Ranting to /dev/null

Dissent vs. deviance

I'm coming to believe that one of the questions that most fundamentally determines how an individual views the world has to do with where to draw the line between dissent and deviance (with nod to Heath and Potter for providing the vocabulary for an idea that has been bugging me for years). In any authority structure, there is going to be disagreement. "Dissent" is disagreement that fundamentally agrees with the powers that be but has honest reservations about some subset of the party line. "Deviance" is disagreement that defiantly thumbs its nose at authority and questions its very legitimacy. Dissent should be welcomed. Deviance should be crushed. The problem lies in telling one from the other.

Fundamentalists and other totalitarians make the mistake of saying that all disagreement is deviance. There is one truth, which is settled, and any difference from that is unacceptable. Those who would question the Truth as given are relativists, anarchists, and agitators.

Countercultural-types and Leftists of all stripes tend to make the mistake of categorizing all disagreement as dissent. Everything is open to questioning, and everything is up for grabs. Those who would not question are hide-bound, blind, ignorant, and manipulated.

I'm equally put off by people who refuse to allow any questioning and people who insist upon questioning everything. The thing is, though God encourages and requires us to make our faith our own and deal honestly with doubts and fears, he ultimately requires us to obey, even if we don't agree and/or understand.

This question governs the way we deal huge swaths of our existence. The current administration at Covenant College has done spectacularly poorly at this, treating all dissent as deviance. But there are people whom I tend to respect, such as the estimible Mr. Sullivan, who seem to fall on the other side, and see any non-negotiable truths as problematic. And in both cases - the enforcement of a petty handbook in the former, the soul of a church in the latter - the dividing question seems to be how we treat this question. The discussions I've had with Tyler seem to get back to questions of this nature pretty quickly, though you'd have to read between the lines to see that from the various conversations that are available to the public.

What is needed, I think, are people with spines rigid enough to be flexible without giving way and hearts soft enough to be resolute without killing. Which turns out to be a complicated way of saying that we need grace.