Bible College Pres Arrested for Forced Labor: Hypocrite or Extremist?

http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/atheologies/7904/bible_college_pres_arrested_for_forced_labor__hypocrite_or_extremist__/

May 29, 2014
By HOLLIS PHELPS

Hollis Phelps is Assistant Professor of Religion and Mount Olive College, Mount Olive, NC. He is the author of Alain Badiou: Between Theology and Anti-theology (2013)



A few days ago, the president of Cathedral Bible College in Marion, SC was arrested for allegedly forcing international students to work long hours for low pay by threatening their immigration status. Although there are still few details, various news outlets have reported that federal agents have probable cause to charge Reginald Wayne Miller with forced labor, a felony that can carry up to a twenty-year prison sentence per charge.

It’s a serious charge, of course, and it serves as a good reminder that we still live in a world where practices of severe exploitation are not unknown. But when religious believers are seemingly involved, our individual and collective disgust often intensifies—if anyone should know better and do otherwise, they should. Rightly or wrongly, and whether we count ourselves among them or not, we tend to hold the faithful to a “higher” standard, and this goes double for the leaders. That’s because such standards are supposedly essential to belief itself, and thus part and parcel of what it means to be religious. Think, for example—and it’s an example that’s particularly relevant in the case of Miller—of Jesus’ distillation of the law into the command to love God and neighbor, which Jesus takes as essential for “eternal life.”

Since the actions of religious believers are, we assume, intimately bound up with their beliefs, when the former do not align with the latter, we often hear a charge of hypocrisy, a charge that in addition is usually meant to call into question the sincerity of the beliefs in question. To label Miller a hypocrite, in this instance, simultaneously points to the apparent disconnect between his actions and “normal” Christian teachings (forced labor is the opposite of love of neighbor) and his seeming lack of concern for this disconnect. Hence the students’ claims against Miller that, at least for them, the school functioned as little more than a front for forced on- and off-campus labor.

The charge of hypocrisy can, however, be convenient for the religious community itself, in that it enables those believers to disavow and dismiss the actions of an errant individual or group. Although seldom stated in these terms we often find the religious equivalent of the no true Scotsman fallacy: since no true Christian would force others into labor, Miller must, if the charge is true, not really be a Christian. Or, to use another example, the Westboro Baptist Church must not really be Christians because true Christians would never protest at funerals.

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