The Missionary Position. (Teaching Notes).

THE MISSIONARY POSITION.

By Christopher Hitchens. New York: Verso, $13.00.

Many instructors at my community college virtually proselytize. Whether heroic Campbell mythos, or born-again Buddhism or Christianity, assumptions about the value and place of "faith" go not unchallenged, but embraced. At recent commencement exercises at this public education institution, a faculty speaker preached about "forgiveness," and "witnessed" on behalf of his Jesus.

Meanwhile, I was called to account for complaints garnered from students (one, actually) about teaching, yes, Christopher Kitchens' slim 1995 case study of the late Agnes Bojaxhiu, The Missionary Position. Subtitled "Mother Teresa In Theory and Practice," Kitchens' polemical essay is not, principally, an attack on religion, but rather a careful and instructively well-written argument against the double standard of political power based on the "transcendent."

My research writing class syllabus also included James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me, the terrific case study of American history textbooks. After studying both texts, students produced their own twenty-five page paper "reconsidering" the accepted knowledge surrounding one social problem or historical account. These included a labor action by Los Angeles bus drivers, "school vouchers," the College Television Network--an odious "free" broadcast equivalent of Muzak--and perceptions surrounding the My Lai massacre.

These choices may seem likely enough to my fellow radical or even not-so-radical teachers, who consider problems defined, usually unsatisfactorily, by the rhetorical architecture which supports them: class prejudice, national chauvinism, etc. But please note that because the assignment reconsidered the arguments themselves and not only the substance of the issue, I avoided getting papers on lethal lower-division writing topic chestnuts: abortion, gun control, teen sex.

Naturally, I paid the price for my curricular choices. Here's part of the furious student letter to my dean, forwarded to my department chair, who, thankfully, elected to ignore it: "As a Christian I was deeply offended." My chair and I had a long talk about the expectations of critical thinking, intellectual curiosity, college discourse. As it happens, he's a Holocaust expert who's been challenged by self-identified fundamentalist Christians for raising the theme of Christian anti-Semitism in Europe. This from students who've expressed surprise, then disappointment, upon learning that their Bible was not written in the language in which they'd memorized it. Clearly, students choose when to be "offended" and by what. My eventual vindication as a religious skeptic--and, generally, as a critical thinker and teacher--returns me to my own adopted teacher, Christopher Hitchens. His purpose in taking apart the nearly sacrosanct Mother Teresa myth? Not only to challenge religion, but to illustrate that the religious cannot be judged, finally, by their own problematic criteria and will not be assessed based on ours. Further, that as critical thinkers-if that's what students really want to be- we must see that, indeed, Hitchens' argument is: "not with a deceiver but with the deceived. If Mother Teresa is the adored object of many credulous and uncritical observers, then the blame is not hers, or hers alone. In the gradual manufacture of an illusion, the conjurer is only the instrument of the audience."

My goal in purposely choosing texts many see as provocative, irreverent, challenging is to deconstruct benign everyday provocations and compulsory reverence for power. My students wrote papers which located contradictions in the powerful, those who create the limited variables that seem to form our civic decision-making discourse: advertising, talk radio, religion, industry think tanks.

"Mother Teresa," argues Hitchens, "is fond of claiming to be not so much above politics as actually beyond them, operating in a manner that is transcendental." In studying his meticulously researched, logical, and well-written argument, my students became empowered to see that one's position, indeed any position, must be accounted for, and that people choose their inspiration and offense based on quantifiable factors, including their choice to transcend.