It’s a curious phenomenon that racists rarely see their own racism—the plank in their own eyes. That was true during the long, torturous days of slavery. It was true during the long torturous days of Jim Crow laws. It was true during the Civil Rights Movement. And it’s true now. No, it’s not conservatives who are spreading racism while remaining blithely blind to it. It’s Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robin DiAngelo, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and BLM who are spreading racism like manure throughout our cultural system. And it’s racist Ibram X. Kendi who sees himself as “anti-racist” and wrote,

The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.

And like racists of yore, they profit handsomely from their efforts to encourage Americans to judge people by the color of their skin.

Leftist change-agents posing as “diversity educators” have captured the wills of corporate executives. Now Big Business is in the business of not only selling goods and services but also in repackaging racism as “antiracism” and browbeating employees into pretending they believe it.

Prior to capturing the wills of corporate execs—not known for their familiarity with or investment in arcane academic theories or for steely-spined moral integrity—leftist change-agents in sullied ivory towers captured the wills of teachers and administrators—not known for independent or “critical” thinking, or for commitments to diversity, inclusivity, or tolerance. In my experience, will-capturing of yellow-bellied teachers and administrators is an almost effortless task. All it takes is a bit of name-calling topped by a dollop of mockery, and the spineless among us bend like paper straws dipped in a Big Gulp.

Now states are requiring ongoing critical race theory (CRT) indoctrination for staff and faculty. Schools are forcing white students to engage in exercises designed to make them feel shame for their skin color (goodbye self-esteem movement).  And schools are racially segregating students in what are euphemistically called “affinity” groups. “Separate but equal” has returned with a vengeance thanks to vengefully regressive “progressives.”

That probably explains why administrators and faculty said next to nothing when the increasingly woke, decreasingly conservative evangelical Wheaton College held a racially segregated pre-graduation ceremony for colorful people on May 8, 2021, which was advertised as “RACIALIZED MINORITY RECOGNITION CEREMONY” (all caps in original) and held in the campus chapel. While it was created “Especially for undergraduate students, staff, and faculty of color,” the school provided “limited seating” for colorless people. I wonder if those seats were way in the back.

One Wheaton faculty member who likely loves Wheaton’s embrace of re-segregation is associate professor of philosophy and critical race theorist Nathan Cartagena who was recently interviewed for leftist Christian Jim Wallis’ Sojourners’ magazine. In this interview, Cartagena explained how he sussed out Wheaton’s friendliness to CRT by delivering a visiting lecture on controversial critical race theorist Tommy Curry during the interview process:

I wanted to see: Is this a place that would welcome such reflection? I received a warm welcome from the students, my department, etc., so I thought “OK, this is a place where I can do this.”

And by “do this,” Cartagena meant, not expose students to the debate on CRT, but to promote CRT:

I taught a reading group my first year at Wheaton that involved one of the important texts in the critical race theory movement, Faces at the Bottom of the Well by Derrick Bell. The following year I asked if I could teach a half-semester class on critical race theory—I got a full thumbs up.

Derrick Bell is another controversial figure in the critical race theory movement “whose writings on ‘critical race theory,’” conservative African American economist Thomas Sowell explains “promoted an extremist hostility to white people.”

Sowell described the academic transformation of Bell, attributing it largely to his scholarly inadequacy at Harvard:

As a full professor at Harvard Law, Derrick Bell was … surrounded by colleagues who were out of his league as academic scholars. What were his options at this point?

If he played it straight, he could not expect to command the respect of either the faculty or the students — or, more important, his own self-respect. …

Derrick Bell’s options were to be a nobody, living in the shadow of more accomplished legal scholars — or to go off on some wild tangent of his own, and appeal to a radical racial constituency on campus and beyond.

His writings showed clearly that the latter was the path he chose. His previous writings had been those of a sensible man saying sensible things about civil-rights issues that he understood from his years of experience as an attorney. But now he wrote all sorts of incoherent speculations and pronouncements, the main drift of which was that white people were the cause of black people’s problems.

Cartagena openly admits the cunning way he gets his students to accept CRT:

When I was first teaching on CRT, I was very explicit about when something was a CRT essay or quote. Now, one of the things I do is I present CRT literature without telling students that it’s CRT literature. Then I ask them what they think about it. The overwhelming response from the students is: “Wow, this essay is so rigorously researched, so clear, and so well-argued. Even if I don’t agree with every claim, I learned so much,” etc. Then, after they’ve sung a little praise song, [laughs] I tell them they’ve read a piece by a critical race theorist. You can see a look of disillusionment set in — this part gets really hard, if I’m honest. On the one hand, it’s a healthy destabilization. You’ve gotta remember that a lot of my students are racialized white folks. If they’re not now going to say that everything they just said was false, how do they reckon with believing there are things to learn from critical race theorists while knowing that the stakes, in some of these communities they’ve been a part of, are so high that to say such is to find themselves ostracized?

While this tactic appears to be a means to enable students to approach ideas objectively, with a mind decluttered and “decolonized” by the detritus of white privilege and systemic racism, educators know it’s a tactic that can be used to propagandize. Presenting students with an interpretive lens beclouded by jargon, ambiguous language, assumptions, and subtexts with which students have no familiarity doesn’t educate; it indoctrinates.

At least as offensive is Cartagena’s evident pleasure in “destabilizing” his students and emotionally manipulating them by manufacturing cognitive dissonance.

Enquiring donors and parents considering sending their children to Wheaton may want to know if Cartagena spends equal time having students study any of the many works of criticism of CRT like Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everyone or Voddie Baucham’s book Fault Lines: The Social Justice Movement and Evangelicalism’s Looming Catastrophe.

Anthony Esolen, professor and writer-in-residence at Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts, senior editor at Touchstone Magazine, and contributing editor at Crisis Magazine, opposes the teaching of CRT in schools:

The problem is that the schools shouldn’t be teaching any “theory” of human behavior at all, for two principal reasons. First, the students do not have anything close to the learning or the broad human experiences that would serve as evidence for checking the theory. For the same reason why it is pointless, and perhaps destructive, to teach literary theory to young people who have hardly begun to read literature at all, because they have no evidence or experience from which to judge the theory, and they will instead be prone to force what literature they do encounter to fit the predeterminations of the theory, so it is pointless, and probably destructive, to teach some theory of human behavior to children who need first to have the experiences, personal or vicarious, that the theory purports to explain.

But the second reason … is more grave. It is that human behavior does not admit of that kind of theory at all. I am not talking here about moral philosophy, or about anthropological observations, or about history and its more or less reliable guidelines. All “theories” of human behavior are necessarily ideological and reductive: whether it’s from Skinner or Marx, it doesn’t matter. The simplest things we do in a given day are steeped in so many motives, passions, thoughts, physical exigencies, and moral commitments, we dare not simply paste a label on them to explain them away and have done with them.

There are glimmers of hope that Americans on both the right and left may be approaching their limits with the racist “antiracism” movement. Virtually everyone on the right and increasing numbers of people on the left are fed up with the ubiquitous manifestations of critical race theory. Americans see CRT is corrosive and divisive. They see CRT is being used to control discourse. And they see that “progressives” are passing CRT off as inarguable, objective truth. “Progressives,” in control of most of the levers of power and influence, feel no obligation to debate CRT’s arguable assumptions. Nor will they acknowledge that CRT is arguable as they use hard-earned tax dollars to promulgate it in government schools. And hoo boy, are they promulgating.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/CRT-at-Wheaton-College.mp3

Join us in Collinsville on Saturday, May 22nd for an IFI Worldview Conference about CRT!

IFI was honored to have theologian, pastor, and courageous truth-teller Doug Wilson speak at our September banquet, after which he continued his critique of culture in an interview with Pastor Derek Buikema of the Orland Park Christian Reformed Church. Pastor Wilson addressed the cultural issues to which Christians must respond: abortion and “same-sex mirage.” Take a break from the holiday hubbub to savor and be both educated and challenged by words that more pastors and priests should be speaking.

We have two video versions for your consideration.  Our short “highlights” video is six minutes long and can be viewed HERE.

The full video interview can be viewed HERE.  So sit back and enjoy twenty-two minutes of instructive and uplifting conversation with Pastor Wilson. And if you enjoy it, please consider sharing it with your friends.

IFI was honored to have English professor Anthony Esolen as one of our esteemed speakers at our banquet in September 2015. Professor Esolen spoke eloquently, soberly, and politically incorrectly about the state of American culture—or lack thereof. Following the banquet he sat down with Derek Buikema, pastor of preaching and worship at Orland Park Christian Reformed Church, for a bracing interview on the corrupt state of our culture and the toxic environment we call public education.

We have two video versions for your consideration.  Our short “preview” video is three minutes long and can be viewed HERE.

The full video can be viewed HERE.  So get a cup of hot chocolate and cozy blanket and enjoy a half-hour of scintillating conversation with Professor Esolen. And if you enjoy it, please consider sharing it with your friends.

In his recent Christianity Today (CT) blog post, New Testament scholar Scot McKnight defends recently retired CT president Mark Galli’s hubristic diktat about the necessity—in Galli’s view—of Trump’s removal from office:

Whether Mr. Trump should be removed from office by the Senate or by popular vote next election—that is a matter of prudential judgment. That he should be removed, we believe, is not a matter of partisan loyalties but loyalty to the Creator of the Ten Commandments.

Trump’s removal from office would inarguably result in the election of a man or woman who endorses, among other things, human slaughter, the intentional creation of motherless and fatherless children for homosexuals, the chemical sterilization of gender-dysphoric minors, the sexual integration of private spaces, a diminution of religious liberty, and mandatory transpeak (i.e., the mis-sexing of cross-sex impersonators)—facts that cannot be ignored in this discussion.

In his blog post, McKnight tries unsuccessfully to recast Galli’s argument via the creation of a colossal strawman painted with an equally colossal brush. He argues that both support for and opposition to Galli’s argument—which in McKnight’s view was solely a moral judgment wholly devoid of political dimensions—reveals a philosophical commitment to “statism”:

At no time in my life have I seen the church more engaged in politics and more absorbed by a political story. … [M]ake no mistake, the American story is increasingly statism. … [S]tatism entails an inherent belief, either explicit or implicit, in the state. It is a belief that solutions to our biggest problems are found in the state and the Christian’s responsibility from the Left or the Right is to get involved and acquire political power. Statism as I am using it here is the idol of making a human the world’s true ruler. Statism exalts humans and human plans and voting. Statism centers its faith in the future on who rules in D.C. Statism makes government a god. … Those who think the CT editorial meant support for the other party are statists. Those who think it meant support for their party are statists. Neither was the case. It was a moral judgment.

McKnight’s strawman is constructed out of a dollop of redefinition, a smidge of ambiguity, and a dearth of nuance. Take special note of McKnight’s critical admission: “Statism as I am using it here” (emphasis added).

The church has always been deeply involved in political issues that are at their core, biblical. That’s why the church was involved in the abolitionist movement and the Civil Rights Movement, both of which created hostility and division within the country.

Statism is typically defined as “centralized government administration and control of social and economic affairs.” As such, deep concern by conservative Christians about the expansion of government, its encroachment into spheres of life where it doesn’t belong, and its promotion of evil as good is not tantamount to “statism.” In fact, such concerns and efforts to participate in the project of self-government to remedy these offenses against truth and liberty are the antithesis of “statism.” The desire to reduce the size and scope of government, to protect human life, and to strengthen support for the First Amendment so as to allow individuals, families, and churches to flourish cannot rationally be conceived of as “statism.”

While the belief that Galli’s editorial “meant support for the other party” may have been wrong, such a belief is not proof of statism. Moreover, while Trump’s removal from office may or may not signify support for the other party, it certainly means the other party will have even more opportunity to harm individuals, the family, and the church.

McKnight implies that Christians believe solutions to all our biggest problems are found in the state, whereas many Christians have more reasonable beliefs. They believe that elected leaders can pass policies and laws, make judicial appointments, and issue executive orders that embody and reflect either good or evil, truth or falsehood, wisdom or foolishness, and that either contribute to or undermine human flourishing.

They value religious liberty and speech rights. They seek justice for humans in the womb. And they are deeply thankful for the blessing of self-government that the oppressed from all around the world come to America to enjoy. And yes, they feel passionate about these issues, which, while political, are first and foremost, biblical, which makes their moral judgments sound.

But apparently McKnight sees the passionate desire of Christians to elect leaders who will protect humans in the womb, women in the locker room, and religious liberty as an idolatrous quest for power and proof of statist drives. Did he feel that way about William Wilberforce’s tireless efforts to end the slave trade in England or Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s divisive efforts to end the egregious violations of the civil rights of African Americans?

Paul teaches that “there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God.” So, who is the authority God has instituted here in America? We, the people, are. Christians who feel passionately about the importance of exercising the blessing of self-government through voting and who believe a flawed man who has implemented policy decisions wiser than the ones his opponents would implement are not making an idol of him or exalting human plans. They are properly exercising their authority instituted by God.

Mcknight also believes that “progressive” Christian Randall Balmer was right when he asserted that

Christianity operates best from the margins of power, not in its center. Too many today think the solutions to our problems are anchored to the one leading the White House.

I’m not sure who Balmer and McKnight hang out with because no Christian I know believes that “the solutions to our problems are anchored to the one leading the White House”—at least not all the solutions to all our problems.

Many Christians believe, however, that some of the solutions to some of our problems can be remedied by elected government leaders, including, of course, the president. Do Balmer and McKnight believe no solution to any problem can be found in the decisions of our president?

While many Christians supported candidates other than Trump during the primary, when the General Election arrived, the choices were between two morally flawed candidates—one of whom offered some glimmer of hope for decisions that would contribute to human flourishing. That candidate—Donald Trump—has made judicial appointments, issued executive orders, and implemented policy decisions that have surprised many conservatives—decisions for which they are thankful.

Appreciation for these good decisions no more constitutes “wholesale evangelical support” for Trump than presumably CT’s support for the work of Karl Barth constitutes wholesale support for this deeply sinful man.

In a 2017 article about Thomas Jefferson’s affair with his slave and theologian Karl Barth’s decades long affair with his assistant, whom he brought to live in his home despite the pain it caused his wife, Mark Galli wrote,

In light of these profound contradictions, what are we to do with the messages of each of these men? Does their behavior tarnish their ideas? … I don’t think so. … Like many, I’ve long hoped to find a heroic human figure whom I can admire unflinchingly. But time and again, I’ve had to discover there is no such person. Well, except the one known as the True Man, who dialectically enough has been known to use ignoble things to shine forth his glory.

Are Donald Trump’s achievements commensurate with those of Thomas Jefferson or Karl Barth? No, but that’s irrelevant to the arguments of Galli, and presumably Dalrymple and McKnight. Their arguments concern whether it is moral for Christians to vote for a morally flawed candidate with better policies than his opponent, and whether admiration for the good policies he has effected constitutes idolatry.

Balmer wants Christians to be marginalized except when he doesn’t. Balmer waxes enthusiastic about times when Christians “set the social and political agenda” for the country:

For years, I have argued in books, articles, op-eds and even a couple of documentaries that evangelicalism, in contrast to the Religious Right, has a long and distinguished history. Evangelicals set the social and political agenda for much of the 19th century. They advocated for the poor and the rights of workers to organize. They supported prison reform and public education. They enlisted in peace crusades and supported women’s equality, including voting rights.

Apparently, Balmer wants Christians on the margins of power only when he disagrees with their social and political agenda.

Still reeling from the 2016 election, Randall Balmer confesses,

I should be over it by now, but I confess that the number 81 continues to haunt me. Following the shock of Election Day 2016, the further news that 81% of white evangelicals supported Donald Trump was devastating to me personally. These were the same people who had been telling us for the past four decades that they were devoted to “family values,” but then they pivoted and, without hint of irony or apology, cast their votes for a twice-divorced, self-confessed sexual predator. … I was, well, devastated.

Here’s what Dr. King, a profligate philanderer—whom CT, with no hint of irony or apology, celebrates—said about Christians and political power:

I have watched many churches commit themselves to a completely other worldly religion which makes a strange, un-Biblical distinction between … the sacred and the secular.

…

There was a time when the church was very powerful–in the time when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. …  Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the people in power became disturbed and immediately sought to convict the Christians for being “disturbers of the peace” and “outside agitators.” But the Christians pressed on, in the conviction that they were “a colony of heaven,” called to obey God rather than man. Small in number, they were big in commitment. They were too God-intoxicated to be “astronomically intimidated.” By their effort and example they brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contests. Things are different now. So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s silent–and often even vocal–sanction of things as they are.

It’s a good thing the early Christians Dr. King described didn’t allow the “reputation” of the church to determine their actions.

McKnight, perhaps accurately, prophesies what Christianity “Tomorrow” will look like:

Evangelicalism … is shifting. … Christianity will be a justice-oriented evangelicalism.

Unlike many evangelicals, McKnight finds such a shift to be a good thing, citing favorably new CT president Timothy Dalrymple’s vision for both CT and evangelicalism:

Out of love for Jesus and his church, not for political partisanship or intellectual elitism, this is why we feel compelled to say that the alliance of American evangelicalism with this presidency has wrought enormous damage to Christian witness. It has alienated many of our children and grandchildren. It has harmed African American, Hispanic American, and Asian American brothers and sisters. And it has undercut the efforts of countless missionaries who labor in the far fields of the Lord. While the Trump administration may be well regarded in some countries, in many more the perception of wholesale evangelical support for the administration has made toxic the reputation of the Bride of Christ.

…

[Trump] is a symptom of a sickness that began before him, which is the hyper-politicization of the American church. This is a danger for all of us, wherever we fall on the political spectrum. Jesus said we should give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s. With profound love and respect, we ask our brothers and sisters in Christ to consider whether they have given to Caesar what belongs only to God: their unconditional loyalty.

Some thoughts on Dalrymple’s thoughts:

• It’s out of love for Jesus and his church, not for political partisanship, that many Christians feel compelled to support President Trump. It’s out of their deep desire to protect those who are knitted together in their mothers’ wombs that many in the 81% that give Randall Balmer the heebie-jeebies feel compelled to support this presidency. It is out of love for God who created man male and female that Christians support Trump. Are those idolatrous statist desires?

• Has Trump’s presidency harmed African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Asian American brothers and sisters? How so? What’s Dalrymple’s evidence?

• For McKnight to cite Dalrymple’s concern for the “reputation of the Bride of Christ” is ironic because McKnight doesn’t view marriage —the earthly picture of Christ, the Bridegroom, and his church, the Bride of Christ—as an essential Christian creed:

The issue is that essentials of the faith and theological robustness speak to the Christian creeds and not to anything about marriage.  

In contrast, Professor Anthony Esolen, writing in Touchstone Magazine, says this about marriage:

The marriage of man and woman is an image of Christ’s union with his bride the Church (Eph.5:32, Rev. 21:20), and that is meant as no mere poetry. The madness of our time would reduce the Bible’s most exalted revelation of the nature of the divine image in man and of the union of God with man to a figure of speech.

Of course, it’s possible to believe the historical understanding of marriage is non-essential and still be concerned about the reputation of the bride of Christ in the world, but Dalrymple’s assertion and McKnight’s admiration for it raises the question, does the world hate evangelicals more for their support—often grudging—of President Trump or for their support for marriage as intrinsically and unalterably the union of one man—the earthly representation of Christ—and one woman—the earthly representation of the church? (If marriage is the picture of Christ and the church, what does same-sex “marriage” mean other than that there is no distinction in nature or function between Christ and the church? And how would that implicit claim be non-essential?)

• Since the alienation of children and grandchildren is offered as justification for abandonment of Trump in favor of morally flawed candidates who endorse evil policies, what do McKnight, Dalrymple, and Galli make of Jesus’ words from Matthew 10:

Brother will deliver brother over to death, and the father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death, and you will be hated by all for my name’s sake. … Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. ³⁶ And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household.

Now that’s some serious familial alienation Jesus has promised us.

Will McKnight, Dalrymple, and CT reject the non-essential understanding of marriage if it makes “toxic” the reputation of evangelicals in the world? Will they reject the non-essential biblically based understanding of marriage if it alienates many of our children and grandchildren?

• Voting for Trump does not demonstrate idolatrous worship of (or “unconditional loyalty” to) him anymore than voting for any of the candidates who heartily endorse human slaughter and soul-destroying sexual immorality would demonstrate “unconditional loyalty” to them.

How would the world respond if evangelicals supported someone as morally degenerate as Pete Buttigieg, whose degeneracy—one could argue—far surpasses Trump’s? The world would rejoice. By currying favor with the world, the church’s “reputation” would shine because the church would now be in the world and of the world. But that shine would not be from the true light of the True Man.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Are-Politically-Engaged-Conservative-Christians-Idolaters.mp3

IFI is hosting our annual Worldview Conference on March 7th at the Village Church of Barrington. This year’s conference is titled “Thinking Biblically About Our Corrosive Culture” and features Dr. Michael Brown and Dr. Rob Gagnon. For more information, please click HERE for a flyer or click the button below to register for the conference.

Professor Anthony Esolen is one of America’s cultural treasures. He writes about moral decline in America with insight, boldness, and eloquence—no timid, hesitant, evasive speech from Professor Esolen. Professor Esolen writes and speaks about the pernicious lies with which leftists sexual revolutionaries have poisoned America.

In 2015, Dr. Esolen wrote,

The latest apologists for the Sexual Revolution—that great swamp of sewage backup, human misery, family breakdown, squalid entertainment, and lawyers—have been saying that the most radical anthropological breach ever known to man, the detachment of marriage from childbirth and the plain facts of nature, will have no effect (none at all, not to worry) on marriage and childbirth and family and community life. To which I reply, “Haven’t you said that before?” About what exactly have the sexual revolutionaries been right?

In the four years since Dr. Esolen wrote those words, the fetid swamp has spread, human misery has increased, squalid entertainment entraps more and younger people, and lies are celebrated as truth. Please watch Dr. Esolen describe the cultural darkness in which we are now immersed and articulate a counter-cultural vision for America and America’s children that is built on a firm foundation.

IFI depends on the support of concerned-citizens like you. Donate now

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Join us as Allan Carlson, Rod Dreher, Tony Esolen, Douglas Farrow, Robert P. George, Russell Moore, John Stonestreet & others discuss The Benedict and Other Options for fighting the world, the flesh & the devil.

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In stunning semi-secretive decisions motivated by fear of religious persecution, the boards of two major evangelical organizations, the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) and the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU), have voted to pass motions that represent an unacceptable compromise with homosexuals and the science-denying “trans” cult. These two influential organizations passed motions that would ask the government to add “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” as protected classes in federal anti-discrimination law in exchange for religious liberty protections that many people know would merely be stepping stones yanked out from under people of faith eventually.

According to World Magazine, in October, the NAE board unanimously passed its motion, titled “Fairness for All” (first discussed in Christianity Today in 2016), which asks “Congress to consider federal legislation consistent with three principles,” the problematic one which says this:

No one should face violence, harassment, or unjust discrimination on the basis of sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity.

Of course, no one should face violence on the basis of any condition. So far, so good. But the rest of this principle is a theological, philosophical, political, and rhetorical mess. To illuminate the mess, here are a few questions for the Christian leaders who passed motions based on it:

1.) While this compromise may—for a short time—protect Christian colleges and universities, how might the religious liberty of ordinary Christians in, for example, wedding-related businesses, be affected if under federal law, homosexuality becomes a protected class?

2.) How are the terms “harassment” and “unjust discrimination” defined now? Could they be redefined or “expanded” later? Would a refusal to provide goods or services for the unholy occasion of homoerotic faux-marriage constitute unjust discrimination? Would opposition to co-ed restrooms and locker rooms constitute unjust discrimination? Would refusal to use incorrect pronouns when referring to those who masquerade as the opposite sex constitute harassment?

3.) Would those Christian leaders who voted for these motions have done so if, instead of the euphemisms “sexual orientation” and “gender identity,” in which are embedded false assumptions, the motions had used plain-speaking or even biblical terms? Let’s give the Fairness for All statement above a less-sanitized whirl:

No one should face unjust discrimination on the basis of their volitional choice to exchange natural sexual relations with persons of the opposite sex for unnatural relations with persons of their same sex, or for choosing to appear as the sex they are not.

How would that more accurately phrased statement have sat with the Christian leaders?

4.) Unlike other protected classes that are constituted by objective conditions that are in all cases immutable and carry no behavioral implications (e.g., sex and nation of origin), homosexuality, bisexuality, and opposite-sex impersonation are constituted by subjective and often fluid feelings and volitional acts with moral implications. Therefore, what other conditions similarly constituted will eventually be deemed protected classes? Why should homosexuality be included and polyamory or Genetic Sexual Attraction (aka incest) excluded?

To fully grasp the magnitude of the potential effect of these motions requires knowledge of the size of the organizations that passed them. The NAE “is an association of evangelical denominations, organizations, schools, churches and individuals. The association represents more than 45,000 local churches from nearly 40 different denominations and serves a constituency of millions.”

The CCCU “is a higher education association of more than 180 Christian institutions around the world,” including Bethel University, Calvin College, Colorado Christian University, Dallas Theological University, Franciscan University of Steubenville, Fuller Theological Seminary, Gordon College, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, Houghton College, Houston Baptist University, Judson University, Messiah College, Moody Bible Institute, Regent University, Taylor University, The King’s College, Trinity International University, and Wheaton College.

To be clear, we must not assume any of these colleges and universities supported the motion passed by the CCCU board. For example, Dr. Benjamin Merkle, president of New Saint Andrews College, which is a CCCU member, explained that “I’ve registered my opposition to this move, as have several other CCCU presidents.” 

While the CCCU and NAE boards capitulate to the Left’s relentless demand to have disordered sexual desires and deviant sexual behavior deemed conditions worthy of special protections, 75 prominent religious leaders oppose capitulation to such demands.

A document titled “Preserve Freedom, Reject Coercion” signed by religious leaders including Ryan T. Anderson, Rosaria Butterfield, Charles Chaput, D.A. Carson, Jim Daly, Kevin DeYoung, Tony Evans, Anthony Esolen, Robert A. J. Gagnon, Robert P. George, Timothy George, Franklin Graham, Harry R. Jackson Jr., James Kushiner, John MacArthur, Eric Metaxas, Al Mohler, and John Stonestreet explains why SOGI laws are dangerous:

In recent years, there have been efforts to add sexual orientation and gender identity as protected classifications in the law—either legislatively or through executive action. These unnecessary proposals, often referred to as SOGI policies, threaten basic freedoms of religion, conscience, speech, and association; violate privacy rights; and expose citizens to significant legal and financial liability for practicing their beliefs in the public square. In recent years, we have seen in particular how these laws are used by the government in an attempt to compel citizens to sacrifice their deepest convictions on marriage and what it means to be male and female….

SOGI laws empower the government to use the force of law to silence or punish Americans who seek to exercise their God-given liberty to peacefully live and work consistent with their convictions. They also create special preference in law for categories based on morally significant choices that profoundly affect human relations and treat reasonable religious and philosophical beliefs as discriminatory. We therefore believe that proposed SOGI laws, including those narrowly crafted, threaten fundamental freedoms, and any ostensible protections for religious liberty appended to such laws are inherently inadequate and unstable.

SOGI laws in all these forms, at the federal, state, and local levels, should be rejected. We join together in signing this letter because of the serious threat that SOGI laws pose to fundamental freedoms guaranteed to every person.

In a recent interview, John Stonestreet used the recent firing of a Virginia high school French teacher for his refusal to use incorrect pronouns when referring to a “trans”-identifying student to illustrate the potential danger SOGI laws pose to Christians in the work place:

Every version of the Fairness for All proposals that I have seen would not help Peter Vlaming at all. In fact, it would put us on the wrong side of that…. Here you have a government employee working at a public school who serves the public interest that has already been defined by Fairness for All and SOGI legislation as including “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” as a category of human being, and that basically sets Peter Vlaming up for failure.

It’s astonishing that time and again the experts—people like Ryan Anderson, Anthony Esolen, Robert Gagnon, Robert George, and Doug Wilson—who have been writing presciently for years on cultural/political issues related to disordered sexuality are ignored by those who spend far less time thinking and writing about them.

Shirley Mullen who is president of Houghton College and a member of the NAE Board, wrote that “the most viable political strategy is for comprehensive religious freedom protections to be combined with explicit support for basic human rights for members of the LGBT community.” What are the “human rights” of which members of the “LGBT” community are currently deprived? Near as I can tell, they are deprived of no human or civil rights. (Anticipating an objection, I will add that no man has a human or civil right to access women’s private spaces—not even if he pretends to be a woman.)

On his American Conservative blog, Rod Dreher quotes a pseudonymous friend called “Smith” who has been working behind the scenes for years on the Fairness for All compromise with “LGBT” activists. Smith argues that this compromise is necessary because conservatives—who have lost the cultural battle on sexuality—cannot count on either statutory or judicial protections of their free exercise of religion. But Smith revealed something more troubling:

[T]here really is a question of justice within a pluralistic society that conservative Christians have to face. We may sincerely believe that homosexuality is morally wrong, but at what point does the common good require that we agree that gay people have a right to be wrong?

First, since when do conservatives deny that “gay people have a right to be wrong”?

Second, since Smith isn’t really arguing that the common good demands that conservatives agree that gay people have a right to be wrong, what specifically is it he believes the common good demands of conservatives? In a consistently dismissive tone, Smith suggests that conservatives demonstrate an absolute rigidity but fails to identify the specific ways conservatives are being intolerantly inflexible and in so doing harming the public good. He seems to be suggesting that standing firm against SOGI laws—which put at grave risk religious liberty and constitute complicity with both moral and scientific error—is the issue that threatens the common good and on which we must capitulate compromise.

Smith continues:

If pluralism is about accommodating deep difference—if conservative Evangelicals are going to ask for accommodation of difference, then they can’t turn around and say in every single case when they are asked to accommodate sexual minorities, ‘No, we will fight to the death.’ That’s not pluralism if all you’re doing is protecting your own rights and saying error has no rights when it comes to you. Pluralism has to be seen by others who disagree with you as fair.

Yes, pluralism is about accommodating differences, but there are differences on which accommodation is impermissible for Christians. I doubt Smith would have made such an ambiguous claim about Christians who rigidly refused to compromise on the nature and intrinsic worth of enslaved blacks or who will not accommodate Planned Parenthood’s views of humans in the womb. The nature, meaning, and value of biological sex, marriage, and children’s rights are other issues on which it is impermissible for Christians to compromise, even if that inflexibility results in persecution.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/SOGI_Compromise1.mp3

End-of-Year Challenge

As you may know, thanks to amazingly generous Illinois Family Institute partners, we have an end-of-year matching challenge of $100,000 to help support our ongoing work to educate and activate Illinois’ Christian community.

Please consider helping us reach this goal!  Your tax-deductible contribution will help us stand strong in 2019!  To make a credit card donation over the phone, please call the IFI office at (708) 781-9328.  You can also send a gift to:

Illinois Family Institute
P.O. Box 876
Tinley Park, Illinois 60477

Have you ever heard of the “Values Action Team,” which is a subgroup of the U.S. House GOP Republican Study Committee? Somehow in all my years of paying attention (including working a stint on Capitol Hill for a member of Congress), it escaped my notice.

Here is how the subgroup has been described:

According to the RSC document describing its Values Action Team, “The goal of this group was to unite conservative Members with pro-family coalitions by establishing legislative goals, identifying key tasks for Members and coalitions to perform, and executing action items that would lead to conservative victories.”

Here’s the opening paragraph of a new press release:

Washington, DC — U.S. Representative Randy Hultgren (R-IL-14), Co-Chairman of the Values Action Team, today introduced the Parental Rights Amendment, H.J.Res. 121, to protect the rights of parents to raise, care for and guide their children without undue government interference unless there is proof of abuse or neglect.

It is difficult to image a better first impression made by a Congressional “subgroup” than the introduction of the Parental Rights Amendment.

For too long, local school districts thought they owned America’s children. It is past time for that to end. “Owned?” Yes, a family moves inside the boundaries of a district and the children are now subjected to the supervision of that governmental unit.

For decades, parents have had to check in with the government if they were planning to send their children to a private school or homeschool their children. Imagine what the Founding Fathers would say to that.

And it’s not just public education, but the government’s role in overseeing health care for minors.

“The freedom for parents to direct the upbringing, education and care of their children is an American tradition once established beyond debate,” said Rep. Hultgren. “Yet every day, families are broken apart by state actors who presume they are able to make a better decision for a child than a parent can. With recent state laws and court decisions threatening this American value, it is time parental rights are enshrined as fundamental rights and therefore protected under the Constitution.”

Here is the “Background” section in the news release:

Parental rights are not explicitly granted in the Constitution, which has resulted in an ever-growing number of conflicts with local, state and federal governments, and courts, seeking to intervene in parental decisions without a substantive justification or semblance of a showing of harm. That debate was reopened in 2000 when a Washington state law provided the authority for a third party to override a good parent’s decision regarding their children if it would be in the “best” interest of the children to do so.

Today numerous lower federal courts refuse to treat parental rights as deserving of protection as a fundamental right, and 35 states include disability as grounds for termination of parental rights.

And they provide a few examples:

• Doctors at Boston Children’s Hospital’s ER disagreed with teenager Justina Pelletier’s primary care physicians at Tufts Medical Center that she suffered from mitochondrial disease. Instead, they said it was a mental illness, and the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families took her from her parents and into state custody. She was kept in the hospital’s psych ward and group homes for months. She was returned to her parents more than a year later, and her health still has not fully recovered.

• Following her birth in Missouri, baby Mikeala Johnson was taken into the foster care system because her parents are blind. When she was returned to her mother Erika 57 days later, they had forever lost important bonding opportunities, including Erika’s chance to breastfeed her baby early on.

• The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in Fields v. Palmdale held that “once parents make the choice as to which school their children will attend, their fundamental right to control the education of their children is…substantially diminished.” (emphasis added)

Here is what the Parental Rights Amendment does:

• Secures the tradition of parental rights as a fundamental right in the text of the Constitution.

• Secures the right of parents to choose the manner in which they educate their child.

• Guarantees the rights of a parent will not be abridged on account of a disability.

It is revealing that a Constitutional Amendment is called for. As with so many other moral issues, earlier generations operated by common sense. As common sense and common law became over-shadowed by countless statutes, big government was able to advance its agenda of making Americans its subjects, rather than their master.

On this topic, I would recommend a brilliant article by professor Anthony Esolen titled “Peonage for the Twenty-First Century.” That is peonage as in peon, little people dwarfed by the big people running the government. Excerpts of the article can be found here.

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There are myriad reasons why young people are abandoning conservative principles, one of which is that our publicly funded schools are run by and our children are taught by fools who revile truth. Neil Rigler, an English teacher at Deerfield High School in Deerfield, Illinois, is one such teacher.

Last week, Rigler posted a link to an article from the far Left website PinkNews that criticized President Trump’s appearance at the Values Voter Summit, which is sponsored by the Family Research Council. Rigler added this comment:

Why isn’t this the lead story on national news? [Trump] endorses this hate group and supports legalized discrimination. Horrific. (Yet again).

Evidently Rigler is a disciple of the ethically impoverished, anti-Christian hate group known euphemistically as the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has deemed the Family Research Council (and IFI) “hate groups.”

But why such a designation for organizations that actually denounce hatred?

The SPLC and Rigler hurl the epithet “hate group” at organizations that hold theologically orthodox views on the moral status of volitional homosexual activity and biological-sex rejection. The SPLC and Rigler evidently believe that moral positions with which they disagree constitute hatred of persons.

Of course, it’s unlikely they apply their underlying principle consistently. It’s unlikely they believe that all moral disapproval of volitional acts constitutes hatred of persons. It’s unlikely they would hurl the epithet “hater” at someone who believes homoerotic love between two consenting brothers is immoral or at someone who opposes the legal recognition of poly-marriages.

Foolish inconsistency is the hobgoblin of little Leftist minds.

Government employee Rigler posted his feckless, pernicious comment on his Facebook page where anyone with a Facebook account can see it, including former, current, and future students. Presumably some of them are theologically orthodox young people.

And Rigler fancies himself “inclusive.”

Unfortunately, Rigler is not alone among our taxpayer-subsidized propagandists who identify as educators and who accuse those who hold values and beliefs with which they disagree of being hateful. Rigler’s comment is emblematic of the openly contemptuous attitude many of our  public school teachers have toward those who hold conservative beliefs and values.

There’s Jason Spoor-Harvey, former Fremd High School social studies teacher and current history department chair at Oak Park and River Forest High School. Spoor-Harvey is “married” to a man and has posted pictures on his Facebook page of his faux-marriage as well as his hearty support for Planned Parenthood. When he was a teacher at Fremd, he posted pictures of Che Guevara and Karl Marx on his official school web page along with this image titled “Evolutionary Theory”:

Rigler and Spoor-Harvey have every right to express their foolish beliefs and values  on their Facebook pages, and parents have every right to say these men are poor role models for their children and refuse to place their children under the their tutelage. The mere fact that Spoor-Harvey is legally “married”—though not in reality married—to a man teaches young people a harmful, untruthful lesson and renders him an unfit role model.

But Rigler and Spoor-Harvey don’t restrict expressions of their political and moral views to their Facebook pages. They express their views in the classroom both through their comments and the materials they choose, like homosexual writer Tony Kushner’s essay titled “American Things,” which Rigler has taught. In this essay, Kushner compares the homosexuality-affirming revolution to the Civil Rights Movement and calls moral disapproval of homosexuality a “social evil.”

There are countless teachers like Rigler and Spoor-Harvey who see themselves as “change agents” and view it as their right and responsibility to use their publicly funded positions to transform the political and moral views of other people’s children. Sometimes they do so by bringing in representatives from partisan organizations to disseminate destructive ideas to children as unassailable truths.

Just last month, Public School District 150 in Peoria, Illinois invited the Central Illinois Pride Health Center (CIPHC) to teach eighth-graders a lesson on “Sexual Orientation and Gender Stereotypes.”

The executive director and founder of the CIPHC is Len Meyer (on the left below), a lesbian who masquerades as a man and is “married” to a woman.

In March 2017, Meyer partnered with Illinois State University for its 19th annual drag show charity fundraiser with proceeds going this year to CIPHC. Meyer said, “I have always been a supporter of the drag show…as a person of the community. I think it is a great opportunity to give students a chance to get involved and get exposure of the cause.”

Do PSD 150 administrators, teachers, and school board members really believe this is the kind of person who should be teaching 13-year-olds? Do they really believe this is the kind of person most parents in their community want to teach their children about sexuality?

The troubling and very hard-to-find “Sexual Orientation and Gender Stereotypes” lesson on the PSD 150 website lists a handout titled the “Genderbread Person,” as a “needed” material for this class. This infamous handout teaches children to sever the connection between one’s sex and gender, or in the words of the Genderbread Person, to break through the “binary.” The lesson outline includes teaching students the meaning of “key terms” like “cisgender,” “queer,” and “intersex,” which is defined as “actually quite common!”

What is never discussed in the lesson is whether the beliefs of the “LGBTQ” community are objectively true or good. No dissenting views are included.

Christian parents should not allow their children to be trained up by men and women who view Scripture as hate-filled, ignorant bigotry.

Christians should not allow their children to be trained up by men and women who do not recognize the intrinsic value of all human lives—and all means all—including those yet in their mothers’ wombs.

Christian parents should not allow their children to be trained up by adults who don’t recognize and respect the immutability and profound meaning of sexual differentiation.

Christian parents should not allow their children to be trained up by adults who believe that inclusivity and compassion demand the affirmation of sexual perversion or confusion or the relinquishment of physical privacy.

Christians parents should not allow their children to be trained up by those who cannot see that marriage has a nature central to which is sexual complementarity and without which a union is not in reality a marriage.

Churches must begin today to create affordable schools for their church families. For diverse reasons, many families are unable to homeschool and unable to afford Christian private schools. Churches should view the education of children in their flocks as a mission field, with mission funds going toward making disciples of them. No matter how nice they are, people like Neil Rigler, Jason Spoor-Harvey, and Len Meyer cannot properly educate children.

Thomas More College of Liberal Arts professor Anthony Esolen offers this parable to illustrate where we are culturally:

Imagine a scene of wholesale destruction. Every old and venerable structure has been reduced to rubble. People relieve themselves in the street. Sometimes they copulate there, too. Their “music” is little more than grunting and groaning. Their rulers are on the take. There are hundreds of thousands of old books in the mountain of stone and mortar that used to be the library. Most of those books are far beyond the capacity of the people to read. They sneer and snort at Shakespeare, because they can’t understand him. They’ve never even heard of Virgil. A lot of these people have taken to cannibalism.

Now then—you have retained some vague memory of a more noble way of life.  You have therefore arrived at a great truth. It’s perfectly obscure to most of your fellow rubble-pickers, who mock you and call you a prude, a Neanderthal, a medieval monk, a madman, a hater of the hungry, and so forth. Your precious truth is simply this: it is wrong to eat human flesh.

Well, that is no great burst of enlightenment, but it is a beginning. So what do you do?  Will you be content to say, “My children will do everything that everyone else is doing, but they will not eat human flesh?” They will be subhuman and subcultural, but their taste in dining will be restricted just a little?  Is that all?

Will you say, “Our family is not anthropophagous, but we will send our children to be taught by the same fellow that all the other parents use,” the one with the squalid leer, dabbling in excrement, contemptuous of any wisdom from the past?

…

What do you do, then?  Turn back, O man.  It’s time to recover and rebuild.

Churches should start the recovery and rebuilding project now. We’re very late. Some of our children are cannibals.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

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The legal recognition of homoerotic unions as marriages goes by many names. Professor Anthony Esolen calls it “pseudogamy,” and Pastor Doug Wilson calls it “same-sex mirage.” Whatever you call it, don’t call it marriage because it ain’t.

Before same-sex faux-marriage was inflicted on the nation by five black-robed miscreants, cultural regressives insisted the legal recognition of intrinsically non-marital unions as marriages would affect no one, no way, no how. Everyone with an ounce of commonsense and a dollop of intelligence knew that was yet another lie. Once society formally ceases to recognize that marriage is something by jettisoning the central, most enduring constituent feature of marriage, it ceases to be anything. Or rather, it becomes an amorphous malleable blob that can be squished into any meaningless semi-form spiritualists, libertines, and narcissists can create.

And so, we now have “self-marriages.” Oprah, goddess and CEO of the self-love cult, must be in—er, well, somewhere warm and cozy.

For those who have been too busy serving the needs of others to have read about self-marriage, it is the newest anti-marriage fad. It entails all the trappings of a wedding without the central ingredient that gives marriage its salt, light, and beauty: a sexually complementary couple. Self-marriage is an oxymoronic, moronic ontological cipher.

Self-weddings include all the accouterments of real weddings: invitations, wedding attire, rings, vows, bouquets, floral arrangements, food, and celebrations—that is self-celebrations. I can only guess what happens on the wedding night.

Rather than committing oneself sacrificially to another who is “other,” celebrants commit themselves to idolatrous self-service and self-celebration. Whereas true marriage has both personal and public meaning, self-marriage has neither.

Erika Anderson is a 2^nd-time bride. This time ‘round, she married herself. Cosmopolitan Magazine describes Anderson’s special day:

On the rooftop of her Brooklyn apartment building this past spring, Erika Anderson put on a vintage-style white wedding dress, stood before a circle of her closest friends, and committed herself — to herself.

“I choose you today,” she said. Later she tossed the bouquet to friends and downed two shots of whiskey, one for herself and one for herself. She had planned the event for weeks, sending invitations, finding the perfect dress, writing her vows, buying rosé and fresh baguettes and fruit tarts from a French bakery. For the decor: an array of shot glasses emblazoned with the words “You and Me.” In each one, a red rose.

“It wasn’t an easy decision,” she’d noted on the wedding invitations. “I had cold feet for 35 years. But then I decided it was time to settle down. To get myself a whole damn apartment. To celebrate birthday #36 by wearing an engagement ring and saying: YES TO ME. I even made a registry, because this is America.”

Anderson was married before but divorced when she was 30 because she and her husband “grew apart” after college. I wonder what will happen if she and herself have a similarly tenuous commitment to their marriage vows.

For those brides and their beloveds who can’t manage together to plan their wedding, there are websites to help. One such website is Self-Marriage Ceremonies where self-lovers can sign up to receive premarital counseling in the form of pre-recorded inspirational messages, questionnaires, and vow-writing guidance all for a mere $200.

For those who need additional guidance, Self-Marriage Ceremonies’ founder Dominique Youkhehpaz is available for private sessions at the discounted rate of $50 per 2-hour session (usually $75).

Youkhehpaz started her business in 2011 during Burning Man, an annual event that bills itself as dedicated to “community, art self-expression, and self-reliance.” I think they forgot “self-love.”

Burning Man’s motto is “a culture of possibility. A network of dreamers and doers.” Someone should tell dreamer Youkhehpaz that it’s actually not possible to marry oneself.

It’s fitting that Self-Marriage Ceremonies got its start at Burning Man. While Burning Man was the brainchild of Larry Evans and was initially held in San Francisco, it was moved to its current location in in Black Rock Desert in Nevada by John Law, who conceived of it as “Dadaist temporary autonomous zone.” Dadaism was a post WWI rebellious, irreverent art movement that rejected aesthetically pleasing imagery, convention, logic, and reason. Instead, Dadaist artists valued “nonsense, irrationality, and anti-bourgeois protest.”

Though the self-marriage movement is utterly nonsensical and irrational, a visit to the I Married Me website would make Dadaists and Jack Handy cringe. Here are some of the deep thoughts Marcel Duchamp and Jack Handy would find:

• You Should Totally Marry Yourself
• Choose Love
• Hell Yeah I’m Awesome
• To Honor Myself Is To Understand And Acknowledge That I Am Worthy
• You Are A Reason to Celebrate

Self-lovers can get the entire self-wedding kit and caboodle for the amazing bargain-basement price of $230! Imagine that. All it costs to celebrate your solemn commitment to and celebration of yourself is 230 smackers. Forget those starving children in Sudan. You’ll be contributing so much more to the world if you spend $230 (plus the cost of the actual ceremony and reception) if you marry yourself.

Dada artist Francis Picabia offered this description of Dadaism: “DADA…smells of nothing, it is nothing, nothing, nothing.”

The same could be said of self-marriage.

While these non-marriages are intended to exalt the self, in reality engaging in such empty, nonsensical  rituals that mock true marriage reflect the irrational and self-abasing nature of our anti-culture.

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The snowflake metaphor for Millennials who quash speech they don’t like seems particularly inapt. These petulant ruffians are more like jackhammers.

Snowflakes are delicate, silent, complex, singular, ineffably beautiful, and naturally occurring. They fall from the sky through no human intervention.

In contrast, jackhammers are brute, noisy, simplistic, uniform, and ugly creations of man that destroy the seemingly indestructible foundations of the buildings in which we live and the solid paths on which we trod.

Millennials who stomp through the streets, smashing windows and shouting obscenities and witless slogans to protest the expression of ideas they don’t like from Ann Coulter, Heather MacDonald, and Charles Murray are not snowflakes. They’re jackhammers.

They aren’t hurt or offended. They’re outraged at the audacity of anyone who dares to utter ideas with which they disagree. They’re poseurs. They don’t need safe spaces, therapy dogs, coddling or mollycoddling. And they know it.

These fake victims/real jack hammers are the ugly, noisy, brute creations of a Frankensteinian culture. Who is our Victor Frankenstein? Victor is our schools, our heterodox churches, our professional mental health communities, and our storytellers (that is, Hollywood).

Many are aware of the jackhammering of presentations by Coulter, MacDonald, and Murray because those attacks on the First Amendment have been well-covered by FOX News. A lesser known attack was perpetrated against the inestimable scholar Anthony Esolen, who until last week taught at Providence College (aptly called PC), a supposedly Catholic college in Rhode Island. Writing on Public Discourse, Michael Bradley, a graduate student in theology at the University of Notre Dame, offers this description http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2017/03/18900/ of Dr. Esolen, a prolific writer who contributes to Crisis and Touchstone magazines:

Anthony Esolen is the contemporary incarnation of GK Chesterton. The simple and beautiful prose, the acute diagnostic precision, the commonsense appeal to and on behalf of everyday things, the recipe for renewal—all these things Esolen shares with Chesterton, the preeminent cultural physician of the early twentieth century. Like Chesterton, Esolen bluntly identifies our problems. And like him, Esolen’s solution centers on God and faith, learning and virtue, and a robust sense of human nature.

What, you may be wondering, so incensed the jackhammers at this tiny Catholic-in-Name-Only (CAMO) College that camouflages itself as a Catholic school and lies in wait for unsuspecting Catholic students? Here is an excerpt from the essay Dr. Esolen wrote about intellectual diversity at PC for the Catholic magazine Crisis that got the jackhammers’ motors roaring:

[T]here is no evidence on our Diversity page that we wish to be what God has called us to be, a committedly and forthrightly Catholic school with life-changing truths to bring to the world. It is as if, deep down, we did not really believe it. So let us suppose that a professor should affirm some aspect of the Church’s teaching as regards the neuralgia of our time, sex. Will his right to do so be confirmed by those who say they are committed to diversity? Put it this way. Suppose someone were to ask, “Is it permitted for a secular liberal, at a secular and liberal college, to affirm in the classroom a secular view of sex and the family?” The question would strike everyone as absurd. It would be like asking whether we were permitted to walk on two feet or to look up at the sky. Then why should it not also be absurd to ask, “Is it permitted for a Catholic, at a college that advertises itself as Catholic, to affirm a Catholic view of sex and the family?” And I am not talking merely about professors whose specific job it is to teach moral philosophy or moral theology. I am talking about all professors.

In my now extensive experience, Catholic professors in Catholic colleges have been notably tolerant of the limitations of their secular colleagues. We make allowances all the time. We understand, though, that some of them—not all, but then it only takes a few—would silence us for good, if they had the power. They have made life hell for more than one of my friends. All, now, in the name of an undefined and perhaps undefinable diversity, to which you had damned well better give honor and glory. If you don’t—and you may not even be aware of the lese majeste as you commit it—you’d better have eyes in the back of your head. 

In response, students protested on campus and created a petition signed by students and 40 faculty members in which they pledged to break the silence surrounding the allegedly hateful statements Dr. Esolen made.

I kid you not. Campus Leftists claimed that campus Leftists have been silent about matters related to “diversity” in general and homosexuality in particular.

Worse still the administration refused to meet with Dr. Esolen and a group of other Catholic professors to discuss the issues surrounding diversity (or the lack thereof).

We should by now see the danger in the “hate speech” ideology. Hatred has been redefined to mean absence of  affirmation of all the desires, beliefs, and actions of culturally favored elites. Hatred no longer denotes antipathy toward persons but disagreement with moral claims. To be more accurate, it means disagreement with “progressive” moral claims.

Once hatred was redefined, the Left needed to persuade society that hatred leads to acts of violence via words and then persuade them that acts of violence can be prevented only by banning the hateful words that Leftists claim lead ineluctably to hateful deeds. Voila! The First Amendment is “disappeared.”

Jackhammers believe that if the claim that homoerotic activity is immoral and destructive to individual lives and the public good is spoken, then someone may, in response, say or do ugly things to those who identify as homosexual.

Jackhammers are right. Someone may do something ugly. And whenever jackhammers express the idea that all who hold homoerotic activity as perverse are hateful haters, someone may say or do something ugly to those purported haters. There’s no way to escape or prevent all the dastardly deeds that fallen human beings commit. That’s why we have laws: to prevent and penalize egregiously harmful deeds.

But our Founding Fathers rightly saw that the suppression of speech poses a far greater danger to individuals and the public good than does the abuse that some humans may engage in as a result of hearing ideas.

The mellifluous-sounding babble that has been pouring out of the professional mental health community, our pseudo-educational government  school industry, mainline churches, and Hollywood has taught that self-esteem can grow only when sinful humans are affirmed in their sinful choices and their ids are fed and watered. If we want a metaphor from nature for the juveniles who attack a man of such integrity, wisdom, courage, and intellectual depth as Dr. Esolen, it would not be snowflakes. What we have grown in our cultural hothouses are prickly, unlovely weeds who are taking over the well-tended gardens of civilization.

“Progressives” believe that if we ban the expression of ideas that don’t tickle the ears of “progressives,” we will create utopia. But what about those words that are expressed in print or virtual print? If people shouldn’t be allowed to speak ideas “progressives” find undesirable, why should they be allowed to have them published or posted?  And what about the phenomenon that precedes even speech: thoughts. Just imagine if liberals could find a way to access those.

The good news is that God has worked some ugly things at Providence College together for good for Dr. Esolen, which he describes in a recent heart-melting essay in Crisis Magazine from which this excerpt is taken:

Sometimes a single encounter with what is healthy and ordinary…is enough to shake you out of the bad dreams of disease and confusion. If it isn’t quite yet like meeting Saint Francis on the road, it is like meeting a bluff and jovial fellow who has just come from a conversation with that great little man of God.

I’ve had such an encounter, at Thomas More College, in New Hampshire.

Dr. Esolen’s describes his encounter with devotion to God and love of beauty and truth among both students and faculty at Thomas More College, which led to his decision to leave his tenured position at Providence College for a new position at Thomas More where he will teach and help found a center dedicated to furthering the college’s mission “to wed virtue and scholarship, contemplation with cultural engagement”:

I have countless memories of fine students at Providence College, some of whom are now my close friends; and to my colleagues in Western Civilization—of whom many have retired and some have passed away—I owe a debt I can never repay, for their friendship and support and instruction. But I am too old to want to spend the evening of my career trying to shore up a crumbling wall, when those who are in authority at the college are unwilling to listen to our pleas, or even to meet with us so that we can make the pleas in person….

No, I’d prefer to be in on building something exciting for the Church and for sheer ordinary humanity: The Center for Cultural Renewal, at Thomas More College.

…

A window shuts, and a door opens—or rather the very roof is blown off, and I see again, in their silent and ordinary beauty, the stars.

IFI was deeply blessed and honored to have Dr. Esolen as one of our banquet speakers two years ago.  To be edified by the man jackhammers tried to crush, watch this:

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One of the email newsletters I receive is from the Witherspoon Institute’s “Public Discourse,” and often link to and/or excerpt articles posted at their website. Recently there has been a number of articles touching on “identity politics.” In this post and in the next I will link to and excerpt from a few of the the articles.

First up is from Professor Anthony Esolen.

Pronouns, Ordinary People, and the War over Reality
Do not dismiss the pronominal wars as nonsense or assume that its warriors are merely daft.

It cannot possibly be to any living thing’s advantage to be confused about male and female. As it is, sex is far more strongly marked upon the human body than it is upon the bodies of dogs or cats or horses or many of the species of birds. A man’s face is not like a woman’s face. … A man’s shoulders do not look like a woman’s shoulders, and a woman’s hips do not look like a man’s hips. Men and women differ down to their very hair, as anyone can perceive who looks at a woman’s smooth chin or a man’s bald pate.

Ordinary and healthy people love that it is so,” Esolen writes. And:

The sexual revolution always has been a war waged against the ordinary family, against the ordinary ways of men and women and children. The moral law as regards sex is meant to protect that family from threats without and within: from the pseudo-marriage that is fornication, from the betrayal of marriage that is adultery, from the rickets and scurvy of impure habits, and from the mockery of the marital act that is sodomy.

And yes, Professor Esolen doesn’t pull his punches.

Our next article is by R.J. Snell — note the subtitle!

Swastikas and Safety Pins: The Grim Heritage of Identity Politics
A war of every group against every other is the sine qua non of identity politics. The peacefulness of classical liberalism is rejected root and branch, for war is the goal.

In it, Snell links to several articles, one of which includes a word I’ve never seen before: “identitarian.”

There is only space here to highlight a couple of things. Note this paragraph:

Without the discipline of party politics, social movements devolve into mere feeling, especially in our age of expressive individualism. People march and feel good and think they have accomplished something. They have a social experience with a lot of people and fool themselves into thinking they are members of a coherent and demanding community. Such movements descend to the language of mass therapy.

And this:

The definition of America is up for grabs. Our fundamental institutions have been exposed as shockingly hollow. But the marches couldn’t escape the language and tropes of identity politics.

I always recommend reading the entire articles I excerpt.

Now to our paraphilia — the poor little mostly-ignored “B” from the identity politics pioneers at “LGBT”:

Bisexuality is romantic attraction, sexual attraction or sexual behavior toward both males and females. The term is mainly used in the context of human attraction to denote romantic or sexual feelings toward both men and women. It may also be defined as encompassing romantic or sexual attraction to people of all gender identities or to a person irrespective of that person’s biological sex or gender, which is sometimes termed pansexuality.

Got it? Are you sure? Want to read that again just to make sure? Are you ready to be quizzed, for example, on the “all gender identities” part?

If you’ve really got it, then let’s get to our closing question: How will society respond to a future well-funded marriage “equality” effort for those in bi-sexual relationships?

Up next: More from Public Discourse.

Articles in this series, from oldest to newest:

Identity Politics and Paraphilias: Introducing a Series

Identity Politics and Paraphilias: Incest

Identity Politics and Paraphilias: Body Integrity Identity Disorder

Identity Politics and Paraphilias: Impact & Transgenders

Transgenderism a Choice or Disorder?

Why the Term “Sexual Orientation” is Nonsense

Identity Politics and Paraphilias: Man’s Search for Meaning

Identity Politics and Paraphilias: LGBT Is Not a Color & Fetishism

One of the best books I ever read is Man’s Search for Meaning by World War II concentration camp survivor Victor Frankl. First published in 1946, the book chronicles his experience in the camp and his struggle to find meaning — and thus a purpose to keep living as many around him died after giving up. Part of what makes the book so fascinating is that Frankl was already a trained psychiatrist when he entered the camp.

Borrowing his title for this piece is done for a couple of reasons. First, to recommend the book. Second, because I have never before connected identity politics with man’s search for meaning. Last December at Public Discourse, Professor Anthony Esolen connected the two in an article titled, “Love, Liberal Education, and the Secret of Human Identity.”

Esolen explains that this identity politics thing didn’t come out of nowhere. This might not be news to the more intellectual types out there — but if that’s the case, why haven’t we heard the case being made? Identity politics is one of the gravest threats to Western culture — and the intellectuals have a duty to help the rest of us grapple with it.

In a nutshell, when people reject Western culture and Christianity (or the Judeo-Christian ethic), they are left in a vaccum. The result is that they seek to find both meaning and community through a childish array of self-identities. Those are my words, not professor Esolen’s.

Before going further, let me say that for the second time in a row in this series we will deviate from our two-part structure and focus on one outside source — in this case, get ready to go deep (in my view, anyway).

Professor Anthony Esolen’s article (noted above) is, like so much of his writing, fantastic. Fans of Professor Esolen are familiar with his intellect and writing style that combines (in my view, anyway) brilliance and humility. In the piece he discusses “how the politics of identity bears on a Catholic liberal arts education.”

To give you a sense of the weight of his topic (in my view, anyway), he touches on a few names you may or may not be familiar with: “Dante and Virgil and their newfound friend, the ancient Roman poet Statius…”

Esolen believes that “a truly Catholic or Christian education in the liberal arts can raise the soul to see a glimmer of what Dante wishes for us to see”:

I have become painfully aware of the chasm between those who love the liberal arts, what I have called the free-making arts, and those whose utilitarianism or whose inverted religion has taken the form of identity politics.

Professor Esolen laments that many of his students “have no such grounding” in the liberal arts, and thus their “self” is “nourished by culture” where the topsoil has been “stripped bare.”

Young people have been starved of beauty: the great majority of them do not even recognize the names of the greatest of English poets, of Milton and Wordsworth and Tennyson, let alone know their songs. They have been taught almost nothing of our nearly three-thousand-year-old heritage of art, no classical or sacred music, no folk music, and no popular music older than a generation. Even many of those who regularly attend Mass on Sunday show no deep familiarity with Scripture. For those who do not darken the church doors, the gospels themselves may as well have come from another planet.

Under the subheading “The Desperate Quest to Fashion One’s Self,” Esolen writes that without that grounding, a person is left to fashion himself “from his own necessarily poor resources, without genuine culture, to bridge the chasm between unmeaning and meaning…”:

This is the source of the desperation with which so many young people, and the teachers and politicians and mass-entertainers who mislead them, hang onto some marker of identity, some sense that they exist, that they belong to a community, even if the community is abstract and notional, no more than an oval in a Venn diagram, designating the collective of people who self-identify in a certain way because of their race or their ethnicity or their sexual desires.

Under the subheading “The Secret of Human Identity,” Esolen writes:

But here is the thing: we must not raise up our young people to be in that condition in the first place. The faith is not something we do, like fly-fishing or playing chess. It is meant to inform every motion of our lives. It is like a royal dye that is to penetrate to the heart of every fiber of our souls. If someone should object that this is but a far-off ideal, I reply that all of our loves are imperfect; we do not therefore cease to believe that love is essentially the total gift of self. The secret of human identity that the politicians seek in the wrong places is the secret of faith and hope and love. We do not only give ourselves away: we become ourselves by the gift. We become who we are by forgetting to think about who we are. So it is that a truly liberal education, a free-making education, is in accord with what Jesus says, that he who humbles himself shall be exalted, and with what Saint Paul says, that it is he who acts, but also not he, rather Christ in him, and with what Saint John says, that “what we will be has not yet been revealed, but we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.”

Identity politics is a popular topic these days, and as I noted in an earlier article, there are a lot of ways to approach and discuss the phenomenon. One way to see it, clearly, is a search for meaning in the “post modern” world where absolutes are rejected. Without “genuine culture” and faith as a guide, the search for identity is conducted in all the wrong places. (In my view, anyway.)

With Dante, his teacher and authority Virgil, and Statius, Professor Ensolen writes:

We are standing in a history of poetry that spans the centuries. To place yourself among those men, thinking of poetry and of love, with gratitude and manly acknowledgment of one’s superior, is to be lifted beyond yourself.

Click here to read Esolen’s entire article.

Click here to watch Esolen’s keynote address at the 2015 IFI annual banquet.

The text of Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning is available in PDF form here.

Up next: Back to the Crazy World of Paraphilias.

Articles in this series, from oldest to newest:

Identity Politics and Paraphilias: Introducing a Series

Identity Politics and Paraphilias: Incest

Identity Politics and Paraphilias: Body Integrity Identity Disorder

Identity Politics and Paraphilias: Impact & Transgenders

Transgenderism a Choice or Disorder?

Why the Term “Sexual Orientation” is Nonsense

COMING SOON: Identity Politics and Paraphilias: LGBT is Not a Color

IFI depends on the support of readers like you. Donate now

-and, please-

Illinois Family Institute’s

FAITH, FAMILY & FREEDOM BANQUET
SEPTEMBER 18, 2015

For the first time ever, IFI will be hosting two esteemed speakers, both of whom are prolific authors.

Anthony Esolen is a professor of English at Providence College in Rhode Island, senior editor at Touchstone Magazine and a contributor to both LifeSiteNews and Crisis Magazine.

Douglas Wilson is the senior minister at Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho; faculty member of New Saint Andrews College; one of the editors of the homeschooling Omnibus series; and apologist extraordinaire whose debates with famed atheist Christopher Hitchens were documented in the film Collision.

There are no better speakers than Professor Esolen and Pastor Wilson to help shed light on the path forward for Christians in the aftermath of the arrogant and foolish Supreme Court same-sex faux-marriage decision. They demonstrate the kind of courage, wisdom, vision, and boldness desperately needed in such a time as this.

How should Christians think about and respond to the many challenges that face us as parents raising children, neighbors extending hospitality, citizens engaged in self-government, and employers and employees in a culture increasingly hostile to truth? What is morally permissible for Christian citizens and what is impermissible? What are our obligations to God and society?

Professor Esolen and Pastor Wilson will offer answers to these vexing questions, and they will answer questions clearly. No ambiguous, strategic equivocating.

Here is a sampling of the kinds of things we may hear from Professor Esolen and Pastor Wilson.

Professor Esolen:

Kennedy has gotten everything wrong, as ambitious sentimentalists are wont to do. Man is worthy of our reverence as man. But his thoughts are worthy of our reverence only insofar as they are true. His deeds are worthy of our reverence only insofar as they are virtuous; and virtue is grounded in truth. I must revere the thief as man; I must not revere him as a thief, because he would be a better man, and more the man he was made to be, were he not a thief. I must revere the sodomite as man, not as sodomite, because he would be a better man if he could integrate his desires and his deeds with the reality of his body. The truth of the sexes, male and female, is stamped upon their bodies, so clearly that even children understand it. To treat a man with reverence is to honor that manhood, what is given to him in the structure of his mind and body; it is not something he has chosen. To treat a man as if he were a woman is to do violence to that manhood and that body. Need we spell this out?

Here finally I hear a soft and simpering voice, the last gasp of the lie. “But what harm will it do to pretend that the two men are married, even if, strictly speaking, they aren’t? Can’t we simply shrug and go about our business?” No, we can’t. Justice Kennedy is a kindly sentimentalist, but kindliness divorced from truth is no real virtue….Ignoring reality, ignoring the law of our being, ignoring the peculiar goodness of the sexes, is always foolish, even when it is not downright evil. You may pretend that such truths do not exist, just as you may pretend that you can suspend the law of gravity as you step off the edge of a cliff. Nature, and Nature’s God, are not required to oblige your fantasy.

And Christians of all people should remember the one whom Jesus called the father of lies.

Pastor Wilson:

In the aftermath of the Obergefell decision by the Supreme Court, a lot of Christian parents are reeling. They know they must do something, but what can they do? The decision was so high-handed, so arbitrary, so insolently rendered, that it would be easy to assume that there is nothing we can do about it down here at street level.

But this is false. There are many steps we can take, and some of the first ones are steps we must take. Here is one that millions of parents could take in just a small number of weeks—they could pull their kids out of the government school system.

The necessity of doing this has been growing increasingly obvious every year, and now the need for it is open, manifest, and pretty much on fire. What can Christian parents do? If their kids are already receiving a Christian education, they can be encouraged and stand fast — and they can use the opportunity to openly appeal to Christian friends who still have their kids in the government school system. And if they themselves still have kids where their kids ought not to be… well, this is the perfect opportunity to bolt. If anybody asks why, a reasonable answer would be anything in the neighborhood of “fire on the mountain, run, boys, run!”

…If your children remain in the government schools, there is now no legal way for them to be taught any normal view of human sexuality. And, depend upon it, they will be taught the other kinds.

We at IFI look forward to seeing you on September 18! Bring your older children, parents, friends, neighbors, and church leaders. This will be a very special night.

Order your tickets now!

Event Details:

Illinois Family Institute
Faith, Family and Freedom Banquet

Friday, September 18 , 2015
The Stonegate Banquet & Conference Center
2401 W. Higgins Road
Hoffman Estates, Illinois  60169

Click HERE for a banquet flyer.

Secure your tickets now – click here or call (708) 781-9328.

Program advertisements & banquet sponsorships are available. 

Professor Anthony Esolen is one of America’s cultural treasures. He writes about moral decline in America with insight, boldness, and eloquence—no timid, hesitant, evasive speech from Professor Esolen. Many people—though not nearly enough—know Professor Esolen through his writing for LifeSiteNews, and Touchstone and Crisis Magazines.

IFI has the distinct honor and privilege of hosting Professor Esolen along with Pastor Douglas Wilson at our upcoming very special banquet, which takes place in just 4 1/2 short months on September 18, 2015.

Those like me who read everything they can by Professor Esolen will welcome this opportunity hear him in person, and those who are unfamiliar with his work must come to be introduced to this remarkable cultural warrior.

To whet your appetite for bold, impassioned truth-telling, here is a recent piece Professor Esolen wrote on the pernicious lies with which leftist sexual revolutionaries have poisoned America:

Fools or Liars?

The latest apologists for the Sexual Revolution – that great swamp of sewage backup, human misery, family breakdown, squalid entertainment, and lawyers – have been saying that the most radical anthropological breach ever known to man, the detachment of marriage from childbirth and the plain facts of nature, will have no effect (none at all, not to worry) on marriage and childbirth and family and community life.

To which I reply, “Haven’t you said that before?” About what exactly have the sexual revolutionaries been right? Which of their non-predictions has been confirmed?

They told us that liberalization of the divorce laws – the no-fault divorce that libertarians so heedlessly pushed – would have no effect, none at all, not to worry, upon the frequency of divorce. The new laws would only make divorce less painful to the couple, and consequently less painful to the children. For there are such things as “good” divorces.

By a miracle of sympathy and maturity beyond their years, children would be happy to find their parents happy. In fact, they could never be happy otherwise. No one troubled to ask how their parents could possibly be happy in the teeth of their children’s sorrow. Well, the revolutionaries were wrong about that. Or they were lying; one or the other.

They told us that “everybody was doing it,” with “it” growing gradually more immoral and unnatural, basing their assertions upon research conducted by that pedophile and fraud, Alfred Kinsey. Therefore, they said, to smile upon fornication was not to change anything, except to relieve everybody from reproach, and allow them to do open and honestly what they had been doing dishonestly and in secret.

In one generation the relations between the sexes were utterly transformed, so that girls (and boys too) who wanted to practice the ordinary virtue of prudence, and even the more difficult virtue of chastity, were “immiserated,” left out, lonely. In the old days, a boy’s heart might leap if the girl gave him a kiss. Now he can hardly feign a bit of affection unless she brings him to climax. Well, the revolutionaries were wrong about that too. Or they were lying.

They told us that pornography was an innocent pastime for a minority of people interested in it. It had nothing to do with violence. It would not coarsen the culture. You would be able to keep children away from it. No effect, none at all, not to worry. Need I comment on this one? They were wrong, or they were lying.

They told us that the Pill would result in fewer children being conceived out of wedlock, and that liberalizing the abortion laws would have no effect, none at all, not to worry, upon the number of women seeking them. Pope Paul in Humanae vitae predicted otherwise. Now forty percent of children in America are born out of wedlock, most of them to grow up without a stable home. And by the testimony of the Supreme Court itself, abortion has become so intimate a part of a woman’s life, as the failsafe against the misfortune of making a child when you do the child-making thing, that it cannot possibly be scaled back now. Again, the revolutionaries were wrong, or they were lying.

I should say they were lying again, because the evidence they brought before the courts had always been a mass of fabrications.

They told us that little children introduced to sex by sweet and gentle older people would suffer no great harm by it, unless parents overreacted. They had for a while to forget that they ever said it, but now that the Catholic Church has cleaned house, they are forgetting that they forgot it, and are starting to sing the same old tune: no harm, none at all, not to worry. They were and are wrong, or they were and are lying.

They told us that the ERA, which was never ratified but which has been litigated into law anyway, would not result in such absurdities as women being sent into combat, the end of single-sex public colleges, unisex bathrooms, and the normalization of homosexuality. No effect, none at all, not to worry. They were wrong about that, or they were lying.

What have they gotten right? Have the relations between men and women ever been more suspicious, more fraught with anger and shame? according to their own testimony, our colleges are swarming jungles of assault and rape. That was not so before the revolutionaries did their work.

They said that abortion would not lead to euthanasia. Now they are glad that it has led to euthanasia, and they say that euthanasia, doctor-assisted snuffing, will not lead to killing elderly people without their consent. Actually, it has led to killing elderly people without their consent. Elderly people are subjected to slow and purportedly painless suffocation every day, in every hospital in the country. No effect, none at all, not to worry.

We were told that extending the notion (not the reality, which is impossible, but the pretense) of marriage to same-sex couples will have no effect, none at all, on anything else in the land. It will have no effect on what children are taught in school. It will have no effect on the number of young people experimenting in the unnatural. It will have no effect on religious liberty. It will have no effect on freedom of speech.

It could not possibly have any effect on such things, because, we were told, the behavior in question was perfectly natural, engaged in by perfectly healthy people. It was not an unnatural moral and psychological disorder, impossible to render natural, which could only be shored up by coercion. No effect, none at all, not to worry. And by the way, agree or be destroyed.

When have they ever been right in their predictions? Why should we trust them now?

The IFI Banquet is a rare opportunity to hear Professor Esolen, who is coming from Providence, Rhode Island and Pastor Wilson, who is coming from Moscow, Idaho. Please come and bring your family, friends, church leaders, and neighbors to hear these two brave, brilliant, inspiring men of God who through their uncompromising commitment to transcendent, eternal, unchanging truths will inspire us all to do more and better.

Click HERE for a banquet flyer.

Event Details:

Illinois Family Institute
Faith, Family and Freedom Banquet

Friday, September 18 , 2015
The Stonegate Banquet & Conference Center
2401 W. Higgins Road
Hoffman Estates, Illinois  60169