Invisible Indoctrination

My application to Yale Divinity School was rejected, but I got a free Yale coffee mug and an opportunity to walk through part of the campus at their YDS open house event. In awe of such a prestigious establishement, my friend and I meandered down a hallway lined with official photos from graduating classes through the years. But we both quickly saw what wasn’t there: women and people from diverse racial backgrounds. As the pictures progressed year by year, the diversity gradually trickled in: Solomon Coles was the first African American student admitted in 1872, graduating in 1875. The first Asian American man graduated YDS in 1921. There were no female graduates period from YDS until 1935; no African American female graduates until 1945; no Hispanic female graduates until 1953. ¹

Until 1935, I would not have felt welcome to walk those halls, because women were invisible.

There’s another walk I take, closer to home. I live in an area of my town known as the poet section because all the roads are named after famous authors. As an author myself, I was enamored with such a literary theme, until the day that I realized the subtheme.

• Hawthorne (born 1804, US)
• Chaucer (Geoffrey, born 1400, UK)
• Emerson (Ralph Waldo, born 1803, US)
• Poe (Edgar Allan, born 1809, US)
• Stevenson (Robert Louis, born 1850, UK)
• Bryant (William Cullen, born 1794, US)
• Barrie (James Matthew, born 1860, UK)
• Twain (Mark, born 1835, US)
• Tennyson (Alfred, born 1809, UK)
• Wordsworth (William, born 1770, UK)
• Whittier (John Greenleaf, born 1807)
• Lowell (I assume James Russell Lowell, born 1819; possibly Robert Lowell, born 1918)
• Scott (Walter, born 1771)
• Browning* (Based on the trend, I assume Robert Browning, born 1812, UK- OTHERWISE, it is possible this is Elizabeth Barrett Browning [his spouse], born 1806, UK.)

*This is the only POSSIBLE female representation.

While I have not been able to verify with my town’s historical records whether the street was named after Mr. or Mrs. Browning, the reality is that over 90% of the representation is male, and 100% is white. Though I don’t know when the roads were built or named, many of the houses around me were built between 1900-1960s, which gives additional context clues about the street names. Many of these houses were built during or just before the Civil Rights and Women’s Rights Movements. Just as a novel is reflective of the concerns or trends of the time in which it was written, these street names reflect the culture, biases, and norms of the era in which they were created.

(For perspective, women technically got the right to vote in 1922, but racial and gender barriers persisted. According to a PBS Article, “Native American, Asian American, Latinx and African American suffragists had to fight for their own enfranchisement long after the 19th Amendment was ratified. Only over successive years did each of those groups gain access to the ballot.”² The Voting Rights Act which banned racial discrimination in voting practices was not passed until 1965.³)

Thus, even if I’m looking roughly within the historical dates covered and birthplaces included, there is no Jane Austen (born 1775, UK), no Emily Dickenson (born 1830, US), no Zora Neale Hurston (born 1891, US), no Charlotte Brontë (born 1816, UK), no Virginia Woolf (born 1882, UK), no Louisa May Alcott (born 1832, US), no Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (born 1825, US), no Harriet Beecher Stowe (born 1811, US).

There was also no Frederick Douglas (born 1818, US), no Jupiter Hammon (born 1711, US), no William Wells Brown (born 1814, US), no William Apess (born 1798, US). And I realize this entirely excludes a vast number of additional diversity.

There are likely countless more female and minority authors who will forever remain nameless because systems (publishing companies, educational systems, slavery, etc) precluded them from public knowledge. Although the first book by an African American was published in 1773 in London (Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral– by Phillis Wheatley) the publishing industry continued to be racially biased, and it censored the authentic content and voice of African American writers. For instance, Zora Neale Hurston wrote an autobiography at the REQUEST of her publisher, who then rejected it because “Hurston indict[ed] white America for its hypocrisy and racism”⁴ For the Indigenous American authors that we do know, how much of their words or thoughts have been omitted or censored due to horrific annihilation or the abusive trend of Native American boarding schools where students’ names were changed, their culture suffocated, and their religious freedom extinguished.⁵

The authentic voices of far too many are still muted, and the faces of far too many are still invisible.

I can’t speak for all, but as a woman, I still feel this gap keenly, not only in the halls of Yale Divinity School or the streets in my neighborhood but in the elder meetings and pulpits of churches, in theological writings and historical accounts, and in the evolving collage of United States Presidents.

My post is not about who to vote for, or what policies are most important. I certainly don’t think that a candidate should be elected or given authority simply for being female, whether in the political or religious realm. But I can say that there has been a joy for me over the years in finally seeing the invisible become visible.

-Seeing women preach and sit at the decision-making tables in churches.

-Hearing women’s voices in the theological discussions.

-Seeing women advancing in STEM and other typically male-dominated fields.

-Seeing a multitude of women in my Northeastern Seminary classes.

-And yes, at the possibility of one day having a female president of the United States.

Part of this is because, as Marian Wright Edelman so beautifully says, “You can’t be what you can’t see.” I joke that I’m the pastor’s kid who never thought to become a pastor because I never saw female pastors when I was growing up. Today I still wrestle with my identity as a female in ministry because there are still tangible and psychological barriers for women. The truth is, whether it is in the graduating class pictures of a prestigious seminary, the common streets or a little town in Connecticut, or a chart of a nation’s leaders, it is hard to imagine yourself being what you can’t see. This is a great loss of God-given potential and beauty.

But it also creates a self-perpetuating single story. The more narrow the representation of voices and faces, the more our picture of our world becomes myopic. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says,“The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they aren’t true, but they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”

The single story impacts our understanding of ourselves, our country, our neighbors, our purpose. It seems to benefit those in power, but it actually diminishes all of us. I’m a preacher, so I’ve learned a great deal about this from my theological studies. For instance, Esau McCauilley shares that all of us read from a social and historical location and that it only when “our varied cultures turn to the text in dialgue with one another” that we get a fuller picture of Scripture and “the mind of Christ.”⁶ Additionally, even within the Gospels, which we often believe tell one uniform story of Jesus, we actually have four sometimes contradictory accounts. Yet Eric D. Barreto and Michael J. Chan insist that it is within the tension of these contradictions that we “hear God speaking most clearly in a diversity of accounts, in the multiplicity of perspectives they bear.”⁷

Multiple perspective are often messy. We want the single-story not just for power’s sake, but for convenience. The single perspective requires little tension, little thinking, little responsibility of us. But the diversity of perspectives actually enriches us, challenges us to grow, and invites us to live and love more fully.

So my second point is that even though we fear intentional indoctrination of ourselves or our children, the most powerful indoctrination is often the invisible kind- the indoctrination that comes not from what we see but what we don’t see. Unfortunately, things that are invisible do not become visible without a great deal of effort, cultural shift, or discomfort. Seeing the invisible means confronting the “other”- those who look, think, believe, and worship differently than I do. This is not easy. But I truly want to live in a nation where there is not a single story- where the voice of the child, the immigrant, the female, the multitude of races, the trans, the person with a disability, the male, the voices from diverse religions, are all able to be seen and heard.

Indoctrination becomes possible when certain people and voices are made invisible or marginalized. I’d rather have the full, horrible, beautiful, complex, messy story. For both myself and my kids, I’d rather have the messy multiple perspectives, and have to wrestle for ourselves through what that means for our faith, our lives, and our own stories.

1. YaleDivSchool. “Changing Faces of Yds.” Yale Divinity School. Accessed October 31, 2024. https://divinity.yale.edu/changing-faces.
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2. “Not All Women Gained the Vote in 1920,” PBS, accessed October 31, 2024, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/vote-not-all-women-gained-right-to-vote-in-1920/. ↩︎
3. “Voting Rights Act of 1965 (U.S. National Park Service),” National Parks Service, accessed October 31, 2024, https://www.nps.gov/articles/votingrightsact.htm. ↩︎
4. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. & Valerie A. Smith, The Norton Anthology of African American Literature: Volume 1. (New York, 2014), p 1031 ↩︎
5. Erin Blakemore, “A Century of Trauma at U.S. Boarding Schools for Native American Children,” History, October 25, 2024, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/a-century-of-trauma-at-boarding-schools-for-native-american-children-in-the-united-states. ↩︎
6. Essau McCaulley, Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope. (Downer’s Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2020), p 22 ↩︎
7. Eric D. Barreto & Michale J. Chan, Exploring the Bible: Foundations for Learning, (Nashville: Fortress Press, 2016), p 103 ↩︎