The sad situation at the University of Oklahoma involving a junior psychology major, her essay, two TAs, Turning Point USA, and even the governor misses what I suggest is an important issue.

As a Christ follower, I think Samatha Fulnecky’s university and others have done her a great disservice. Many commentators have provided ample evidence of the poor quality of her essay; many commentators defend her as a victim of religious discrimination; and the faculty sponsor of the school’s Turning Point chapter offered a lukewarm defense of her essay. The university places the TA on leave, with some cheering and others objecting.

Protest at OU in response to the U suspending the instructor (photo, The Oklahoman)

I take Samatha Fulnecky at her word that she is a Christian. However, what I don’t accept from her is her grasp of humanity’s creation.

What she writes in her unqualified essay are trite examples from Moses’s creation of men and women. While skipping past Genesis 1:27 in which Moses writes, “male and female he [God] created them,” (RSV), she writes about Genesis 2:18, which tells another version of how men and women were created.

Without referencing the book of Genesis and the verse, she writes, “so He [God] created a helper for man (which is a woman). She goes on to explain that “the word [helper?] in Hebrew is ‘ezer kenegdo’ and that directly translates to ‘helper equal to”.[sic] She offers a non-cited source for that translation of “ezer kenegdo”, but the scholar Robert Alter writes “The Hebrew ‘ezer kenedgo’ (King James Version ‘help meet’) is notoriously difficult to translate.” (Alter’s footnote in his translation of Genesis)

Because she never clarifies, Fulnecky leaves us to believe she considers only the second creation story, since that one seems to support her belief best.

Graphic courtesy Inside Higher Education

Fulnecky continues when she writes, “He created us with such intentionally [sic] and care[sic] and He made women in his [sic] image of being a helper, and in the image of His beauty.” Fulnecky is correct about the image part in the Bible, but for the life of me, I can’t find Biblical support for women being created as beautiful helpers.

Fulnecky’s essay is a poorly written one that, in my view, harms Christianity by treating it not as a belief, a way of living as shared in the Sermon on the Mount, but as a pathetic way to argue against something to which she does not agree.

But her university, its leaders, and Turning Point are, I offer, using her and her essay grade as a stick to beat a gender argument. She was not discriminated against because of her religious beliefs; she received a grade determined by her TA (and a second TA, by the way) because she never answered the question; How does school bullying affect gender identity? Instead, she wrote her reasons for believing that there are only two genders poorly. And she never, even in that, cited sources.

Now, she has her Warhol moment of fame, and it will forever be on the Internet—such a burden for such a young person.