The Ethics of Tainted Legacies: Human Flourishing after Traumatic Pasts, By Karen V. Guth

Karen V. Guth’s timely contribution examines how intellectual and moral legacies of people and institutions whose sins of commission and omission—involvement in slavery or sex abuse scandals, for example—continue to force a reckoning within the academy and culture at large. As she notes, although the rise of #MeToo and widespread institutional scandals are relatively historically recent phenomena, the question of whether and how to distill “good” from a sinful tradition or leader harkens back to Augustine and the Donatist controversy. How do we best engage with tainted legacies that wield irrevocable influence and cause unjust harm?

Guth’s method is informed by structural analysis and a victim-centered approach. She employs a typology that is reminiscent of the late Christian ethicist H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture (1975) to identify six distinct modes of responding to tainted legacies. These positions are denier, separationist, abolitionist, revisionist, redeemer, and reformer. The classification scheme allows Guth to identify nuances in ethical responses that may or may not align with specific political positions or identities. For example, a separationist affirms a neat distinction between the violation and its instigator, whereas an abolitionist expresses “appropriate censure toward perpetrators and compassion toward survivors” (73). The most extreme position is that of the denier, who minimizes or altogether denies the violation, or in some cases, declares that “all is tainted.”

In this typology, there are multiple ethically adequate responses, as Guth explains, which generally 1) acknowledge harm and goods of the legacy in question, 2) address the specific violation and systematic injustices involved, and 3) consider both the immediate impact of the legacy and its formative effects. Guth argues that the best approach is that of the reformer, who attempts to salvage the good of the legacy from the destruction. This person expresses a commitment to truth-telling, appropriate memorialization of victims, learning, and putting tainted goods in the service of life-saving causes; they express a commitment to seeking larger structural and cultural reform.

Guth draws on womanist theology as a major source for her reformer approach. She compellingly employs feminist and womanist scholarly approaches to “texts of terror” from the Bible. Using a hermeneutics of suspicion, we can engage cultural icons and artists (and the symbols they create) who leave tainted legacies, including male performing artists. The argument is that “critical engagement with oppressive texts is necessary—not because we cannot unread them, but because we need to de-authorize them” (118). Guth applies Emilie Townes’s description of the “fantastic hegemonic imagination” and Delores Williams’s argument against the glorification of violence on the cross in Christianity to the debate over Confederate statues. In arguments about the legitimacy of these statues, moral agents navigate the institutional betrayal of ideals (such as the promise of freedom and liberty for all) as well as the larger legacy of the US, which has indispensable goods (such as freedom of expression). By centering the experiences and methodologies of Black women in assessing the meaning of the statues, Guth maintains that Confederate statues are less for the dead than they are a testimony to the endurance of white supremacy and the continued need to interrogate whiteness.

Other chapters deal with the tainted legacies of the pacifist John Howard Yoder, whose serial sexual abuse of women was covered up by the Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary until his death, and of Georgetown University and its slaveholding past. Guth is unwilling to concede that the respective legacies of Yoder or Georgetown can simply be dispensed with after knowing about their respective past sins/human rights violations. She provides four criteria for repair or making the suffering of innocent people meaningful: 1) truth-telling and memory; 2) honoring victims’ agency; 3) the possibility of learning; and 4) d reparations. From these criteria Guth ascertains that Georgetown, for example, has done a decent job of addressing the first three criteria but falls woefully short in the fourth, as they have focused on symbolic repair and not reparations.

These typologies and criteria will prove useful for cultural discussions and particularly undergraduate classroom environments, where students can evaluate different case studies currently circulating in American public life. Guth’s central contribution in this book, I would argue, is her ability to guide readers beyond the discursive limits set by our politically polarized culture and through a framework where ethical distinctions are worthy of attention. She encourages the reader to voice their commitments in ways that attempt to persuade others. Her privileging of historically marginalized voices and methodologies is critical to the success of her argument about tainted legacies. In collectively determining the values at stake in these legacies, we must first consult the persons who have been historically harmed by the authorities or institutions in question. Failing to do so only perpetuates harm.

The pedagogical use of moral injury in this book is interesting but raises a question about the evolving role and authority of the professor. For example, Guth observes that a large percentage of students in college classrooms have likely been exposed to some level of violence-related trauma (statistically speaking, experience of sexual trauma is common). Guth writes against trigger warnings and safe spaces and focuses more on preparing students for difficult conversations using moral injury as a conceptual framework. She argues that properly executed, a lesson on Yoder’s tainted legacy can encourage a critical lesson on authority, help students approach “right” and “wrong” in more nuanced ways, and show how different audiences have various goods at stake. I agree with these points. One should be curious, however, about whether such a framework assumes a professor-as-therapist model. What are our expectations of a college ethics professor who often does not have a background in psychology or counseling? College classrooms have long been flashpoints in the culture wars, but since the COVID-19 pandemic and the #MeToo movement, there seems to be an implicit—and maybe increasingly explicit—expectation that professors engage in therapeutic labor, for which many of us are not trained. We should pause and be critical of this phenomenon, even as we acknowledge the pain and struggle that occur inside and outside of the classroom.

One other point that deserves attention is the relationship between Christian ethics and the public sphere. Guth advances a Christian theological ethics of liberation (broadly construed) that offers a necessary structural and cultural critique of injustice in the status quo. Yet, how do our debates about the “remainders” of tainted legacies serve as places to build coalition and find things in common in democracy more generally? There is a parallel scholarly track along the lines of Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (2018) and Bonnie Honig’s Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair (2017). Honig, building creatively on Arendt’s insights regarding democratic engagement, highlights the importance of agonistic struggle in democracy and the role of public things and places as sites of struggle. Guth’s argument supports active democratic engagement, particularly in terms of her rejection of ideal types that shut down or prohibit discursive engagement around contested symbols and legacies. What does it look like to move beyond Christian symbols and theology? As a work of Christian ethics, Tainted Legacies engages important theological questions of suffering and justice and the possibility of redemption. In the landscape of religious diversity and questions about the viability of democratic pluralism, perhaps now is the time to think about more explicit engagement with other traditions and the places of both coalescence and divergence. What does it mean to be truly “public” in a way that accounts for many perspectives?

In summary, Guth’s argument and her meticulous typological parsing of perspectives helps us encounter, without shame or fear, the question of what to “do” with tainted legacies. Her investment in undergraduate pedagogy is especially significant, given the complexity of the topics before us. This is a welcome resource at a moment of profound uncertainty in our culture and higher education, as it provides a clear method for structuring difficult conversations.