The Human Animal at a High School Reunion

If I were a diehard evolutionist seeking to discredit the Christian doctrine of man, I would not spend my time digging with Dr. Leakey in Africa, but rather roaming the halls of America’s high schools. They offer science a showcase for what Phil Donahue calls “the human animal” at its most animalistic. I say that having just returned from my twentieth-year high school reunion.

In biology class we had to learn an impressive-sounding formula that none of us understood: Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. It means, among other things, that individual organisms will act out the characteristics of their type. In other words, biology is destiny. And high school surely illustrates that principle.

At the reunion, the subspecies still showed the characteristics they had displayed so prominently 20 years before. The group we called “jocks” still walked with a peculiar swagger, despite the potbellies and receding hairlines. Another group, cheerleaders, were the best preserved. They had learned early that face and body were their best tickets to success in the world, and thus they disguised facial wrinkles and extra pounds better than anyone else. In stocking feet, rather sheepishly, those career women and housewives led us all in half-remembered high school cheers.

One high school grouping has gone through several mutations in the last 20 years, from “hood” to greaser to punk. None of them came to the reunion sporting hair slicked down with butch wax or wearing a white T-shirt with a cigarette pack rolled up in the sleeve, but the former hoods still huddled together on the sidelines, holding up the fringe of society.

One of my most vivid high school memories involves a colossal clash between the number one hood (I suppose he would be a gang leader today) and the number one jock, the school quarterback. At least 300 students blocked a hallway, keeping frantic teachers away, as the two fought over a girlfriend.

I will never forget how abruptly the spirit of the cheering mob changed when the hood grabbed the quarterback and bashed his head against a sharp water fountain nozzle—once, two times, three times. The crowd melted away in sickened silence, letting teachers through at last to tend to the quarterback, now writhing on the floor in a widening pool of blood. The girl who had inspired the combat sat hunched in a tiny ball by a locker, sobbing.

A behaviorist could view such a scene as the human version of Rocky Mountain sheep lowering their heads and colliding with a force that echoes through the canyons. The humans, like sheep, were establishing a tribal and sexual dominance, a status won through brute force.

But there is another side to the human animal. G. K. Chesterton said, “Man is not a balloon going up into the sky, nor a mole burrowing merely in the earth; but rather a thing like a tree, whose roots are fed from the earth, while its highest branches seem to rise almost to the stars.” And Tolstoy added this pungent observation: “Materialists mistake life for that which limits life.” Both were expressing the most basic fact of all Christian anthropology, that the human animal was created to be more than animal.

As I reflected on my high school experience, it struck me that the gospel often calls us to cast off the simple “biology is destiny” formula and to reach farther and higher toward spiritual reality. In short, we are asked to transcend biological destiny and prove that we are more than animals.

High school amply demonstrates our drives toward self-preservation, a “survival of the fittest” of the most primal kind. Like animals, we compete with each other on the basis of power and appearance. A beautiful face, a famous name, or an impressive physique can guarantee success, and it is that kind of success that high school so lavishly rewards with its homecoming crowns and sports trophies. High school shows what happens when, untrammeled by the polite artifice of “maturity,” we express the base instincts we inherited as members of the human race.

But our Christian calling asks us to defy those instincts. Jesus announced a great reversal of values in his Sermon on the Mount, when he elevated not the rich or attractive, but rather the poor, the persecuted, and those who mourn. Instead of admiring such traits as wealth, political power, and physical beauty, he warned against their grave dangers. A passage like Luke 18 shows the kind of people who impressed Jesus: an oppressed widow, a despairing tax collector, a small child, a blind beggar.

Instinctually, animals mark the weak for quick destruction; we are commanded to value them. We are also told that fulfillment comes not in the “pursuit of happiness,” but rather in the pursuit of submission and service. We are asked to respond to our most grievous failures not by covering them up, but by repenting of them openly. When you are wronged, says the gospel, extend forgiveness, not vengeance. And don’t cling to the valuable things, for the kingdom of heaven is a pearl of great price, worth all that you own.

Christians have long worried that science, especially evolutionary theory, might reduce humanity to a status lower than that the Bible assigns it. But what if, instead of trying to prove that homo sapiens is not an animal, we concentrated on demonstrating that we are far more? Instead of challenging the age of fossils or disputing the results of genetic engineering, we could determine to prove that biology is not destiny. What would happen in the national consensus if these nine words came to mind when you said the word “Christian”: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control?

I know for a fact that no one in my high school gave out awards for the nine qualities listed above, a list known to most Christians as “the fruit of the Spirit.” But I believe that the effect of those qualities will endure long after all high school yearbooks have turned to dust, long after the solar system itself has grown cold and still. And perhaps, just perhaps, exhibiting the fruit of the Spirit may be our very best defense against a materialist view of mankind here on earth.

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