The time I could have been canceled, the column that made a campus angry, and the professor that let me stay to write another day*

It was 1981, the start of the academic year, I was a sophomore, and I had just ascended to the exalted position of Editor-in-Chief of our college campus newspaper. I was smart enough to know that our bi-monthly publication wasn’t going to rock the world, but prideful enough to think it should. And I was also inexperienced enough to mistake passion for substance.

That semester I wrote a column that taught me a lesson about the way people respond when they disagree. And, especially, how they should respond. Let’s just say I am grateful I didn’t write that same piece in today’s cancel culture. If I had, this story might have turned out differently.

It was, as I recall, the second column I wrote from my lofty station. I latched onto my recent knowledge that Darwinian evolution was being taught in the science department at our small, Baptist college (the fact that this surprised me tells you just how naïve I was).

So I penned a sweeping, emotionally charged diatribe against Darwinism and atheism and some other stuff I thought was related. To be honest, I don’t recall the details, and thankfully I do not have a copy of it (hopefully, no one else does, either). I wasn’t necessarily wrong, but it was not well-reasoned or researched. Mostly, the column was just me ranting. Maybe I just wanted to be noticed.

If so, it worked.

What happened next is hard to describe. I didn’t fully appreciate the fortitude required to challenge an embedded academic narrative like Darwinism, and to do so without solid reasoning did nothing more than incense people on campus. And even off campus. And for weeks the anger throbbed everywhere I went.

Bear in mind these were the days before personal computers had proliferated and everyone carried a cell phone. No email, texts or, thank God, social media. Instead, things were said personally, handled directly. Criticism and condemnation, vindictive phone calls, scathing notes in my mailbox, letters from professors and students. Silence and side glances from people who, just days before, had joked with me in the Student Center. Even a scathing hand-written letter from a science professor on sabbatical. And another professor suddenly shifted the class schedule so she could lecture on Darwinism. All like darts and arrows, fired from a distance or in close quarters, targeting my ego, challenging my intelligence, shattering my spirit. I tried to put on a strong front but each one pierced more than the last.

And then one afternoon, I got a call.

A religion professor I barely knew at the time asked me to come to his office. We scheduled an appointment, and I shuffled across campus and found my place in a semi-comfortable chair against a book-lined wall. He kindly asked me how I was doing, about my family, about my studies. And then he got to the point.

He explained the reason that I was being pummeled with criticism. It wasn’t personal, he offered in his round, baritone voice. But it was because most faculty were “theistic evolutionists,” those who believe that God used evolution to create the world. My column didn’t insult just the science department. It insulted nearly everyone on campus.

I assumed he was included in that group. I fidgeted and waited for the next barrage of criticism that was surely about to be lobbed my way.

But that’s not what happened. Not at all. Instead, he did what no one else on campus had bothered to do in the last two weeks. He distinguished what I wrote from who I am. He talked to me with the evenness of respect, and he gave me advice. “You are a leader on campus,” he said, as if it were an accepted fact. “It’s not what you said that offended people as much as how you said it. You can do better.” Then he talked to me about leadership and about responsibility, and he finished with a smile.

He didn’t condemn my perspective or attack my character, and he didn’t bellow that he was going to call for me to be fired, have my scholarship revoked, or have me tossed off campus. None of that. Just a quiet, reasoned corrective. There’ll be a next time. You can do better.

Eventually, the storm passed. And in the intervening years, I have not changed my position on Darwinism or evolutionary theory. As a philosophical worldview it’s bankrupt at its core. But that’s another blog for another day.

But what I learned was the value of respectful disagreement. When people disagree, it is a chance for everyone to learn something. And when Christians disagree, we should help one another grow and learn, and biblical values should shape the way we communicate.

I hate to think what my life would be like had I published that piece today. Our culture, divided and vindictive, is destroying our ability to disagree and canceling anyone with differing opinions. We shout down the opposition and force compliance when we cannot get it with reason and substance. Worse, no one can grow, learn, or improve in this climate. Past mistakes have become memorials to our failures rather than markers to guide us to be better people.

I will always be grateful for that professor, Dr. Jerry Surratt, who disagreed wholeheartedly with what I wrote, but supported my right to say it. He assumed I was a leader and treated me as such, and he assumed I could grow to engage an audience in a more measured way.  He didn’t argue with me or try to change my stance on Darwinism, but he corrected my approach, encouraged me, and sent me along with the confidence that I could do better.

In the years that followed I enrolled in two of Surratt’s classes, wrote a paper that he returned with a note generously claiming it was the best he had received in that class, and later we interacted on our shared interest in the work of Martin Luther.

But the time I spent in class with him, while educational, never shaped me as much as those fifteen minutes I huddled in his office. Those fifteen minutes he decided to craft my character rather than cancel my opinion.

He believed that I could learn to express myself with more clarity and more substance, and, even though we disagreed, he let me stay to write another day.

For that, I will always be grateful.

Just as you want others to do for you, do the same for them

Luke 6:31

*Dr. Jerry Surratt passed away August 16, 2020—two days after I finished writing this blog.