Virulent Propaganda

Cultural Revolutions
December, 1994
Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture
(Original had no title, because “CR” never gave articles names, and I can’t recall the one I’d given it.)

By Nicholas Stix

“THERE IS NO GOD, and if there was. She made a mistake.” That statement came from a colleague of mine during a class in philosophy. That is also the extent to which most public college students will hear the “G” word mentioned during their years of “higher” education.

Recent polls have shown that 89 percent of the American people believe in God. Of the 52 percent of American high school graduates who go to college, a clear majority attend public two- and four-year schools. Yet the faculties of these schools appear to come exclusively from the 11 percent of the populace that doesn't believe in God. That's not very “multicultural,” and it shows little “respect for diversity.”

Students, faculty, and staff alike at public colleges and universities tend to assume that the separation of church and state forbids teaching about God. The fact is, you can teach about God in a public college; the Supreme Court says so. Of the package of freedoms included in the First Amendment, three are relevant here: freedom of opinion, freedom to teach, and freedom of religion. Those freedoms mean that I can stand in front of a class of undergraduates and read chapter and verse from the Bible and not be charged with misconduct, harassed, suspended, or fired from my job. Not legally, at any rate. Last year, a federal judge upheld Leonard Jeffries’—Dr. Hate’s—right to spew racial venom in his classes at New York’s City College. Few, however, seem aware that the same right allows professors to teach religion.

Most people associated with public colleges and universities seem to interpret the First Amendment as guaranteeing freedom from, rather than freedom of, religion. Failing that, they conclude that religion is something obscene, to be tolerated only as long as it is conducted behind closed doors between consenting adults.

Many people seem to think that religion belongs only in private colleges. Private colleges are free to teach particular confessions, but true freedom of religion exists only in the public sphere. That’s because while a Catholic college isn’t legally bound to respect Islam, a public college is obligated to respect all religions.

Another beef against religion is that it involves forcing one’s beliefs on students. One of my students took this to be the basis for banning prayer from schools. The ban on public school prayer, however, doesn’t touch on my right to teach religion in a public college.

Besides, all kinds of beliefs are forced on college students—socialism, multiculturalism, radical feminism, Afrocentrism, and the superiority of homosexuality—and woe to anyone who disagrees with them. These dogmas have long ago left the “ghetto” of special academic departments (e.g., Women’s Studies), which are really political patronage programs. The half-baked theories of such political cults are now forced on students in English courses that all must take.

Thus do students learn that there is no such thing as sex, as opposed to gender, which is supposedly forced on children through a sexist, patriarchal conspiracy. Anyone who opposes homosexuality is mentally ill, and anyone who does not support condom distribution in the schools without parental choice—and the affirmation of teenage sex that goes with it—is wishing VD and AIDS on young girls. (The fate of young boys doesn’t matter.) It is no coincidence that condom distribution and homosexuality are opposed primarily by religious people, particularly Christians. Such propaganda is virulent in remedial courses at community colleges, which are the biggest money-makers for such schools. The exit exams required to advance from remedial, noncredit courses to credit courses routinely consist of feminist and antireligious propaganda, and students who challenge the leftwing catechisms thus risk their academic career.

Since no one may enjoy the patronage of gay, black, or women’s studies departments who refuse to kneel at these idols, why can’t history departments refuse to hire all but Catholics, or economics departments refuse to let all but free-market monetarists teach? Lest socialist, er liberal, readers seek to write me off as a member of the “Christian right,” I’m a liberal, Jewish agnostic who has been accused of being a flaming atheist.

Whatever my religious leanings, I’m a devout believer in education and the First Amendment. The history of Western religion is the history of our civilization’s deepest passions and most sublime thoughts. No education can be called “liberal” that lacks its study.

—Nicholas Stix