Located in Murray Dodge Hall, Princeton’s Office of Religious Life (ORL) is a hub for undergraduate religious and interfaith programming. The center provides meditation, dialogue, and worship for students. In the words of the Dean of Religious Life and of the Chapel, Dean Alison Boden, the ORL is a “home away from home for our students.” However, my research into the ORL reveals an engagement with one-sided political messaging.
“Our goal is community,” Dean Boden told me. She further clarified that when it comes to political issues, “we are a part of Princeton University and the University doesn’t take positions on a lot of issues, and we don’t take positions on issues too.” However, this narrative is challenged by the center’s past programming.
While there are efforts to promote diverse dialogue through programming like the Rose-Castle Society, the activities of the ORL are progressive. A search through the ORL’s Youtube channel and its recent programming clearly spells out specific political beliefs and a lack of viewpoint diversity.
The political slant injected into religion at the ORL runs contrary to the preferences of most Americans. A majority of Americans prefer that religious institutions stay out of political spheres. According to a Pew Research Report, 36% of Americans support their religious leaders endorsing a political candidate, 20% of Americans trust their clergy’s opinions “a lot” on immigration, and 13% trust their clergy’s views “a lot” on issues of climate change.
Despite the prevalence of progressive content in ORL programming, I could not find a single example of a speaker or event sharing conservative content on the ORL’s Youtube channel and digital media. On the other hand, the ORL has organized events that include praising the work of the official Black Lives Matter organization, radical comments on the status of women in America today, and an implicit endorsement of Biden-Harris back in October 2020.
On June 3rd, 2020, the ORL hosted “From Lament to Prophecy: A Litany for Black Lives.” This event included members of the ORL as well as current and former students and their “laments, confessions, repentance, prophecy, and spoken word.” The event gave the opportunity to reflect on difficult times and discuss ways to interact meaningfully with one another, but Dean Boden instead offered the view that whites as a collective are responsible for all problematic police altercations and troubles in minority communities.
During the confession portion of the video, Dean Boden proclaimed on behalf of her self-professed white community that “we confess that we choose to deny financial resources and political power to Black people, hoarding them to ourselves.” She then added that “we have not spoken about the injustices we do recognize, and so our silence begets more violence. We have not dared to ask ourselves who we are if we no longer have white privilege.”
During the “spoken word” section, a student speaker selected by the ORL stated regarding the controversial Michael Brown case in 2014 that “she expected [Daryn Wilson not to be indicted] because somehow in this land a police officer can always claim to be defenseless against a black body and it could warrant a killing.”
Former President Barack Obama’s Department of Justice found “no credible evidence” that Brown’s hands were up in the air when he was shot and, instead, argued that the officer acted in self-defense when killing Brown. The dismissal of nuance in the ORL implicitly excludes those who hold different ideas for effecting change in the criminal justice system.
There is an increasingly widespread assumption that the left-leaning view is the normative position on a subject and is the only one deserving of consideration. The ORL’s decision to hold this program without any space for deliberation makes many question the ORL’s overall intentions.
I also looked at an event the ORL hosted on October 31, 2020, titled “Legacy of Love: Why Gandhian Non-Violence Still Matters Today.” While the title of this event suggests an inclusive and agreeable hour, the two speakers moderated by University and ORL staff were openly partisan in their representation of paths towards non-violence. The two guest speakers, Reverend James Lawson and Dr. Rajmohan Gandhi spoke on non-violence and current events.
Reverend Lawson opened by declaring that “most of us in the United States today cannot define non-violent struggle or non-violent philosophy because we have been born and cultivated in perhaps the most violent culture that the earth has ever known.” Quite apart from the historical record, our Southern border is filled with asylum seekers trying to escape the violence of their home countries every day. A statement portraying the United States as a uniquely evil civilization does not align with the high immigration rate— if the United States were the most racist, sexist, inequitable country in the world, people would not risk their lives every day for the possibility of calling America their home. Unfortunately, neither the University nor the ORL staff moderating the event chose to respond to this statement.
During a later discussion about former President Donald Trump and his policies, the reverend lamented that future Republican leaders would continue what President Trump accomplished during his Presidency. He stated that “I don’t think we the American people are going to be rid of the racism, the sexism, the violence, the plantation capitalism theory and structures that are in place without a very much larger expulsion of those forces from our country.” Seventy-four million Americans cast their ballots for former President Trump in 2020, and among those voters were numerous Princeton students. So when an event moderated by Princeton staff and posted on the ORL’s Youtube channel paints all Trump supporters as racist, violent misogynists, it casts further doubt upon the ORL’s claim to be apolitical.
The second speaker, Dr. Rajmohan Gandhi, made an implicit endorsement of Biden-Harris in the week leading up to the election during the ORL event. Dr. Gandhi stated that a Biden victory would represent “equality [being] honored and vindicated,” and that defeating former President Donald Trump would symbolize that “America belongs to everybody, not just one group of people or one race.” For an organization that prides itself on not thinking of itself “as not talking about politics so much as about belief,” sponsoring events that feature speakers endorsing political candidates is not consistent with that statement.
Though the ORL is not the only place to find religious programming, it is essential to note that it is the only one that receives University funding for its daily expenses. While Dean Boden shared that “different Chaplaincies have different kinds of privileges,” these privileges primarily include free office space and accounting access, not money for salaries or programming. Different religious communities may have independent political leanings. Still, they are affiliates of the University and, therefore, are not beholden to the same standards of consistency and equal representation as University offices are.
Princeton University emphasizes freedom of speech and freedom of expression, especially when those opinions do not conform to the mainstream school of thought. The ORL, however, does not include programming on all perspectives nor does it feature speakers from a variety of intellectual backgrounds. The ORL’s inability to respect different viewpoints sadly means that it is failing to live up to its own mission, alienating many religious students who call Princeton home.
The above report and analysis reflect the author’s views alone.
(image courtesy of Princeton University)
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