Photo by David Adamson on Unsplash
By Cordelia Fitzgerald
Honestly, it’s rather impressive that the commencement speech at a little college of 2,300 students has gained so much press (for comparison Yale has 17,000 and Notre Dame 13,000). Yes, the speaker was a member of that almost deified organization known as the NFL. More importantly, he, a gentleman by the name of Harrison Butker, spoke words not all agreed with, and, in fact, many starkly opposed. But how many have actually composed themselves and watched all twenty minutes of the address? (Certainly not me; I composed myself and read the transcript, with one or two interruptions.) One cannot amass statistics, but even supposing critics have watched the whole speech, they are not beyond all obstacles, and so I think most, speaking broadly, fall either into the frying pan or the fire.
The frying pan is the practice of responding, sharing, and viewing only select clips or quotes from a speech, or, more succinctly, lack of context. Accusations of misogyny and antisemitism fall a little flat when the speech is taken as a whole. My takeaways were (1) stay in your own lane (2) be the best person you can in your vocation (3) don’t settle; keep clear standards and (4) reform yourself, rather than criticizing leaders (which is mostly a restatement of #1). It’s hard to find misogyny or antisemitism in those points; the bits most have issues with were more illustrations than the main point and are therefore more susceptible to context issues.
“But,” you say, “this clever sausage over here leapt out of the frying pan and read/watched the whole thing!” Good for them! Just make sure they tumble clear of the fire.
The fire: failure to take into account the audience being addressed. Or: lack of context. While the frying pan was taking a quote out of the context of what was said, the fire is divorcing it from who it was said to, in this case, a small Catholic liberal arts college. In other words, Butker’s speech doesn’t apply to most of the world. He was speaking to those students specifically, and even states toward the conclusion that he believes “that this audience and this venue is [sic] the best place to speak openly and honestly about who we are and where we all want to go, which is Heaven.” You see, he and they have common ground, the basic shared philosophical building blocks from which he can make his point.
For example, it is unlikely that many of these students have managed to avoid contact with Pope St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body. In it, he speaks of man not being meant to be alone, so woman was created, bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh – yet different, for woman was created for motherhood. There were no celibates in Eden, only life. And though the Fall happened and now there are many singles and priests and monks and nuns, each man’s calling is to be a father within his station in life, and each woman’s calling is to be a mother within her station in life. Obviously not everyone now is called to physical motherhood or fatherhood, but though this right end was disrupted by the Fall, that does not mean it should be forgotten. Within the fallen world, we can still lean into our respective masculinity and femininity as our different reflections of God’s whole. For a student body taking theology at a proudly Catholic college, this background is assumed. For the world in general, perhaps not so much. Applying Butker’s remarks to this context makes far more sense than approaching it with the very different idea of womanhood most critics seem to subscribe to.
Again, claims of misogyny abound since Butker referred to Taylor Swift as his teammate’s girlfriend, rather than using her name. Folks, it was a joke. It was met with laughter, or so my transcript tells me. Harrison checked the waters, found a crowd solidly in Swift’s target demographic, and inserted a common reference to lighten the mood. If he had wanted to truly dismiss women, he could have attributed the saying to St. Augustine, who Oxford Reference tells us first recorded the saying.
If he had, it could have supported the unpopular idea that I shall nonetheless introduce here: technology might be communication’s worst enemy. In St. Augustine’s days, such an address as this would only have reached more than its intended audience if it had been written down (by hand), and even then, if one of the, say, five hundred people who read it disagreed with it, this person would have to snail (or donkey) mail a letter back, or even better, journey over to debate with him. It would have to be intentional. There would not have been a gazillion tweets. Two or three people could meet and talk out the context and nuances and misunderstandings. More would be accomplished and fewer would be offended.
Did you ever witness the adults of your acquaintance say to a child, firmly and evenly, “I wasn’t talking to you”? It seems that I saw such things far more often twenty years ago than now, but it is still relevant. Don’t borrow trouble! Don’t dig in other people’s conversations and get offended! Unfortunately, media have provided us such instant and intimate access to everyone’s lives and opinions that we think it is all for us. That which does apply to us, however, can only be encountered by entering into conversation with the authors and meeting them personally, not through chopped up bits of quotes. It is, after all, the first step in Christ’s decision tree: “If thy brother shall offend against thee, go, and rebuke him between thee and him alone. If he shall hear thee, thou shalt gain thy brother. And if he will not hear thee, take with thee one or two more: that in the mouth of two or three witnesses every word may stand. And if he will not hear them: tell the church. And if he will not hear the church, let him be to thee as the heathen and the publican” (Matthew 18:15-17).
Remember, it was the publicans with whom Christ dined.
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