It Doesn't Need To Be As Bad As Iran To Be Bad Enough

(As the post-Christian, post-modern insanity escalates on college campuses, it seems a good time to re-publish this Worth Revisiting this post from September, 2014. To enjoy the work of other faithful Catholic bloggers see Worth Revisiting Wednesday, hosted by Elizabeth Reardon at theologyisaverb.com and Allison Gingras at reconciledtoyou.com.)

Submit Or Be Derecognized

      For a long time now elite opinion on college campuses has been trying to shut down speech that doesn’t stick to to a certain script, especially religious speech.  Specifically, Christian speech.  The clampdown has now become a little more overt: the California State University system has “derecognized” the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF), an Evangelical group, on all 23 of its campuses, as explained in this article [here] by Ed Stetzer in Christianity Today.  The reason for the derecognition (who even knew that there was such a word?) is that the ICVF refuses to change its rules requiring leaders in the group to be believing Christians.  The state of California has said, in other words, that Christian groups will not be recognized as official groups on campus unless they open up their leadership to people who don’t share, and may even be hostile to, their very reason for existing in the first place.

InterVarsity Students spreading . . . bigotry and intolerance?

Consequences of derecognition

     You may be wondering what the consequences of derecognition are.  According to Greg Jao, National Field Director & Campus Access Coordinator, there are three main things that IVCF chapters will lose:

1)      Free access to rooms (they will now have to pay, and will be shut out if a “recognized" group wants the room).

2)      Access to student activities programs “including”, he says, “new student fairs where we meet most students.”

3)      “We also lose standing when we engage faculty, students and administrators.”

He doesn’t explain in detail what that last point entails. Tish Warren led a similar IVCF group at the private Vanderbilt University a few years ago that experienced a similar fate.  In a separate Christianity Today article that Stetzer quotes at length she explains:

Because we were no longer allowed to use Vanderbilt's name, we struggled to convey that we were a community of Vanderbilt students who met near campus.

In other words, as close to invisible as they can be short of being banned altogether.

Is Christianity "Hate Speech"?

     What’s behind it all?  Stetzer says that “The university system has decided that speech with beliefs that undergird it—and shape how it is organized—has to be derecognized.”  I suppose you could put it that way, but not all “speech with beliefs” is really being targeted.  He allows Warren to be somewhat more specific.  She explains that the banned groups had “crossed a line”, one that

was drawn by two issues: creedal belief and sexual expression. If religious groups required set truths or limited sexual autonomy, they were bad—not just wrong but evil, narrow-minded, and too dangerous to be tolerated on campus.

This states the case more plainly.  Notice that it is the same in the wider world: support (not simply tolerance) of what used to be considered sexual heterodoxy is the standard by which elite opinion decides who enjoys basic rights and who does not.  Warren and Jao are both being rather too generous when they posit a desire for “democracy” as one of the motives for the anti-Christian people.  No, democracy is not a priority; these same people have no problem with federal judges overturning state laws and constitutional amendments voted in by 60-70% of the electorate, and at the university level you will not see them applying to the vegetarians, Muslims, and certainly not the LGBTQ groups the same unreasonable demands they have imposed upon the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship.

Don't read that, kids - it might be hate speech

    And that connection to the wider world is what most concerns me. Stetzer starts out his article saying “Now, it’s not persecution”, an admonition he repeats at the end, adding: “I hope they won’t call themselves persecuted, since that lessens the persecution in, for example, Iran.”  If only we could lessen the persecution in Iran so easily!  What he means, of course, is that equating the inconveniences experienced by college students in California to the very real suffering, up to and including torture and death, suffered by Christians in the Middle East tends to diminish our proper sense of horror and outrage at the latter. Fair enough, but on the other hand injustices don’t need to rise to the Iran or ISIS level, or anywhere near it, to merit condemnation.  And I don’t think he should be in such a hurry to downplay the significance of what has happened in California.

We Don't Need No Stinkin' Constitution

     First of all, what the State of California is doing is a direct assault on the constitutional rights of  Christian students.  The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution starts out as follows:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . .

Telling members of a religious group whom they must choose as their leaders is an exceptionally unsubtle trespass on the free exercise of religion – and I know that courts have found all sorts of ingenious ways to make laws and constitutional provisions mean the exact opposite of their clear meaning, but if we’re not willing to fight something this blatant, we might as well run the white flag up the pole and get it over with.  Since the courts have also found that the restrictions the Bill of Rights places upon Congress also apply to all other government organs, including state run schools, this is clearly a constitutional issue (as it is not at a private school like Vanderbilt).

     This potential damage here also extends beyond the walls of the university.  The half-spoken message that California State is sending its students is that Christian belief is bad: “not just wrong but evil, narrow-minded, and too dangerous to be tolerated on campus”, as Tish Warren said of the attitude of the authorities at Vanderbilt.  If such a thing is simply a given in the environment where they are formed for four years, how many students are going to be prepared to be open to and tolerant of Christian belief when they get out . . . especially if the outside environment agrees with what they experienced at the university?

Bad Is Bad

     And, as I have noted in these pages many times, there is a conscious and coordinated campaign underway in the United States and the rest of the Western world to “derecognize” Christianity as a whole.  The mainstreaming of anti-Christian bigotry lays the foundation; simply holding traditional beliefs about morality and marriage makes a person fair game for the foulest and most hateful verbal abuse (see here and here).  Somehow the targets of this vileness, and not the spewers of it, are scorned by elite opinion-makers as “haters” and “bigots”.  And who is going to argue when haters and bigots are defamed, or even threatened with loss of their livelihood (here, here, here) if they oppose the dismantling of traditional morality -  or simply decline to participate actively in its destruction?  This harassment, I submit, is in fact persecution, even if not on the level of Iran or Iraq, and it sets the stage for worse: once Christians have been completely driven beyond the pale, what's to prevent harsher forms of persecution?  And in fact serious persecutions almost always start with little things, and with the delegitimizing, the "derecognition", if you will, of the targeted group, 

     Finally, I haven’t discussed the fact that our colleges and universities have, in a very short time (and practically unremarked), undergone a radical change: where formerly they acted in loco parentis ("in the place of the parent"), a role in which they protected their students and enforced moral standards, now they actively promote promiscuity and licentiousness . . . and actually punish students for upholding morality.  How can this possibly turn out well?  

     So, to all you Ed Stetzers out there, hold your head up – we have nothing to apologize for. Nobody is confusing California State University with the Islamic Republic of Iran, but what’s happening at California State is bad enough, and if we allow harassment and injustice to continue, more serious persecution is sure to follow.

A Couple Paving Stones On The Road To Hell

This Throwback Thursday Post was first published on December 12th, 2014. Warning: contains content of a sexual nature.  

      There’s an old saying: “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.”  It’s a little odd, when you think about it: shouldn’t our intentions be good?  The road to Heaven certainly isn’t paved with bad intentions, is it?  The answer, I think, is that the second half of the proposition is left out.  It's about good intentions that are not grounded in reality, or in wisdom, or in God’s law: they create more problems than they solve (if, indeed, they solve anything at all). 

“Is it OK if I take my pants off?”

     A classic example of the Road to Hell Principle is the thoroughly modern practice known as “Sex Education” (Sex Ed informally).  A concern, and I believe a sincere one in most cases, for the well-being of young people in an increasingly sexualized world has led to instructional programs in schools (and not just public schools) that, because they are disconnected from God’s law, and Natural Law, and plain common sense, promote the very harm they are intended to ameliorate.      One such program has been in the news recently: a class run by a Planned Parenthood chapter in California that was invited to teach a class on sexuality to 9th graders in the local public high school.  According to the Fox News story [full story here]:  

. . . some parents are irate that their children’s sex ed class at Acalanes High School in Lafayette is being taught by employees of Planned Parenthood without their prior knowledge. They are also fuming over the methods and materials being used, including a checklist that asks students if they are “ready for sex” and another worksheet that describes how to give and obtain consent, as well as a diagram that uses a "genderbread" person for lessons in gender identity. 

The Gingerbread Person is a cute little fellow who clearly was designed to appeal to children, much like the old Camel Cigarettes mascot “Joe Camel”; and like the much maligned cartoon camel, who was criticized for promoting an unhealthy product to children, Gingerbread Person offers reassurance to the very young that whatever they want to express or do sexually is not just all right, but good and desirable.  Things, perhaps, that had not even occurred to them before.  As for the class itself, many of the children “felt the sessions were pressuring them to have sex” or, as one parent put it, “Some of the kids were distracted because it was divergent from what they were taught at home.”  Indeed. For example:   

Included in the materials provided to students were documents and worksheets that included a checklist entitled, “Sex Check! Are You Ready For Sex?” in which the 13 and 14-year-old students are asked questions such as if they have water– based lubricants and condoms and if they could handle a possible infection or pregnancy. Another worksheet reads like a how-to on obtaining consent from a possible sexual partner and offers possible statements like “Do you want to go back to my place?” and “Is it OK if I take my pants off?”  

"You can go now."

There are more problems with school-based sex ed classes that I can get into here.  I will point out that the foregoing tends to support what many of us have been saying for a long time: that such classes not only debase sexuality and separate it from its appropriate place in a loving marital relationship, but actually encourage (or even “pressure”, as the students say above) early and promiscuous sexual activity. 

     Here’s another case, this time from the UK [full story here].  After a sex ed class, a thirteen year-old boy and girl   

. . . went to a secluded area where they discussed what they had just been taught about sexual intercourse. The boy said that he asked the girl if she wanted to "try sex." Although the young girl repeatedly said "No," the schoolboy proceeded to pin the girl down and rape her. Afterward he allegedly told the girl, "You can go now."  

     This is only one case to be sure, but we can see a clear connection between the instruction and the act.  And, as it turns out, many British students have misgivings similar to those expressed by their American counterparts above.  From the Life Site story:  

Earlier this year a poll of UK teenagers by the Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR) [here]found that a large majority of both boys and girls complained that sex education often presents promiscuity as normal, putting additional pressure on them to become sexually active before they might otherwise do so. Many of the teens criticized the sex education lessons they had received at school for not doing enough to discourage them from becoming sexually active. One 18-year-old girl responded to the poll question about her sex-ed experience: "I always felt pressured by teachers, like, 'sex is normal, just be safe OK' when actually I wasn't interested in having sex at the time and was happy to wait for the right person.” "I don't think sex should be taught as 'the norm'. I think people should be made to feel comfortable and teachers should say, 'you should wait, the law states 16, don't be pressured'." 

The Definition Of Insanity

According to Dr. Philip Ney, a retired professor of psychiatry, there is plenty of research to show that the negative effects of sex ed programs are very real.  In an essay he wrote for Life Site News [full article here] he says: 

It is quite conclusive now, that the more sex education, the more sexual activity and all the problems that go with that.  The introduction of sex education is well correlated with the increase in abortion, STDs and boy-girl interpersonal problems. Good education gives people the desire to try it out or learn more experientially.  Paradoxically, in that respect, current forms of sex education are good education but have the wrong results . . . The earlier the sex education, the younger children explore sex and try various sexual techniques. Present evidence makes it possible to also conclude that the earlier the sex education, the earlier the sexual behavior. Thus sexual education is sexual titillation.  

     Despite all the evidence that these programs do the opposite of what they intend, the “experts” have nothing to offer but more of the same.  In response to the British case above, one such expert said that “in her opinion the solution to this type of misbehavior is more sex education, ‘and much earlier than 13, I would say.’”        This whole situation brings to mind an old saying: “Insanity is to keep doing the same thing, while expecting a different result”.  But what else can they do in the public schools, or in the secular world in general?  They have rejected a worldview in which healthy sexuality is nourished and supported.  They have torn down the social attitudes and institutions that protected people from the consequences of lust run amok. In a world where the most important thing is feelings (and isn’t that what the Genderbread Person is all about?), right and wrong are random abstractions.  That’s why even abstinence classes, while better than the Planned Parenthood inspired alternative, are still not enough.  Young people need to be taught not simply the (negative) practice of abstinence but the (positive) virtue of Chastity, and not just in a classroom: they need to see it as part of a coherent worldview, as something that not only works but can be lived out joyfully, especially by the example of the adults in their lives. 

         It has happened before. There are many reasons why Christianity spread as quickly as it did throughout the Roman Empire in the first few centuries after Christ.  I have heard that one of them was that pagan Romans saw the joy in the lives of their Christian neighbors, not the least part of which was the love and respect Christian men had for their wives.  In a culture that more and more encourages people to use each other for pleasure rather than embrace each other in love, we are again called to show a more excellent way.  We need to understand, and help our fellow Catholics see, that Church teachings on sexuality and marriage are not so much a series of prohibitions as they are a road map to happier, more productive, and holier lives.  We need to rebuild, one person, one family, at a time a culture in which Christ is King.

Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring (Celtic Woman) & Weekly Roundup

I love this piece - as perfect an expression of Joy as we can hope to find in this world, and of course focused on our one true source of Joy, Jesus Christ.  He is Risen, Alleluiah, Alleluiah!

As an added bonus (no purchase necessary), below please see the Weekly Roundup of the past week's posts from Principium et Finis and Nisi Dominus.

“What Is The Liturgy Of The Hours?” The second installment of my series on the Divine Office as a devotion for busy lay people.

“Are We Collaborators In The Culture Of Death?” Hillary Clinton says religious believers need to change their beliefs in order to facilitate more abortions.  But that's not as surprising as the fact that millions of Catholics will vote for her anyway.

 “A Church Is Much, Much More Than A Building” Instead of closing Churches that have been at the center of people's lives for generations, maybe we should try to re-fill them . . . 

“Peace, Baby!” A Vatican congregation decides, after nine years of study, to leave the Sign of Peace where it is, but they do agree that something should be done.

“St. Joseph The Worker Invites Us All To Work For God’s Kingdom” It may have been instituted to counter the communists' May Day, but the Feast of St. Joseph the Worker has a lesson for everyone.

A Dark Matter: "Proving" God In A Materialistic World

The Expanding Universe, from the NASA publication "Dark Energy, Dark Matter"

     How do you show young people that Christian belief is reasonable?  I’ve seen more and more over the years in which I have been teaching in Catholic High Schools that most of my students have been formed in a materialist worldview – even when they are professing Christians.  It’s an unspoken assumption in most of the classes they’ve taken, particularly the science classes.  They just assume that a transcendent God who cannot be measured or detected with scientific instruments cannot be shown to exist.  I have found that, with a little help from NASA and modern cosmology, many students can better understand that belief in God is at least as reasonable as many “scientific” concepts that are accepted almost without question.  

     Cosmological science offers a good illustration of some ways in which we apply reason to our world and experience.  You may occasionally hear in the news, for instance, reports of planets discovered in other solar systems.  We do not now have any instruments capable of “seeing” the planet itself; instead, we detect it by observing its effects on other things, such as the miniscule wobble its gravitational pull causes in the star it orbits, or the very slight changes in the light we observe from the star as the planet passes in front of it (read more here).  On an even grander scale, consider the question of “Dark Matter” and “Dark Energy.” Over the past century, scientists have formulated what is known as the Big Bang Theory to account for the fact that the entire universe appears to be expanding at a consistent rate.  At the same time, they have calculated that in order for the universe to do what it seems to be doing, there needs to be much more matter and energy than we can detect – many times more.  As the NASA publication “Dark Energy, Dark Matter” explains (my italics): 

More is unknown than is known. We know how much dark energy there is because we know how it affects the Universe's expansion. Other than that, it is a complete mystery. But it is an important mystery. It turns out that roughly 68% of the Universe is dark energy. Dark matter makes up about 27%. The rest - everything on Earth, everything ever observed with all of our instruments, all normal matter - adds up to less than 5% of the Universe. Come to think of it, maybe it shouldn't be called "normal" matter at all, since it is such a small fraction of the Universe. (full publication here) 

Notice that physicists say that more than 95% of the matter and energy in the universe is completely undetectable, and we may never be able to detect it.  There is no direct evidence of the existence of Dark Energy and Dark Matter, and yet they are sure it is there, only because of the effects we observe on other things.

     Much of the evidence for God’s involvement in our world is of a similar sort, at least for those who have not themselves had a direct experience of God.  Like Dark Energy, God cannot be measured with scientific instruments, but his effects are very clear.  Consider the case of Bernard Nathanson, an atheist doctor from a Jewish family who was one of the founders of the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL).  Nathanson himself performed or presided over tens of thousands of abortions until he was convinced by ultrasound images of the humanity of the unborn.  Deeply disturbed by his involvement in the taking of so many innocent lives, Nathanson, still an atheist, became active in pro-life activities, where he encountered many committed Christians.  He noticed something different about his religious friends, which he eventually recognized as what St. Paul called “The Gifts of the Holy Spirit”: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control" (Galatians 5:22-23).  It was clear to him that the difference he saw was due to the religious dimension of their lives, the visible effects of their relationship with God.  He eventually converted from atheism to Catholicism.

Merging Galaxy Cluster Abell 520 from "Dark Energy, Dark Matter" 

     Literally millions of people have come to Faith in the same way over the last two thousand years.  Like Nathanson, they were first attracted by the effects they saw in others, and after embracing Christ, found the same changes in their own lives.  They very reasonably based their faith on the real results they saw in others, and in themselves. 

     That, by the way, is one way in which belief in God is different from a belief in Dark Energy or Dark Matter.  Nobody has ever had a personal encounter with Dark Energy, or seen a miracle performed by Dark Matter; countless people throughout the ages have had direct experiences of God, or witnessed His miracles, which continue up to the present day.  One might say that, when we examine the evidence of the world around us, belief in God is actually quite reasonable.

Related Posts: 

"What Would Darwin Do?"

"The Presentation of Our Lord, Atheism, and the Problem of Suffering"

Don't Give Up On Catholic Education!

1953: the Good Old Days

Should We Have Catholic Schools?

   
 Fellow Catholic blogger RAnn at This That and the Other Thing recently published a post called “Catholic Schools – Should We Have Them?” [here].  She raises some interesting points, and asks a number of questions well worth asking, in particular “whether we as a church should be investing so many resources in our schools”.  Let me say at the outset that I have a lot of experience in this area: I have taught in Catholic High Schools for the past twenty-seven years; at the same time, I attended both Catholic and public schools (I graduated from a public high school), and my own children are home-schooled, so I’m drawing on a wide range of experience. While there are definitely things that Catholic schools can and should do better, I would argue that they are more important than ever.

     I’d like to start with a point on which I respectfully disagree with RAnn.  She had been reviewing a book on the integration of segregated schools in the 1950’s and 60’s, and points out that the first black students in the previously all-white schools had a very hard time of it: she ties that to the question of whether to send her children to public or to Catholic schools. “In both cases”, she says, “I think there is a choice that is right for society and a different choice that may be right for individual kids.”   I don’t think the analogy holds.  In the case of integration, black students had been unjustly deprived of choice of schools, and forced to attend inferior ones; integration really did put them into better schools, despite the hardships and indignities suffered by the first black students to integrate; superior schools at least potentially gave them more and better options later in life, and of course paved the way for a much better educational outcome for those who followed them.  The temporary disadvantages were for the sake of future benefit not just for society as a whole, but for those children themselves. 

Catholic Schools Are Good For Students

     The question of whether to choose a public or private school for your children today is very different.  As I argue below, putting them into a public rather than a Catholic school may in fact be to the detriment of society as a whole, and very often means putting them into a worse school, rather than a better. Catholic schools have always out-performed public schools in every measurable academic category, as long such categories have been measured (see here and here).  My own experience backs this up: I’ve taught Latin and English in three different high schools in three different states, all of which draw students from a wide area and from a wide number of grammar and middle schools, and I have consistently found the Catholic school students much more prepared for high school level language study than the students from the public schools.   

     Also, in light of the integration issue, it’s worth noting that minority students derive particular benefit from Catholic schools: they are much more likely to graduate from high school than their peers in public schools, and two and one half times more likely to attend college (here). Catholic schools, in fact, have long been recognized as an unparalleled path to success for minority students, and their closure has a more profound impact on these students than on other students (here).  So, if we’re talking about Catholic schools in the context of the civil rights era integration of the public schools, we might point out that Catholic schools, by effectively preparing African American and other minority students to participate successfully in society as adults, do an excellent job of accomplishing what was the primary purpose of school integration in the first place.  In this regard, supporting Catholic schools is good for both the individual students and society as a whole.

Sometimes It's Even Good For Their Souls

     What is true for minority students is true for all other students as well: the purpose of education is to prepare them for adulthood.  From society’s point of view, the end of education is that children are good and productive citizens.  We Catholics want the same, but we also have a higher aim: we want our children to be formed into moral and faith-filled adults.  This is even more important than intellectual excellence; it is better to be illiterate before the Throne of God than to be the smartest man in Hell. Happily, as we saw above, Catholic education in fact does a superior job of training the intellect, but its primary purpose is to point the students under its care in the direction of sainthood.

     If we remember that we’re talking about formation and not simply instruction, the case for specifically Catholic schools becomes even clearer.  We are corporeal beings, unlike the Angels (see here), and as students we are formed by the entire school environment as much as we are by the content of the curriculum.  When I last attended public schools three and a half decades ago they were already committed to a secularist worldview, and had already abandoned any effort to teach the natural virtues.  Today’s public schools have gone beyond that, and beyond where they were even twenty or fifteen years ago to the point where many of them have Planned Parenthood, the world’s largest abortion provider and a zealous fornication promoter (take a look here get a feel for their agenda) providing “health” instruction; an increasing number are instituting mandatory “diversity” classes. The courts in some states have ruled there is no right to exempt your children from objectionable classes.  Add on top of that an environment that crushes any dissent on various leftist enthusiasms from global warming (or is it now “climate change”?) to gay marriage.  That's before we even start to talk about the whole Common Core fiasco.  We’re kidding ourselves if we think that our children will absorb the good things and somehow be immune to the bad things. I’ve heard the argument that “we went to public schools and we came out all right.”  First of all, as I pointed out above, these are not your father’s public schools, or even your children’s father’s public schools; also, quite frankly, not all of us do come out all right: I know plenty of people who didn’t, and speaking for myself, there were experiences and hard-to-shed habits I picked up in my public high school that I could have done without.

Catholic Schools Aren't Perfect, But . . . 

     One might counter that Catholic schools have their imperfections as well: there may well be administrators and teachers who undermine the Faith; as a practical matter, a school of any significant  size will need to hire people who are not practicing Catholics to fill some positions.  Also, as is the case in any school, the peer group will exercise a powerful formative influence, and many, probably most, students will be there not from religious devotion, but in order to benefit from the safer environment and the superior academic rigor.  It was partly for these reasons (we wanted our children to model themselves on us rather than their peers), but also because we wanted to have more control over the process, that my lovely bride and I decided to home school our children.  Most people are not going to go that route, however, and for all their unavoidable imperfections, good Catholic schools provide an environment where Christ is at the center, the Catholic faith is both taught and lived out, and moral excellence is promoted. 

     I'm also not a big fan of the idea that our children can or should be sent into the maw of the government-run educational complex as Ambassadors for Christ.  I don’t think it’s fair, reasonable or, frankly, even safe to send our not-fully-formed children into the public school system and expect them to improve the environment there in the face of a peer culture that is hostile to religious faith and a system that ever more aggressively proselytizes for extreme secularism; all but the most heroic are more likely to be converted themselves.  They have a better chance to be successful evangelizers as well-formed adult Catholics.  Also, a good Catholic school will not only bring some, at least, of the Catholic students from lukewarm families into a closer relationship with Christ and his Church, but will also convert some of its non-Catholic students.  In the school where I currently teach we typically see several of these students receive the Sacraments of Initiation and enter the Church at the last school Mass of the year. Even those not converted will at least be "levened" by the experience, a levening they will bring with them throughout life.

     There’s a lot more that can be said on this topic, and this is already a long post, so here’s my final point: it might well be the case that the traditional model of the parish school is no longer viable, but that’s no reason to abandon Catholic Education itself in a culture that is rapidly shedding its Christian heritage.  We need to find structures that fit the times.  Already a growing number of homeschooling families are participating in a wide variety  of groups and organizations; some families in my area have actually created their own school, independent of any official Church body; and it may well be that the new ecclesial movements that are doing so much to energize other parts of the Body of Christ will have something to contribute here.  We need to be open to the Holy Spirit and, as Saint John Paul II often said (and as it says many times in scripture), "Be not afraid!".  Whaever form it takes, this is not the time to abandon Catholic education.