President's Blog

Ask my kids what dad’s favourite book is and in a split second they’ll say in unison, “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee. I’ve read the book a bunch of times and listened to it on the Audible app. I got the movie, even the special anniversary edition. My kids bought me tickets to see the play at the Stratford Festival Theatre as a Father’s Day present. I have a t-shirt and ball cap with the words “To Kill a Mockingbird” plastered across it. I named my dog “Scout” (RIP: April 2019) after the female protagonist in the book. But my family put their collective foot down when I wanted to name our second dog “Jem”. [Sophie, you have Jessica to thank you for your beautiful name.]

There is just something about the story that grabs me by the throat and throttles me. Emotions deep within well up every time I see the movie. One of my favourite scenes involves Scout’s father, Atticus Finch, who is a lawyer. He leaves the court room all alone after fighting for the life of an innocent black man who was falsely accused of raping a white woman in the deep south of Alabama in the 1930s. The entire court has been dispersed. Standing alone, Atticus collects his papers, turns, and stoically caring the burden of the day he departs. He doesn’t notice that in the “coloured” section in the upper balcony of the courthouse, the entire black community stands waiting for him to leave. One black lady, standing with her peers, is caring for Atticus’ young daughter, Scout. She whispers to her, “Stand up, Scout. Your father is passing.” Gets me every time, without fail!

When I grow up I want to be just like Atticus Finch. In my opinion, he is definitely one of the greatest fictionalized heroes ever created.

Harper Lee chose to never write another novel after “To Kill a Mockingbird”. Wow! I can only imagine the other tales with which she could have gifted us.

So you can imagine my excitement when I heard that Lee’s only known earlier work was discovered and published in July 2015.

Harper Lee wrote, “Go Set a Watchman” in the mid-1950s, using the same backdrop and characters of her Pulitzer Prize winning “To Kill a Mockingbird”. It’s set 20 years after the tale told in Mockingbird in the same town adjusting to the turbulent times transforming mid-1950s America.

A publisher back in the 1950s looked at “Go Set a Watchman” and thought a story about her town and characters 20 years earlier might be more interesting. So she wrote “To Kill a Mockingbird” and everyone thought her first book was lost.

I read the book or, more accurately, I struggled through the book. Atticus wasn’t the same man. Beaten up by life itself.

Atticus Meets Critical Theory

What saddens me is that I can imagine that Harper Lee’s, “Go Set a Watchman” is likely a far more popular novel today than, “To Kill a Mockingbird” in our enlightened times. In a time of “white fragility”, “internalized oppression,” and “colourblind racism,” I imagine Atticus Finch might be viewed as a villain, not a hero.

Contemporary critical theory is based on the idea that society can be divided into dominant, oppressor groups and subordinate, oppressed groups along the lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, and other factors. In the book, “Is Everyone Really Equal?” (Sensoy and DiAngelo), the premise is that every social group has an opposite oppressed group; and so sexism, racism, classism, and heterosexism are viewed as specific forms of oppression.

Atticus is Public Enemy #1

No one argues that all the “isms” above are oppressive, evil, and deserve our disdain. Any one of us also might be found in both an oppressor group and also an oppressed group. Intersectionality states that our identities are complex and should not be understood along a single axis alone. Taken to the ideological extreme, oppression is no longer just understood as acts of cruelty, violence, injustice, and coercion, but expanded to include society’s dominant group imposing social norms and traditional values that justify its own interests. And so oppression is not necessarily the injustice people suffer because of coercive power, but it could also be because of the everyday behaviors and norms of a perhaps well-intentioned civil society. These embedded practices, habits, and symbols oppress.

With this definition, Atticus Finch, could be understood as Public Enemy #1. What? Not my Atticus!

He’s white, upper-middle class (lawyer), male, older, heterosexual, able-bodied, citizen, and with a Christian orientation. He “checks” all the boxes. My hero becomes the enemy.

You need to understand the “times”

Let me encourage you to learn more about critical theory, intersectionality, and the basis of so much of this incredible thinking. Remain uninformed at your own peril. I remain a novice but I’m seeking to learn.

A good place to start is reading Carl R. Trueman’s book, The Rise and the Triumph of the Modern Self. Carl is a theologian and historian (Westminster Theological Seminary) who weaves the history of ideas that led to the popular thinking of the early 21st century. Every thinking Christian should peek at this book. I just heard my pastor quote Trueman in a recent sermon. “Way da’ go, Bob!”