In the 70s when I grew up, it was hard to know what to think about American culture. On the one hand, one had had a trickle of affirming American History in elementary school; on the other was the Pop Music mindset which dominated our small choice of media, as it does now with an explosion of content. Of course, we had no Internet, cell phones or cable news alternatives like Fox News, and we had no Christian pop. Amy Grant is my age exactly (She went to Belmont University, down the street from Peabody, my undergraduate school in Nashville), and she didn’t come out with a local album until the late 70s. So those of us fortunate enough to be in the middle class spent our money on the usual suspects: Rolling Stones, Beatles, Dylan and one up-and-comer, the Jamaican sensation Bob Marley, who would swiftly make reggae part of the mainstream (Dylan would turn all this on its head in 1979 when he had an authentic Christian conversion.). Interestingly, Bob Marley records were bought almost entirely by white middle-class students as I would read. Black students in my school liked American black music exclusively, as far as I could make out.
Those of us in this age-niche, the tail end of the baby boomers who hadn’t been old enough for the tumultuous 60s, still imbibed their knee jerk superiority of pop music sensibility over our parents’ ethos. This “liberal” tolerance would embrace any revolutionary, no matter how zany; patriots like John Wayne and his ilk were openly mocked. I’m sad to say I was in that camp in my teens.
The confusion for “open-minded” students came in the form of pop songs like “Get Up, Stand Up” by Marley around 1974. In the song he says, “We don’t need no isms-schisms, no Jesus in–a-heaven goin’ come/ We understand/ We know that God is a living man.” Say what? This of course seemed all wrong to a Christian but “critics” hung on his every word, his dreadlocks conquered all doubt; you weren’t allowed to be negative about “liberation.” I did not know about all of Marley’s Rastafarian tenants of black liberation theology, including the bizarre belief that Jesus was come then in one Haile Selassie, an obscure Ethiopian emperor who might have been traced back to King Solomon.

In short, Marley was unique in his rhythms for an American audience, but his revolutionary anti-middle class, anti-business rhetoric fit right in with the radical zeitgeist of pop music at the time. One man’s ideology is another’s idolatry.

So with this mindset, still reading the Bible though, I entered college with one overriding goal in mind: I wanted to find a professor I could trust to help me sort through this ideological mess. How did we get where we were? How much could I trust pop music even if it was obviously making those people very rich? Was there a “real” culture I didn’t know about? It turns out, there was an alternative ideology, but it was decidedly under attack in the 70s (and still is really). It was called “conservatism,” and it didn’t sound exciting. It sounded like it was somehow about big business and repressive morality, though it was not. These were not cool for the mobile middle class liberal in the 70s.

Luckily, in 1979 when Peabody merged with Vanderbilt, I found an English professor on the Vanderbilt staff named Walter Sullivan, who introduced me to the great English writers: T.S. Eliot, Charles Williams, William Butler Yeats, W.H. Auden. All of these were intellectuals who had imbibed the artist’s disdain for the middle class but came to be Christians and conservatives later on. He openly mocked the “revolutionaries” of our time as being superficial, and he knew what tradition, known by intellectuals as “conservatism,” was really worth—everything.

I also had a feminist English professor who became a cause célèbre nationwide when she failed to get tenure. She said it was her politics, but it really wasn’t. She scorned her students, most of whom—unlike me—were rich kids that were confident without her worldview. But I enjoyed her class on the English novel because I had never read the works of Tobias Smollett, William Thackeray, George Eliot and so on. I learned to separate the individual professor’s obvious bias from that of the material and my own.

When I went to graduate school, I had the confidence of knowing where all the faddish theories about culture came from, that words had no real, fixed meaning, etc., and I studied through the storm of the Culture Wars that were at their apex in the late 80s and early 90s. We had avowed Marxist professors; limousine liberals some of us called them since they clearly coveted tenure and their salaries more than anything. I have to say, though, that we did have one principled old line communist that really did not care about money. He once shocked our class by accusing female graduate students of selfish ambition and saying that anyone playing tennis or swimming on a college campus was a “joy hog” (i.e., middle class) who should be eradicated. That was hardcore wildness. I’m glad I got to meet him, though I wouldn’t want to be him.

We even had feminists who refused to speak to any of the male graduate teaching assistants on principle. One time, I only had a conversation with one of these feminist professors because I was “OK’ed” by a female teacher she trusted. In the mid-80s, all the graduate assistants except me and my one like-minded conservative friend marched from our building to descend on the federal courthouse in downtown Knoxville to march against the American military (necessary for any true Marxist radical, nearly all of the junior professoriate in English then) for their upcoming role in Grenada, knocking back a few Cuban thugs away from American students there. When they came back they stared us down but we just laughed. That infuriates the superior liberal, by the way.

So I said all that to earn your attention to tell you this: You will have some ideological liberal professors here at Lee, and you will have some ideological conservatives. However, we’re all moral conservatives since we are Christians and don’t advocate fornication and drinking like my graduate school Marxist professors. So you can listen to all of us without fear. I urge you to ask questions about what we believe and why we believe it. If you feel moved to do it, find a professor whose mind you want to challenge and sift because, after all is said and done, you can only decide yourself what you will believe and make for yourself a quality intellectual experience. Get up, stand up, and ask one of us a real question.