Why the Great Christian Purge?

In an effort to plunge the world in to a modern day Dark Ages, the American campus has become rife with meaningless coursework documenting the ills of western culture. Even as the world has become more prosperous, albeit imperfectly, the intellectual left cannot square themselves with the idea that the west is not the root of all evil. From leftist academia are anti-American fist shaker sloganeering of Imperialism!, American greed!, and now; Christian!

Truth be told, the left has openly despised Christianity for as long as Karl Marx made leftist academics feel all smart about themselves.

The week of April 2nd, George Washington University’s Multicultural Student Services Center, proposed a workshop on Christian Privilege. The seminar poses the questions; “How do Christians in the USA experience life in an easier way than non-Christians? Even with the separation of Church and State, are there places where Christians have built-in advantages over non-Christians?”

There’s a lot to unpack here. The most obvious of which is the idea of privilege as a means to knock down Christianity a notch.

Whereas decades earlier, true moral leaders of the left (and even more so, the right) would have rightly called out obvious examples of racism such as the Jim Crow south and the second-classing of African Americans. These awful policies were clear examples of oppression and were institutionally supported by many local, state and federal governments.

In the decades following the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, things have changed. Much good has occurred but there still remains some bad. For black America economic status has improved since 1966 from a more impoverished black community at nearly 42% to a lesser poverty rate of just over 27% in 2010. Still more than double the poverty of white America. That doubled rate is clearly the bad.

Given the improved economic status for many African-Americans and movement to prominent roles in society (such as becoming president), the issue is less about oppression but about something else. At least as claimed by the academic left.

The tale to unravel starts here. Within the workshop is the topic of white privilege. The concept that, “Unlike the more overt individual and institutional manifestations of racism…white skin privilege is a transparent preference for whiteness that saturates our society.”, including benefits such as better shopping choices with products that are broadly and better available to a larger white American population. From band-aids to hair care products, most products do serve the white population better. Many on the right lament the concept of white privilege but underlying academia’s belaboring of the idea, there is truth to the concept.

What on earth does any of that have to do with Christian Privilege?

In my estimation, the workshop is more an attack on evangelical Christians. Though not explicitly stated, demographically, this has to be implied. Why? The extrapolation that white privilege being nested within Christian privilege is the only implication available to explain it. If the seminar were broadly focused on all Christians in the U.S., then it is ignoring that statistically, black America is more Christian than other ethnicities. More.

If the idea that being a Christian were such a benefit, wouldn’t then the black population be much more prosperous? Given the statistics, though improved economically, the black Christian population can hardly claim said defined privilege.

The concept of Christian privilege is being used as a Trojan Horse to weaken Christianity. Which is the point. Leveraging the demographic and marketing benefits to white’s in America, white privilege, by trying to burrow this within Christianity serves to place weaknesses within the moorings of the religion. As noted in the GWU invite, “…reflect upon ways we can live up to our personal and national values that make room for all religious and secular identities on an equal playing field.”

Still, it seems a teensy inconvenient to assert privilege given that one of the most economically challenged segments of our nation is proportionally the most Christian.

Why do leftists hate Christians?

You can sift through the puffery of internet opinions both right and left, but I’d posit that Christian hate stems from Christian’s non-relativistic morality. That is to say; Christians tend to be followers of rules. The Bible doesn’t allow for much moral relativism and so it follows through civic life.

The liberal left too has it’s own ethical absolutes. Just a different set of moral and ethical rules. Leftist rules are no less absolute. Countless talking heads have noted the differences in the left and right being amplified in recent years. Mechanisms like Facebook and especially Twitter take that amplification from something like a speaker on your desktop to The Who in London ’76. Without the political bifurcation already existing, there would be little to amplify. Our politics have found our collective ideological paradigms and we’re stickin’ to ’em. We are split. For the left, in order for Political Correctness to exist, there must be some moral measure.

It ain’t Christianity.

According to UC Berkeley’s George Lakoff, it’s about framing, “Framing is not primarily about politics or political messaging or communication. It is far more fundamental than that: frames are the mental structures that allow human beings to understand reality – and sometimes to create what we take to be reality…they structure our ideas and concepts, they shape the way we reason.” That is to say, the left and the right do not have the same moral frame.

There’s an obviousness to stating that conservatives as Christians versus the left have different moral frames. I mean, well..duh. Of course. Still, consider the hot-button debate of abortion. This is a certain split in moral interpretation and specifically due to Christian interpretation.

The Christian interpretation of abortion’s morality is pretty darned absolute: No abortion. Any variation from that stance is to knowingly diverge from Biblical morality (and perhaps those exceptions have reason, such as the mother’s well being).

The leftist absolute on abortion is to allow it for about any reason, at any time. Understand, this is not regarding the Constitutional (Roe v. Wade) consideration of legality. This is a moral consideration. According to Pew, 91% of liberals consider that abortion should be legal in all or most cases (versus conservatives at 27%). This legality statistic is a moral reflection. Leftists are pretty o.k. with abortion most all the time.

Wrapped in the cloak of women’s heath (akin to wrapping your dog’s pills in cheese), abortion on the left is something of its own religion. When the left speaks of the so-called ‘women’s health’, they laudably speak of health issues like breast cancer in their reflection of what women’s health means. The ‘icky tasting pill’ is that abortion is wrapped within those other (valid) concerns. It’s packaging. It’s marketing. It’s how the left has made abortion nearly inarguable; ‘How can you not be for women’s health?!’

Thus is the fragility of liberal morality. And fragility is the point. David Goldman in writing his review of Mary Eberstadt’s It’s Dangerous to Believe: Religious Freedom and Its Enemies noted about liberal anti-religion ‘inquisition’, “Today’s Inquisition is energized by a similar sense of fragility. The liberal establishment lives in terror that the people will rise in revolt. Its program has failed.” Further noting that economic failures under Obama and that other longer term progressive programs Like LBJ’s Great Society have failed.

Whereas the Bible has stood as a moral compass for many centuries to an imperfect humankind, the leftist support of moral decisions like abortion rely on a marketing ploy; bundling. This is no small point. When Moses, in Exodus, came down from the mount after God having spoken to him, he did not return with the 10 Suggestions. He did not have in his hands the 10 Habits of Highly Moral People. These were commandments. Like, dude, you don’t have a choice. You’re required to follow them.

There is no fragility in this logic. It’s clear. It’s also a mite inconvenient when moral and ethical decisions are tough. You don’t get to choose your own morality. You don’t get to make up your ethics and morality to meet your personal ideology. Or as Oprah told us, your own truth.

Leftists do have absolutes in morality, albeit temporary. The difference in comparing the left and Christianity is the left’s tendency to have an absolute morality…of the moment. Does this morality serve the agenda right now? Is the (not unfounded) idea that Donald Trump may well be a misogynist any different than the insatiate sexual power plays from Bill Clinton? Yet, Hillary, with all the tone deafness of Alfalfa’s love crooning, lectures us on misogyny being a reason (of many) she lost the election. Is it lost on Secretary Clinton that the very reason she could run for president at all was because of a predatory misogynist as her husband?

Morality is a mechanism of convenience for the left. Not a specific moral code. What serves the cause at the moment serves as morality.

This is what makes Christianity an inconvenience; its steadfast holding to an ethic, to a belief and to a moral code that does not bend to current social justice causes. Accordingly, to the left, it must be destroyed. Irrespective of the fact that the very Christianity they despise gave them the individual right to do so.

To those whom claim that the United States was not founded on Christian principles have not been truly educated on our nation’s origin and the concepts of individual rights. To varying degrees, many founders were influenced by John Locke’s ideas on life, liberty and property. In and of itself, no self-respecting progressive would be against these things if it were not, in large part, due to the origin of Locke’s philosophies; the Reformation. That is the Protestant Reformation.

The very separation of the church and the state was not to protect the state from the church but to protect the individual’s right from government rule over their beliefs. Influencing Locke was Martin Luther’s assessment, “The soul is not under Caesar’s power…He can neither teach nor guide it, neither kill it nor make it alive.” The idea is not to keep religion from the government but to keep the government from religion. This is the opposite of what’s occurring in modern America.

New York’s junior senator and card carrying progressive Democrat, Kirsten Gillibrand is herself not immune. The organization, Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF) has taken exception to her abhorrent habit of Bible study, “It’s courageous and commendable to stand up to a sexist and lewd president, yet unfortunate that by your (Gillibrand’s) participation in a congressional bible study you appear to be blessing a book that has smeared women for millennia.”

FFRF’s illiteracy regarding women of the Bible, many of whom were central heroes in Biblical stories, is funny if not for its betrayal of their ignorance. A trait within their organization that is sadly not in short supply.

FFRF’s About FFRF page refers to, amongst other things, non-religious as “…the first to call for an end to slavery.” That is, unless you’re the early 19th century Brit, William Wilberforce. To understand how slavery rightly came to an end is to know this man and his motivation, “God had set before me two objects: the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners.” This is but one example. If casting stones upon Christianity, they’d do well to be intellectually meticulous. But who am I to quibble?

The great purge of Christianity from public life is to overcome the greatest obstacle to a progressive nirvana; Christianity’s clear and consistent moral code.

Christianity and Judeo-Christian religions can claim a long and substantial history in the sciences (Copernicus, Bacon, Kepler, Galilei, Einstein) and in the founding of the individual freedoms many places in the world have enjoyed. It’s hard for the leftist academia to claim the failure of Christians when so much of the modern world was created by the followers of the faith.

Progressive orthodoxy have as their moral and scientific footing; a racist progressive president in Woodrow Wilson, eugenicist/racist and Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger and that Charles Darwin fella…who only proved what we already know from dogs, they evolve with breeding. He never actually squared the overall evolution circle.

You can see why Christianity is a bit of an inconvenience. Without it though, history and progress would have still been in the Dark Ages indeed.