When Christian Students Want A Special Day - Road to the Middle Class

IT’S ONE thing to have a “Day of Silence” that celebrates the difficulties and the angst of gay students. But it is quite another when Christian students want to observe a “Day of Truth.”

Writes Michael Johnson:

The idea of the “Day of Silence” is that students and educators go all day without talking, while flashing a card at those around them explaining that the quiet is their way of showing solidarity with the culturally-oppressed kids who get bullied “just for being who they are.”

It’s a wonderful idea. Everyone should have a day like that. Because we are all misunderstood and we all live under frightful pressure to conform.

Imagine what it is like for a conservative like me to live in “Baghdad”Jim McDermott’s Seattle. We could use a little surcease from liberal bullying around here, I can tell you.

But then Christian students requested a Day of Truth “with some thoughtful discussion of differing views – religious, scientific, social, personal – on homosexual behavior.” And that was different.

Requests for “Day of Truth” events are perfunctorily denied, students who initiate discussions or even wear philosophically provocative T-shirts quickly find themselves on the short list for detention, even suspension.

It’s part of a pattern. Liberal agenda events are fine. But don’t bring your conservative bigotry or your religion in here, pal.

Even when student protests don’t call for open discussions, debates, and conversation – as in the pro-life Days of Silent Solidarity, which focus on calling attention to abortion – educators and government officials move fast to shut down what are usually quiet, respectful, non-aggressive demonstrations.

The delicious thing about this is that students are getting a clear message. If you want to rebel, if you want to create a stink, if you want to really get the adults riled up, then there is one thing that really gets their goat.

Try to bring your religion into the government school.

Not your average, run-of-the-mill government-approved secular religion like civil rights, or feminism, or gay rights, or racial quotas. No. We are talking about the God thing.

They just cannot stand it. And that is strange, because we live under a constitution that says that:

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

But hey, it’s one law for us and another law for the peons.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Drang nach Osten

There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

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