A tour guide in Hungary once explained how that nation’s Marxists “dealt with” the Christians. “It wasn’t that you couldn’t be a Christian, she said,” related Jonathon Van Maren in 2015. “You could pray at home, worship at home with your family, even get baptized and go to church. However, you had a choice. ‘You could either be a Christian,’ she told us, ‘or you could be successful.’”
We’re increasingly seeing the same tactic in our time and place, and the latest example involves an effort to essentially eliminate Christian colleges. As Life Site reports:
The Human Rights Campaign (HRC), America’s largest and most powerful LGBT lobby organizations, is pushing Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to target Christian educational institutions, demanding that a Biden Administration strip colleges that adhere to rules and positions opposing homosexuality of their accreditation. The HRC’s “Blueprint for Positive Change,” which offers 85 recommendations, proposes eliminating non-discrimination exemptions for religious colleges if they refuse to abandon the biblical position on marriage.
Al Mohler, a theologian and president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, sounded the alarm on the HRC’s push in an essay titled “A Direct Threat to Christian Education.” The laundry list demanded by the HRC, he notes, are fundamentally transformational. The HRC is demanding that the State Department “include a non-binary gender marker” on identification such as passports and form a panel to explore how the LGBT agenda can be classified as “inalienable rights” and how this agenda can be pushed in international relations.
“But the most dangerous proposal is aimed at essentially destroying Christian institutions overnight,” relates Life Site. It then quotes Mohler as stating that the accreditation threat is “an atomic bomb.”
The HRC’s demands “would mean abandoning biblical standards for teaching, hiring, admissions, housing, and student life,” he warns. “It would mean that Christian schools are no longer Christian.”
As alluded to earlier, this isn’t new. For example, I reported in 2016 on an American Bar Association (ABA) “ethics” rule that would have prohibited lawyers from expressing “conservative” views. It was kiss the ring or kiss your legal career goodbye.
This approach is typical in aggressively ideological states. In places such as the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and today’s North Korea, the official government ideology permeated/permeates everything, from businesses to sports to entertainment and beyond. We’re increasingly witnessing the same phenomenon in the United States, too (“Black Lives Matter” emblazoned on NBA courts, “woke” corporations, etc.).
Some will correctly point out that, as with marriage, what Mohler fears wouldn’t be an issue if the government weren’t involved in rubber-stamping the thing in question. Yet this focus on government sometimes blinds us to another reality:
Government is making leftist policies because politics is ultimately shaped by the culture, which has gone “left.” And even if government did somehow resist involvement — a lot to expect since man often legislates what he becomes intensely passionate about — the culture alone can “kill.”
Every land’s cultural imperatives will be reflected through its events. In a faithful or patriotic nation, people may, respectively, pray to God or play their national anthem before sporting events. This is positive (assuming they’re not praying to Satan), and we’ve seen both these phenomena in our country. To state the obvious, however, when a nation’s culture becomes toxic its cultural imperatives follow suit.
This is why I often point out that if you don’t control the culture, the culture will control you. Just consider the power of political correctness, often now called “cancel culture.” Private schools and colleges, the ABA, “woke” corporations, Big Tech with its censorship, trade organizations, and manifold other private entities can turn you into a non-entity via blackballing. This, of course, has already happened to countless Americans.
While I think I’ve made my point, doubters should consider a July poll finding that 62 percent of Americans fear expressing their political views. Then ponder this question: Of what are they afraid? Government isn’t putting dissidents in gulags (yet) or executing them (yet). Our First Amendment is still operative. These people fear social/private sector consequences.
They fear the culture.
This also is nothing new. A self-proclaimed Nazi or Marxist 65 years ago would have been ostracized and scorned and had trouble finding employment. What is new is that the script has been flipped — now this fate is visited on Americans who espouse “Americanism.”
It’s what happens to people proclaiming Truth in a time of deceit.
