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In ballet, a grand pas is a duet in which the drama pauses so the lead dancers can demonstrate their graceful movement. Ballet was born in Renaissance Italy. After it spread to France, it was nurtured in the courts of the “most Christian kings.” It is, by origin, Christian and conservative.
In politics, a faux pas is a post Indiana’s lieutenant governor makes on Facebook.
Late last month, Micah Beckwith posted that Westfield High School’s band kids — who were wearing red and black makeup and outfits for their spring percussion show called “Red Line” — gave him a sense the school loves “giving the (middle finger emoji) to Christian Conservative families.” The comment stirred plenty of drama. It had no grace.
When met with backlash for the post, Beckwith said he objected to the themes behind the music the band played, originally from the opera “Carmen,” of exploring and crossing boundaries, witchcraft, seduction and broken family relationships. He then doubled down, calling the band’s performance one example of “demonic” action in Indiana’s public schools, which the Hoosier taxpayer currently funds and which he intends to fight.
This is not the only fight Beckwith has picked with Westfield High School, or with Indiana’s schools more broadly. In November, he threatened to strip Westfield’s funding after claiming the school disinvited him from an agricultural program it hosted. A week before the latest incident, he said Valparaiso Community Schools’ superintendent sent a “horrible and dangerous message” by apologizing for his visit to a career fair while permitting students to protest ICE earlier in the year. Across these cases, a pattern emerges in which Beckwith not merely picks battles, but does so frequently, indelicately, publicly and always with opponents smaller than himself.
Beckwith is not wrong that American civic life once had a more pious, sometimes puritan, sensibility, which has, over the past decades, faded. In the 1980s, the ACLU sued cities big and small across the country for their lone displays of nativity scenes in city halls, eventually securing a Supreme Court win that banned the practice.
It used to be that Hollywood’s Hays Code prohibited films that would lower audiences’ moral standards. I don’t suspect evil forces were undermining Westfield band kids’ morality through art at the Red Line, any more than through video games in the 2000s. But I can’t fault the lieutenant governor for caring for the uprightness of the youths, either.
What is at issue is not Beckwith’s grievance but his response, and specifically whether the response reflects serious engagement with what the Christian tradition has said, over a long time and with considerable sophistication, about how believers should conduct themselves toward cultures or persons who oppose them.
Beckwith’s has been the Trumpist response. This means it is, by origin, neither Christian nor particularly conservative, as President Donald Trump far more closely resembles Nero than St. Louis IX the king of France and a reactionary populist than a steward of this country’s traditional institutions. The form of public discourse Trump has innovated is new and beyond the old pale.
Why, then, have so many self-described conservative Christian politicians throughout the country, especially in Indiana, adopted this way of addressing their opponents?
Contrast this approach with that of St. Francis de Sales. The 16th-century Catholic bishop and theologian — and patron saint of journalists — reconverted, according to tradition, 72,000 people in a hostile territory. His region of southern France had recently, and enthusiastically, embraced Calvinism amid a time of fierce, and bloody, religious conflict. Yet de Sales won so many people to his cause through small virtues: gentleness, temperance, modesty and humility.
There is a tradition of Christian thought that would resist the reduction of Christianity’s public relations to gentleness alone, that would insist the faith must sometimes wield muscle, even state power, in addition to meekness. This tradition is found in St. Thomas Aquinas: False beliefs obstruct our enjoyment of the common good, so the state, whose job it is to foster that good, has a valid reason to curb such beliefs. Presumably, Beckwith might place himself in this tradition.
But the difficulty is that Beckwith’s actual relationship to the tradition seems nonexistent. The belligerence that characterizes Beckwith’s rhetoric is not Thomistic. Nor is it clearly the product of theological reflection over St. Thomas. Instead, it appears to have been absorbed from a post-Trump politics that favors the social media attack, replete with all-caps and bad-faith assumptions, as its foremost method of expressing grievances. Christian vocabulary like “demonic” is thus fitted onto a form that postdates it, is unrelated to it and degrades it.
De Sales’ practical counsel, written five centuries earlier, serves well as a response to this trend.
On language, de Sales warned against impolite words. Even without poor intentions, those who hear them may interpret them differently. The problem with Beckwith’s use of the word “demonic” is thus not only that it is uncharitable but that it prevents the conversation Beckwith should want. Rather than persuade, he performs disgust that only confirms, in the minds of band kids, that Christians are exactly what their naysayers have long suspected them of being: intolerant prudes.
On judging motives, de Sales said human judgment sees only so far. When we assume others’ intents, we attempt something only God can do. Neither band kids playing a classical operatic piece nor the teachers behind it are, on the available evidence, aiming at ruining good morals.
On being slighted, de Sales wrote that humility means we should have a certain joy in our own abjection. Being protested at a career fair or disinvited from another program is therefore an occasion for practicing the small virtue of meekness, not for threatening to defund schools.
On conflict itself, de Sales said, “If possible, fall out with no one.” He followed this with a parable of two kings. One peacefully visits a country, and its people are “gratified and flattered.” The other brings soldiers into the country. Even if the king does this for the people’s sake, he advises that the visit “is sure to be unwelcome and harmful.”
De Sales, writing in a time of open conflict and massacres, did not attack, accuse or offend. In “Introduction to the Devout Life,” he rehashes a Christian king’s wisdom to this point:
Contradict nobody, unless sin or harm comes from agreeing. When it is necessary to assert one’s own opinion, do so gently and considerately. Nothing is gained “by sharpness or petulance.”
And what is more Christian, more conservative than that?
Eric Cannon (he/him) is a sophomore studying philosophy and political science and currently serves as a member of IU Student Government. Francis de Sales and Louis IX of France are among his best friends.
