The Humanity of Heroes

When you teach, you get asked strange questions.  From how I pronounce caramel (because he wants you to agree with him in the argument he is having with a friend) to my favorite element (which I don't know how to have an answer for) to my favorite meme (do people have favorite memes), students ask a lot of opinion questions.  Occasionally, I even get asked who is my favorite President.  The answer is Thomas Jefferson, but I know that can be a difficult answer for some people to take.  After all, he was a very flawed and self-contradictory individual, both wanting to free his slaves and writing that "all men are created equal" while fathering children with one of his slaves, Sally Hemmings.  Similar contradictions are true of many of the founding fathers, so we feel we are left with the choice of ignoring their faults or ignoring their contributions. 

When the movie The Greatest Showman was released, I heard a lot of students speak very lovingly of PT Barnum because the movie had portrayed only his heroic side.  I guess his ownership of an old woman (yes, he purchased her) doesn't make for good content in a musical.  He is the person known for lines like, "A fool and his money are soon parted" and "There's a sucker born every minute."  While it is hard to know if all of the saying attributed to him are true, we can all agree that his character is more complicated than the movie portrays.

There are so many examples of this.  This summer, I decided to read Buzz Aldrin's book Magnificent Desolation to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the moon landing.  He describes the affair he had with a woman he met while on the world tour, flying back and forth to New York to "keep up his flight certification."  We all know the controversies over monuments to confederate leaders.  Henry Ford was antisemitic as was Charles Lindbergh.  Both Charlie Chaplin and Elvis seemed to be interested in girls we would call younger than appropriate.  If you want to keep admiring singers that you grew up listening to, I don't recommend seeing Ray or Walk the Line.  Since I'm writing this post on Martin Luther King Day, it might be worth noting that he regularly cheated on his wife.  Recently, A few weeks ago, I saw a tweet asking a prominent Baptist leader why he didn't call out George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards for their apparently racist views.  Of course, Twitter's character limit means it is hardly the place for a deeply meaningful discussion, so the answers to this question left much to be desired.  John Piper does a pretty good job of addressing the issue here, even referencing Peter's denials of Christ and God's forgiveness.

Speaking of Twitter, it seems that every day, someone is being "canceled."  It takes one statement or action for the mob response on Twitter to call for us to boycott various celebrities or companies.  In the past year, I have seen cancelation calls for Kanye West,  JK Rowling, the Hallmark Channel, and even YouTube.  I'm not saying some of them aren't deserved, but it is an almost daily event.  Can there really be that many?  (It's also worth noting that it doesn't seem to work.  Kevin Hart may have removed himself from hosting the Oscars after being canceled, but his shows are still as popular as they were before.  And, I don't think the use of YouTube dropped even one percent after being called out as "over" on Twitter.)

If you haven't seen the PBS documentary Hamilton's America, let me recommend that you do.  Even if you aren't into the musical, the presentation of history is compelling.  There are two scenes in it that stuck with me.  One is the scene in which Christopher Jackson, the play's original George Washington, visits Mount Vernon.  While standing in the slave quarters, this African American states that he is trying to reconcile the heroic aspects of George Washington with the fact that he owns slaves.  In the end, he decides that he has to make peace with the fact that he can't make peace with it.  He is a deeply flawed and yet heroic figure.  The other scene that returns to my mind frequently involves a conversation with Leslie Odom, Jr., the actor who portrayed Aaron Burr.  He discusses how, before the show, most of us only knew that Burr killed Hamilton in a duel.  The benefit of the show, in his estimation, is showing the events that led to that moment because we see the complexity of the man, not just his actions on his worst day.  In fact, one of the things I most appreciate about Lin Manuel Miranda is that Hamilton treats each person in our complicated history as a three-dimensional human being, not a marble statue of their best moments or a painting of their worst. 

How do we deal with this, especially when having conversations with our students (who have been immersed in cancel culture for their entire lives)?  The answer is certainly not to ignore faults in order to maintain our hero worship.  The answer is not to ignore the accomplishments of those we look up to because their flaws make them worthless.  The answer to acknowledge the complexity of human beings.  We are made in the image of God, but we are also corrupted by sin.  Even young students are capable of recognizing complexity.  In fact, these types of discussions are the perfect time for Christian school teachers to talk about sin and our need for redemption.  We can be glad that God uses people with flaws since those are the only kind of people there are.  If we want our heroes to be perfect our only option is to make Christ the hero of the story.