Negative about affirmation - Letter to a Daughter - Column

Christian Century, June 1, 1994

Dear Ellen: I finally managed to follow your recommendation and watch Stuart Smalley's "Daily Affirmation" on Saturday Night Live. It's every bit as funny as you said. Perhaps it ought to be required viewing for every church member. In fact, I've been thinking of suggesting to Pastor Haden that we all take a vow not to use the word "affirm" for a year. If we had to get along without the term, we might learn to think more clearly.

Whenever I start thinking this way, Mr. Hollander comes to mind. He's certainly a decent man, and I imagine he's a fine counselor, but sometimes he acts as if the whole of life were a counseling session. Your father says outrageous things just to bait him. Last week, for example, he suggested that we devise a method for publicly shaming high school students who had children. I was afraid Mr. Hollander might have a stroke.

But the point is serious. Hope and I started talking about it when she came home from a basketball game the other day. She tells me that everybody's always very excited when one of the girls brings her baby to a high school event. I can understand that. I can't think of anything more thrilling than a baby. But, then, how are we to put forward certain ideals about what a marriage or a family should be? If we're so busy "affirming" these young girls and boys with their babies, we lose the capacity to distinguish right from wrong, the ideal from the flawed.

Why should we be surprised that the point of life for so many students becomes self-fulfillment? We have never suggested that they might have to make sacrifices in the name of an ideal. We don't hold them to anything, and, not surprisingly, pretty soon they don't hold themselves to any standards.

Just last week I went to a meeting of parents who wanted to discuss concerns about the high school. To my amazement, the constant refrain was that the teachers "just don't understand and appreciate" our children, and don't try to develop their talents enough. I sat quietly for as long as I could and then said that the real problem with the high school was that it didn't teach Latin. The nice thing about it was that they were conducting the meeting in a way intended to "affirm" all suggestions. Every comment was entered on a big chart at the front of the room. So my suggestion too will be transmitted to the school authorities.

Mr. Hollander says that someone with my training should understand that Christians, at least, should be people for whom forgiveness is front and center - which, of course, he equates with constant affirmation. But I'm not persuaded. Genuine forgiveness never paralyzes the capacity for moral judgment, since it forgives what is acknowledged as wrong and repented. That's a far cry from the affirmation talk that is clogging so many Christian arteries.

Moreover, there's a hidden element of condescension in much of that talk. If I try to hold you to an ideal, I don't simply "impose" my standards on you. I ask of you what I first ask of myself. That's the nature of an ideal: we hold it up not just for others but for ourselves. We don't distinguish ourselves from others. But when I simply affirm you without holding you to such ideals, I don't really take you seriously. And I make it too easy on myself. It's not particularly hard or costly for me to be affirming. What's hard, what requires a great deal of Christian virtue and ordinary tact, is caring about you while still holding you to an ideal. The hardest thing in the world is to fail a student while demonstrating concern for his or her well-being. The easiest thing in the world is to fudge the grade a little and pass that student.

It's the latter that's happening with all this "affirmation" talk - and I hereby renounce it for a year. If you will join the movement, we can declare ourselves its co-directors.

Love,

Mom