My recent USA Today column discusses how the Democrats have suddenly discovered God in elections after recruiting various far-left ministers to run on faith-based anti-Trump messages. I discussed how Divinity Schools have shown the same trend as other departments in higher education with a radical shift to the left. That was evident in a controversy this week at Point Loma Nazarene University, where Dean of Students Jason Cha told student leaders that identifying as being “in Christ alone” is a sign of “white privilege.”
Dean Cha is an example of the resumes that draw appointments and presentations in higher education. According to The College Fix, Cha’s 2023 dissertation at Azusa Pacific University was titled “Raging Waters of Whiteness: Addressing White Evangelical Racism in Higher Education.” His scholarship draws on critical pedagogy, incorporating “critical race theory, critical white studies, and evangelical postcolonial studies.”
Roughly three years later, he was made Dean of Students at PLNU.
As discussed in the USA Today column, the same pedagogy is evident in the crop of progressive proselytizing in the midterm elections. In Texas, Democrat James Talarico has declared that “I always think of myself as a Christian who hates Christianity.” His church leaders at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church admit that most of its members are likely agnostic or atheist.
Other Democratic minister-candidates have similar far-left views of religion, including Iowa’s Lutheran minister-turned-candidate Sarah Trone Garriott, who is under attack for participating in a Satanic wedding.
They are part of a movement of “resistance preaching” to organize far-left ministers to use religious pitches to support a blue wave. Harvard actually selected an atheist as its head “chaplain” a few years ago.
Critics of Cha posted an Instagram post revealing the alleged statement to students as part of the fall leadership training.
Cha has long been an outspoken critic of what he views as “white privilege” in religion and the need to prioritize “racial justice,” including past presentations on “Whiteness as Witness: Re-conceptualizing Diversity in Christian Higher Education.”
Asked for a comment on the controversy, Lora Fleming, associate vice president of communications and public affairs at PLNU, defended the statement, noting that the university’s commitment to “confront racism, love our neighbors, and seek justice is not separate from our Christian discipleship. It flows from it.”
The school has been under fire over the shift to the far left in faculty appointments, a familiar story in higher education.
The university was previously under fire over reports that it has held such sessions as “decolonizing yoga” and refused to recognize a Turning Point USA chapter.
Critics also pointed to a prior controversy involving a poet brought to campus to share a view of Jesus as “agnostic and horny” and an “erotic lover.”
As will not come as much of a surprise to readers of this blog, I do not support calls to bar such views or to remove faculty who publish radical values. Higher education relies on academic freedom and free speech to maintain vibrant intellectual environments.
The problem is that, while claiming such protections for diverse viewpoints, today’s faculty have engaged in open bias and intolerance in hiring faculty. The faculty and administrators in control of higher education are the most intolerant and orthodox in generations. They have purged departments of conservatives and libertarians while creating an ideological echo chamber.
This is a private university, so it depends on donors and alumni to change the culture by withholding support.
At state schools, I have also opposed efforts to dictate curriculum and class content. I have encouraged state legislatures to tie further public subsidies to real, substantial changes that create intellectual diversity among faculty.
If we are to protect these bastions of free speech, legislatures will need to play a more active role in addressing the exclusion of both faculty candidates and speakers on public campuses. Too many faculty members still view citizens as a captive audience expected to keep funding their departments, while excluding conservative or dissenting views held by many, if not most, citizens in a given state.
If faculty members want to maintain echo chambers for their own viewpoints, they should seek private donors to sustain such intolerance and orthodoxy.
Legislatures can demand evidence that schools maintain intellectually diverse faculty when determining the level of continued support from citizens. Otherwise, it is ridiculous to expect the public to subsidize their ideological echo chambers.
For a school established as “a simple Bible college,” it now seems determined to be something quite different. What that is remains a matter of faith best left to the faculty, the students, and the alumni.
As for Dean Cha, the faculty of Point Loma Nazarene University has every right to pick their leadership, and donors have every right to base their contributions on those choices.
Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the New York Times best-selling author of “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.”
Resistance Preaching
Turley highlights ‘resistance preaching’ which pulls up a Fox News article on the subject. That piece contains this passage:
“Pastors of the resistance” were working against a Trump-led coalition rooted in “White supremacy,” “exploitation,” “greed,” and “heteropatriarchy.”
………………………………….
This has Turley in panic mode. Real Christians can’t possibly support Donald Trump.
Real Christians see Trump for what he is: ‘A greedy buffoon trying to stuff his pockets while dividing the country with racist rhetoric’.
I’d like to see someone say, “I am a Muslim who hates Islam.” He’d be dead or mortally wounded before the month is out.
Well, I can tell you this absurdity appears only to be happening at traditional four year colleges.
The community college, no one is interested in this kind of nonsense.
The more general education classes like math and English, they seem to be a mix bag of students, could be of any leanings, but most were in high school last year and I think are more of the, where is the party this weekend than any politics.
Classes that are more fitted for a particular field of study, like A&P, those students are a bit more serious and really dont care for anything outside of learning and the class. More than a few of them also work part time in the medical field and have absolutely no time for this kind of nonsense.
The professors also stick to teaching the subject at hand and none of this nonsense.
Might explain why enrollment at traditional four year colleges are on the decline. Students are simply not interested in the nonsense, indoctrination, and having to pay for it.
I understand where Professor Turley is coming from, but when Christian institutions hire anti-Christian faculty, does that make any sense? Wouldn’t it just be common sense for them to say they are not going to, like a Jewish institution refusing to hire a Holocaust denier, or Caltech refusing to hire a professor who thinks math is white supremacy and maintains that 2+2=5?
OldManFromKS,
You are displaying a degree of common sense. Something that seems absent from so-called four year higher education.
That ^^ was me
Haha, thanks Upstate. The professor is obviously committed to his free speech cause, which is admirable, but sometimes common sense needs to prevail even if it’s not consistent with the purest form of free speech advocacy, at least where private schools are concerned. My comment was in reaction to PT’s statement against “barring” certain views even in a private setting. I think some views should be barred when they are both ridiculous and diametrically opposed to the school’s reason for existing.
OldManFromKS,
I respectfully disagree.
When this kind of ridiculous shows up, it needs to be pointed out how not only ridiculous it is, but absurd, goes against common sense and should be ridiculed to great extent.
I think it also shows how, while some like to think of it as . . . “progress,” it is a sign and symptom of when a society reaches a given level, it has the luxury to indulge in the absurd. This is when a society then appears to go into a decline as the absurd is embraced as “normal,” common sense is abandoned and society begins to unravel.
Just recently, some idiot in the UK decided it was a good idea to climb into a Siberian Tiger enclosure, bow down to it, and then was shocked and surprised when it mauled him to death. He and the Tiger are good examples of the progressive absurd and reality.
Upstate, I think we actually agree. By “barred” I didn’t mean censored, just not hired as a professor. Given the context of this discussion I was using “barred” as a shorthand for that.
The faculty and administration most places are adept at demonstrating that social utility would be improved if their particular school or department was closed and they were sent to the unemployment line. You could say that of many denominations as well. Their parishes are tedious social clubs being chewed up by the actuarial tables and the clergy presiding twits.
Does the above apply to conservative institutions as well? I don’t recall a mention of them in these screeds.
Just how is this purge being done? For certain, this should provide ample instructors and administrators for conservative and libertarian schools? It seems more likely they are self-selecting to not apply for jobs in these schools. A critical analysis of this exclusion mechanism would be welcome, with interviews with those who have supposedly been purged.
@anonanass “It seems more likely they are self-selecting to not apply for jobs in these schools.”
Yeah, I’m sure those who got on the trains to “work camps” were self-selecting too. As were those who were executed in trenches. Are you the former secretary of state Clinton, or just spouting your acolyte indoctrination.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/markjoyella/2023/10/06/hillary-clinton-suggests-formal-deprogramming-for-maga-extremists-who-still-support-trump/?sh=1ae07e5d73b8
Professor Turley generally does not write about mythology, including the mythical conservative university you mentioned.
Jewish, Catholic organizations bring non Whites to America to destroy traditional values and gain political power.
Anonymous , because you never want real humans who might have the displeasure of knowing you to realize the garbage
going around in your polluted braincells…..
Profound ignorance or overwhelming race hatred are necessary for seeing Christianity as racially biased. All four gospels, together with the letters of Paul, assert the imperative to transgress tribal and racial boundaries. The Wise Men come from afar. Jesus proclaims his messiahship first to a Samaritan woman. Paul preaches to the “gentiles,” which is to say, to all the nations.
Is it anti-racist to be consumed with race?
Thank you for telling truth instead of spreading hatred
Almost no self-identifying Christians follow the teachings of Christ. What the Gospels assert has nothing to do with how most modern Christians operate. For one, the core tenet from Christ is that there is no need for a religious organization; that the faithful pray directly to God.
These insane Leftists in education from kindergarden to graduate and professional school—through their teachings— will either inspire their students to destroy our constitutional republic and replace it with a Marxist scourge or they will inspire a backlash so intense, that an enraged population very well might acquiesce to a Stalinist dictator who would purge all Leftists from education and government with deadly methods and who will never relinquish power or perhaps that population might summon a Cincinnatus-like being (if such a being might be found) to act as a dictator who would purge the ranks of education, minimize the corrupt and the elitists in government who ignore the consequences of honest elections, and then retire as did Washington. It may be my own limited imagination at play, but I do not forsee how any true republic under our Constitution can cope with these problems and survive long term. Of course, do we truly enjoy the benefits of a true republic? I have my doubts.