Writing at the intersection of Christianity and leftism I follow a lot of left blogs, so I’m familiar with the concept of ‘trigger warnings’. The idea is that there are materials like art or literature that when seen or read can ‘trigger’ memories of trauma which in turn cause negative physical reactions of one stripe or another. Therefore if an author is going to discuss content which could arouse memories of trauma they’ll let readers know up front with some kind of label like so: trigger warning: sexual assault; trigger warning: violence. That’s how they began anyhow.

But, the internet being what it is and people being what they are, the idea has now expanded so that trigger warnings often apply in a sort of indirect or cultural sense to ‘trauma.’ So insofar as everyone can claim to have been traumatized by, say, a misogynistic culture, they can request trigger warnings for misogyny. Now that the tumblr users are hitting their college years en masse, the practice of trigger warning has come to the academy. The NYT reports:

Should students about to read “The Great Gatsby” be forewarned about “a variety of scenes that reference gory, abusive and misogynistic violence,” as one Rutgers student proposed? Would any book that addresses racism — like “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” or “Things Fall Apart” — have to be preceded by a note of caution? Do sexual images from Greek mythology need to come with a viewer-beware label?

As you can imagine, the two halves of this debate shake out generally along party lines. On one hand, it’s obviously fair to accommodate actually existing illnesses like PTSD. By and large universities already do this through disabilities support offices. Yet there’s more going on here.

Proponents have argued that there’s no harm in adding a little more information to texts. I’ll submit that much, but of course that isn’t what this is about. If this were just about labeling books for their content, nobody would raise a fuss. But the problem breaks down into two parts:

1.) Trigger warnings mark material that affected individuals should avoid; the call for trigger warnings is therefore also a demand that professors/teachers allow students to avoid particular materials. In that case we’re looking at alternative assignments and so forth.

2.) What is deemed worthy of being labeled with a trigger warning is deemed so because the material is seen as harmful, and trigger warning is deemed necessary because harm is seen as wrong. In that case, things that are labeled with trigger warnings are labeled as being harmful to vulnerable people. Smacking texts with that kind of label is a value judgment, and will affect how all students encounter the material.

Take a piece of work like Augustine’s Confessions. It’s got all kinds of salacious stuff going on in it. He’s got a little two-line aside in there where he says while some things may periodically be allowed because they’re immediately advantageous and not unnatural (like polygamy) there are some things which will never be allowed because they’re always and everywhere unnatural, like homosexuality. In another sort of distressing aside, he talks about how his father was mean and abusive to his mother St. Monica, but being an obedient wife she persevered and thus avoided many beatings. If we’re tagging for homophobia and misogyny and so on, then Confessions would have a trigger warning list a mile long.

But it would also come to students in a pre-packaged ideological frame, no matter how the professor chose to teach it. It would arrive with essentially a new introduction: “warning, the book you’re about to read is harmful to oppressed groups and is therefore bad.” Even Christians who don’t interpret scripture like Augustine does would likely prefer a more nuanced, complicated introduction than that harsh, resounding is.

And this is essentially the challenge of being a Christian leftist. To put it shortly: Christian leftists want the same policies as the remainder of the left, but we don’t necessarily want the same world. The trigger warning thing is roughly 20% legitimate complaint and 80% attempts to label and exclude works that are not compatible with cultural leftist ideological projects. (Ask yourself how likely it is that religious students at liberal universities would be granted trigger warnings and accommodations for works featuring extra-marital sexuality, like Anna Karenina or The Awakening.) But even though it causes a bit of strife within left coalitions periodically, I think Christians should hold the line here. Why?

Because I think we need to maintain that education itself is about the cultivation of virtue, and the virtue that’s cultivated by the notion that certain principles are, as a matter of fact harmful is contrary to that which we would see cultivated. This could look like a stipulation that would simply reverse what’s labeled with warnings, but I disagree with that project as well, for reasons I’ve stated before: in short, avoiding things because they appear to contain non-virtuous content only makes them seem more dangerous and organized than they really are, which perpetuates a defensive culture of fear and distance. In the case of education it can also rob students of genuine opportunities for learning.

I’m Christian, I haven’t wavered in that. But I’ve read nearly the whole corpus of the Marquis de Sade, Fanny Hill, loads of D.H. Lawrence, The Satyricon, stacks of James Baldwin, and so on and so forth. I’m an avid reader and I read what the writers I read write about reading, which isn’t a problem because I simultaneously cultivate the virtue it takes to read rightly, that is, in the spirit of becoming more discerning, more wise, more sensitive, more able to perform my role in the world. And I think the trigger warning thing, taken in the direction it’s being taken in, perpetuates an ethic that is contrary to the cultivation of that virtue, which is why I would resist it in its more extreme incarnations.