The militants have long declared their intentions about targeting churches and Christian education. They are fully aware that Christianity is really the last stronghold remaining that is opposing the activist agendas. Get the churches to capitulate—by force or by fear—and you pretty much have a complete free run in implementing your radical agendas.
There are at least two major ways in which Christianity as a whole—and Christian education in particular—can become fully radicalised and secularised: one is by external assault, and the other is by internal capitulation. Here I want to look at both pressure points, specifically in relation to the war on Christian colleges.
Let me begin with the first means by which they are under attack. The militants have long declared their intentions about targeting churches and Christian education. They are fully aware that Christianity is really the last stronghold remaining that is opposing the activist agendas.
Get the churches to capitulate—by force or by fear—and you pretty much have a complete free run in implementing your radical agendas. The homosexual activists have long known this, so they are working overtime to undermine things like Christian education.
Consider just one of the latest attempts of this. As one article states, legal action is being used against Christian colleges. The piece, which makes for scary reading, opens as follows:
When five unelected super-legislators on the Supreme Court unilaterally amended the Constitution to legalize same-sex marriage in 2015, Chief Justice John Roberts warned that the ruling would pose “hard questions” about the freedom of religious colleges to operate according to their convictions. Former Solicitor General Donald Verrilli said, “It will be an issue.” This week, Roberts’ warning has come to pass, and the time in which Verrilli’s “issue” comes to the fore is now.
On Monday, 33 current and former students at federally-funded Christian colleges and universities launched a historic attack on religious freedom by filing a class-action lawsuit against the Department of Education (DoE). The lawsuit, Hunter et al. v. Department of Education, claims that the DoE violated the First, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution by granting religious exemptions to Christian institutions that allegedly “discriminate” against “sexual and gender minorities.”
The article continues:
While the lawsuit takes aim at federal funding for colleges and universities like Azusa Pacific University, Baylor University, Bob Jones University, Brigham-Young University, Liberty University, and Fuller Theological Seminary, a ruling in favor of the plaintiffs would likely ultimately impact the conservative Christian colleges and universities that do not receive federal funding, such as Hillsdale College, Grove City College, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (SBTS), Boyce College, and others.
Taxpayer funding makes some institutions more vulnerable, but if the Senate passes the Equality Act and if President Joe Biden enforces his view of LGBT “rights,” then even refusal to take federal funding will not protect biblical Christian institutions from penalties for “discrimination.”
Of course, the issue also extends beyond colleges and universities. As SBTS President Al Mohler explained on Wednesday, the lawsuit targets “not just Christian institutions, organizations, and ministries, but the churches and denominations behind them.”
“If your church or your denomination cannot establish an institution serving your purpose on your own convictional basis, then you are being denied the right to operate as a church,” he argued. The lawsuit notes that “most of the institutions seeking exemptions are Evangelical Christian institutions,” even though a few of the colleges and universities are Mormon or Seventh-Day Adventist.
Make no mistake—this lawsuit is a direct assault on the religious freedom of conservative Christians who dare to dissent from LGBT orthodoxy and attempt to live out their convictions.
That is just one of countless attempts to destroy Christianity from without. But sadly all too often Christians are doing a pretty good job of allowing it to be destroyed from within. The truth is, the more woke the culture gets, the more woke the church gets.
And that includes things like Christian colleges. I have often written about this happening, as formerly sound Christian institutions of higher education increasingly succumb to the world around them, and start caving in on so many issues. Thus we have had plenty of Christian colleges happily pushing the homosexual agenda. See here for example.
Or here.
