Our next guest on the Knight and Rose Show is Tyler O’Neil, who is the senior editor at Daily Signal. It’s still in editing. Tyler is an expert on the SPLC, and monitors threats to religious liberty. Well, he had back-to-back articles this week exposing two different ways that the secular left showed their hostility to family integrity and parental authority. I thought it would be worth putting these together into a blog post, so you can read about them, too.

The first Daily Signal article was from March 18th, and it talks about a new program designed to indoctrinate young women in wokeness:

The organization that sets the agenda for the 130,000 school counselors across the U.S. just promoted a left-wing activist program that advocates for transgender ideology and critical race theory, according to a new report.

“While the American people are actively rejecting the harms of transgender ideology, the invasion of women’s private spaces, and the culture of critical race theory, the American School Counselor Association is working overtime to install these very same radicalisms into our daughters,” Alvin Lui, president of the conservative group Courage Is a Habit, told The Daily Signal.

The American School Counselor Association, which counts about 42,000 of the nation’s estimated 131,230 school counselors as members and which releases guidance for the entire profession, held a Feb. 19 webinar promoting the Lean In Girls program. The Sandberg Goldberg Bernthal Family Foundation, founded by former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg, launched Lean In Girls as a leadership program for girls ages 11-15.

[…]The handbook’s section on “Gender Inclusion” warns facilitators that “some teens in the program may identify strongly with being a girl, while others may be exploring their gender identity or may feel uncomfortable with the label ‘girl.’” The section recommends resources from the Southern Poverty Law Center, the British LGBTQ nonprofit Stonewall, and GLSEN (which rebranded to GLISTEN in February).

[…]Courage Is a Habit also faults the handbook for promoting critical race theory, the idea that American society is systemically racist despite the progress of civil rights laws and that it requires fundamental change to root out “white supremacy.”

“Group facilitators are directed to rank themselves and each other on an intersectional hierarchy of oppression, a textbook critical race theory exercise that divides children by race, sexuality, and perceived victim status—all disguised as harmless ‘mental health’ support,” the Courage Is a Habit report states.

The second Daily Signal article has to do with how secular leftists in government view the parents who pay their salaries:

When the Biden administration turned its attention to concerned parents in the fall of 2021, the Central Intelligence Agency drafted a memo warning about white racial extremists recruiting women for “traditional motherhood” and “homemaking.”

The CIA produced an intelligence assessment focused on “women advancing white racially and ethnically motivated violent extremist radicalization and recruitment” on Oct. 6, 2021.

[…]The CIA warned about the “great replacement” theory, which it framed as extremist.

“White REMVEs and their sympathizers have claimed in online posts that it is essential for white families to have as many biological children as possible to counter the rising birthrates among non-white populations, white REMVEs allege that this rise is a conspiracy, which they have termed the ‘great replacement,’” the assessment states.

The CIA discussed a specific organization—the identity of which has been redacted—and noted that this group “has lauded motherhood and homemaking as women’s most important responsibility.”

Now, I work with a fair number of conservative Christians. They love to read people like Russell Moore and David French and Tim Keller and JD Greear. If I had to summarize what their worldview is like, I would say that they are experts at Netflix, Star Trek, Disney and especially Star Wars. When I talk to them about these threats to religious liberty and parental authority, they say “I don’t want to get involved in the culture war, I just love everybody”. They just don’t believe that corporations or governments could ever interfere with their ability to live out Christian life plans. They just “love everybody”. But their taxpayer dollars are going to pay the salaries of powerful people who don’t love them.

I think it’s something that we all need to think about. You might not be interested in fighting the secular left, but the secular left is most definitely interested in fighting you. We should be learning from what happens to Christians in places like Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, etc. and make sure that it never happens here. Part of that is going to be voting conservative, but part of that is surely convincing others to vote conservative, too. And you’re not going to learn how to do that from Star Wars. Instead of feeding at the trough of popular culture like good little piggies, Christians are going to have to work a little harder and learn how to discuss policy issues.

I was already a Christian by the time I made it to university, but I had never seen the sorts of sophisticated arguments that could be presented for Christianity. Somehow, I stumbled upon a website called Leadership University, and that pointed me to a whole bunch of Christian professors who had written essays on a wide variety of topics. From there, I was able to locate actual lectures they had given to students on university campuses.

Although I grew up in a trashy communist country, I was still able to order campus lectures on audio cassette or VHS video tape. I got them from Veritas Forum, Integrated Resources, Access Research Network, etc. So I was able to listen to and watch lots of lectures by Phillip E. Johnson, Michael Behe, Walter Bradley, Henry F. Schaefer, J. P. Moreland and of course William Lane Craig. Some of these recordings were actual debates between a Christian and a non-Christian. That’s how I got serious about Christianity.

There is just something about watching a Christian professor get up on stage at a secular research university and deliver a lecture to non-Christian faculty, graduate students and undergrad students. And then take questions – that’s the key part that’s so different from church sermons and vacation Bible school. In the campus lectures, you can see hostile questions from non-Christian thinkers being handled gracefully by Christian scholars. Sometimes I wonder if the reason I stuck with Christianity this far is because of the non-traditional way that I learned about it.

Anyway, what made me think about this? Well, it was this interesting article written by physicist Dr. Brian Miller. We just had him on the Knight and Rose Show, to discuss fine-tuning and the multiverse. He just did some talks at a different universities, and I wanted to share what he wrote and the video of one of the talks with you.

Here’s what he wrote:

I recently had the privilege of speaking at High Point University, ranked the best-run university in the country, and at Duke University, my alma mater, on the cumulative case for God drawn from cosmology, the origin of life, and the centrality of information in biology.

I was joined by Dr. Rice Broocks, whose training in philosophy and history complemented my scientific expertise. Over the past several years, we have also addressed students together at several other universities, such as Berkeley and MIT, engaging in questions at the intersection of science, philosophy, and Christian thought. Last year, I spoke at the University of Washington, and the presentation, along with the Q&A, was recorded. The consistently positive response reflects a deep hunger among students to examine foundational questions of truth, meaning, and purpose.

Dr. Broocks and I labored to create an atmosphere in which listeners from any philosophical or religious background felt respected and safe to share their ideas.

So, the key part is that when you are on a non-Christian university campus then you really have to know your stuff. Because people who don’t agree with you are going to ask you questions, and this is in front of a live audience, and the recording is probably going on the Internet.

Brian listed some of the questions that he was asked:

• How can we infer that Earth was designed if we do not know the total number of planets? I addressed this question in a recent article (here).
• In what ways can evolutionary theory be integrated with faith, and which evolutionary claims conflict with traditional religious beliefs?
• To what extent is modern science consistent with various religious doctrines?
• If God is an all-powerful creator who is directly involved in the world, why does so much evil and suffering exist?
• What role does evidence play in Christianity, if religion is supposed to be grounded in faith?
• Why should anyone even pursue the ultimate truth? Isn’t skepticism the easiest option?

Have you ever heard any Christian leader in a church take questions from a non-Christian? Have you ever heard a Christian leader in a church even interact with non-Christian views? Have you ever heard a Christian leader in a church explain why people who go to church just assume that the Bible is authoritative? Most people who grow up in the church never hear questions, because most leaders in the church don’t know how to answer them. And that does send a message to young people about the sort of thing that Christianity is. As J. P. Moreland says, most Christians see Christianty as a “faith tradition”. But Moreland says that Christianity is actually a “knowledge tradition”. Young Christians dump Christianity because a “faith tradition” grounded in community is easily swept away when they arrive at university and have a new godless community. But if they were trained to see why Christianity is a “knowledge tradition”, then maybe they would be a bit more resilient.

Anyway, back to Dr. Miller. Here’s a lecture where Dr. Miller shares reasons and evidence for the core claims of his Christian worldview:

Here’s the summary:

• evidence for an origin of the universe
• evidence for cosmic fine-tuning
• evidence for habitability fine-tuning
• evidence from the origin of life
• refutation of naturalistic alternatives

So, there is a “show your work” approach to Christianity that is going on outside of the church / family environment. That’s how I learned about it, and I’m still taking Christianity seriously even nearing my wealthy early retirement years, where I don’t have any felt needs. People who stick with Christianity over the long-term don’t do it because of “needs” or “feelings”. They choose it because it’s true. Christianity actually makes life harder these days, because of the moral rules, the self-denial and the social disapproval. But real Christians like all that, because we want to suffer like Jesus suffered for obeying the Father. We like losing some of our autonomy for the sake of relationship and we like taking a loss to our reputations when we stick up for the Boss. Christianity is life on hard mode, and we like that. We want the deep vertical relationship more than we want the shallow horizontal relationships.

Let me know in the comments if you have any experience with campus lectures and debates contributing to your lasting faith.