If you’re white and Christian, you just must have “racism” in your heart, the theory goes. But fret not; help is on the way. For Tufts University is promoting a “Rooting Out Racism” event billed as “A free online retreat for white people.”
Described as a “10-day, pray-at-your-own-pace online” endeavor, it “was marketed as a ‘retreat about white supremacy,’” reports campus Reform. “The event’s host, Spiritual Grounding, which does not appear to be directly affiliated with Tufts, insisted upon the necessity of the retreat as ‘George Floyd’s murder has highlighted once again the need for white folks to do their work.’”
How white people compelled Floyd to ingest a fatal level of fentanyl and commit crimes was not explained.
Spiritual Grounding [SG] also “stated that the event prompts ‘White people to search their souls’ and to ‘understand how Christianity has contributed to racial inequity,’” Campus Reform continues. “The organization invites participants to ‘repent, lament, and uproot racism from [their] own heart.’”
Interestingly, SG changed some of its website language after being contacted by Campus Reform (the latter has screen shots of the original language, however). You’d think SG would have gotten its propaganda ducks lined up sooner, though, given the “credentials” of those involved with the organization. As Campus Reform also tells us:
Tufts University’s event page lists the contacts for the retreat as the university’s Protestant Chaplain, Daniel Bell, and the university’s Catholic Chaplain, Lynn Cooper. Tufts also lists the event’s sponsors as the university’s Protestant and Catholic Chaplaincies.
Spiritual Grounding also has other notable links to higher education.
The organization’s two founders, Lauren Schwer and Oliver Goodrich, both serve as university administrators. Schwer is the Associate Director of Campus Ministry at Loyola University Chicago, where she “is responsible for developing and implementing a campus-wide retreat program.”
Goodrich is the Associate Dean of Students for Spirituality and Meaning-Making at Cornell University, where he “provides oversight and support to Cornell United Religious Work, Cornell’s long-running chaplaincy program that facilitates the campus engagement and community building of 24 spiritual and faith leaders.”
Notable here is that when at issue are Muslim terrorists and their jihad, leftists are quick to claim that such people “pervert” Islam; this is despite how much language in the Islamic canon and Mohammed’s own example both militate in favor of violent action.
Yet when the matter is Christianity, SG states matter-of-factly that it “has contributed to racial inequity,” never suggesting that any such outcome might also be a perversion of the faith.
And, in fact, it is. When the Apostle Paul said in Galatians 3:28 that there “is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus,” it well reflected Christianity’s spirit. Why, Jesus said himself in Matthew 12:50, “For whosoever shall do the will of my Father, that is in heaven, he is my brother, and sister, and mother.”
Of course, this isn’t to say Christianity can’t be, and hasn’t been, misrepresented and misused. In fact, Spiritual Grounding is a perfect example of doing so.
The organization well reflects what G.K. Chesterton spoke of when observing that nowadays we (I’m paraphrasing) “have Christian values floating around detached from one another. Consequently, we have scientists who care only about Truth but have no pity, and humanitarians who care only about pity but have no Truth.”
The truth is that we suffer from racism-on-the-brain. I read a remark recently by an intellectual who pointed out that our focus on race was gratuitous, that young people now already generally consider racism the epitome of evil. Yes, well, that’s the problem.
Oh, this isn’t to say bigotry isn’t a sin, only that it’s just a sin. A subcategory of Wrath, one of the Seven Deadly Sins, forgotten is that there are six others, though don’t ask students who can recite critical-race-theory dogmas rote-style to even list them.
If they could, they might realize that with our money- and power-craving pseudo-elites, Greed is a bigger problem than racism. Envy enables the class-warfare card, Sloth our spirit of entitlement, and Gluttony our lack of self-restraint.
Lust is perhaps our sexualized society’s biggest problem of all, one that sadly consumes too many young people. They might realize this, too, were they not blinded by the sin of Pride, instilled in them under the guise of “self-esteem” boosting. Knowledge of the virtues of Humility and Chastity, stressed in Christianity, would also help.
In fact, racism isn’t even our biggest Wrath-related defect, as the blind prejudice against and hatred of President Trump and his supporters evidences.
In his book the Screwtape Letters, philosopher C.S. Lewis points out that evil seeks to exacerbate man’s woes by fooling him into exaggerating his faults. Thus does it tell the militarist that he’s too pacifistic and the pacifist that he’s too militaristic, is the example the author uses. And today, evil tells a mushy-headed youth in thrall to hate-America-first civilization destroyers that the real menace is America-first patriotism, acting as a Trojan horse for “white supremacy.”
The moral here is to be careful what spirit you worship — and that the spirit of the age is hardly ever the right one.
