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Christianity Today reports on Wheaton College’s racist history: “Though the flagship evangelical institution was founded by abolitionists, over the next century and a half it turned away from concerns about racial equality. Even when the school’s leadership knew what was right, they frequently lacked the courage to ‘take a more vocal role in opposing widespread forms of racism and white supremacy’”, as the report reveals, “and too often ‘chose to stay silent, equivocate, or do nothing’ about racial injustice. We cannot be healed and cannot be reconciled unless and until we repent’, the task force concluded at the end of an 18-month study.” History is repeating itself in evangelical institutions these days. Today it’s over matters of same-sex orientation.
The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God: Why New Atheism Grew Old and Secular Thinkers Are Considering Christianity Again is a book by Justin Brierley, with a Foreword by N. T. Wright. It’s the most significant analysis of this inevitably suicidal “New Atheism”. As a vital apologetics thinker, Brierley moderated many debates between “New Atheists” and real Christians, so he’s recognized, e.g.: “When the New Atheists bring up atrocities committed by Christians – at which the ancient Greeks and Romans would not have batted an eye – they are appealing to a distinctly Christian ethic! Those who criticize the ethics of the Bible, are presupposing the ethics that the Bible has given them! Similarly, when progressives demand social justice, racial equality, the rights of women, and respect for the marginalized, they are drawing on the Christian heritage they tend to repudiate.” There’s much more of such accurate insight in Brierley’s book, and it should be read by all who’ve been erroneously propagandized in the entirely opposite direction.
“Keeping the ‘C’ in the YMCA” is a topic in the July 7th issue of First Things. As your editor recalls from his Saturday mornings in the YMCA in the late 1940s, the “Y” had already mislaid that very significant “C”. The “Y” in downtown Youngstown was all about swimming in the nude, running track and Joe Check’s showing all us kids how to “squat like on the toilet” when getting ready to hit a baseball with a bat.
A hundred years before, at the beginning of the Young Men’s Christian Association at an English garment factory, it was more about feeding hungry young souls. That was young George Williams’ calling. Interestingly and thankfully, there’s a budding desire on the part of many involved with the “Y” today to bring back Williams’ vision and reality.
The Alliance Defending Freedom is standing with a Christian homeless ministry in the state of Washington as the Yakima Union Gospel Mission is under a Christophobic attack, i.e., because this ministry wants to remain Christ-centered. The Union Gospel Mission is being ordered to hire non-Christians or else abandon its homeless charity.
Among Mormon college students in the US, 22% identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or something else. 1 in 4 American high school students identifies somewhere on the spectrum of LGBTQ, according to reports of the research from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Who instigated 20th Century “transsexualism”, today’s “transgender” movement? It was John Money (1921-2006), a New Zealand sexologist. He migrated to America in 1947, pushing his odd notion that one’s “sex of rearing” was more significant than one’s biological anatomy and genes, that gender is really a social construct. In 1954, he also promoted “erotic age roleplay” across generations.
His hunger for fame was given an unfortunate opportunity after an electronic operation to fix a young Canadian twin boy’s phimosis, to facilitate his ability to urinate, went very horribly wrong and totally destroyed that little boy’s penis. Media publicity on Money’s strange ideas reached the boy’s young Mennonite parents up in Winnipeg. Money’s “solution”, given to them, was to rear this XY boy as if he was a “YY girl”. This made no sense, but it made the headlines. The twin boys, with one now being reared as a little “girl”, were repeatedly sent down to Money’s office in Baltimore. During these visits, he’d lead the two kids into having sex with each other in front of him, role-playing as opposite genders, and he filmed them for his “research” on this and other pet theories, e.g., “Chronophilia”, “paraphilias”, etc. Finally, the twins begged their parents to please discontinue these dreaded visits down at Money’s office, and their parents agreed to it. Sadly, the damage had already been done and both boys later committed suicide.
In 1973, having done his doctoral dissertation analyzing the etiology and treatment research on homosexuality and founding The Homosexual Community Counseling Center in New York City and The Homosexual Counseling Journal, Ralph Blair was invited to lecture on homosexuality at Johns Hopkins University. John Money was his assigned host at Money’s residence. Money served Blair coffee in a rather banged-up pan that Money called his “billabong”, a New Zealand colloquialism for anal sex.
Money died in 2006, years after the suicides of both Reimer twins. But, David, who’d been reared as a “girl”, was always, quite naturally, a “tom boy”.
The savvy Bill Maher keeps “knocking them out of the ballpark”. Here’s another, as he states: “New rule: If you’re part of today’s woke revolution, you need to study the part of revolutions where they spin out of control because the revolutionaries get so drunk on their own purifying elixir, they imagine they can reinvent the very nature of human beings. Communists thought selfishness could be cast out of human nature. Russian revolutionaries spoke of the ‘new Soviet man’, who wasn’t motivated by self-interest but instead wanted to be part of a collective’. … No, turns out he wanted to be on a yacht in a Gucci tracksuit holding vodka and a prostitute, not standing in line all day for a potato. … Lincoln once said, ‘you can repeal all past history but you still cannot repeal human nature’, but he’s cancelled now, so f**k him”, Maher facetiously said, as he showed his audience photos of another vandalized statue of Lincoln.
Maher isn’t a Christian, but he sees what fits a Christian view of fallen human nature. He notes Mao’s “Red Guard”, quipping of Mao’s regime, “a lot of pointing and shaming went on, and oh, about a million dead. … Submit to reeducation! or, as we call it in America, freshman orientation.” New Yorkers recall a 4-ton headless monster of a Mao Jacket in the middle of Park Avenue back in 2008. Unintentionally, it was more proof of Maher’s point about the cluelessly “woke” who nonetheless keep on snoring away.
Research continues to find that the policies of PC coddling of college students’ “feelings” so sadly worsen their mental health. Suicides on college campuses now exceed 1,000 each year. That’s in addition to all who survive their attempted suicides. “Safe spaces”, “microaggressions”, “trigger warnings”, “speech codes” and DEI codes are just some of the quite foreseeable, though quite fashionably unforeseen, factors for this formula for a dangerous state of affairs and deadly downturn in campus mental health.
Unfortunately, yet, of course, it was considered politically incorrect to reasonably warn of such tragic outcomes. Thus, was lost, any frankly honest preparedness for difficult times to come after the counter-productive “baby-sitting” for trained-to-be-thin-skinned teens, forced them to survive outside of their “perfectly PC” classroom playpens. In the meantime, the uncoddled folks live through mean times, maturing in “schools of hard knocks”. They, thus, become realistically productive in real achievements by having learned to grow up in the fallen world as it is.
Harvard University is ranked as, by far, the worst university in the US for free speech. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and the College Pulse have released their findings on free speech culture at 248 of America’s largest and most “prestigious”, universities. According to FIRE’s survey of more than 55,000 students across the country, most attend colleges that “don’t value free expression.” Harvard is the worst, followed by the University of Pennsylvania, the University of South Carolina, Georgetown and Fordham. Sadly, but, of course, “self-censorship for fear of retaliation undermines free speech on these campuses.” As a scientist expressed with sadness: “Honest research and truthful publication of findings in the academic scientific community are being sacrificed at the altar of political correctness.”
“The new Red Scare taking over America’s college campuses” by Greg Lukianoff, attorney and CEO of The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, (FIRE) was published in The Washington Examiner in September. He reminds us of the early “Red Scare” from 1947 to 1950, when “around 100 college professors were fired for real or imagined Communist sympathies. These witch hunts, now known as McCarthyism, continue to represent the worst example of illiberalism on college campuses in American history.” But, as he says, “it’s worse today, much worse, across multiple important metrics. It’s on a historic scale.” In his new book, with Rikki Shlott, The Cancelling of the American Mind, he explains that “we define “cancel culture” as the uptick around 2014 of campaigns to get people fired, expelled, de-platformed, or otherwise punished for speech that is (or would be) protected by the First Amendment.” He reports, “In the last nine and a half years, we know of more than 1,000 campaigns to get professors punished for their free speech or academic freedom. Of those, about two-thirds succeeded in getting the professor punished, and almost 200 of them, nearly twice the number estimated for the Red Scare, ended up with the professor getting fired. We also know that 1,000 is a wild underestimate, as about 1 in 6 professors report having been disciplined or threatened with discipline for their speech, and a whopping 1 in 3 reported having been pressured by colleagues to avoid researching controversial topics.”
Christianity Today reports: “Eleven evangelical college and universities have announced record enrollment this fall—which is a record for breaking records, as far as anyone in Christian higher education remembers.” Among them are Asbury, Taylor, Samford, Abilene Christian, Cedarville, Dort, and East Texas Baptist University.
She’s not a Christian, but she thinks favorably of Christianity. That’s Louise Perry, who, in her moving piece, announces her alarm: “We are Repaganizing”. This is in the October 2023 issue of First Things. As editor, R. R. Reno, says repeatedly, “We enter the fray of contemporary cultural and political discussions with the confidence that it is God above who oversees our victories and setbacks. This confidence allows us to see clearly and speak soberly during uncertain times.” And it is a concerning alarm that Perry is ringing: “We are Repaganizing”. Coming from her and from Reno, it should ring a bell for Christians and all in an atmosphere that’s been so influenced by an underlying Christian outlook for centuries.
“Good Guys Doing Good” is a Christian reality series about Christians from various walks of life who render service to others in need. It has featured, for example, a very talented stunt man who brings fun to folks facing difficulties, before he presents the true relief that they need that’s freely offered in the Gospel. He’s heard Jesus. (Matt 10:16)
The Cathedral of Hope in Dallas, calling itself, “the world’s largest LGBTQ-friendly church”, hosts “Drag Sundays” with “The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence” in rainbow drag! Unlike the historic Catholic meanings of the term, the LGBTQ version is focused on always indulging in whatever you want to do. This woke Dallas Cathedral, denominationally tied to the ultraliberal United Church of Christ, was started in the early 1970s as one of Troy Perry’s Metropolitan Community Churches.
In the years since the Trump Administration brokered the Abraham Accords, historic bilateral progress has been facilitating significant advancements toward a workable peace to the Middle East. Investments, innovations, and interactions that were previously said to be impossible have been accomplished.
Pro Life Press reports that: “‘Pro-choice’ is out and ‘freedom’ is the new buzz word. … Telling women, they have the ‘choice’ to murder their own baby seems barbaric – even pro-abortion activists can’t deny this reality. Especially since Pro-Lifers immediately combatted the ‘pro-choice’ campaign by telling women to ‘choose life’. The radical pro-abortion group will now be known as ‘Reproductive Freedom for All’. … But what about the ‘freedom’ for an unborn baby?”
Well, Jesus gave the clearest guidance in terms of both the baby and the mother. In Mark 12:29ff, Jesus said: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this, love your neighbor as you love yourself. There is no commandment greater than these.” What neighbor is literally closer to a mother’s heart than her unborn baby?
And Finally: Coleman Hughes, writer and fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, gave a talk defending “color blindness”, i.e., with no regard to race, at TED’s annual conference. But after “blowback” from TED insiders, “TED failed to promote the video as it does others.” He wonders if TED wants to be just “another echo chamber”.