Last week, I wrote about how the devil has tried to tear US Methodism to shreds. This week, it appears that the devil has escalated the culture wars and is now fighting on a broad front.
After teaching for twenty years, Samuel Joeckel could boast about a much-acclaimed book on C.S. Lewis, a professorship (full rank), and a regular renewable (tenured) appointment. That was until yesterday. As he left his noon class, the Provost and the Dean of Liberal Arts at Palm Beach Christian University waited for him outside the door.
The Provost held a document in his hand that may terminate his “regular appointment.” His crime was that he was teaching students about the race theory. The theory is very simple to understand. Just last week Tyree Nichols stopped at a traffic stop light. From that hour he was to breathe his last breath. He was beaten senseless by five black policemen.
Now, you say. “Ken, stop being dramatic. Tyree must have provoked the police in some way.”
That is the point, you sluggard. A Memphis Inquiry has searched everywhere and found no reason why he was stopped. But it is very simple. Every black father’s nightmare is to hear that his black son has been stopped by police.
In the funeral oration, Reverend Al Sharpton explained it this way. “I bet, if Tyree had been white, the police would not have beaten him to death.”
That is the truth. Black lives (especially black males) are expendable.
Palm Beach University is a Christian University. Joeckel exceeded his writ. The University does not want learners to be taught the “truth.”
There is a war going on here.
Professors are being dismissed left and right for teaching the “truth.” Christian Universities are in the forefront of this movement.
If Christians thought that the devil is done with them, they are mistaken.
In the echelons of higher education, an innocent sounding theory has gained ground. It can be traced to the innocent experiments by the American educator, John Dewey at Columbia University. Dewey, in the 1930’s noticed that technology was shattering all what we used to call norms. We must therefore teach our children in a futuristic way, to cope with change. Former President Barak Obama said, “You are the change you want to be.”
That sounds cool. In its extreme form, biologists came to believe that gender norms are socially created rather than natural. Since 80 % of the teachers in K-12 teachers are women, their overwhelming influence upon the boy child is deleterious.
Now dear reader, please hold your breath. Between 2018-2020, as many as 300 000 kids suffered from gender dysphoria. The devil saw a loophole. The Democrats believe that if a girl child (say 10 years old) confides in a teacher that she wants to be a boy, the school must take affirmative action. The parents need not be informed.
Now there are devil doctors who say that they can surgically remove a girl’s breasts and by using hormones, affirm her journey towards living the life of a boy.
These ignoramuses, under the inebriation induced by the devil, refuse to acknowledge that girls are born with a womb and boys do not have that capacity.
A secret memo was misplaced at Vanderbilt University Medical Center purporting to be able to physically make gender affirmation.
The Democratic government supports this position. If a teacher were to reveal the gender struggles of the child to the parents, that teacher’s job is on the line.
But there is more. It is more than ten years now since airports have re-oriented their toilet facilities into non-gender specific accommodations. We were flying to Mexico just last week. When my wife raised her head in the toilet, there was a bearded man standing there. The man has a right to use a toilet of his gender preference.
This has caused confusion. Some male prisoners (I envy their spunk) through gender preference have opted to be sent to female jailhouses. “Things happened” (black English) and in one case two women reported that they had been raped.
Christians fight back.
A “bunch of students, maybe twenty” at Asbury Methodist University, Wilmore, Kentucky, knew that something is wrong in the culture described above. Following John Wesley’s example, they occupied the University chapel three weeks ago and began praying for discernment.
They had no agenda, except the affirmation that there was something rotten in the Kingdom of Denmark (Shakespeare). News spread, and as the second week encroached, and they were still praying, masses of people, some from Scotland, came to share the gospel affirmation.
As many as 50 000 people eventually visited and shared the prayer revival.
Eleven states’ assembly have set up commissions of inquiry into these gender affirmation and critical race theories.
The devil is not a fool. The Democrats are deep in the mud committed to gender choices and preferences. Therefore, Christians are forced into the Republican camp. Republicans have been smeared with the racist brush.
Though Republicans will agree that blacks are disadvantaged, and that blackness itself is an albatross on their necks, they argue, rightly, that not all whites wish blacks ill. In fact 300 000 US Union soldiers died to free blacks from slavery in the civil war. But the issue is that the stigma of race continues, and they would rather hide behind a fig tree that the law forbids racial acts.
The Baptists, who are the storm troopers of the faith, are deeply divided on race issues and have remained silent.
So, Christians are divided. Then comes former president Donald Trump. If he were re-elected to lead the party in 2024, the devil will laugh all the way to the bank. While his economic policies reduced unemployment to zero, the first time in 50 years, he is a horrible character, who picks fights where silence would have been golden.
- Ken Mufuka is a Zimbabwean patriot. He writes from the US.