The Ethics of Tainted Legacies with Karen V. Guth

Kristian Petersen:

Welcome to Religious Studies News. I’m your host, Kristian Petersen, and today I’m here with Karen Guth, associate professor of religious studies at the College of the Holy Cross and winner of the 2023 AAR Book Award in Constructive-Reflective Studies. She’s here to speak to us about her book, The Ethics of Tainted Legacies: Human Flourishing After Traumatic Pasts, published with Cambridge University Press. Congratulations Karen, and thanks for joining me.

Karen V. Guth:

Thank you. Thanks for inviting me to do this.

Kristian Petersen:

Yeah, it was great. It was a great read, too. I’m glad I had the opportunity to dive into the book, although it’s not the fun-est of subjects, but certainly a critical one. And I think one that we’re dealing with across our various subfields in religious studies, so I hope others will pick up the book.

You’re dealing with the contemporary problem of reckoning with these remainders of harmful and injurious pasts. Can you start maybe telling us a little bit about where this project began for you and what made you decide to tackle such a difficult subject?

Karen V. Guth:

Sure, sure. Well, I’m a Christian ethicist, and the book really started with a crisis in my field, which was that of John Howard Yoder. John Howard Yoder was widely recognized as the most important apologist for Christian pacifism in the 20th century. And as we now know, he was also a serial perpetrator of sexual violence. As you can imagine, this raised a lot of really important and pressing questions in my field about how to think about his case. A lot of folks were asking questions about his work, the status of his work, the status of his authority on pacifism, and those questions fell right in my lap, so to speak, because I actually had written about Yoder in my first book. And so I was really wrestling with his case, and that was the impetus for this book.

But as I really got into his case, I realized that it wasn’t an isolated Mennonite problem or even an isolated Christian ethics problem, that there are cases like this across every field of endeavor and human history. And so I really wanted to wrestle with what exactly this problem was and how we could go about responding to it.

Kristian Petersen:

And you do a great job here. You kind of coined this “tainted legacies” as the name of this distinct moral problem. And I’m wondering if you could plot out what you mean by this term. You go into very systematic detail in the book. So what are some of the features of this, and what are some of the approaches or moral resources that you use to inform your project?

Karen V. Guth:

Yeah. Well, so as I said, when I really started to wrestle with Yoder’s case, there were a lot of relevant literatures that were helpful to me in thinking through it. I also noticed, as I said earlier, that it was a pervasive problem across a variety of fields, but there wasn’t actually, yet, any literature in philosophical or theological ethics that really diagnosed the precise problem that his legacy and others like it present us with. So that was one of the main tasks of the book — to think about what is this problem and how should we talk about it?

And so I call it tainted legacies, and for me, tainted legacies have four constitutive features. The first feature is that they contain indispensable goods or wield irrevocable influence. So it goes without saying, if there weren’t valuable things here, we wouldn’t have a problem.

But that’s the first feature. The second feature is that those goods or that influence is somehow tainted by the traumas of slavery or sexual violence.

And then third, those distinct traumas are also compounded by other traumas. And here I turn to the psychological literatures on moral injury and institutional betrayal, and those are concepts that name certain kinds of moral harm.

In the case of moral injury, I follow Jonathan Shay’s definition. He says moral injury happens when a legitimate authority betrays what’s right in a high-stakes situation. So it’s a form of leadership malpractice. And then there’s also kind of what I see as an institutional level of moral injury, which is known as institutional betrayal, and psychologists Carly Smith and Jennifer Freyd have developed this concept, and it has to do with trusted and respected institutions that harm those who are dependent on them.

And then finally, I saw that all of these cases have what I call remainders. There are texts, there’s bodies of work, there are monuments, practices, that serve both as reminders of whatever the original trauma was, but that also represent deeper injustices that are still with us today.

So for me, a tainted legacy has all four of those features.

Kristian Petersen:

I think it’s a really useful framework that I can imagine people applying in their own kind of subfields here. You also give us an instructive typology of responses to these moral problems. So what are the types of responses that folks or institutions have to these tainted legacies, and what do you see as the most productive path forward perhaps?

Karen V. Guth:

Yeah, so this is one of the really fascinating things for me as I started to look at different cases of what I came to call tainted legacies, which is that they all had a kind of common set of responses that basically mapped onto each other despite the fact that a lot of times the cases didn’t seem like they had anything to do with each other. So for example, questions about Yoder and the kinds of responses that people were suggesting kind of mapped onto conversations in philosophy about Martin Heidegger and his Nazism. And then those responses kind of mapped onto cases like the American Medical Association’s conversation around what to use with medical data that’s unethically obtained. And so it was really interesting to me to see that there was a common set of responses across these disparate cases, or seemingly disparate, I should say. And so one task of the book was really to kind of map out a typology of those responses. What I saw were five common responses, and then I proposed my own sixth preferred response. So I can just say a little bit about each of those if you’d like.

Kristian Petersen:

Yeah, that sounds great.

Karen V. Guth:

Yeah. So the first thing that I noticed is there are always people who are what I call deniers. There are a variety of different types of deniers, I mean, each of these responses have kind of subtypes within them.  But basically deniers are folks who don’t want to be transparent about whatever the violations are or won’t acknowledge them, or maybe sometimes they try to mitigate them or say that the influence of this figure or institution is so great that we don’t really have to think about the violations too much. So that’s the first response.

Then I also saw that there are a lot of folks who wanted to try to separate a figure like Yoder from his theology. So these folks will say things like, well, Yoder was a really, really bad person, but he was a great theologian. Or you have folks who think about Heidegger in the same way. That there’s a value to his phenomenology despite the fact that he may have been a Nazi. And so these folks are really trying to preserve the integrity or the authority of the body of work or the text, what have you, without letting it be tainted by the violations of its instigator.

Then we have what I call abolitionists. Abolitionists are folks who move in the opposite direction of the separationists. They want to say there’s no way we can actually separate these things, that whatever a person has done, who has contributed valuable thought, texts, et cetera, that those texts are forever tainted by what they’ve done. There’s no way to think of them as authorities anymore. And they tend to say, we’re not going to use that material anymore, even if it had some kind of good, we’ll just ban it. So these are folks, for example, who might take Yoder off the syllabus and say, we’re just not going to teach his theology anymore.

Then fourth, there’s a type that I call the revisionists, and these are folks who want to take into consideration the ways the various violations might shed new light on the figures or institutions in their work. And so they’re really all about the work of reassessing and reinterpreting a person’s theology or text given what we now know about them.

And then finally, I saw a common thread of folks that I call redeemers, and these are folks who are trying to salvage good from the ashes. I identify memorialization efforts here. I mentioned the American Medical Association earlier. They actually have a redeemer kind of position where they say, if we have medical knowledge that was obtained unethically, but it could actually save lives, that we should use it, we should salvage what good there is there, even though we recognize that there’s a kind of tainted quality to that knowledge.

And for me, all of these positions have advantages and disadvantages. I mean, I really tried hard in the book to think about what each type offers, what the drawbacks of each type were. But what I found is that the first five types tend to be focused on the remainders at the exclusion of larger questions about structural injustice. And so I put forward my preferred type, which I call the reformer, and reformers —they combine some of the responses, I think, of the last three types of the abolitionist response, the revisionist response, and the redeemer response. But they’re really interested in using the flashpoint debates or browned remainders to go deeper into addressing the structural injustices that led to the violations in the first place, and to try to reform structural injustice so that we don’t have to deal with this problem as much in the future.

Kristian Petersen:

Take us through some really interesting kind of case studies, I guess you could call them, or themes, the first around debates around cultural figures exposed during the Me Too movement; controversies around confederate monuments; and then the legacy of slavery at colleges and universities in terms of their relationship to the slave trade in the kind of founding and early workings of institutions. The final chapter, if we can skip there, you really kind of flesh out this debate about Yoder’s legacy, the struggle within the field of Christian ethics, and unfortunately, I think, in many of our subfields we have figures like this, and I think this might be the one that is, at least in our academic lives, the one that’s the topic that needs to get sorted out for many of our colleagues. So I’m wondering if we can kind of start there, even though you deal with him at the end, but can you tell us a little bit more about him, the debate around his work, and then how does one appropriately deal with the legacy of such a figure? And how do you employ your reformer approach to his work?

Karen V. Guth:

Yeah, that’s a great question. Yeah, Yoder, so he was a Mennonite theologian who taught at a variety of Mennonite institutions, but also at the University of Notre Dame until his death in 1997. And as I said earlier, he was widely recognized as kind of the authority on Christian pacifism in 20th-century American social ethics. And so when the full disclosure of his sexual violence was made known in a Mennonite Quarterly article by Rachel Waltner Goossen, it really sent shockwaves through our discipline.

I think his sexual violence was somewhat of an open secret among Mennonite communities. But as a graduate student studying him, I was not privy to any information about any violations. And there really was not an acknowledgement of his violations in the secondary literature.

But some of the questions that were raised about his case I also found pretty limited. Folks were saying, as I said earlier, what does this mean for peace church theology? How do we teach his work? Can we still teach his work? Can we still produce scholarship on his work? Is he still the legitimate authority on pacifism? These kinds of questions, and those are important questions, but you’ll notice that they’re all about Yoder and about his work, which are what I call the remainders.

And so this is the problem with some of the other responses for me is that they stay focused on the remainders rather than moving in the ethical directions that I think they should. And so for example, there are a variety of other questions that we could be asking, like questions about the survivors of his sexual violence, questions about institutional complicity in his violence and how he managed to perpetrate violence for so long without being held accountable. Questions about how to create a peace church theology that actually addresses the problem of sexual violence.

And so when I think about Yoder’s case, the reformer is really interested in those kinds of larger structural questions about what do we owe to survivors? How do we care for survivors? How do we create peace church theologies that better address the problem of sexual violence moving forward? How do we assess institutional responses to ensure that we can repair the harms of the past, but also move forward in positive ways? So I think that’s a little bit of a snapshot, I guess, for how I think about Yoder’s case as a reformer.

Kristian Petersen:

Yeah. It’s very obvious to me as a reader of the book that this will be valuable to others in religious studies. I wonder if you could think through how you imagine others in the study of religion might benefit from reading your work. How might they extend your project in other directions?

Karen V. Guth:

Yeah, so I think part of the work that the topology of responses does for me is that it’s actually part of my argument — that there is this thing called tainted legacies as a moral problem. So by showing that there are these common sets of responses across cases that come from wildly different contexts and different traditions, I’m showing that there is a kind of problem that runs across a variety of fields.

And so even though my case studies and analysis are grounded in Christian feminist and womanist ethics, I really do think, or I hope at least, that the project can be helpful for folks who work in other religious traditions or even outside of religious traditions. I mean, when you think about it, religious traditions themselves are tainted legacies. And so this is a problem that’s already there from the beginning with any religious tradition.

And so the framework of responses, I think, holds no matter what tradition we’re talking about. And so I hope that folks are able to find some conceptual tools and maybe even some concrete guidance for response regardless of what religious tradition they work with.

Kristian Petersen:

Yeah, I think they certainly will. There’s so much more to this book, and I wish we did have more time to go into it, but I want to give you an opportunity if there’s any kind of final thoughts that you’d like to offer or any kind of broader takeaways that you want listeners and hopefully future readers to know about your book.

Karen V. Guth:

Sure. Well, I’ll just maybe highlight one central argument of the book that we haven’t really talked about yet, which does have to do with my case studies that I drew from American public life. And I think you mentioned before that I have four case studies. One is about what to do with the work of artistic authorities who were exposed as sexual abusers in the Me Too movement. The second case study is how to think about the United States’ political tradition, our tainted political tradition, that espouses justice and liberty for all, but still celebrates things like confederate monuments. And then the third and fourth case studies have to do with thinking about American institutions of higher learning and how they make reparations for slave pasts, but also violations of a sexual nature. And in each of those case studies, I’m actually drawing on what I see as analogs from the history of Christian thought.

So one of the arguments of the book is that, at least in the Christian tradition, and I’m sure in other traditions as well, there are already versions of these conversations in the history of those traditions of thought around tainted figures, symbols, and institutions within religious traditions, and that those provide really valuable resources for thinking about these “public” case studies. So in some ways, the book is kind of a work of public theology. It’s meant to show the value of these religious resources for thinking about public and political cases that confront us every day.

Kristian Petersen:

Yeah, it’s a great book and certainly deserving of the award. So congratulations again, Karen.

Karen V. Guth:

Well, thank you. I appreciate that.