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When Christian Colleges Teach Students to Fear, Not to Think
Townhall.com ^ | April 13, 2019 | Ryan Bomberger

Posted on 04/13/2019 3:43:34 AM PDT by Kaslin

Christians are called to be strong and courageous. But that’s not what Christian students are being taught on many Christian college campuses today. Too often, they’re taught to fear and to hide behind a false pretense of grace while extending none. 

Christian writer, speaker and author—Matt Walsh—was protested by college staff and students, at Baylor University, who didn’t want to hear a Biblical perspective on culture-shifting issues. How dare a Christian father speak Biblical truths about abortion, marriage and gender! That’s “hate speech." This is intolerable in a day and age when many define their own subjective truth which cannot, apparently, be subjected to any level of scrutiny no matter how civil the discourse. 

Truth is offensive. It’s divisive. It boldly separates fact from fiction. It’s freedom.

In a Knight Foundation college student poll, 69 percent agreed that colleges should “restrict slurs and other speech that is intentionally offensive to certain groups." Who determines what’s considered a slur and which language is “intentionally offensive?" Hate speech is now the default accusation for ideas or words that challenge a “progressive” worldview.

There’s no America without free speech. It’s not free if it comes laden with restrictions and heavy societal costs.

I don’t support legislation through Presidential Executive Orders, but why should any American President have to resort to such lengths to ensure our First Amendment rights? Trump’s Executive Order on Improving Free Inquiry, Transparency and Accountability at Colleges and Universities was signed because many places of alleged higher learning have become institutions of intolerance. 

Walsh is not a threat to civility, but conformity. The Baylor Lariat has several articles attacking him with titles like “Hate Speech Has No Place in Christianity” and “Why I Pulled Down Fliers Advertising Matt Walsh Event”. There is a spiritual and emotional immaturity that is on full display here. Patrick Hill, a gay Baylor graduate, started the petition to ban Walsh from campus. Hill decries the suggestion that there is such a thing as LGBT activism. Perhaps he’s not aware of how multi-million dollar, pro-abortion LGBTQ orgs like Human Rights Campaign, Lambda Legal and the ACLU have been fighting to erase religious liberty, free speech, pronouns, and faith-based adoption agencies.

Hill complains that Walsh and Baylor’s Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) are “demonizing an entire people group." In their letter of protest, the signers proceed to absurdly equate YAF with white supremacists of the Jim Crow era. That’s not demonizing at all. 

I find it amusing that throughout the letter, signed by current and former Baylor faculty and Board members, there’s not one use of Scripture to defend homosexuality. They refer to YAF and Baylor’s official position on sexuality as a “debatable view of Biblical teaching.” It’s not debatable. It’s undeniable. (Please see Dr. Michael Brown’s thorough take on all of this.) 

The fear of (truthful) free speech on college campuses should be alarming to all. Back in November 2018, I was invited by the Wheaton College Republicans to deliver a talk about race and abortion entitled “Black Lives Matter In and Out of the Womb”. Two Wheaton staff members and three student government leaders denounced my presentation in a campus-wide email as “offensive rhetoric” that made “students, staff and faculty of color feel unheard, underrepresented and unsafe on campus.”

I’m black. I was the speaker. Nobody of my color was “unheard” or “underrepresented” in an hour’s worth of Q&A. And “unsafe?"They had no factual basis with which to argue against my perspective, so they chose to become victims. The school’s leadership stood behind them, refused to resolve the issue with The Radiance Foundation or the College Republicans, and allowed us to be demonized by those who espouse an unbiblical approach to truth. 

One of the only professors to attend my event wrote an outrageous article, recently, defending abortion in the black community. Wheaton professor, Theon Hill, is an African-American who passionately supports the #BlackLivesMatter movement and seems to have ignored everything I talked about in the presentation. I don’t support a radically pro-abortion, anti-fatherhood, anti-Biblical, secular movement with zero intention of forgiveness. Instead, I proposed that the Church should be leading on issues of racial justice. In his Faithfully Magazine article, Hill reveals he either knows absolutely nothing about the prolife movement or doesn’t care. He falsely claims we don’t address the relationship between abortion, poverty, racism and access to health care. That was my whole presentation (see it here).

Less activism, more factivism professor. 

Even worse, while praising the rabidly racist Black Panther Party and Nation of Islam, Hill defends abortion with an example of…infanticide. Invoking Toni Morrison’s disturbing novel, Beloved, Hill justifies abortion in the black community (which Fannie Lou Hamer considered to be ‘black genocide’) with a story about an unremorseful slave woman who kills her two-year-old daughter to prevent a life of pain. Yeah. Because black people today live in exactly the same horrid circumstances as 1860. Former slave and abolitionist, Sojourner Truth, had 13 children, most of whom were stolen away from her by slave masters. She mourned the tragic loss of her children in her speech “Ain’t I A Woman?”; she didn’t wish she had killed them.

My dear friend and colleague, Star Parker, was recently banned from speaking about abortion’s impact in the black community at the University of Northwestern, a Christian college in Minnesota. Why? Because as a conservative Christian woman, the school’s leadership decided that she “radically holds beliefs that UNW as a whole would not agree with.” Of course, they never articulated what those “radical beliefs” are. Apparently, they meant her Biblical beliefs. Who better to address race and abortion than a post-abortive, black, woman saved by grace?

Matt Walsh, Star Parker and I aren’t the real problem. Loving people enough to speak difficult truths is anathema to those who confuse capitulation for compassion. How will these Christians evangelize a fallen world if students, staff and faculty are too busy taking shelter in their safe spaces on campus?


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial
KEYWORDS: abortion; academia; academicbias; baylor; christian; colleges; genderdysphoria; globalwarminghoax; greennewdeal; homosexualagenda; infanticide; learning; medicareforall; obamacare; teaching; universities; wheaton; yaf
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1 posted on 04/13/2019 3:43:34 AM PDT by Kaslin
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To: Kaslin

‘It’s not free if it comes laden with restrictions and heavy societal costs.’

free speech has been under attack since humans began speaking...and religions of numerous stripes have long histories of lading it ‘with restrictions and heavy societal costs...’


2 posted on 04/13/2019 4:11:28 AM PDT by IrishBrigade
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To: Kaslin
"That’s “hate speech." This is intolerable"

Kill the intolerant! See what I did there?

3 posted on 04/13/2019 4:16:27 AM PDT by outofsalt (If history teaches us anything, it's that history rarely teaches us anything.)
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To: Kaslin

Luke 17 “And you will be hated by all for My name’s sake.

Sounds to me like anyone who follows Jesus won’t get a fair shake from those who don’t believe.


4 posted on 04/13/2019 5:46:17 AM PDT by excalibur21
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To: IrishBrigade
When Christian Colleges Teach Students to Fear, Not to Think...

...you can be fully assured that OTHER 'theological truths' are being Satanized as well!


2 Timothy 1:7 NKJV
For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.


Philippians 4:8 King James Version (KJV)
Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.

5 posted on 04/13/2019 6:01:38 AM PDT by Elsie (Heck is where people, who don't believe in Gosh, think they are not going...)
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To: outofsalt
Truth is offensive. It’s divisive. It boldly separates fact from fiction. It’s freedom.


Matthew 10:34-36

Do not assume 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 turn ‘A man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.
A man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.’

6 posted on 04/13/2019 6:06:56 AM PDT by Elsie (Heck is where people, who don't believe in Gosh, think they are not going...)
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To: Kaslin
Ryan Bomberger
Ryan Bomberger
 
 
 
 
Ryan, when an article bashing (exposing) a large Baptist (and Protestants in general) institution
is written; having an image of a bible with a Catholic rosary with crucifix laying on it
sends a subtle message.   But what is it?

7 posted on 04/13/2019 6:14:44 AM PDT by Elsie (Heck is where people, who don't believe in Gosh, think they are not going...)
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To: Elsie

I’ve had work published online, and it was the editors who selected the accompanying images, not me. Might be that case here.


8 posted on 04/13/2019 6:29:22 AM PDT by sparklite2 (Don't mind me. I'm just a contrarian.)
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To: Kaslin

I know only one person at Baylor, a great professor who’s name is not on that document.

Sadly, it seems everyone else there signed that letter.

Satan is working overtime at Baylor!


9 posted on 04/13/2019 6:43:35 AM PDT by ConservativeMind (Trump: Befuddling Democrats, Republicans, and the Media for the benefit of the US and all mankind.)
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To: Kaslin

These “Christian” students (that’s part of the problem, many just attend a Christian school but are not a never were church going Christians) actually have within the body their professors many who are neither Christian in their perspective and politically can be Leftists. So hearing the attitudes coming from the students at these “Christian” schools does not surprise me. To what extent they were not indoctrinated by Leftists in high school, they are getting that indoctrination in many “Christian” colleges, in any of the non-religious courses and even in some of them.

MANY “Christian” colleges are doing little to insure they actually remain “Christian”, to see to it that their instructors are Christian, or that the curriculum is shaped by Christianity. Many today remain “Christian” more as it relates to how they got started than as to what they practice today.


10 posted on 04/13/2019 8:30:28 AM PDT by Wuli
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To: Elsie

If a college won’t allow you to speak against abortion, is it still Christian? And if it isn’t Christian anymore, is it still “Baptist”?


11 posted on 04/13/2019 8:38:31 AM PDT by marron
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To: Kaslin
There’s no America without free speech. It’s not free if it comes laden with restrictions and heavy societal costs.

Well yes.

Which is why we have FREEDOM of speech rather than FREE speech.

Speaking the truth has always come with heavy societal costs. Just ask Anita Bryant. Ask Whittaker Chambers. Ask John the Baptist.

The government may not prevent you from speaking your mind. Certainly it is the duty of the law to prevent violence against you because of your speech and to punish those who do violence against you.

You can not prevent people from shunning, not hiring you or not attending your events.

Having said that it is true that the government has fallen down on their part of the job. They seem to have no interest in preventing violence against those who are voicing unpopular truths. Nor do they have any interest in punishing those who commit those acts of violence. That is something that is concerning and something that we can and should do something about.

But free speech?

There ain't no such animal.

And there never has been.

12 posted on 04/13/2019 9:04:27 AM PDT by Harmless Teddy Bear (If you are going to be baked by a witch you might as well go out with a mouth full of gingerbread!)
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To: Wuli

You are absolutely correct. So many of these Christian colleges started well, but now they have largely abandoned the true Christian faith. It seems that their faculty and administrators, who often were educated at secular colleges, want to be seen as “tolerant” and “open-minded” and “sophisticated” by their secular leftist counterparts. This seems to slowly happen at almost EVERY Christian college. “They love the praise of men more than the praise of God.”


13 posted on 04/13/2019 10:28:06 AM PDT by DeweyCA
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To: Elsie

“But what is it?”

Likely just a stock photo.


14 posted on 04/13/2019 2:36:26 PM PDT by Republican Wildcat
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To: Kaslin

bump


15 posted on 04/13/2019 6:42:25 PM PDT by foreverfree
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To: DeweyCA

“They love the praise of men more than the praise of God.”

Or it has been said: “”Woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you”?

Why? It is a trap. It is an enticement, when the glory of praise of men is sought.

“The Bible has little to say in praise of men. Little space is given to recounting the virtues of even the best men who have ever lived. This silence is not without purpose; it is not without a lesson. All the good qualities that men possess are the gift of God ; their good deeds are performed by the grace of God through Christ. Since they owe all to God, the glory of whatever they are or do belongs to Him alone • they are but instruments in His hands. More than this—as all the lessons of Bible history teach—it is a perilous thing to praise or exalt men; for if one comes to lose sight of his entire dependence on God, and to trust to his own strength, he is sure to fall.”

[From a book “Patriarchs and Prophets”]


16 posted on 04/14/2019 5:19:11 AM PDT by Wuli (30)
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To: Elsie

‘having an image of a bible with a Catholic rosary with crucifix laying on it
sends a subtle message. But what is it?’

probably just to piss you off...


17 posted on 04/14/2019 8:12:29 AM PDT by IrishBrigade
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To: IrishBrigade
Nah; it takes a LOT more than that.

This example of Arrogant Superiority does a pretty good job.


 

"One indeed is the universal Church of the faithful, outside which no one at all is saved, in which the priest himself is the sacrifice, Jesus Christ, whose body and blood are truly contained in the sacrament of the altar under the species of bread and wine; the bread (changed) into His body by the divine power of transubstantiation, and the wine into the blood, so that to accomplish the mystery of unity we ourselves receive from His (nature) what He Himself received from ours."

--Pope Innocent III and Lateran Council IV (A.D. 1215)

18 posted on 04/14/2019 12:39:41 PM PDT by Elsie
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To: Kaslin

Baylor was the first University I attended. I don’t even know it anymore. It has apparently become pagan.


19 posted on 04/14/2019 4:06:24 PM PDT by fwdude (Think about it: Blacks were made slaves in Africa, but were made free men in America.)
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To: Wuli

Remember several years ago when the “controversy” came up about Baylor University’s explicit prohibition on homosexual behavior? Threats of withheld funding and lawsuits were lobbed, and the University tacitly softened their stance, now simply prohibiting any sexual behavior outside of the marriage commitment, excising homosexuality completely out of their policy.

I’m guessing the homos now essentially OWN this administration.


20 posted on 04/14/2019 4:13:45 PM PDT by fwdude (Think about it: Blacks were made slaves in Africa, but were made free men in America.)
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