Has Grove City College Gone Woke?

Conversations That Matter

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Welcome to the Conversations .Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. Before we get started with the episode, I've had a number of questions today and I need to follow up because in the last episode,

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I talked about an event that I was speaking at called Reformation War Room, January 29th in Shelbyville, Kentucky at the

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Reformation Church of Shelbyville. And there's gonna be steak, you get a copy of my book, you get to be part of three sessions and ask me whatever question you want.

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And we're just gonna have a good time talking about this issue. And it's men with men, it's men who love

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Jesus together. I mean, how can you beat that, right? So I encourage people to come out. But the problem is I didn't have a signup link for it.

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And there is a signup link for it. And so people have been asking me this today and you can go to the info section or the show notes if you're listening and you can click on the link there and it'll take you right to the signup section if you wanna come out to this particular event.

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I would love to see you if you can make it. So wanted to say that upfront before we get into the rest of it.

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We're gonna talk today a little bit about Grove City College, Grove City College.

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And before I even do this, I wanna say, I have observed something that I think is encouraging and we need to focus on things when they are encouraging.

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We need to take a moment, stop and rejoice and say, thank you, God. Thank you that you have given me something that's encouraging today.

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And every day there are things that are encouraging but as it pertains to this particular issue, the social justice movement and the inroads it's making in various institutions, including evangelical

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Christianity, it can be discouraging, can it not? We can think sometimes that there's just hardly any men left.

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I've thought that. I've thought, where are the men? Even the ones that say sometimes that, and complain about other men not being men, sometimes they show incredible weakness and it can really just be, it can get discouraging.

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And you wonder, do we have anyone that has not bowed the knee to bail in the upper echelons of evangelicalism and the elite circles?

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And there may be a few here or there, there's not many. And I think the more and more you study this issue and get into it, ignorance is bliss, right?

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So knowing more, sometimes you can see how bad the cancer is and it just is really discouraging.

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But a couple of things to remember is number one, no temptation has overtaken you except such as is common to man.

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God will make the way of escape that you may be able to bear it. All temptations are common. This is a common problem.

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And if anything has been reinforced in my mind over the last few years, it's that men are weak. Men are very weak.

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And I know they're weaker today than they were perhaps 50 years ago, 100 years ago. I don't think we could win

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World War II with this generation. And so I realize, and I think most of you realize that we're in a unique time in that men seem to be very weak.

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But that's also something that's a universal condition of men. And unless we are vigilant to instill strength and also not just strength, but character into the next generation, then we will continue to see this.

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And we haven't, believe me, we haven't seen anything yet. It can get much worse. And so there's a sense in which

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I think people who have done what I've done and taken the shots for it, I've taken a lot of hits for this. We can tend to very easily develop a bunker mentality.

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And by the grace of God, I don't think I've done that. That's my own assessment, but who knows? I can't assess myself as well as perhaps other people who know me better that are watching me.

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You can get cynical. You can start thinking I'm the only one. And that's not the case. That's not true. I know that's not true.

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But I've seen others who have gone that direction who have tried to do similar things to what

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I'm doing. And they've gone to such an extent that it's just very unhealthy and it's really taken a toll on them.

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Even physically, it's just taken a toll. And really, I think the part of the reason for that is you get really marginalized really quickly when you start to go this direction.

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I have two master's degrees from evangelical institutions. I'm the kind of person that normally would probably be climbing the ranks somewhere if I was gonna work at an evangelical institution.

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But that's pretty much impossible at this point because of what I've done to say things against the

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Southern Baptist Convention, against the seminar I went to, but individuals who have compromised in these organizations and now other organizations like CRU.

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And it's a lonely road in some ways. There's not a lot of people that do this. And the people who do do this tend to want to be kind of, some of them can develop relationships with each other because there's unique challenges they face that they can relate to with one another in.

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And so it's important that we encourage one another. One of the encouraging things though, and this is the positive silver lining here, is that even a year ago, if you were gonna look at an organization to see, hey, did they compromise on social justice within Christianity?

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You would have had to go to some kind of a, what would be considered in the elite circles, a discernment blog.

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And that's a pejorative in their minds. I don't know why, I really don't quite understand why that became a pejorative discernment blog when discernment is such a good thing.

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But that became a pejorative somewhere along the line. And you wouldn't find the information you were looking for about a particular university or institution or whatever it may be, unless you went to one of these blogs that was kind of off the beaten trail in a way.

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Sometimes even a lot of people might read some of those blogs, but it was never given any kind of acceptance in intellectual circles.

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And it was, honestly, a lot of the people who run some of these blogs, they're not the kind of people that probably would be trying to climb the ranks of an institution as much.

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They tend to be more common people. And they're doing the work that other people that should be doing it, elites who should be doing it refuse to do.

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And that's why it's happening. And that's why I really don't like when I hear a lot of criticism for discernment blogs, even from people who agree with me theologically on ecclesiology, on the doctrine of the church.

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And really, there's a whole group of people that think anything outside the local church is very bad.

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And I tend to think that the local church is the organization that God died for.

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Well, the church as a whole, but the local church is where God is building his kingdom and that's where you have accountability with elders.

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And so there's authority there. And I agree. But oftentimes, the reason that these discernment blogs, if you wanna call them that, even existed was because they were trying to fulfill a need that wasn't being met.

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People had legitimate questions and their pastors were not answering them. Their pastors oftentimes were not even looking at any of the things that their people would be rubbing shoulders with and being influenced by on a daily basis.

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And I'm not saying that's universal for all pastors. I'm just saying that it was a problem to an extent.

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It was enough of a problem that there was a vacuum formed where discernment wasn't happening in the pulpit.

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It had to happen somewhere else because people had legitimate questions and there was a demand to get these answers.

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And there's more that can be said there. It's not like that's the only thing that led to some of these blogs, but that's one of the things.

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And it's one of the major things. And that's why I don't, you're not gonna find me really, at least I don't think I have, criticizing quote unquote discernment blogs like you hear all over the place because I realize they're doing something, even if they don't do it the way

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I do it, even if it's not, sometimes it's not the best. I realize they're kind of standing in the gap where other people should be responsible and meeting the challenge and they're not.

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And to criticize them is, just seems to me, the better thing to do rather than criticize is to then do the discernment in the way you would have it done.

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Do it the way that you think it ought to be done rather than just point fingers at the only people trying to do it.

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I wasn't actually planning on talking about all this, but that's my little spiel, I guess. You get my thoughts on discernment blogs now.

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And I never set out to, some people have called me this, I've never set out to be a discernment blogger. I don't think of myself that way, but you know what?

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Hey, I am trying to bring some discernment to bear on certain things. So hey, if someone wants to call me that, then

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I'm not gonna like correct them about it unless they're trying to say that means I'm a liar or something.

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They use discernment blogger the same way they use the word conspiracy theorist. Have you noticed that? But the thing that I've been beating around the bush and I'm finally getting to is this outlet,

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American Reformer, is not what you would consider to be a quote unquote discernment blog. It's not run by laymen trying to fill the gap.

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It's not, there's not 50 million ads on it. It's not a blog that is primarily run by people who aren't operating in academic or elite circles.

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It's actually run by people who would be considered more academic.

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It's, I don't wanna know if I wanna call it mainstream, but it is certainly on the road to possibly becoming more conservative mainstream.

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And it's just not in that genre. And to have an article like this, wide awoke at Grove City College question mark by Josh Abattoy, I believe that's how you pronounce it, is crazy to me.

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It's just, it's not done. It's just not done. You're not supposed to in a blog that's trying to gain mainstream attention in conservatism.

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You're just not supposed to go criticizing conservative quote unquote institutions. This is rule breaking right here.

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And I'm very encouraged by that. And you should be too. This, and I hope this keeps going.

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I hope more and more we see this. And let me point to some other things. The Daily Wire did a story not too long ago on the enemies within the church documentary.

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The Daily Wire, more of a mainstream kind of neoconservative outlet talking about that issue.

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It's not something that they really would have talked about I think even a year ago. I think the

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Woke Preacher Clips channel on YouTube and Gab and Facebook and Twitter is such an encouragement.

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You have someone here. Now they're not, I'm not saying Woke Preacher Clips is a intellectual force that's trying to get mainstream attention.

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But the fact that you have a group or a person, I'm not sure who's behind that, doing so much work to expose the evangelical left and just putting out videos sometimes almost every day on here's another false social justice teacher is something that you just wouldn't have seen a few years ago.

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And I remember it felt a lot more lonely. It really did. And you were called crazy all the time that you're slandering all these things.

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You're still called that to an extent, but there's more people realizing what's actually happened. I've seen it on the ground level and I'm seeing it now in other institutions that they're finding it to their advantage or important enough to talk about what's actually happening.

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The elephant in the room is being addressed. So I wanna talk about this article. Let's read it together. At least some of it.

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And we'll go through it and just comment on it.

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Because Grove City College is a, it's supposed to be a conservative college.

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As I recall, it's a college that does not take federal funds and that was one of the things that they were supposed to use as a mechanism by which they would hedge against the liberal bias that most universities tend to go toward.

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They were going to hedge against it by withholding, by not taking federal funds. But it doesn't seem to have worked as well as perhaps we would have all hoped.

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And those who formed it would have hoped. And this is not research I've done.

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This has been done by someone else. And that's, I think, what I find encouraging is that there's starting to be a few people that are doing this kind of research.

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So let's read through this. Because I think this is very well written. Trouble brewing within a conservative citadel.

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Sad to say, but American higher education is littered with once venerable Christian colleges and universities that have succumbed to the spirit of the age.

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Recent examples include Azusa Pacific University, Calvin University, and Wheaton College.

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In different ways, each has fallen prey to aspects of critical race theory as well as gender and queer theory. Now, can you imagine any mainstream conservative publication starting with this?

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Really just calling shots, saying, you know what, Azusa, Calvin, Wheaton, you guys have fallen.

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That is, that's bold. That's bold. And it should be obvious. Everyone should be saying this kind of stuff.

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But it's rare, unfortunately, because men are weak. Again, men are weak. There's a little bit of strength. There's a hint of strength in this, on this website, in this article.

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And so I would just recommend, maybe keep an eye on American Reformer. The fact that they're even, they're gonna say, yep, there's an elephant in the room.

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If any school were immune to this trend, one would think it would be Grove City, an institution not only grounded in biblical orthodoxy and conservative intellectual tradition, but also they vigorously have defended their identity and mission.

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And yet the smoke coming out of the college compels us to ask if a fire has been kindled. The backdrop, in the 1980s,

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Grove City College famously stood up to overreach by the federal government, taking its case all the way to the

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Supreme Court. On principle, Grove City has foregone all federal financial support, a move that preserves its institutional independence.

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In their campus view book, it highlights the distinctions of the college, a traditional humanities core curriculum that students engage with.

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Let's see, residential liberal arts program, chapel. They have preaching of the gospel there, gothic architecture, beauty, truth, goodness.

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So a lot of things that conservatives would really value. The college is home to the Institute for Faith and Freedom.

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And they have the Ronald Reagan lecture there. They have alumni magazine that preserves the fundamental ideas of American freedom.

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So far, so good. Grove City College presents itself as an intellectual citadel, unapologetically

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Christian, conservative, and countercultural. And so the expectation would be that they would recoil against the pseudo -religious character of wokeism.

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But instead, that's not what's happened. And this is the evidence and they bring it.

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And this is what I really love. They actually bring the evidence. Everyone who knows me and reads my books and listens to this podcast, you know,

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I'm a stickler for that. I really, I love footnotes. I don't know, it's part of my history education,

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I guess, but I love the evidence lined up. Make the case. Don't just use conjecture, but actually make the case.

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So there was a petition that concerned Grove City College parents and alumni initiated at this website, 481 signatures.

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And I'll show you the website. This is the website. And there's a letter here on November 10th saying how concerned they are.

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The parents, that critical race theory, it says, is essentially being promoted there.

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And they highlight the problems with critical race theory. And it's actually very well written.

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This could be a template, by the way, for parents who want to do this kind of thing at other colleges. They weren't the first to do this, by the way.

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Liberty University had this very same thing done. I think 1 ,600 people signed that petition and it was concerned parents.

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I know because I was involved in that, that whole issue. And they made a petition against, or it wasn't against, it was actually for Liberty University, but it was against the social justice that was happening there.

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And it did gain some responses from the university. Now, sadly, in my mind,

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I think the gains that were made because of that, and there were gains made, especially gains behind the scenes.

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Sadly, I don't know that those gains were, I don't know that those were long -term gains.

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And so that is something that saddens me to some extent. And I think Liberty University is just on that precipice and it's starting to go in the wrong direction in some ways.

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But there's still very much a fight going on there and parents getting involved, that's one of the only things, honestly, especially these universities, that conservatives have as a bargaining chip.

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They have parents that are paying the money for their students to go.

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And you're not gonna find it in the elite circles. You're not gonna find the resistance there. There's weakness there, especially.

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The higher you get, the more of a sacrifice you have to make by rattling the cage. And people who are at these institutions do not want to rattle the cage.

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There's a weakness there. There's a fear there. And you're not gonna see the opposition, many of the people who wanna see it, that you'd like to see.

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And I know this, people who get more involved in this at whatever institution and they start thinking, wait a minute, that person, that's a solid person.

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And then they see them back down or not say anything and they get disappointed. You have to realize that once you get to these levels, everything's about relationships.

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It's all about, you're always calculating. This is true, by the way. I know some of you, you don't live in this world.

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You just have to take my word for it. The relationships become the way in which you get ahead, the way in which you jump from a sinking ship to a floating ship.

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If things go bad, you have a connection. Your insurance is your relationships.

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And your social credit score, which is not something that's come to the United States in the way it is in communist

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China, it very much exists in these elite circles in an unspoken way. Everyone has a social credit score.

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And your relationships are, the sum of them are really who you are and the kind of power you have.

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And climbing that ladder requires a lot of people liking you. And so if you rattle the cage, you jeopardize all that.

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And so if you're in one of these institutions and you want to actually have an impact, obviously pray, rely on the

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Lord, but you're gonna have to use some kind of leverage. And the only thing that you have is the people who actually fund it, who don't realize what's going on or are against the social justice stuff.

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And that's kind of what happened here is the parents got involved and they obviously had some kind of a connection to the school to know what was happening there.

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Same thing happened at Liberty. And this is the kind of thing that probably needs to keep happening. Hey, we're not gonna send our kids there.

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We'll send them to the local community college where we can keep an eye on them. And we know they're gonna be fed some bad stuff, but at least we're there to take care of it before we send them off to your school, which claims to be

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Christian and gives us a false sense of security. How about that? That's the kind of thing that if you pull out the money, they can respond to that.

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That's the thing that talks to them. So that's my spiel on that, but there was this letter that sent and it looks like it's a very well -written letter and it gets specific.

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And you can check that out at petitions .net forward slash save underscore GCC underscore from underscore

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CRT. Now let's get back to the article. The specific allegations of the petition can roughly be distilled to the following.

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That a couple of recent chapel speakers, including crucially Grove City College's chaplain,

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Dr. Donald Opitz, had promulgated critical race theory from the pulpit. We have

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Grove City College's training for residents, RAs included a segment by Justin Jose, a member of Grove City College's newly established diversity council.

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You ever hear those words, diversity, equity, inclusion? You should have a little red flag go up. That's usually where this stuff is the most prominent and where you're gonna find it.

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The director of office multicultural education and initiatives in which Mr. Jose instructed RAs on the concepts of interracism, white privilege and white guilt.

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So this is the implicit bias training. They got to go through that. Mr. Jose has observed, wow, has been observed wearing an

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LGBT rainbow mask. That's interesting. That, let's see, education classes requiring students to read

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Kendi, Abram X. Kendi's book, How to Be an Antiracist. So that's critical race theory.

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And that Grove City College's diversity council sponsored a number of reading groups, including Reading While Black.

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I just did a review of that by Issam Akkali. Terrible book. Also has false teaching in it. That the education department requested the applicants to provide preferred pronouns.

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Interesting. And that Grove City College's academic resource center requested applicants to provide preferred pronouns.

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Now, some of these things apparently are undergoing some sort of review. And there's some, your

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Grove City College is changing somewhat. Some of what they're doing because of this, apparently.

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Now here's McNulty's response, the president of the college. He issued a limp response to the critical race theory petition on November 19th.

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The response reads as a defensive approach that should give little comfort to the concern stakeholders who expect to hear bold thought leadership from the president of this bastion of intellectual conservatism.

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Now let's look at this because here it is. A response to the critical race theory petition.

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So they're forcing the hand of the university. The university has to respond now because enough parents made a stink about it.

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And this should be a lesson to everyone. You don't just get upset and do nothing with it.

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Think about practical things you can do. You can write letters to the editor. You can start petitions.

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You can email some of the people who are compromising and encourage them to get a backbone.

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There's lots of things you can do. And I encourage you to, even if it's a little bit, do a little bit.

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And you can give to organizations and people. People, even people give to me. I'm really thankful for it.

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This is not something that I could do to the extent that I've done it without the support of individuals out there who donate to what

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I'm doing so that I can get the word out there. And so do something is all I'm saying. Do something, even if it's small.

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So let's see here. So I'm just skimming the response here from President McNulty.

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And he does what the Southern Baptists do. He talks about their vision, their mission, their value of faithfulness, how great they are.

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And then gets into details a little bit more here.

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He says, there is an important difference between engagement on social justice issues and critical theory, a politically charged approach to the criticism of society that has no intellectual home at Grove City College.

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And this just shows that he doesn't really know what he's talking about fully. And I know that's a strong charge to level, isn't it,

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John? I mean, he's the president of a university. You're just a little guy with a microphone. Well, yeah, I mean, the thing is though,

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I mean, he probably knows much more about me in many areas. But if you study the history of the term social justice, how it became popular, which

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I do go through in my book, Christianity and Social Justice, Religions and Conflict, you'll know that critical theory is just an ongoing part of it.

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It's an iteration of social justice. Social justice is really more or less the term that was used in the

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United States. And there were some places in Europe it was used before then, but it was primarily made popular in the

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United States as a way to Christianize Fabian socialism. And it's kind of a loose word.

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It's a catch -all word or term. But social justice, its very origin exists within a

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Marxist framework. And I go into the Catholics who try to use this to mean something else and all of that.

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I talk about that in my book, Christianity and Social Justice. But if you know the history of it, you're not gonna separate those two. His effort to separate them is very interesting to me.

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He talks about Dr. Carl Truman, a professor of religious studies there, and that he describes a distinction that there's faithful social concern like William Wilberforce had, and that's grounded in the image of God.

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And then there's anti -Christian ideas. Honestly, this is a very vague quote that he's using here.

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But of course, we would say that there's ethics that the Bible gives us that apply to society.

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No one argues that. The question is though, do we need some kind of a scheme that tries to achieve some kind of egalitarian society through smashing or deconstructing the organizations and hierarchies that supposedly prevent its achievement through some kind of a central authority that redistributes privilege or finances?

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That's what we're talking about when we talk about social justice. So not a very helpful distinction here, but he's trying to shield himself and the university.

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And then he tries to get into some of the specific allegations that he talks about Jamar Tisby, author of Color of Compromise, super woke book.

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He was invited to speak in chapel in 2019, a year before Dr. Opitz began serving as the college's chaplain.

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His visit was postponed because of COVID. And so anyway, he's just going through the nuts and bolts of this, that Tisby's gonna be there.

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It's worth noting that Mr. Tisby's views appear to have shifted on critical race theory following his presentation, even though the topic was not discussed.

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Now this is stupid. I know, John, how can you say that as a president of a university? Aren't you worried you're gonna get in trouble for saying that?

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No, not really. This is stupid. This is just fess up, right? Just confess, we blew it, having

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Jamar Tisby. Jamar Tisby's, in 2019, were his views all that different than they are today?

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Come on, come on. Color of Compromise, didn't that come out in 2019? I mean, it was there, the whole premise of that book is basically a premise that comes right out of critical race theory.

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Racism doesn't ever go away, it just changes forms. It's interest convergence.

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All right, we're gonna skip through some of this. This is just a limp, just weak response, in my opinion.

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Now, going back to the article in American Reformer, they really go through this.

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And the totality, I'm just gonna read you some quotes from them. The totality of McNulty's response creates the impression that the petition blindsided

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McNulty, that he had not received any communications regarding the matter prior to the petition being circulated.

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And he says, I was hoping I would receive the petition currently circulating before providing this extensive response.

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I am responding before receiving the online petition because it has become clear that misinformed assertions, including in the petition, are unfairly threatening the reputation of the college.

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And this is similar to Salvation Army. This is, they all do the same thing. They reiterate their statement of faith or their values, and then they say that anyone, they insinuate, or they say that anyone who's challenging them is a liar.

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They try to tarnish their reputation when there's truth to these allegations. If there's truth to the allegations, just confess it.

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And the lack of humility is just astounding to me. And so Grove City College joins the ranks of Big Eva, in this case.

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The way that Big Eva responds to things is the way Grove City College is responding. And it is not an honest response.

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And so this article really gets into the details of this even more and challenges

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McNulty and the arguments that he makes. For instance, the section

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I just read about the distinction between critical theory and social justice. It says in the article, even for those willing to grant a distinction between critical race theory and social justice,

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McNulty does not offer any substantive account of how he or Grove City College defines critical race theory or social justice, which is surely a necessary basis for coherent institutional action, right?

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If you can't define the problem, if you can't locate it, there's no way you can deal with it. They're not even trying, is the point.

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McNulty persists in referring to what he seems to think of a critical race theory as critical theory throughout his response.

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While critical race theory is certainly grounded in critical theory more broadly, the two are not synonymous. And that's a good point, that he's acting like he knows definitions, but then he doesn't give you definitions and he acts like critical race theory and critical theory are exact same things.

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They're not quite exactly the same. Critical race theory would be further downstream from critical theory. So, let's see, what else do we have here?

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McNulty accuses the petitioners of perpetuating cancel culture. So he's trying to say, you're the ones canceling.

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You're the, you've heard this before, haven't you? Danny Akin says this. You're, at least I think it was him.

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He said it, yeah, he said it once. You're engaging in cancel culture, really? Because we're trying to hold any, trying to hold someone accountable apparently is cancel culture.

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No, cancel culture is trying to destroy someone, trying to destroy their reputation and make it really impossible for them to function in the economy.

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Trying to smear them to the point that they don't have a place in society. That's what canceling is.

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It is trying to limit the freedoms that they ought to have in the public square, to get rid of them, to do away with them because of some view that they have that's offensive.

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So that's not what's happening here. No, parents are just trying to say, could you be accountable?

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Could you please change the direction of the school? We're paying a lot of money for our kids to go there. It's a lot different, but McNulty doesn't seem to know what he's talking about or he's putting up lame responses that have already been used often by other institutions that have undergone the same kind of thing.

31:18

Let's see, yeah, and so this article makes pretty much the same kind of argument that I just made.

31:24

McNulty's response suggests that he either lacks a robust understanding of how both curriculum or co -curriculum, chapel, student life, communicate institutional values, or he assumes that the petitioners will not make basic distinctions between education and indoctrination.

31:37

For instance, he says, Grove City College's academic mission. An institution of higher learning committed to excellence, we examine a broad range of ideas that are biblical.

31:45

Okay, this is the same thing Danny Akin's done at Southeastern. Hey, we study about critical race theory. We're not studying critical race theory, in a positive sense, which is absolutely not true.

31:57

When you're promoting something or an aspect of something, it is not the same thing as studying about that thing.

32:05

You can study the Book of Mormon at a Christian church where you're in a class on cults. It's not the same as believing it to be true, okay?

32:13

That's the distinction and McNulty's trying to say, no, we're just studying about something. So he's pulling out all the answers

32:20

I've seen before. McNulty fails to answer substantively a number of specific issues raised by the petitioners, so he ignores some of them.

32:29

And the Jomar -Tisbe goes through the Jomar -Tisbe issue and seems to indicate that Jomar -Tisbe has, these problems have existed with Jomar -Tisbe for a while.

32:40

It's not like he all of a sudden has adopted CRT or anything like that. All right, so the article then doubles down.

32:50

It goes through more questions. Additional digging beyond the scope of the critical race theory, petition reveals that critical race theory may well be far more pervasive than appears even on the face of the petition.

33:00

So the article is saying that there's even more to what the parents said that we found on this issue.

33:09

In June of 2020, when in the midst of nationwide riots, a group of BLM activists and disaffected students, or alumni, launched a petition campaign against Paul Kengor, senior director and chief academic fellow at Grove City College's Institute for Faith and Freedom, subsequently directing a number of demands at the president and the board, including creation of a diversity office.

33:29

In contrast to its critical race theory petition response, Grove City College issued no formal response to the critiques of Paul Kengor.

33:37

Grove City College did, however, as, let's see here, they actually buckled to one of the demands when

33:44

McNulty created the Council on Diversity. So they actually bended to the will of another petition by people motivated by critical race theory.

33:54

Shortly thereafter, the thematic content of Grove City College's chapel's programming shifted drastically and a raft of racially charged talks took place in the chapel, each of which took the fact of ongoing systemic racism as assured, so they assumed that.

34:09

And it has a number of them listed here. There's a screenshot of racial reconciliation sessions.

34:17

Let's see, Jamar Tisby. Okay, so yeah, there's a bunch of them here, man.

34:23

So they were really on a roll. Talks about a panel it looks like they had.

34:33

There's a screenshot of a poster here on a two credit course that seeks to cultivate in its students a multicultural awareness in the field of education and the workplace.

34:47

It's, let's see, we will approach contemporary race issues in the United States from a Christian perspective and consider how to become actively anti -racist.

34:54

All majors are welcome to take this class. There are no prerequisites. And you can see it's a bunch of fists, like the black power fist raised.

35:01

There's three fists raised high. Spring 2022. So this is recent.

35:06

Spring 2022 education 290 course. Cultural diversity and advocacy.

35:14

They're advertising this on campus. So this is just, this is terrible.

35:20

This is terrible to see Grove City College go this direction. It's another one. So what's good though is that you have an outlet like American Reformer calling attention to this.

35:29

And these people are under pressure. That's why this kind of stuff happens. So I think this is just very helpful to note this.

35:40

Now, the question that I often get is, John, what college should I send my kids to?

35:46

And the answer is, I don't know. I mean, it really depends who your children are.

35:51

Are they strong? Are they able to withstand the, are they already ready? I mean, I wrote my book really for everyone, but mostly

36:00

I was thinking of someone who would be just going to college. And these are the ideas you're gonna get. Understand how to answer them and know what they are and spot them.

36:08

So if your kid is going to college, give them Christianity and social justice, religions and conflict.

36:14

And maybe you'll even have to make them read it. I don't know. Hopefully not. Hopefully it's interesting enough and it's short, but that was my intention.

36:22

If they're prepared, then they can go to a lot of places. There are families, and I know some would disagree with me on this.

36:29

I think there probably are, let me give you a hypothetical scenario. Your kid scores really well in the

36:35

SAT, gets a full ride to Harvard or Yale, an Ivy League. Let's say they maybe even get, you know, a diversity scholarship or something.

36:44

Not saying those are right necessarily, but hey, if they're gonna offer it to you, then by all means, right?

36:52

If you qualify and you have someone that can withstand those things, and that's maybe sometimes hard to tell.

36:58

Sometimes you think, sometimes your child might be stronger than they actually are, but let's say you know that they're strong enough and they get into these circles where they can really have an influence on influencers, then

37:10

I would say, go for it. There's nothing wrong with that, but know what you're getting into. When it comes to local community colleges, that can be a really good route just because you already know that there's some secular stuff going on there.

37:25

And again, it depends on the major. Taking psychology might not be the best thing, but if you're doing like a math major or something like that, or physics or some kind of a science, you may be able to, and there's other majors too, you may be able to get through it, but you're at least there at home able to talk to the student, able to monitor every semester kind of how they're doing, what kind of effect this is taking.

37:53

So that's another option. And then there's the third option of sending them away to a good university that you really want, and this is ideal, a university that you want them to learn the truth from, the capital

38:05

T truth, and not a mixture of truth and lies that they have to try to discern. So if you do that, then

38:12

I think, from what I know, Appalachian Bible College seems to be a very good option. They've seemed to have taken a stand very early on to hedge against this stuff.

38:23

So I usually mention them first. They're the only ones, I think right now

38:29

I feel very comfortable as an undergrad institution saying that I can, without,

38:34

I mean, other people have reached out to me and said, hey, this one's good, but then I'll look into it, and I'm like, oh, I don't know. I mean, maybe your student's experience was good, but it seems to be that they're not taking a hard and fast stance.

38:46

When it comes to seminaries, which is the other question I often get, there aren't many.

38:53

There are some smaller ones throughout the Midwest, really, that, and I can't even remember the name of some of them that people told me are good, but I have no firsthand experience.

39:03

I know a professor who's out of school in North Carolina that they say that they've taken a really great stance against the social justice movement, and they're going in a good direction, and that's

39:13

Southern Evangelical Seminary. And they have, yes, in the past, they've had some problems with some of,

39:20

I guess, faculty members converting to Catholicism and these kinds of things, but today, and they have a new president, apparently, it's, from what

39:28

I know, and this is just from someone I trust who works there, that it's going in a really good direction.

39:34

And yes, you can be reformed and go there. Of course, you don't have to be reformed, but they're taking a stand.

39:42

I do hear about other institutions every now and then, but it's hard for me to put my name behind anything, and hopefully everyone can understand that.

39:50

So my encouragement is to do your research. Do your research on whatever college or university it is, and really do a deep dive.

39:58

Spend an hour or two, at least, on your computer, checking the school out, doing searches on their social media.

40:05

Find out what's going on, and then make a determination. You have to be careful in this day and age.

40:12

Sometimes you can do online stuff. Your kids can be home. I did some of that in my early 20s, and they can ask mom and dad questions, right, if they're still having questions about some of the things that they're learning, or their pastor from their home church.

40:30

So there are things you can do, but there is no perfect place out there, and even if your kids aren't going to be exposed at the university level, as soon as they get a job, they're gonna be exposed to all these ideas.

40:41

So they need to be ready for them anyway. So that would be my advice, is to get them ready for that.

40:47

But encouraging news, though, that there is an outlet starting to take these cases on more and more, and I hope that Grove City College will make some changes based on this.

41:01

But that's the show for today. That's the podcast. God bless. Hope that was helpful for you, and more coming later by now.