Today I read an article at the Unfundamentalist Christians blog about the departure of anti-gay firebrand Robert Gagnon from his position at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary (PTS). In the article, “Gagnon out at PC(USA) Seminary” the author Don Burrows talks about Gagnon’s limited job prospects after PTS:
“Gagnon himself appears to realize [his limited prospects], as, in the announcement of his resignation, he pines for employment at an evangelical institution, noting (correctly) that ‘it seems unlikely, given my stances on sexual ethics and Scripture, that any university religion department or mainline denominational seminary would take me.’
Burrows continues:
“his scholarship falls far outside of mainstream consensus in a variety of fields. Gagnon knows this, which is why he states that God is calling him to an evangelical institution. By ‘evangelical,’ I think Gagnon means those institutions that do not generally pay heed to peer-reviewed scholarship in academia at large, but instead hew to a specific set of ideologies and require their faculty to play within that limited sandbox.”
Personally, I found Gagnon to be unpalatable. In the comments I wrote: ” While I never met him, I have heard him on many occasions and he always struck me as combative, acerbic, and condescending. I can’t imagine what it would be like to share the same photocopier. I suspect things may have gone differently for him if he’d shown more of a gentle, Christlike spirit … and ditched the bow ties.” (For more on my perspective see my review of Gagnon’s debate with Jayne Ozanne on “Unbelievable.”)
But the real bee in my bonnet concerned Burrows’ withering comments about evangelical institutions, their alleged “ideologies” and the resulting “limited sandboxes”. In response to those points I replied to Burrows as follows:
“You paint with a very broad brush here. I don’t dispute that the work of scholars employed by avowedly evangelical institutions is constrained by “a specific set of ideologies” which leads to a “limited sandbox.” But as your post illustrates, that is likewise true of a mainline PCUSA seminary: whatever else you think of it, Gagnon’s scholarship did not conform to the ideological expectations at Pittsburgh. It is also true of secular institutions. (I remember, for example, Norman Finkelstein’s infamous and ultimately futile attempt to secure tenure at DePaul.)”
