. And where better to learn how to engage in such reading than the relatively safe environment of a university classroom?
More compassionate than cleansing curricula of potential spiritual triggers is equipping students with tools to cope and learn. The censoring that surrounds trigger warnings and microaggressions have been loudly discussed and debated in the national media, but I suspect its religious iteration is quieter, happening behind closed doors and through private emails. Self-censorship must be much more common than headline controversies. How often do professors at Church schools—anticipating that one complaint out of a hundred students—quietly shrug their shoulders and conclude it’s simply not worth the hassle? It only takes rumors of being in the hot seat to encourage an atmosphere of self-censorship.
Safe space is not a space free from challenging material; safe space should be a place where such material can be critically discussed and understood in a supportive environment. Yes, discomfort might be part of learning in a safe space. Safety in the gospel is about developing the tools to understand and manage opposition, not flee from it. The Garden of Eden was a perfectly safe space, and leaving it was necessary for growth.
*Based on a paper delivered at Mormon Scholars in the Humanities Conference, March 2016
Interesting thoughts. I particularly like the invocation of the 13th article of faith in this context. “Learning to see the good” — a more active exercise than we often seem to think.
On other points: if you haven’t read Tom Rogers’s recent volume of essays from the Maxwell Institute (Let Your Hearts and Minds Expand), I think you would find much there that resonates with your thinking as expressed here.
Thanks for the tip, Jonathan. I’ll have to look that up.
Well stated and applicable to much more than a school environment. Thank you for the thoughts!
Will be digesting this for a while.
I get frustrated with this sort of censoring. Real conflict is important in the formation of testimonies. Being a real person is important in being an example to others….
Being unapologetically flawed and unapologetic about working to become better is essential to repentance and redemption. We need those stories and examples.
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If I taught at a church school, methinks I would assign the Atlantic article and this essay together for the first night’s reading.
Interesting article. I guess to push back a little – some truths are more important than others. Some information, theories, teachings, doctrines are more important than others. The danger of “liberating” the class rooms is that we (if we aren’t careful) promote the false idea that all opinions or theories are equal – or that all information presented must be respected. There is so much false information out there, twisted by those who seek to destroy faith (whether intentionally or not). I think it is important to teach fundamental truths at church schools which are in harmony with the gospel. It doesn’t mean that we can’t debate or bring in new ideas but we don’t need to waste our time. For example, I don’t need to read sexualy explicit poetry to get a well-rounded education on literature. There are enough great books to keep me busy for a life-time without diving into the filth available on the internet or elsewhere. One of our goals is also to edify and strengthen one another. Yes, sometimes our faith needs to be challenged in order to be strengthened, but more often then not, we should seek to fortify and strengthen one another’s faith in the Son of God. Bringing in faith-diminishing ideas into the classroom have very little value at a faith-based institution in my opinion.
What I appreciate most about this article is the definition of a ‘safe space.’ Whereas many of us might think of it as a space devoid of troubling material, others may see it as a place safe to wade through that material with others who will help navigate that material.