by ADF Senior Counsel Joseph Infranco

The stereotype of the arrogant, leftist professor in the ivory tower occasionally shows up in real life in a manner that shows that the truth is stranger than fiction.

Recent case in point:  a biology professor at a Colorado college (let’s call him Dr. Jones) hotly ridiculed a student (let’s call her Ms. Smith) in front of her entire class for her lack of belief in the theory of evolution.  In order to avoid legal trouble for his immense misstep, he agreed to settle the case in advance of litigation.  Part of the settlement required a written apology to the student.  Here is the letter of “apology” from the professor, followed by a response from Alliance Defense Fund allied attorney Barry Arrington that can only be said to…um…set the record completely straight:

June 1, 2011

Ms. Smith:

With regard to our conversation about your belief that evolution is not true, I apologize to you for appearing to denigrate your obviously strongly held beliefs.  I had not intended to offend you in any way regarding your faith or your world view.  That this was so perceived by you, I again offer my sincerest apology.

In making this apology to you, I am reminded of what happened to Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) – considered by many to be the father of modern science.  In 1610 Galileo determined through his telescope and various mathematical calculations, that the Earth moved around the sun, rather than the other way around which was, according to the Catholic Church “false and contrary to Scripture.”

In 1632, he was tried by the Inquisition, found “vehemently suspect of heresy”, forced to recant heliocentrism, and spent the rest of his life under house arrest.  As he was led away to begin his confinement, he said (to no one in particular) “and yet it still moves”.

Sincerely,

Dr. Jones

Response from ADF-allied attorney Barry Arrington:

July 27, 2011

Dear Dr. Jones:

I am writing in response to your June 1, 2011 letter to my client Ms. Smith, in which you apologized to her for “appearing” to denigrate her strongly held beliefs.  Sir, we both know you did not merely “appear” to denigrate Ms. Jones’s beliefs.  You specifically intended to use your position of authority as a platform from which to denigrate Ms. Smith’s beliefs and humiliate her in front of her peers, and you accomplished your purpose.  It saddens me that in your letter you decided to add mendacity to your boorish and abusive attack on your student.

You say you did not intend to offend Ms. Smith.  Rubbish.  I assume you are not an idiot, and only an idiot would not know that your words would demean and humiliate her, intimidate her into silence, and curb her natural desire for self expression in the face of the orthodoxy you represent.  Do you really expect anyone to believe that it was an unfortunate and unintended side effect of your actions that she would feel hurt by the experience or perceive it as an assault on her personal dignity?  Please do not insult our intelligence.

Finally, I cannot let your smug reference to Galileo go unchallenged.  Firstly, as a matter of simple fact, your history is all wrong.  Galileo never uttered the words you mistakenly placed in his mouth.  I provide for your edification a primer on the matter under my signature.

More importantly, however, your letter illustrates an utter failure to grasp the significance of this figure from history.  I will not spell it out for you.  Instead, I urge you to go back and think about this one a little more.  To assist you in that endeavor, please ask yourself and answer the following questions:  As between Ms. Smith and you:  (1) who is the pope (i.e., the authority figure with all of the power in the relationship)?  (2) Who speaks for an unyielding established orthodoxy?  (3) Who holds the minority dissenting view?  (4) Who was willing to challenge the entrenched orthodoxy at significant personal risk to herself?

“But Galileo was right and his opponents were wrong!” you might respond.  And that response would completely miss the point.  The adherents of every entrenched orthodoxy believe not only that they are right, but also that everyone who challenges the orthodoxy is at least wrong if not wicked.  Yet history is full of failed orthodoxies, collapsed paradigms, and discredited dogmas.

You are a high priest of the Church of Darwin.  How easily you slipped into the role of inquisitor.  You sniffed a hint of heresy from Ms. Smith, and you did not hesitate to put her on the verbal rack.  In your letter you point to Galileo as a hero of free thought and expression against an entrenched orthodoxy.  I hope you appreciate by now how richly ironic your appeal to Galileo is.

Sincerely,

Barry K. Arrington

Primer on Galileo

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That’s the first sentence of a remarkable article in the Chronicle of Higher Education.  The article describes many colleges’ efforts to encourage homosexual students to apply and attend.  These colleges tout their LGBT centers, their “pride months,” their homosexual alumni, their gender-studies classes, their “drag balls,” their “queer spaces,” and the general “gay-friendliness” of their campuses.

That most colleges and universities have “taken sides” in the ongoing national debate over the morality of homosexual behavior is not news.  That said, I suppose I am not alone in being a little shocked by what this article reveals — an extraordinarily high degree of commitment and investment of resources.

What does all this mean for Christian and conservative students who dissent from the prevailing orthodoxy?  Whatever it means, it isn’t good.  It is difficult to imagine that a campus that invest significant resources in recruiting homosexual applicants will tolerate a religious student group that adheres to the traditional understanding of sexual morality.  ADF’s Center for Academic Freedom expects the threats to religious freedom to grow, and it stands ready to defend the rights of Christians.

The late American philosopher Richard Rorty (d. 2007) in describing his assessment of the role of university professor wrote:  “When we American college teachers encounter religious fundamentalists, we do not consider the possibility of reformulating our own practices of justification so as to give more weight to the authority of the Christian scriptures.  Instead, we do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization.”  The re-education imperative is one that he, “like most Americans who teach humanities or social science in colleges and universities, invoke when we try to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic, religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own.”  Rorty explains to the “fundamentalist” parents of his students:  “we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable.”  He helpfully explains that “I think those students are lucky to find themselves under the benevolent Herrschaft [domination] of people like me, and to have escaped the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents.”

The sociologist Alvin Gouldner in his book The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class set forth a number of the historical developments that were decisive in the formation of the revolutionary intellectual class.  Among the factors is the process of secularization which de-sacralizes authority and enables challenges to theological traditions.  Another factor was the extension of non-church public schooling.  The colleges and universities in particular generate “dissent, deviance, and the cultivation of an authority-subverting culture of critical discourse.”  And the school teachers at all levels conceive and fulfill their tasks as representatives of (the abstract) society as a whole (whatever that is), thus distanced from and with no allegiance or obligation to the values of the parents of their students.  A related factor is the structure of the new educational system:  “increasingly insulated from the family system,” thereby situated to serve as “an important source of values among students divergent from those of their families.”  In both form and content (which are not so neatly divisible, by the way) the state educational enterprise has been leveraged to missionary ends, further undermining parental authority and replacing its formative function. 

Law Professor Samuel Levinson has with welcome candor revealed that it is not due to his sympathy for certain religious students that he prefers that public grade schools grant limited exemptions to those students with conscientious objections to portions of the curriculum.  Rather, such measures are calculated to mollify those religious students, thereby keeping them in the secularizing environment of the government school where they are likely to have their views transformed.  With just enough solicitude for such students’ interests, they may be convinced to stay put, and thus be “lured away from the views—some of them only foolish, others, alas, quite pernicious—of their parents.”     

To push these [Christian] students from the public schools . . . will assure that they will in fact be educated within institutions that are, from my perspective at least, far more limited, and indeed, “totalitarian” than anything likely to be found within a decent public school.  My desire to “lure” religious parents back to the public schools thus has at least a trace of the spider’s web about it.

And there’s more than a trace of irony in his assigning “totalitarian” levels as he plots means to manipulate the worldviews of children by coaxing them to remain in institutions designed for that very purpose.  Spider’s web, indeed.

The proselytizing purpose and effect of herding the kids into secular formative venues to ensure they don’t turn out like their parents is celebrated by Stephen Macedo.  “[W]e should accommodate dissenters when doing so helps draw them into the public moral order. . . .  Will the refusal to accommodate religious complaints about public schooling drive religious families out of public schools and into Christian schools?”  If that would be the result, “then we have a powerful pragmatic argument for accommodation.”  Macedo is refreshingly forthcoming about “the transformative ambitions of liberalism.”  Acknowledging that the children of “Fundamentalists” are future participatory citizens, he sees the importance of exercising leverage over their moral and intellectual development to deliver them from family influence and impose a new outlook.

If parents want their children always to be guided solely by sectarian religious teachings—both in politics and elsewhere—then their view of good citizenship is at odds with the liberal one. . . . We have good reason to hope that there will be fewer families raising such children in the future.

We should, therefore, preserve liberal institutions, practices, rituals, and norms that psychologically tax people unequally, for if that has the effect of turning people’s lives—including their most “private” beliefs—in directions that are congruent with and supportive of liberalism, thank goodness it does.

Thus does he insist that we “should not be concerned to make it equally easy for Fundamentalist Protestants and modernist Protestants to pass along their beliefs to their children.”  And he later concludes:  “The extinction of many of the communities that pose truly radical alternatives to liberal democratic political principles is to be welcomed.”  Of course, not only to be welcomed, but be an aim of our transformative liberal social order. 

The monopoly authority to centrally influence how young people understand the world is quite a prize.  As we have explored in past posts (see, e.g., here and here), the idea of the religious neutrality of secularism is a myth.  Secularism is a rival religion.  But the myth of its non-religious character secures its governing role in our system, due to the constitutional interpretation which hands civic control exclusively to the “non-religious.”  (It’s all in the categorizing, you see.)  From that position of authority it is uniquely empowered to fulfill its own Great Commission to go and make disciples.  Its control over the State Church of Education gives it a tremendous competitive advantage.

That is the question that dominated the Society for Personality and Social Psychology at its annual conference, according to a fascinating article in today’s New York Times (also referenced by Inside Higher Ed).  But rather than looking at the usual litany of victims and rounding up the usual suspects, Dr. Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia argues that social psychologists discriminate against conservatives.  After polling the audience, over 80% of which self-identified as liberal, he commented: 

Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation. . . .  But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations.

And this leftist echo chamber has consequences on campus, especially for conservative students, who hide their political beliefs from colleagues who openly assume that everyone—or at least everyone who is considered “intelligent”—is liberal. 

Dr. Haidt’s diagnosis confirms what other studies—some of which the New York Times references—have shown:  that leftists and Democrats vastly outnumber conservatives and Republicans among university faculty.  And it confirms what professors like Dr. Mike Adams and students like Julea Ward have experienced:  if you merely express conservative or Christian views, you will face discrimination, in the form of lost promotions or even expulsion.  

But Dr. Haidt does not just diagnose the problem.  He also explains how it arose:  “social psychologists are a ‘tribal-moral community’ united by ‘sacred values’ that hinder research and damage their credibility—and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals.”  And to break up this ideological monopoly, he prescribes some good medicine:  hefty portions of National Review and Thomas Sowell.  Hopefully, his message will catch on and the discrimination against conservatives and Christians in higher education will end.  Until then, perhaps we should call his prescription Chicken Soup for the Leftist Soul.

It is a reigning deceit in our national consciousness, a lie on which innumerable social and institutional practices and expectations are founded, that religion can and should be merely an optional component of individual private life.  This thesis further maintains that barricades can and must be erected to keep religion from influencing public policy in order that a fair and impartial government may be operated.  This narrative offers that the former, unfortunate day when religious allegiances governed the polity is behind us; we now operate from neutral principles of value shared across the ideological spectrum, uninfected by provincial religious tenets.  And we are told that a realm cleansed of religion is freed to be objective, scientific, and democratic, instead of subjective, dogmatic, and theocratic.  This is a definitional coup.  It is flatly wrong on all counts.

One of the principle errors in this project of defining lies in its analytical placement of religious beliefs as if they were ancillary to the basic views that we all uniformly share.  Or to employ a metaphor, the assertion is that religion is an optional side-dish available to supplement the universal main course:  some select that side-dish, some don’t.  This proposal is fundamentally mistaken, and serves to hide the fact that the theistic view of life which it marginalizes is precisely like any other competing view of life, in this respect:  such worldviews organize and set in place all other ideas, facts, and values.  There is no approach to life that eludes authoritative presuppositions about the nature of reality.  It is, for example, inevitable that the government is going to organize itself and take official positions based on some conception of moral precept, of its own authority and legitimacy, and so on.  And this process is made sensible only in terms of a certain network of premises about reality—i.e., a religion (theistic or not). 

The question, then, is simply:  which reality-defining standard will govern?  It is not whether a conception of life will be established in a privileged position in a polity.  Only which will enjoy the dominant and defining position.  Modern liberal societies obscure the partisan nature of this ordering process by deceptive naming conventions:   the excluded are called “religious,” and the ruling outlook is called “secular.”  The former is biased, the latter neutral.  Sure. 

Thus when the government through compulsory education laws takes children for 12 formative years and subjects them in government schools to a functionally atheistic, naturalistic education, imposing on them what the Supreme Court calls the “inculcat[ion of] fundamental values necessary to the maintenance of a democratic political system,” our enlightened class calls this neutral and eminently constitutional.  Secular catechizing is praiseworthy.  But when a rebellious legislature dares pass a law that throws a crumb allowing for one minute of silence at the beginning of the school day before the beginning of the “inculcation of fundamental values” (from which God is banished) in order to give students a fleeting opportunity to pray to the Deity-in-exile, this is condemned as unconstitutional state support of religion.  The requisite “neutrality” requires entire elimination of divine acknowledgment while young minds are being regimented. 

So the State may spend years—at taxpayer expense—giving children a comprehensive view of the world, explaining its (and their) meaning, intricacies, and operations, and foisting on them all the values ostensibly necessary for America to flourish (which usually requires a great deal of instruction on contraceptive methods), just so long as it does not suggest that God is necessary or relevant to anything that can be taught or learned. 

This principle is applied across the board.  Thus while we observe the government pursue social engineering through the omnipresent threat and application of force, and the redistribution of multiple billions of dollars, we are to take comfort in knowing that these efforts derive from a neutral outlook shared by all reasonable people, and are accomplished without any official reliance on the precepts of Christianity.  Thereby is liberty and scientific fairness maintained.  Indeed.

Please, love, let us do away with this fiction that the exclusion of Christian precept from government voice and mind constitutes “neutrality.”  Government policy is nothing other than instantiated value judgments.  The state necessarily must choose between competing visions of justice, of what is the appropriate design of community, and so forth, as it legislates and regulates through incentives and coercion.  There will always be a prevailing view of the good, which is itself derivative of a factional, comprehensive worldview of some sort.  James Madison in Federalist 51 mused, “What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?” 

No realm of cultural endeavor or significance is immune from similar assessment. 

We either submit to God or replace Him with a rival.  The Position is never unfilled.  Authority is inescapable.  Neutrality is a myth.