Four tiers in preaching, denominations, other…

Two brief reflections on my post a month back about four tiers or levels in Christian/theological publishing.

First: I think the tiers/levels I identify there apply to preaching as well. But because preaching is different from writing and especially from the genres and audiences each publishing tier has in view, the levels apply differently. Put another way, it is appropriate and good that there is a scholarly level of writing that very few can or ever will read. It is neither appropriate nor good for there to be preaching like that. Perhaps, I suppose, a chapel connected to Oxford or Harvard could justify that sort of preaching—but even then, it should drop down to a level 3 or even a pinch lower.

The exception proves the rule, in any case. Preaching, in my view, should never be above level 2; and the best preaching hovers between levels 1 and 2. Preaching should not assume a college degree; should not assume much, if any, background knowledge; should not assume much, if any, familiarity with popular culture; should avoid jargon; should avoid mention of ancient languages; should not name drop authors; should not make erudite allusions to great literature. Instead, it should be intelligible, accessible, and immediately relevant to a high school dropout in her 60s who never reads and doesn’t watch much TV, whether Netflix or the news.

Does that mean such a sermon will lack substance, heft, weight, meat, sustenance? No. But it does mean faithful preaching, week in week out, is very difficult indeed.

Second: A friend sent me a link to someone on Twitter—his name is Patrick K. Miller—riffing on my four tiers in relation to both church conferences and church traditions/denominations. I don’t have a Twitter account so I’m not able to look at the whole thread, but (a) the conference tiers seemed both apt and funny, while (b) I don’t think the ecclesial analogues quite worked. Here’s why.

It’s true, in 2023, that American Christians self-sort into churches based on education, class, wealth, and culture. That’s a sad fact. Protestants with graduate degrees like high liturgy; whereas evangelicals on the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum are more likely to attend charismatic, storefront, or prosperity churches. Granted.

The author’s implication, however, is flawed. I take Miller to be suggesting that the market comes for us all, churches included, and it’s best we accept this self-sorting and (for eggheads like me) avoid condescension. Agreed on the latter, less so on the former. Why?

Because this self-selection by class is neither inevitable nor universal. It’s contingent. It’s a product of a very particular moment in a very parochial ecclesial subculture. Catholicism and Orthodoxy and Anglicanism are all flies in the ointment here (I often group these together as “catholic” traditions). Both past and present, these traditions encompass high and low, rich and poor, over- and under-educated. Nothing could be “higher” liturgically than these communities, yet the type of person who regularly attends them is not indexed by income or number of diplomas.

It isn’t natural, in other words, it isn’t just the way of the world for well-off folks to go “high” and less-well-off folks to “low.” In fact, this very distinction doesn’t exist in many parts of the world. Go to Catholic Mass or Anglican liturgy in Africa and you’ll see charismatic gifts alongside smells and bells. Eucharistic liturgy is the common inheritance of all God’s people down through the centuries, not just the sniffy or effete. We err when we take our current passing moment as a kind of timeless law. Infinite sectarian fracturing, by doctrine and stye and personal preference, is not the rule in Christian history. Religious liberty plus capitalism plus consumerism plus the automobile plus evangelicalism plus populism plus seeker-sensitivity-ism plus so many other factors—all contingent, all mutable, all evitable—brought this situation to pass. We need not accept those factors. We can reject and oppose them, seek to overturn them.

We are not fated to the present crisis of Christian division. Our churches should not cater to it as a given, but fight it as an enemy. Self-sorting by class is only one way this enemy manifests itself. Let’s not pretend it’s a friend. Expel the evil from among your midst.

Deconstruction

My post on Thursday generated a lot of responses, many of which were positive. One mostly mild but nevertheless negative reaction was a defense of the concept of deconstruction, seeing in my post an unfair diminishment of what for many has proven to be both a necessary and a healthy process of growth in faith and repudiation of false or destructing teaching.

That’s fair. The piece I wrote was a blog post, shot off on little more than a whim. The point of it was less why deconstruction is bad, more why my friends and colleagues who presuppose that my main task in the classroom is deconstructing my students’ beliefs are dead wrong. I didn’t intend the post as an entry in the Deconstruction Wars—God forbid—which I find to be simultaneously vicious, vacuous, and largely pertaining to highly specific sub-cultures in American evangelicalism. The soldiers in these wars seem insistent on refusing to listen or understand one another. And since I’m not enlisted in either this or any intra-evangelical war, I don’t think of what I write as ever anything more than observations from a friendly outsider who lives in, if not enemy territory, than a sort of foreign land.

Having said that, in the hopes of clarifying where I was coming from in my post and offering some of those observations, here’s my two cents on that ill-famed and contested word, “deconstruction.”

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Deconstruction is just a word. It’s not a technical term. Like every ordinary word, you know its meaning by the way people use it. To be sure, people don’t use it in identical ways, but those ways are nonetheless quite similar, and one or two primary meanings rise to the top of common usage.

By way of comparison, consider transubstantiation. That is a technical word. It has a prescriptive meaning however you or anyone else uses it correctly. Why? Because it was a term of art invented for a purpose: to give a name to whatever it is the magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church believes (which is to say, teaches) occurs in the eucharistic rite, following the fourth Lateran Council and as developed by St. Thomas Aquinas and the Council of Trent.

Deconstruction is not like that. Unless you’re exegeting Derrida—and here’s the part where I remind you that exegeting Derrida gives you quite a bit of (shall we say) hermeneutical latitude—deconstruction is not a piece of jargon, a technical word, or a term of art. Its meaning is not determined by any magisteria of which I am aware, and that includes Christian Twitter. What it means is how it means in the natural discourse of those who deploy it. Which means, in turn, that to say, “D doesn’t mean X, D means Y,” is only a rather implausibly dogmatic way of saying, “I use D differently than you do,” which is itself just a way of saying, “I would prefer to restrict the use of D to mean Y instead of X.” The first phrasing sounds like a statement of grammatical fact, and thus a sort of rebuke; the second is mere description of difference of usage; the third is a normative claim, supportable by argument if one is in a mood to supply it.

It is perfectly defensible to opt for the third phrasing. That’s part of how the meaning of contested terminology gets sorted out. The second phrasing is a way of making disagreement intelligible, though it doesn’t move the needle of the conversation one way or the other. The thing to avoid is the first phrasing. There is no eternal dictionary definition on hand to which one may refer in parsing and correcting others’ usage of deconstruction. So it’s not only silly to bang one’s fist on the digital disk, insisting, flush-faced, that the word doesn’t mean X because it only means Y. It’s false.

The good news is, when faced with a novel word trailing behind it a range of possible meanings, we can hash out together how we think we ought to use the word, and why. That’s worth doing in this case, since deconstruction is very much a feature of The Discourse today. Even if we only establish distinct meanings that different people use in various contexts for diverse purposes, we might understand one another better, which is a worthy goal in itself.

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I’m not going to try to settle what we all ought to understand by deconstruction. That’s a fool’s errand in any case. I do want to make a few remarks on the wider cultural trend the term names and why I said about it what I did in my original post.

Lest I be at all unclear, there are many, many people for whom deconstruction describes a crucial part of their spiritual formation in which they divested themselves of wicked or false beliefs or practices and learned to amend or replace those beliefs or practices with true or life-giving ones. To the precise extent that that experience is what is meant in general by deconstruction, then it is obvious to me that deconstruction is both necessary and good, a work of the Holy Spirit worth celebrating and commending. And I personally know folks, both college students and friends in mid-life, who fit this description and who unquestionably needed such an experience—if, that is, they or their faith were going to survive.

At the same time, I do not think this is the only experience named by deconstruction. And if I’m honest, I do not think it is the primary one, common though it may be.

The primary one is what I named in my post on (re)construction:

The form is the thing: deconstruction is a style. Deconstruction is a mode of being, a moral, social, and spiritual habitation in which to dwell, for a time or indefinitely. Deconstruction says: I’m unlearning all that I ever thought I knew—usually about the Bible, Christian teaching, Jesus, faith, or some charged element therein. Deconstruction in the imperative says: You must unlearn what you have learned. And what you have learned, you learned from an authority in your life, namely a parent, a pastor, a church, a school, a mentor, a sibling, an aunt, a grandmother, a coach, a friend. Which means, at least as the message is received, that you must unbind yourself from the wisdom of such authorities; you must accept me, your teacher, as an authority above your inherited authorities, and defer to my learning over theirs.

This, as I hope is evident, is foolish, self-serving, and manipulative pedagogy. But it is the regnant pedagogical mode not only for professors but for every would-be influencer, life coach, self-help writer, and podcaster on the market, doubly so if they purport to be an expert on matters spiritual. And the content (i.e., the catechesis) matches the form (i.e., the pedagogy): nothing concrete whatsoever. Generic therapeutic self-affirmation clothed in whatever the latest HR-approved, capital-appropriated progressive cause happens to be. Goop gone wild; woke goop. De-toxined crystals against toxic positivity, VR social justice in the metaverse, and oh by the way click here for your subscription to the weekly newsletter from Deconstruction, Inc, it’s only $39.99/month.

Granted that I allow myself to get carried away there a bit (though forever and always you must credit me, I demand it, for “woke goop”), the basic point stands. Deconstruction today has become a sort of brand with which a certain class of evangelicals and exvangelicals would like to be identified. It has been transformed into a commodity that confers upon the person a particular social status, a status apt to those who have passed an invisible threshold of salary, graduate degrees, and political opinions. That status we may call “not disreputable.” To be disreputable is to be associated with the wrong people, in this case the people who raised you or the people you worship with, people who lack in the extreme the right status and the right opinions. Deconstruction™ provides permission structures for you either to hold such people at arm’s length or to renounce all their ways and works. You need not be associated with them, because (you now realize) you are unlike them. And the prompt for such realization is deconstruction.

At this point I will repeat: Is this all that deconstruction is, for anyone and everyone? No! I just said above that it is altogether something different for plenty of folks. But is it also this, namely the influencer-mediated mass phenomenon of Insta-trademarked social and spiritual status marked above all by the public signaling of newly disavowed disreputable and offensive beliefs and associations (or, as it happens, newly acquired reputable and inoffensive beliefs and associations)? Yes, it is. And I don’t know that I could believe you were being honest if you denied it.

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There’s a third style of deconstruction worth mentioning, and its complexity is found in its unstable placement between the two I’ve already described. It’s this one that I was largely after in my original post, because it’s the one I see my students most susceptible to at this stage in their lives. Recall: I’m not a pastor. I’m a professor. My responsibility is the classroom, not the sanctuary. But because I teach at a Christian university and I have students of every major in my classes, it is part of my charge to teach on this or that aspect of Christian faith and theology in such a way that I am forming my students in the truth of the gospel as an outworking of the academic task.

Among the ways by which one can approach that charge, I identified two. One is deconstruction, the other is (re)construction. Deconstruction as a pedagogical mode treats students as ill-formed fundies in need of a sort of intellectual transfusion: my wisdom replacing their corrupted upbringing. I cannot put into words my contempt for this style of teaching. It is self-aggrandizing nonsense. It spits on students’ families and communities of origin. It presumes to know in advance that they come from ignorance and stupidity, whereas I represent knowledge and enlightenment.

This is an abject and risible failure of the high calling of teacher.

When I say I don’t deconstruct in the classroom, this is what I mean. I don’t set myself in opposition to all that my students have ever known or trusted, asking them to place their faith in me instead. That doesn’t mean I abjure my authority or expertise. It just means teaching does not have to be contrastive to be successful. It doesn’t have to involve evacuation of the contents of students’ minds before learning can begin. It certainly does not require covertly incepting students such that they learn from the professor that, to be an educated person, they must actively distrust the very source of their life: their parents, their churches, their neighbors and coaches and mentors—in short, everyone they’ve ever loved.

Let me give a concrete example. I am explicit in my classroom that I hope to make an anti-Marcionite of every one of my students. I suppose I could do that by telling them, in so many words, that their churches are just the very worst for instilling in them, intentionally or not, a tacit skepticism of Israel, Israel’s scriptures, and Israel’s God. Why, though? Why must I engage in “them bad, me good” to make my point? Instead, among other things, what I say is: Think through the logic of your commitments, which are by and large the commitments of your churches and families. Do they believe the Bible is the word of God? Is the Old Testament in the Bible? Do they believe the God and Father of Jesus Christ is the God of Abraham who created the world? So on and so forth. It’s not hard at all for them to see, and quickly, that they and their communities are already committed to not being Marcionite. The subtle question then becomes, Where and how and why did they imbibe the assumption, however deep-seated, that the Old Testament is a second-class citizen in Holy Scripture? And that’s when we get cooking.

Do you see? You could describe what I’m doing there as deconstructing my students’ Marcionite beliefs. Is that really necessary though? Because you could equally describe it as building up (and grounding) my students’ antecedent but largely implicit beliefs about the unity of God, God’s people, and God’s word. And if what I’m after here is a choice between alternative pedagogies, then the latter is not only a superior description of what is happening. It is a guide to the “how,” the style and sensibility, of my teaching. It shapes my approach and governs my words. It reminds me, constantly, that I’m in the business of building, not tearing down—all the while allowing that building sometimes involves rebuilding, or removing this slat for that one, or securing walls or foundations in a more reliable way, and so on. The end is the edifice, which is why St. Paul calls for edification. That end has an aim or goal, then. It also implies a terminus, a destination, a point of completion. Ultimately that completion is in God’s hands, in God’s time, and arrives only after death. Keeping the end in mind, though, helps the teacher, or at any rate this teacher, from supposing that the construction project is aimless or without guidance, a wholly human endeavor in the philosophically constructivist sense: something we do, on our own for our own purposes, since of all things the measure is man.

In the world of education, especially academia, it can be tempting to believe that Protagoras is right. But he’s not. And my worst fear for my students is that they will be seduced by the most childish of all the deconstructions on offer, namely, that there are no answers, only questions, that deconstruction is a journey without a destination, that faith is only faith so long as you don’t believe in anything in particular, that what the gospel is good for is reinforcing what makes me comfortable and never demanding of me risk or loss, suffering or sacrifice, or (horror of horrors) disreputability.

I want my students to know Christ, the living Christ who is both more beautiful and more terrible than they’ve ever imagined. That means training them to ask good questions, and it certainly means crucifying their (and my) expectations of what may be true of God, what may be true of us, and what the true God may truly ask of each of us. If the result for my students is deconstruction in the good and proper sense, then so be it: you’ll get no protest or complaint from me. But if the result is the loss of Christ, if the result is an endless voyage away from God into the false self fashioned for them by the postmodern merchants of identity (whose god is their stomach, which is to say, Mammon), and if they call that deconstruction—then I don’t want anything to do with it. Such deconstruction will find no ready welcome in my classroom, only hostility and refusal.

Like everything that can be used well or poorly, then, deconstruction may be judged by its fruits. If it gives us Christ, we ought to welcome it. If it does not, we ought to turn it away. If sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t, then we ought to judge case by case. At the very least, we should know in advance the good it is capable of doing and judge it accordingly. If by and large it fails to do that good, doing it only on rare occasions, then we are justified in viewing deconstruction as a general cultural trend to be something worth lamenting and resisting. And if I’m wrong, if the bad sorts of deconstruction outlined above are the exception to the rule, then God be praised: he’ll have proven me a fool again, and not for the last time.

Incomplete theses on God's will, providence, and evil

Last week, in my upper-level majors course on systematic theology, the topic was providence. We read classical accounts of divine and human agency and discussed the nature of God's will. I wrote up some provisional, incomplete theses to help guide them through the thicket. I'm sharing them below, partly as an aid to others, partly as an invitation to be corrected by my betters—this area is simply not my specialty. St. Thomas, pray for this theologian's poor soul!

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Affirmations

1. God, as the sole creator and author of creation ex nihilo, is solely responsible for the ongoing existence and well-being of the creation.
2. God is sovereign, omnipotent, omniscient, and good.
3. God is Lord of creation.
4. God upholds creation as a whole and in all its parts at all times, without ceasing.
5. God underlies, informs, and enables any and all activity in creation: nothing happens apart from God; no creature can act apart from God’s sovereign will.
6. God conducts creatures and creation as a whole toward their proximate and final ends, in this world and the next.
7. Nothing exists or happens outside the scope of God’s will.
8. Sin and evil are contrary to God’s will; sinful deeds and evil events occur.
9. God does not will sin, nor is God the author of evil.
10. When and where sin and evil are found in creation, God permits it.
11. God is able to bring good from evil and sin, including when they are intended by creatures to obstruct God’s purposes.
12. In the end, God will triumph over all sin and evil, and they will be no more in the new creation.

Implications

1. We do not know why God permits sin and evil.
2. On its face, a sinful deed or evil happening is a surd: meaningless in itself; neither sin nor evil is ever (really, deeply, ultimately) good.
3. The experience of suffering or loss is not itself necessarily sin or evil.
4. God may therefore actively will (rather than permit) our suffering in this world.
5. “Everything happens for a reason” is either true in an incomprehensible way (where that “reason” is Christ, who will reveal all to us only in glory) or false in a facile and pastorally disastrous way (where the starvation of children has a readily intelligible reason we can grasp in the moment).
6. The relationship between God’s will (as primary cause) and my will (as secondary cause) when I engage in sin (say, lying) is mysterious and inscrutable: somehow my willing as a free agent in bondage to sin possesses some deficiency (or, rather, lacks something necessary) that keeps it from fully performing righteous activity in full in accordance with God’s will and command.
7. So that: 
1. We may say that God wills in all my willing, but...
2. ...we may not say that God wills the sin I invariably will.

Principles of Luddite pedagogy

My classes begin in this way: With phone in hand, I say, "Please put your phones and devices away," and thereupon put my own in my bag out of sight. I then say, "The Lord be with you." (And also with you.) "Let us pray." I then offer a prayer, usually the Collect for the day from the Book of Common Prayer. After the prayer, we get started. And for the next 80 minutes (or longer, if it is a grad seminar or intensive course), there is not a laptop, tablet, or smart phone in sight. If I catch a student on her phone, and Lord knows college students are not subtle, she is counted tardy for the day and docked points on her participation grade. Only after I dismiss class do the addicts—sorry, my students—satiate their gnawing hunger for a screen, and get their fix.

For larger lecture courses (40-60 students) with lots of information to communicate, I use PowerPoint slides. But for smaller numbers and especially for seminars, neither a computer nor the internet nor a screen of any kind is employed during class time. I further require my students to submit their papers (however short or long, however rarely or commonly due) in the form of a printed copy brought to class or dropped off at my office. And for weekly (or random) reading quizzes, students must come prepared with pencil and Scantron; we begin the quiz promptly at the beginning of class, with the questions coming sequentially in large print on the PowerPoint slides. I give them plenty of time for each question, but I do not go back to previous questions. If you arrive late and miss questions or the whole thing, so be it.

I rarely reply immediately to emails, and may not reply at all if the question's answer is specified in the syllabus. I will reply within 24 hours, but I will not reply (unless it is an emergency) after hours, while at home; some days I may not even check my work email between 5:00pm and 6:00am the following morning.

I have a strict attendance policy: I count both tardies and absences; three of the former count as one of the latter; and beginning with three unexcused absences (for a twice-weekly course), I deduct four percentage points from a student's final grade. So, e.g., a student with four unexcused absences and three tardies would go from a 91 to a 79. More than six unexcused absences means an automatic failing grade.

Students behave exactly as you suppose they would. They come to class, they show up on time, they do the reading, and they take hand-written notes. The only distraction they fight is drowsiness (I will not say whether I contribute to that perennial pedagogical opponent). And for two 80-minute blocks of time per week, these students who were in second grade when the first iPhone came out have neither a device in their hands nor a screen before their eyes nor buds in their ears.

It turns out I am a Luddite, at least pedagogically speaking. On the questions raised by this set of issues, my sense is that my colleagues, not just at my university but in the academy generally, are divided into three campus. There are those like me. There are those who find us and our pedagogy desirable, but for reasons intrinsic or extrinsic to themselves they cannot or will not join us and fashion their classrooms accordingly. And then there are those who, on principle, oppose Luddite pedagogy.

This last group, broadly speaking, views screens, phones, tablets, laptops, the internet, etc., as positive supplements or complements to the traditional teaching setting, and want as far as possible to incorporate student use of them in the classroom. This view extends beyond the classroom to, e.g., learning management systems and e-books, videos and podcasts, etc., etc. The scope of the classroom expands to include the digital architecture of LMS: a "space" online where discussion, assignments, interaction, learning, video, editing, grading feedback, and so on are consolidated and intertwined.

What rationale underwrites this perspective? Perhaps it is simply "where we are today," or "what we have to do" in the 21st century, working with digital-native millennials; or perhaps it is neither superior nor inferior to traditional classroom learning, but simply a different mode of teaching altogether, with its own strengths and weaknesses; or perhaps it is not sufficient but certainly necessary alongside the classroom, given its many ostensible benefits; or perhaps it is both necessary and sufficient, superior to because an improvement upon the now defunct pedagogical elements of old: a room, some desks, a teacher and students, some books, a board, paper and pencil.

I'm not going to make an argument against these folks. I think they're wrong, but that's for another day. Rather, I want to think about the basic principles underlying my own not-always-theorized pedagogical Ludditism—a stance I did not plan to take but found myself taking with ever greater commitment, confidence, and articulateness. What might those principles be?

Here's a first stab.

1. I want, insofar as possible, to interrupt and de-normalize the omnipresence of screens in my students' lives.

2. I want, insofar as possible, to get my students off the internet.

3. I want, insofar as possible, for my students to hold physical books in their hands, to turn pages, to read words off a page, to annotate what they read with pen or pencil.

4. I want, insofar as possible, for my students to put pen or pencil to paper, to write out their thoughts, reflections, answers, and arguments in longhand.

5. I want, insofar as possible, for my students to develop habits of silent, contemplative thought: the passive activity of the mind, lacking external stimulation, lost in a world known only to themselves—though by definition intrinsically communicable to others—chasing down stray thoughts and memories down back alleys in the brain.

6. I want, insofar as possible, for my students to practice talking out loud to their neighbors, friends, and strangers about matters of great import, sustained for minutes or even hours at a time, without the interposition or upward-facing promise of the smart phone's rectangle of light; to learn and develop habits of sustained discourse, even and especially to the point of disagreement, offering and asking for reasons that support one or another position or perspective, without recourse to some less demanding activity, much less to the reflexive conversation-stopper of personal offense.

7. I want, insofar as possible, for my students to see that the world to which they have grown accustomed, whose habits and assumptions they have imbibed and intuited without critique, consent, or forethought, is contingent: it is neither necessary nor necessarily good; that even in this world, resistance is possible; indeed, that the very intellectual habits on display in the classroom are themselves a form of and a pathway to a lifetime of such resistance.

8. I want, insofar as possible, for my students to experience, in their gut, as a kind of assault on their unspoken assumptions, that the life of the mind is at once more interesting than they imagined, more demanding than a simple passing grade (not to mention a swipe to the left or the right), and more rewarding than the endless mindless numbing pursuits of their screens.

9. I want, insofar as possible, for my students to realize that they are not the center of the universe, and certainly not my universe; that I am not waiting on them hand and foot, their digital butler, ready to reply to the most inconsequential of emails at a moment's notice; that such a way of living, with the notifications on red alert at all times of the day, even through the night, is categorically unhealthy, even insane.

In sum, I want the pedagogy that informs my classroom to be a sustained embodiment of Philip's response to Nathaniel's challenge in the Gospel of John. Can anything good come from a classroom without devices, from teaching and learning freed from technology's imperious determination?

Come and see.

Roger Scruton on the new divisions of class, centered on TV

"The growth of popular sports and entertainment in our time, and the creation of a popular culture based in TV, football and mechanized music, have to some extent enabled people to live without ... home-grown institutions. They have also effectively abolished the working class as a moral idea, provided everyone with a classless picture of human society, and in doing so produced a new kind of social stratification—one which reflects the 'division of leisure' rather than the 'division of labor.' Traditional societies divide into upper, middle and working class. In modern societies that division is overload by another, which also contains three classes. The new classes are, in ascending order, the morons, the yuppies and the stars. The first watch TV, the second make the programs, and the third appear on them. And because those who appear on the screen cultivate the manners of the people who are watching them, implying that they are only there by accident, and that tomorrow it may very well be the viewer's turn, all possibility of resentment is avoided. At the same time, the emotional and intellectual torpor induced by TV neutralizes the social mobility that would otherwise enable the morons to change their lot. So obvious is this, that it is dangerous to say it. Class distinctions have not disappeared from modern life; they have merely become unmentionable."

—Roger Scruton, The Meaning of Conservatism, 169. Originally written in 1980, the book was heavily revised for a 2002 re-publication, from which this excerpt comes. With the rise of both "reality TV" and so-called "Peak TV," this semi-Marxist, though conservative, analysis would be worth modifying and extending into the new situation in which we find ourselves, especially in the U.S. (since Scruton is British).