# The Direction of Required Reading Reveals Who Holds the Canon ## Claim In any field, whichever group must become fluent in the other side's thinkers to survive or advance, while the reverse is never required, is not the group setting the canon — the asymmetry in who has to read whom is the power structure, independent of what either side's actual ideas contain. <!-- atomicity: 1 idea ✓ --> ## Scope & conditions - Applies wherever admission, credentialing, or advancement depends on demonstrated fluency in a body of thought — seminaries, academic disciplines, professional certifications, open-source contributor tracks. - The diagnostic is the direction of the requirement, not the content of either canon: ask who has to cite the other side to be taken seriously, and who never has to. - Doesn't claim the excluded voices are correct or that the required canon is wrong — only that whoever set the requirement, by definition, formed their own views without needing to answer the excluded ones. - Weakens where a field's required reading is genuinely reciprocal — every credentialing track requires fluency in every other track's foundational work — which is rare enough to be worth checking for rather than assuming. ## Evidence > [!quote] ID:rw_01m1h1fggkv50r8kkd90hz16yb > "There are certain groups in our culture who have the privilege of never having to have been conversant with black people or women or brown people in their matriculation. That's the robbery, the thievery that takes place in theological education. I got to know about you in order to survive. You don't even have to hear about me to earn a degree." Charlie Dates, describing his own theological formation, names the asymmetry precisely: to be credentialed and taken seriously, he had to be fluent in Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield by seventh grade, while white evangelical theological formation could proceed to a degree without ever engaging a Black, brown, or women's theologian. He draws the further conclusion that formation done this way is "accurate, but not exhaustive… an echo chamber" — the resulting doctrine reflects who was required reading for whom, not a neutral reading of scripture. ## Links - [[3. Resources/MOCs/Faith & Theology MOC]] — the theological-formation thread this claim comes from, and the general mechanism (who sets doctrine's emphases) the MOC's other entries examine from different angles - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/A Fabricated Anecdote Becomes Load-Bearing Doctrine Unchecked]] — contrasts; both describe how a closed formation process shapes what a group believes without the group noticing the shaping, one through a required-reading asymmetry and one through an unverified anecdote given more doctrinal weight than it can bear ## Tests / falsifiers - Pick any professional or academic canon and check both directions: does credential-track A require fluency in credential-track B's core texts, and vice versa? An asymmetric answer predicts that track A's practitioners will describe their own formation as complete and accurate while missing the same gaps Dates names. - Find a field with genuinely reciprocal required reading and check whether its practitioners report fewer blind spots attributable to formation — if the asymmetry claim is right, mutual requirement should measurably reduce the "accurate but not exhaustive" problem. ## Source - [[3. Resources/Readwise/Articles/The Greatest Contradiction in American Christianity Charlie Dates Ep. 736]] — Holy Post episode 736, Skye Jethani interviewing Charlie Dates on his book *What Hath Justice to Do with Righteousness?*; a friendly author interview on a network that plugs the book, so treat the claim as Dates's own testimony rather than an independently adjudicated finding, though the specific asymmetry he names is not in dispute in the interview.