‘Politically incorrect’ | Fred Clark – Patheos

Sexual Harassment Went Unchecked at Christianity Today according to an aggressive, blunt report published yesterday by Christianity Today.

Heres the beginning of that report, written by Daniel Silliman and edited by Kate Shellnut, published without prior review from executives at the magazine:

For more than a dozen years, Christianity Today failed to hold two ministry leaders accountable for sexual harassment at its Carol Stream, Illinois, office.

A number of women reported demeaning, inappropriate, and offensive behavior by former editor in chief Mark Galli and former advertising director Olatokunbo Olawoye. But their behavior was not checked and the men were not disciplined, according to an external assessment of the ministrys culture released Tuesday.

The behavior of these two men was gross, and just as disturbing was the apparent culture of retaliation that silenced, shamed, or stymied anyone who tried to report it. For years.

Olawoyes harassment of women at Christianity Today only ended in 2017 because he was arrested in a federal sting and wound up serving three years in prison for trying to pay for sex with a teenage girl. Gallis crude and creepy behavior continued unchecked for years until August 2019, when Galli was accused of inappropriately touching three women in three days. That led to his first workplace reprimand, after more than a decade of impunity despite numerous complaints. Galli announced his retirement two months later.

This long article is an unpleasant, icky, and appalling read, but Silliman deserves credit for his candor and thoroughness. And CTs new leader, Tim Dalrymple,* deserves credit for introducing accountability, bringing in an external investigator, and going public with this report rather than a total spin job.

Religion News Service interviewed Galli after the piece. Hes piously unrepentant, offering only a stock non-apology:

Galli said he was deeply troubled by the allegations in the story, which he denied. Several of the incidents in the story were taken out of context, he said, or were simply false.

My initial reaction is that I am shocked at how many of the statements made in the article were simply not true, he said.

Galli also said he was deeply troubled if he did anything that offended or intimidated other people and would be open to meeting with people he had offended and apologizing.

Thats about how youd expect Galli to react based on the creepily indignant and entitled portrait painted of him by lots of women he used to work with. Sillimans report includes some particularly vivid and skeevy snapshots of the mans character:

When [one] woman was hired on as an editor in the mid-2000s, someone joked that she was only brought on because a senior editor wanted to have sex with her. She didnt report that to HR, but a colleague did. After that, the woman heard regular comments from men at CT about how she was too quick to see sexual harassment in everything.

Galli in particular began asking her if she was offended when he held a door open for her, she recalled. He would make a banal statement about gender, she said, and then add, Are you going to report that?

None of the women saw Galli suffer any repercussions, and several said he seemed to brush the complaints off as a minor annoyance, a generational difference, or a problem of politically correct culture.

I dont know Mark Galli personally,** but I know that guy. You probably do too. The guy who extravagantly makes a point of holding open doors and pulling out chairs and other chivalrous behavior toward the ladies while always aggressively joking that hes sure theyre offended by his doing so because its politically incorrect. The guy who is constantly pushing for a reaction in the hopes of being able to tell women theyre over-reacting. That guy.

The politically incorrect bit there is a tell. Im not saying that every man who repeatedly recites variations of that 40-year-old joke will turn out to be a smarmy, handsy sex-pest seething with resentment toward women for their failure to grant him the deference he believes hes entitled to. But Politically Incorrect was the name of a show by Bill Maher. So.

These not-really-jokes about political correctness (or, more recently, wokeness or cancel culture) are a form of mockery directed at moralistic scolds. Or, to be more precise, theyre an attempt to evade legitimate moral condemnation by portraying the sources of that condemnation as legalistic, hyper-sensitive, tyrannical moral scolds.

They are, in other words, part of the bitter and bewildered backlash against the moral revolution of the Civil Rights Movement and the wave of feminism that accompanied it. That revolution didnt topple the old regime its power structures and systems mostly remain in place. But it completely demolished, forever, the prior claim that those structures and systems were morally legitimate.

So The Powers That Be retained their power, but no longer enjoyed any pretense of moral authority. The fact that uppity women and people of color no longer defer to their alleged moral superiority is something they cannot abide. So they hide the past, or try to rewrite it while they whine about their context by inventing an imaginary tyranny of political correctness and wokeness and cancel culture, portraying themselves as victims.

This imaginary victimhood shows that they still dont fully understand what changed. It shows they never fully heard, or understood, or examined the moral arguments that overwhelmed their objections. All they took from the Civil Rights Movement and from feminism is some vague, dim sense that those people who had been perceived as the victims of injustice somehow thereby gained some kind of moral authority. And since they refuse to examine either justice or injustice itself, they guess this must be due to some magical property of victimhood. And so they try to claim the power of that magic for themselves by portraying themselves as the real victims. (Are you going to report that?)

This attempt to evade well-earned disgrace by a claim of victimhood is unconvincing even to themselves unless theres at least some tiny shred of evidence that those uppity inferiors really are the over-reacting, vindictive moral scolds that all those jokes about political correctness and cancel culture make them out to be. So that guy needs to get a reaction from them.

And if those people with all their talk of equality and decency and justice dont initially provide the reaction he seeks, then he will goad and needle and grope and harass and offend until finally somebody cracks and gives him the reaction and the pretext he so desperately needs to paint them all as uptight, hyper-sensitive jackbooted stormtroopers attempting to impose moral tyranny from the bottom up.

Thats why Mark Gallis long response to Christianity Todays article doubles down on his defensive defiance. Its not an apology, its a victory lap in which he savors the opportunity to portray himself as the victim.

Is it full of pious humble-bragging and sanctimonious faux lamentation? Of course. Does he play the weaselly Matthew 18 card that every evangelical abuser plays? Of course. But the main sense one gets from his ill-advised screed is that Galli perceives that article as a kind of vindication. It all just proves that he was right and that the politically correct gazpacho were out to get him. That makes him the real victim here and according to his garbled misunderstanding of the magical power of victimhood that must re-establish his moral legitimacy and moral superiority, right?

That post from Galli reminds us of another unfortunate side-effect of choosing to become that guy the guy seething with downward-focused resentment and indignant entitlement vented off in a steady stream of jokes about political correctness and wokeness and cancel culture. Choosing to become that guy makes you incapable of listening to anyone who might care enough about you to tell you to choose better. It turns you into someone who lacks the trust of friends or family members who might tell you that the best thing to do right now would be to shut up for at least a day or two rather than firing off a narcissistic, obtuse tribute to your own imagined martyrdom.

* Yes, thats the same Tim D. who purged us liberals from Patheos evangelical channel, thereby inadvertently popularizing the term progressive Christian. And who once blamed me, by name, for the popularity and influence of Pat Robertson, James Dobson, and Billy James Hargis. And who once seriously suggested that Wendell Berry needed a deeper understanding of the meaning of marriage and should turn to Focus on the Family for their wisdom on the subject (which is exactly like suggesting that Berry should turn to Monsanto for greater wisdom on farming).

In this case, though, hes acting responsibly.

** I have, over the years, interacted quite a bit with Gallis writing. See, for example:

Galli was also the source of a long-time running gag here, and the butt of that joke. He wrote the CT editorial that sought to define that magazine, in perpetuity, as: a publication that believes gay and lesbian couples are destructive to society.

Read through the links in this footnote and then re-read Sillimans report and, well, its all rather consistent, isnt it?

Continued here:

'Politically incorrect' | Fred Clark - Patheos