‘Grapevine’; more than just another school culture wars clash?

NBC News’ latest podcast gives listeners a dramatic story without cheap shots or superficiality, but — so far — lacks added insight that could move us forward.

 

By Bekah McNeel

 

Recent podcasts like “Southlake” and “Teaching Texas” should have us well acquainted with the flamboyantly-backwards-things-happening-in-Texas-education podcast genre.

There are more conservative places in the US, but none that wear their conservatism with more unironic self-caricature than the Lone Star State. Conspiracy theories, Bible-quoting, saying the quiet part out loud — it all makes for great listening in an audio medium. The public comment portion of any Texas school board meeting is a journalist’s gold mine.

But what do journalists do with the gold they mine as parents demand that publicly elected officials submit to the law of the Christian God or mock the idea of gender fluidity?

That’s the question that hovers over “Grapevine,” a new six-part podcast reported by NBC News’ Mike Hixenbaugh and Antonia Hylton about “faith, power, and what it means to protect children in an American suburb.”

In the first episode, The Girl And The English Teacher, we meet the main characters in their politically fraught context and get some background on how they got there. They include a queer 20-something teacher named Em, a trans girl named Ren, and her parents, one of whom, Sharla, is a devout Christian.

In the second episode, The Seven Mountains, the podcast picks up where Southlake left off, in a way, and explaining the various players and ideology animating the conservative Christians running for school board seats in North Texas.

As a journalist and Christian raising two children in Texas public schools, I’m invested in good journalism about the religious influence on education in Texas.

And, based on what I’ve heard so far, what Hixenbaugh and Hylton are conveying is nothing more extreme than what I’ve heard in my own reporting or from friends and family watching their school districts descend into intractable conflict.

And yet, I find myself wishing for more careful contextualizing of the conflict — which is, after all, as much about the differences between conservatives and Christian nationalists as anything to do with liberalism.

Even more than that, I want the podcast to give us useful insights for enduring these kinds of conflicts, rather than six hours of endless strife.

 

I want the podcast to give us useful insights for enduring these kinds of conflicts, rather than six hours of endless strife.

 

As a lifelong Texan myself, I hold no protective shield in front of my home state. Privately, I may be its harshest critic.

But I do demand one thing: if you’re going to criticize bigotry or mistrust of science in public, criticize bigotry and mistrust of science.

Don’t take cheap shots at cowboy hats or folksy phrases.

Regressive things do happen in Texas — but the book-contesting parents, the pastors, the creationists, are not backwards people. They are often afraid, frustrated, and caught up in what they’re convinced is a battle with eternal stakes.

Fortunately, Hixenbaugh and Hylton, who also created the much-admired Southlake podcast, know this.

This new series starts with the colorful snippets of angry testimony at a school board meeting in Grapevine-Colleyville Independent School District, a middle-class suburb of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex.

Quickly though, the journalists zoom out to provide the context for the rise of what they call “a coordinated and well-funded campaign to exalt God in the halls of public schools in North Texas.”

Then, “Grapevine” makes use of one of the primary perks of the long runway Hixenbaugh and Hylton have, telling the kind of fraught family story so often lost in the churning waters of ideological politics.

The characters — teacher Em Ramser, Christian mom Sharla, and transgender child Ren — are presented three-dimensionally (as much as possible with Sharla refusing to be interviewed).

Of course, these people are also presented as symbols of the parents’ rights movement, the teachers they target, and the kids they are trying to protect.

The characters are not caricatures, though it’s difficult not to fall into a heroes and villains dichotomy.

 

The characters are not caricatures, though it’s difficult not to fall into a heroes and villains dichotomy.

 

It’s pretty clear in the first episode that the teacher, Em, is being presented as somewhat of a hero character.

Charming and a little naïve, she provides the book, The Prince and the Dressmaker, that becomes ammunition in the mom’s quest to root out the indoctrinating teachers in Grapevine-Colleyville ISD.

At 27, she is already beleaguered in the way that any education reporter will recognize. She’s a queer woman, sticking out in her community, who is frequently asked, “have you found a church yet?”

“I look like a gay person in a school where no one else looks like a gay person,” she tells the podcast.

But however she is framed — and wherever your sympathies may lie — teachers are not amoral actors. Lending a child a book like The Prince and the Dressmaker is not a value-free choice — especially when that kid has tried to run away from a non-affirming parent, like Ren did.

Students like Ren do beg the question of whether teachers should be advocates, allies, and social role models.

So much of the workforce fatigue we report on has to do with the constant scrutiny and embattlement of teachers. Teachers have never been immune to compassion, and while we valorize their explicit crusades against hunger and bullying, we reporters play into the drawing of an arbitrary line of where their compassion needs to stop.

To be fair, Ramser does talk explicitly about her desire to be a role model or beacon of hope for kids who have never been exposed to queer happy endings. But when it comes to the book in question, she and the podcast team default to guilelessness and curricular appropriateness as a defense.

Similarly, it’s too easy to make Sharla a one-note villain.

I want to see Sharla as a mother whose relationship with her child has, at some point, gone beyond conflict with either Ren or her ex-husband (who does present his side of the story in depth in episode one).  When she says at a school board meeting “I lost my son,” I wanted to know what that meant beyond an insistence on misgendering a trans child.

I get the sense that Hixenbaugh and Hylton wanted more nuance as well, to give the heaping sympathy for Em some kind of balance. But one of the most frustrating drawbacks of ultra-conservative Christians is their insistence on picking the theater of engagement, and their insistence that all of life be either vehemently for or against something.

Tired of how they are portrayed in the media, many Christians refuse to be interviewed, and thus the flattened character becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

We’re not our best selves in blogs and public comments, but that’s all a journalist is left with if you don’t sit down for an interview. But maybe that’s the point, at least for those who are profiting from the perception of oppression. A good “liberal media hit piece” sharpens the teeth of a fruitful enemy.

 

I get the sense that Hixenbaugh and Hylton wanted more nuance as well.

 

As it moves into its second episode, “Grapevine” demonstrates how a family’s personal crisis became swept up in a movement to capture the culture for Christ — an old saying I’m borrowing from my own evangelical culture warrior days.

Christian nationalism is the parent ideology of this belief that public schools should be teaching not just Judeo-Christian ethics or morals, but in extreme cases even Protestant doctrine.

Hixenbaugh and Hylton connect the political promise to Seven Mountains dominionism, a specific version of Christian nationalism that doesn’t just want kids to be free to pray in school. It wants school prayer to be mandated. The seven mountains doctrine doesn’t call for school board members seeking council from their pastors. It calls for them to write policy according to the Christian Bible.

Episode two takes listeners on the rip-roaring path that brought dominionism to the Grapevine school board via Patriot Mobile and Rafael Cruz (Ted’s dad). Anyone who has experienced or read about a community that has seen a school board campaign run by Moms for Liberty or similar conservative groups that blur the line between grassroots and Super PAC knows how this all goes.

Look. North Texas is not politically homogenous. Dallas is blue, Fort Worth can lean purple. Collin County keeps people on the edge of their seat in every election. But I’ve yet to hear of a bona fide Marxist, or even a socialist, or even a democratic socialist majority on a school board up there. People who consider themselves conservative — people I would consider conservative —are the ones in danger of losing their seats. The battle in many rural and suburban Texas towns is between the conservatives and the dominionists.

 

The battle in many rural and suburban Texas towns is between the conservatives and the dominionists.

 

It’s also worth noting that Hixenbaugh here runs into another freeze-out, this time in a recorded attempt to talk to Patriot Mobile’s Leigh Wambsganss. She tells Hixenbaugh, with tape rolling, that she doesn’t feel like the coverage had been fair.

As a reporter in Texas, I’ve gotten this response from would-be sources, so have most reporters who report on the far right. Hixenbaugh pleads the case every reporter does, but it’s clear that this podcast is going to be missing some key voices and will likely probably be written off by the hardcore conservatives as a biased hit piece.

It’s not a hit piece, at least not in its first two episodes. But it’s going to feel slanted, because the perspectives represented have gone beyond the point of a morally neutral disagreement.

In honestly presenting the competing viewpoints in at play, the podcast buzzes with ethical, moral, and emotional change — and to portray the situation in Grapevine as anything less would be untrue.

 

It’s not a hit piece, at least not in its first two episodes.

 

Two episodes in, I’m not primarily concerned with journalistic cheap shots. Education news podcasts do seem to rely less on those tropes than other national coverage. And I don’t feel like the podcast is a one-sided hit piece.

I admire the podcast for devoting the second episode to a particular doctrine and how it manifested in a community. The theological background for this stuff is important. Lots of journalists don’t seem to have the desire to do that kind of homework when religion intersects with other spheres.

My biggest concern is that the framing of the podcast will make the two sides of the debate seem further apart than they really are. What’s instructive about these communities is the hair’s breadth that can separate the parent activists and their still-conservative neighbors, and the forces that drive people in different directions. I really hope they get into that here.

 

Previously from McNeel

The case for writing angry

Reporting remote participation levels

Previous podcast and documentary reviews from The Grade

Praise and a wish for more from ‘Raising Kings’  (by Joe Williams)

‘Nice White Parents’: a different way of covering school inequality

‘Room 205’ asks big questions about school reform (by Tara García Mathewson)

‘America to Me’ highlights the need to deepen school integration coverage

Some questions about ‘The Problem We All Live With’