I am (or try to be) a partisan of pluralism….But this respect is difficult to maintain when these institutions will not admit that this is what is going on. Instead, we have the pretense of universality ”” the insistence that the post-Eich Mozilla is open to all ideas, the invocations of the “spirit of free expression” from a school that’s kicking a controversial speaker off the stage.
And with the pretense, increasingly, comes a dismissive attitude toward those institutions ”” mostly religious ”” that do acknowledge their own dogmas and commitments, and ask for the freedom to embody them and live them out.
It would be a far, far better thing if Harvard and Brandeis and Mozilla would simply say, explicitly, that they are as ideologically progressive as Notre Dame is Catholic or B. Y.U. is Mormon or Chick-fil-A is evangelical, and that they intend to run their institution according to those lights.
I can live with the progressivism. It’s the lying that gets toxic.
Amen. The lying is doubly toxic in TEC because the progressive direction is touted as the work of the Holy Spirit.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the “resignation” of Douthat is announced by the NY Times one of these days.
Refreshing honesty from a prominent journalist. The truth is, of course, that there is no such thing as a naked public square, as Richard John Neuhaus pointed out long ago. “Nautre abhors a vacuum, and if Christian values are banished from the public square, something else will take its place. You can call the new replacement “secular humanism,” or “pluralism,” or whatever label you prefer, but the fact remains that another ideology has replaced Christianity as the dominant worldview everywhere in the Global North.
The outrageous ouster of Mozilla Firefox’s co-founder is a blatant example of what I like to call “Leftist Fundamentalism.” I will never forget what my esteemed mentor and doctoral supervisor at Union Seminary in Richmond told me after he’d been ousted by that Presbyterian school’s president after the guy became furious at him for outing his covert liberalizing agenda to the school’s board of trustees. My revered teacher was Dr. Jack Dean Kingsbury, a Lutheran, who had been forced out of the Missouri Synod decades earlier for refusing to subscribe to the myth of biblical inerrancy. He had exposed to the trustees how the school’s president (Louis Weeks) was doing his best to take the centrist school scretly to the left while trying to retain the support of the alumni, who were far more conservative on the whole.
Kingsbury’s unforgettable remark to me was this: “David, I’ve seen the fundamentalism of the right and the fundamentalism of the left up close, and believe me, the fundamentalism of the left is worse.”
So true. There are none so illiberal as supposed liberals who have come to power after a long struggle and are determined to consolidate their gains at all costs. The sheer hypocrisy of such “liberals” is staggering.
David Handy+