The Column

Keep 'Em Separated

Controversy from my hometown

Recently, a science teacher from my hometown made national news. John Freshwater of Mount Vernon Middle School was fired by the school board for behavior in the classroom that included, among other things, keeping a Bible in view on his desk, teaching elements of intelligent design, creationism and anti-evolution theory in his lessons, and using an electromagnetic method to painlessly burn a cross into the arm of a student.

Now, you'd think I'm ready to launch into a full-fledged tirade against my ignorant backwater hometown based on previous anti-religion diatribes circulating on the internet (like this one here).

However, life is always more complicated than ideological tirades allow, so consider this me back-peddling, flip-flopping, jig-tappit-a-lappin (I made up that last one, but trust me, it's going to catch fire).

Mr. Freshwater was my eighth grade science teacher, and despite knowing his strong, occasionally fierce, religious inclinations, I genuinely liked and admired him. In fact, growing up, I had numerous friends (most of whom remain my friends to this day), whose religious views, frankly, frightened me. I never bothered to reconcile these two diametrically opposed truths in my life:

1) I really really liked so many of these people.

2) I found their worldviews hopelessly corrupted by simplistic and incoherent religious dogma.

What is a seventh-grader, already severely stressed out from his embarrassing lack of pubic hair, supposed to do with that? And in the end I never did anything with it. I went with a live and let live approach, and tried to keep Jesus as far away from the conversation as was possible in a place like Mount Vernon, Ohio.

Mr. Freshwater, for his part, was an excellent teacher: Gregarious, welcoming, and genuinely interesting in the classroom. I remember him demonstrating how to rip a phone book in half (and spending the next month of my life trying to do the same, to no avail), challenging us to build a contraption that would keep an egg from breaking when tossed from the roof of the middle school, and saying he would give an A to anyone who brought in a rare silver penny to class (My friends and I spent most of the following six weeks looking in coin stores for silver pennies; it turned out you had to use some kind of chemical reaction to change the color. Very clever, Mr. Freshwater.). Similarly, he was a highly popular wrestling coach and obviously well-regarded in the community judging from the strong support he enlisted in his battle with the school board.

Mr. Freshwater made no secret of his spiritual feelings, and it was in these (mostly rare) moments that I grew uncomfortable with him. Although to be fair, he was by no means the only teacher who had this effect. The next year when I got to the high school, I would find several (okay, more than several) teachers, who were way worse.

It has taken me a considerable internal battle to come to the conclusion that religion can and does serve communities in ways other institutions cannot. Barack Obama has taken a lot of flack for his faith-based initiatives endorsement, but far from being out of character, it is quite consistent if you've read his first book Dreams From My Father. As a community organizer, he found that sometimes the best or only mechanism for distributing aid to ravaged inner-city communities was through local religious institutions because, frankly, they were the only ones stepping up to the plate.

Churches, synagogues, and mosques operate on the front lines of disease and poverty in many countries. In the U.S., where poverty is our 217th concern—somewhere after gay adoption and whether or not a candidate has ever quoted a profane line from the film Diner—you begin to see the role religious institutions must play in the absence of a government willing to care for the neediest of its citizens. This does not mean I'm comfortable with government money landing in the hands of priests and pastors, but I can at least acknowledge that there are a lot of situations where the church has a more direct ability to assist those in need than the government.

Even this guy—a die-hard agnostic—had to admit that faith does have a power that can't be found or duplicated elsewhere. When I wrote for The Miami Student, I spent a week following around ex-drug addicts from Cincinnati as they sold candy on Oxford street corners to support the church that saved their lives. When someone tells you that before he found God he was pulling IV needles out of his arms so he could escape to an alley behind a hospital to smoke crack out of a pop can—well, it's hard to dismiss the efficacy of his beliefs.

Having said all that, Mount Vernon, Ohio is a brightly-lit billboard visible from space for why we need to separate church from state.

I spent most of my childhood fending off born-again advances on an almost daily basis. Through middle and high school I allowed myself to be "saved" not once, not twice, but three times—not because I thought any of peers' arguments that a 2,000 year-old carpenter savior had risen from the dead to forgive my sins were particularly convincing, but because I wanted them to shut up and leave me alone so I could go back to being a sinful, godless heathen in peace (okay, and one time it was because of a chick).

Both schools run with an electric undercurrent of religious fanaticism that endorses utterly absurd ideas like intelligent design or classes where you read the Bible as literature (with a "wink wink" here and a "nudge nudge" there)

In my day there was constant lobbying to allow prayer into first period. The Fellowship of Christian Athletes (in middle school it was called Cross Club) was one of the most well-attended school groups, and their crucifix-adorned signs could be seen on every fifth locker in the building. When I suggested to an FCA member that perhaps some of us did not enjoy feeling like we were in Bible Camp every time we walked down the damn hallway, he said, "Well, just don't look at them," referring to the posters. This was the dumbest thing I had yet heard in my life (but keep in mind this was pre-George W. Bush).

What my born-again peers and teachers never seemed to understand was how unrelentingly oppressive that gets after awhile. How obnoxious and self-centered and insular all of these people—people who are your friends, who you like, who you want to remain close with—begin to look. To level the same amount of pressure on them, you would have to go to absurd lengths. For instance, I sincerely doubt that the devout Christian parents of Mount Vernon would react kindly if a teacher began suggesting to his or her students that Jesus Christ was not the son of God but actually a transgender Walrus named Bernie.

After all, I have as much evidence that Jesus was a Walrus named Bernie who had his gender assigned at birth but feels more like a woman as they do for intelligent design or creationism, which is to say, none.

Certainly Mr. Freshwater has every right to believe what he believes, to be open about his beliefs, and hell, even to keep a Bible on his desk (I mean, seriously who cares? It's not going to leap off the desk and eat your secular child's face). However, when kids come home with a cross in their flesh, and—I think, more importantly—when students have to be re-taught in later grades that ID and creationism are complete fabrications by a wishful-thinking Christian lobby, something is seriously wrong.

I struggle, though, because I feel badly for Mr. Freshwater, for his son and daughter, and for the students who will never benefit from his creative and (mostly) informative teaching.

In the end, I'll give credit to local Mount Vernon resident and father of three middle school graduates Sam Barone, who said it best when he publicly praised the school board's decision: "You have done it fairly. You have done it courageously," he said.

Consider that sentiment seconded, and let us all go back to believing or disbelieving in Bernie the transgender walrus in peace.