Yes, Grove City College is Compromised on Social Justice

Conversations That Matter

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Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. We are going to talk a little bit more today about Grove City College and the situation there with parents who have written a petition against the college.

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It's not even against the college, it's actually for the college. It's trying to get the college to take a stand on the critical race theory debate in, of course, the negative position against critical race theory.

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And then the response of the president and the now Carl Truman has come out with his own response defending the school.

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And I wanna talk about all of this because I did not do anything close to a deep dive. I still haven't done a deep, deep dive, but I was very encouraged.

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This is why I talked about Grove City College in the last episode was I was very encouraged that there was an outlet, the American Reformer, that decided to peel the onion layers back and actually take on an issue at a conservative, politically conservative, evangelical institution.

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And you don't see that often. You do not, it just isn't done. And it's left up to mostly people who are working class, who don't have the academic jobs or,

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I made the whole point, so I don't wanna make it again, but the long and short of it is is the people who should be doing this kind of work, who we would expect to defend our way of life and especially biblical truth are the kinds of people who are caving and not saying anything and bending to institutional pressure more than anyone else.

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And it's left up to mostly working class people to write blogs about what's happening in their neck of the woods.

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And so that's been the way it has been going. And this was, in my opinion, an aberration.

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This was a fairly new publication, The American Reformer, but very much a academically astute publication and desiring mainstream conservative and Christian acceptance, putting out something like this.

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I just, I haven't really seen that yet. And so I was very encouraged. And that's really the main reason that I talked about this situation to begin with.

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But now it's a different story in some ways because there were some interesting comments made to me in the info section or the comment section of the

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YouTube video about Carl Truman responding. And so I started reading that and I thought, well,

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I need to get to the bottom of this a little more. And I'm convinced now, I don't understand it.

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Either Carl Truman seems to be ignorant and I'll make my case for that. I'll show you why I'm assuming that.

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Or he is playing politics. He's trying to defend the school in his mind from an attack and he's bending the truth somewhere.

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So something's wrong. Something is just wrong. I sensed it from the beginning, but I've confirmed it now.

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And I wanna show you some of the things that I've seen. And I haven't spent as much time as I could have spent.

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I probably spent, I don't know, maybe three hours, if that, listening to just chapel podcasts.

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And that's all I did. And I was very disturbed by the end of this, that you could even try to say that Grove City College hasn't compromised.

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Of course it has. How can anyone say that it hasn't? This is fantasy land that some of the elites out there in evangelical

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Christianity, and now I guess even political conservative Christianity, I don't know,

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I guess that's how I think of Grove City College. They're expecting us to just believe this fantasy.

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It doesn't make sense. It doesn't add up and it's very disturbing to me.

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And it just tells me there's pressure and I've seen the pressure. That's the thing, I've seen it. I've seen it even brought to bear on me at times.

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Even right now, I can think of situations and I know what that's like.

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I don't often talk about that stuff. I don't, there's a lot of things I don't mention that go on behind the scenes. There's a lot of pressure, even in conservative quote unquote

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Christian circles, there's just a lot of pressure. And you can see that,

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I think. You can see the tip of the iceberg and you can see evidence that there's something big beneath the surface. So we'll talk about that and I'll just show you some of the evidence.

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And part of my desire in all this, I just wanna step back. I just wanna get out of the way. I am gonna provide commentary.

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That's what I know many of you expect. You want me to talk through this, but part of me just wants to get out of the way and just roll the clips and just say, here's what's going on.

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I've done that with Southeastern, done that with some other, with Southern to some extent, and I see how that usually goes.

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It's just, usually the party line people, they ignore the clips, they ignore the evidence, and they just call you a liar, call you a racist, call you some kind of name, they don't care.

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And then the people who actually are open to information who maybe were skeptical, they get red -pilled and they think, oh my goodness, this is what's going on.

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And that's really all we can do. It's only the people that are open to truth that you can actually have a conversation with about this probably.

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But what I've decided to do is, I'm gonna put out this video with, kind of walk everyone through this and provide some commentary, but then

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I'm just gonna provide about a 10 -minute video of just some clips from their chapel, that's it. It's in the info section.

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So if you wanna go just see that, you can go to the info section and you can just see here's their chapels, like five of their chapels from last year on social justice, right in a row, by the way.

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This isn't like, these aren't, I'm not picking and choosing, I'm just, these are the ones I listened to in a row.

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I wanted to see the ones before and after Jamar Tispy and when he spoke. And so that's what will be in that video.

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And I'll post it on Facebook, I'll post it probably on Rumble and then you can get the links then for just seeing the raw footage there without my commentary.

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But for the purposes of this particular video that you're watching now, we're gonna talk through some things. We're gonna do some commentary.

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So let me blow this up. This is for later. This wasn't the, wasn't exactly the page that I was gonna land on.

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Let's see, I think it's this one that I wanna start at. This is where the trouble began, right? Or at least this is where I found out about what was going on.

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This isn't where it began. But the article is called Wide Awake at Grave City College by Josh Abatoy.

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And it's a good article. I went over this in the last episode. So I'm not gonna go through all of it.

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But to summarize some of the things it talks about, it talks about what amounts to an implicit bias training going on with the

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RAs. It talks about chapel. It talks about courses that are offered that are influenced by critical race theory.

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It talks about a very weak response from the president when he was called on the carpet for some of these things. Here's a poster.

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This is very interesting. Education 290, cultural diversity and advocacy. And you got a bunch of fists raised, like the black power type fists raised in the background.

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And then it says, this two credit course seeks to cultivate in its students a multicultural awareness in the field of education and or the workplace.

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And it talks about how to become an anti -racist. This is totally the language that critical race theorists would use to describe a course like this.

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So it's spring 2022. This is current stuff. This is what's happening next semester at Grove City College.

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And so I thought this was a pretty good article. I was very happy that this article went out there.

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Let's see here. And this is the original petition that was written by parents on November 10th to Dr.

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McNulty, who I suppose he's the president of the institution, I'm guessing on that.

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But they go through, there's a whole worldview section here on what the objections are, and then they give examples.

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And then there's an update. And this is what I wanted to focus on. The update is on the 13th of last month.

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They request that the Grove City College, the institution, issues an official statement rejecting critical race theory as unbiblical and inconsistent with the founding principles of the college.

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Number two, that they, with the RA situation, the

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RA trainees were trained into this implicit bias training, that you remove the person who was doing that,

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Justin Jose. And so this is one of the things that they're asking. And then, so they talk about the chaplain's office being compromised.

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So they're asking for changes. And then number three, that the diversity council be disbanded, or at minimum, be restructured and renamed.

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If restructured and renamed, all members promoting critical race theory should be asked to resign. This has teeth in it.

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I'm impressed by this. This isn't, they're not satisfied, these parents, with just a limp -wristed, we have it under control, we've heard your complaint.

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That's kind of, and I know I might be stepping on some toes here, but that's kind of, I think, what happened to some extent, at least

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I'm getting the impression. I gotta quantify my words here. I get the impression, that's kind of what happened at Liberty.

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That's the response Liberty University parents got when they put out a similar petition. It was, you had

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Jonathan Falwell make a statement that this campus isn't gonna go liberal. If it does, I'll light the match to burn it down.

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It was that kind of thing. But there wasn't any concrete public action taken that you could point to.

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And so this petition is saying, we're not gonna go for that stuff. We want actual concrete action taken, and good for them.

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That's exactly what we need. Well, in other news, Carl Truman has decided, let's see if I have, okay, so I have the response.

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We've already talked about that. Let's go to Carl Truman. I'm gonna have to search it now, because I guess

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Grove City. I lost it somewhere along the line here.

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Okay, Grove City College, WOKE. All right, here it is.

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It's on the patriotpost .us. And I'm just gonna read through this.

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And as we read through it, I'm gonna show you some clips. So the title is, Do I Teach at a WOKE School?

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Carl Truman's a professor at Grove City College. Now, Carl Truman is also a unofficial,

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I mean, like I said in my video on Big Eva, it's kind of a loose group, but Carl Truman's kind of, he's a member of the evangelical intelligentsia.

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His platform is beyond Grove City College. So he's probably one of the most prominent professors at Grove City College. So I thought, you know what, this is illustrative.

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We're gonna go through it. And we're gonna use this as an example of how the elites often will defend their own institution, sometimes even in contradiction to their own stated principles.

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And this is a real problem. This is a big problem that I see. And so let's just go through it.

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Do I Teach at a WOKE School? Grove City College, even with all of its moral failings and human flaws, is a remarkable place.

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Okay, well, that's, we haven't even read the article yet, but that subtitle, that's kind of irrelevant.

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It could be a very remarkable place and also have some serious problems. Okay, that's, you know, you could have a really amazing, house, but if the foundation is rotted and the house is starting to slump, yeah, you know, you can say all day it's a remarkable place.

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I'm sure the parents who signed that petition, who said, you know, Grove City College, we're worried about you, think it's a remarkable place.

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If they didn't, they wouldn't have signed it. So there's, I'm already sensing, right, this element of kind of shadow boxing, that almost pretending that the people that are concerned about Grove City College are trying to smear it and say it's not remarkable.

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And that's not what's happening. So let's read the article by Carl Truman. Do I teach at a woke school?

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Was not a question I seriously considered until one evening last week, when I received an email from a friend assuring me of his prayers for me in my workplace.

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The reason was an article he had just read on the American reformer entitled, Wide Awake at Grove City College. The background to the article was a petition launched some weeks ago by parents at Grove City College, students and alumni concerning what they perceived as a woke drift on campus.

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Grove City College president had responded to the petition in a way that I myself had thought was solid, but American reformer dismissed as limp and by implication disingenuous.

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I do not know if the author of the article has ever set foot on the campus which he writes about, but I confess that had he not told me he was writing about Grove City College, I might have struggled to recognize the ethos of my institution in the way he described it.

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Now, a few things that are concerning to me, and I think they'll become more concerning to you as I show you some video clips, is he had not considered this until last week.

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Really? This is the first time he's considered? Now, I don't think anyone's made the accusations that every single element of Grove City College is woke, and every professor's woke, and everything's woke.

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That would be a straw man set up to then try to disprove in order to then smear anyone who would try to challenge the school or challenge the woke teachings to move the goalposts by saying, well, we're not completely thoroughly woke.

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And if that's the question, then of course, Southeastern isn't completely thoroughly woke. I doubt even most secular campuses are completely thoroughly woke in the sense that every single professor is social justice minded.

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I'm sure that there's math professors somewhere that probably aren't, but who knows? Maybe there are some schools like that, maybe Berkeley or something.

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But even Berkeley's probably got some professors that are bucking the trend. And so, however, subtly they try to do it and without making waves.

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So this is just interesting to me that he doesn't, he never considered it until recently.

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It just makes me wonder, are you aware of what's happening at your own campus then? Now, the reason, let's see, he also seems to indicate that he believes that the president's response was a good response, but it wasn't accepted by the

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American reformer. And I've read the response and I thought it was limp. It didn't actually address the concerns the parents had fully.

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And it seems to imply that they don't know what they're talking about.

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So I don't understand this reaction either from Carl Truman. Even if what the president was saying was true, it wasn't a very respectful or it did not communicate well, we'll put it that way.

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And so he likes the response somehow. And then here's the big thing to me. I do not know if the author of the article has ever set foot on the campus.

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Okay, that's kind of irrelevant. And the author is just putting together facts that he can source that indicate that there's a problem on the campus.

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That's what the author is doing. Why does it matter if he set foot on the campus? The question is what he said true.

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What he pointed to, is it true? This idea that you have to go somewhere or you have to, what if he did go there?

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What if the author did go there? What would Carl Truman say then? Well, I don't know if the author spent enough time here.

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That's the kind of, it's never enough. And I've learned this, it's never enough. I'm a graduate of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.

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I've been through the courses there. I know what it's like. I have many friends who are still there, some people

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I know. And the idea that I don't know what I'm talking about, they still use that.

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There's no amount of experience that you can bring to the table that justifies, that I found at least. So this is kind of a backhanded way of smearing or at least casting some shade on this author at American Reformer and say, well, they don't know what they're talking about.

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They never actually been here. If you've been here, well, this is, I mean, unless the videos are complete fabrications that I'm gonna show you later,

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I don't know how you can deny that there's a problem. He says, now, wokeness is surely a serious problem in American higher education.

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Parents and alumni of all schools are right to be concerned about how various institutions are responding. I'm not persuaded that petitions are ever the best way to address such problems, but I can certainly sympathize with those anxious about their children or about their beloved alma maters.

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I myself am passionately committed to saving education from wokeness. I'm a member of the James Madison Society at Princeton, University and the

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National Association of Scholars, both of which have a keen interest in maintaining the importance of academic freedom and excellence on campuses.

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Now, here's the thing. This is an example I brought, I usually use Al Mohler as the example for this, but there's so many you could use.

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How about using the influence you have in the place in which you have the most influence? In other words, the campus you work on, you would have more influence there than anywhere else.

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Would you not? Would a professor have more influence on, let's say a professor at Liberty University, would they have more influence at Liberty University or would they have more influence at Harvard University if they're a professor at Liberty?

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That's the obvious answer. They would have more influence at Liberty. Harvard's not gonna listen to you. They'll think you're a right wing nut job just because you work at Liberty.

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So this is the thing that bothers me is there's work to be done at some of these institutions that people actually work at in their own backyard, things that they have some measure of control and influence over.

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And yet, what he's citing here is, well, I'm a member of these organizations.

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Well, who gives a rip if you're a member of some organizations? What are you doing on your campus?

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The one that you actually work at, the one that parents are paying your salary to help their kids understand life, what are you doing there with the things that have actually been entrusted to you?

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See, this is concerning. This is a shift in responsibility in my mind.

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I see it all the time. I'm acutely aware of the struggle that many friends face at this difficult time.

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And I understand my parents and alumni are disturbed when they hear stories, or in this case, mostly misguided rumors. Okay, I'm about to show you some videos and you tell me if they're misguided rumors.

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I just showed you a screenshot of a course that's being offered there. Is that just a misguided rumor? Was that a fake screenshot?

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Does that not exist? Did they not do implicit bias training with the RAs? None of this stuff is challenged.

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They are right to ask questions and raise concerns. They need to know if the colleges that take their money are providing the education they claim to be doing.

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Absolutely, that's the whole crux of the issue. And the heart of academic institutional excellence is of course, academic freedom.

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That can be tricky at a school that holds a stated religious position, such as a Christian college like Grove City, but it can be done.

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Okay, this is kind of irrelevant. Why are we getting into this? Well, let's see. The way a Christian school can hold to its belief, yet give students a good education, is to hold faculty to a standard of belief, but then ensure that they engage from other viewpoints in the classroom, host speakers from a variety of political and philosophical traditions, and encourage students to wrestle honestly with the great news and the hard questions of the past and the present.

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So where he's going with this, it seems like is, well, it's kind of like Danny Akin's defense at Southeastern.

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We don't teach critical race theory. We teach about critical race theory. It's the same thing Al Mohler says about Southern Seminary. Problem is, they actually, there's videos of people actually teaching critical race theory, teaching the principles of it.

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And then there's no like, there's no statement against those specific principles that they taught.

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You might now find a general statement against CRT, which is inadequate, but you're not gonna find a statement specifically against previously taught things like interest convergence or white privilege, and things like memory studies, and some of these elements of critical race theory that have actually explicitly been taught, especially the idea that racial reconciliation in a

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CRT -driven racial reconciliation is part of the gospel. They've never actually gone back and said, you know what?

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We're going to disavow these things. We fired the professors. We've taken disciplinary action.

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We've corrected this issue. They've never publicly said that. They never admit any error. And that's the problem. They don't admit it.

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And instead they try to expect you to believe that, oh, we're just doing this for education purposes because we wanna expose your students to other beliefs.

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Well, if you're gonna do that, if you're gonna teach them bad beliefs that are contrary to Christianity, then you need to say we are going to today, we're going to have, actually, to be honest with you,

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I don't even know why you'd have a speaker. You could show a video. Rather than pay someone to come do false teaching, just show them, here's some false teaching, and here's how we react to it publicly in chapel.

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Here's why it's wrong. That's not what they're doing. They're promoting it. They are promoting it.

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I've listened to enough of the chapels. They explicitly promote a CRT -driven racial reconciliation message.

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And this is just, for Carl Truman, not to know this on his own campus would be very embarrassing. But I suspect he probably does know it.

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He does, he has to be aware of the professors he works with in the chapels that have happened.

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So this is very disturbing to me. He says, for example, as I recently wrote, told the Religious News Service, I declare my classes to be free speech zones, something none of the more progressive figures interviewed said about their classes.

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I do not require students to agree with me in order to make a good grade, but if they dissent from my view, they need to do so respectfully.

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Let's see, for me, education is not about cloning myself intellectually. It's about giving students the skills to think for themselves.

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Here's the problem. He is getting hung up on free speech here. That's not the question.

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It's kind of a deviation to, hey, look over here. We believe in free speech. I believe in free speech.

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Okay, big deal. What does that have to do with the questions that parents are asking? About the false teaching that's going on, what they expect their kids to, let me put it this way.

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Where's the line? Because there is one. Where is it? Where's the line about what you want your kids in college to learn?

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And I mean to what you want to pay people to promote in front of them, because that's what we're doing.

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Let's be honest. You're paying someone to promote certain ideas to your children, and you want them to understand some bad ideas so they can think through them and correct them and not go down those paths.

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But where's the line? I mean, let me just be ridiculous here.

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And if you have kids in the car, just warning because this is kind of a ridiculous example. It's an extreme example, but there's a case going on right now with Josh Duggar.

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He'd just been convicted of child pornography. And would you want those kinds of images shown in the classroom in a positive way that there's people with an orientation for pedophilia, and this is the kind of thing that they're into.

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And it's just one example of many of how we're wired differently and nothing wrong with it.

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And that's an alternative viewpoint that's offered and promoted. Would you want that? No, of course you wouldn't. Why not?

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Well, it's wrong. It's evil. There are boundaries. We all have them. We all have boundaries, okay?

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And what if instead, let me give you another example in a class on sexuality or something, on some psychological sexuality course, you're talking about that issue.

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You're talking about people that have pedophilia, inclinations towards children in those ways that it's absolutely disgusting and wrong.

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And they just, they study it. They study the people that do it. They wanna understand why they do it. And they wanna help or put away in jail.

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Let's say it's a criminal justice course. They wanna help put people away who do it. What if it's something like that?

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In church counseling situations, you wanna understand as a counseling class. That would be much different, would it not?

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And that's, I think, what Karl Truman's trying to do is we're doing that latter thing. When in actuality, no, you're doing the former thing with critical race theory.

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It's being promoted. At the center of the storm surrounding Grove City College was an invitation to Jamar Tisby to speak in chapel.

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Okay, this isn't the only thing, but he would be right that this is the center. This is, I guess you could say it's one of the things.

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It's not the most, honestly, it's not the most disturbing thing. It's the professors on campus that promote this stuff that's disturbing.

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But okay, Jamar Tisby came. Hindsight is 20 -20, of course, and in retrospect, inviting Tisby to give a chapel address may have been a mistake.

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Okay, may have been. You can't just say it's a mistake. I disagree with him. Why can't you say that?

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A chapel address carries a certain institutional... Wait, hold on a minute. Hold on, let me just go back to this.

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Hindsight is 20 -20, and in retrospect, inviting Tisby to give a chapel address may have been a mistake. I just remembered earlier in this article, he said that there was an accusation made by the

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American reformer that the president of Grove City College offered a limp -wristed response to the parents' petition, and now he's giving a limp response to having

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Jamar Tisby come. I'm just noticing this. This is limp. This is lame. Stay what you believe.

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I mean, there are things to say that about. It may have been a mistake, but why don't you just say it was a mistake? It was.

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A chapel... Let's see. All right, so he tries to make a difference between a chapel and a guest lecture.

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He's taking a separation here. And this is an important role of the university to invite guests.

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He says, this is not a criticism of my colleagues who invited Tisby to speak in chapel, one of the hallmarks of... Okay, so he can't even criticize his own colleagues who invited

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Tisby. Well, then what's the point? You can't even criticize them? Really? One of the hallmarks of wokeness is cultural amnesia, the swift forgetting of what was true the day before, yesterday, in order to demonize those who still hold, say, to the importance of biological sex for gender.

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Conservatives need to be careful not to play their own version of the woke amnesia game when it suits them. Okay, so now he's accusing.

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He cannot oppose his own colleagues who invited Jamar Tisby, but he can accuse conservatives in this particular situation of having woke amnesia.

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That's interesting. Tisby is a good example. He was first given a platform by Reform Theological Seminary, where he had been a student on its

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Jackson, Mississippi campus. That is a flagship conservative reformed institution. Yeah, right. Indeed, as recently as 2015, he was appointed director of African -American

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Leadership Initiative at RTS. He was described as, at the time, by the chancellor, Lincoln Duncan, as follows, a man

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I trust, a dear friend, an educator, and a churchman committed to inerrancy of scripture, the reformed faith, and the gospel, ground on all his efforts towards honoring the image of God in all people.

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Lincoln Duncan is no woke progressive, as anyone who knows him will attest. Lincoln Duncan, he's no woke progressive, right?

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He literally wrote the foreword to woke church. You're not, you can't make this up. Lincoln Duncan wrote the foreword to the book,

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Woke Church, but he's not woke. He's not a woke progressive. Okay, Lincoln Duncan, at the

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Shepherd's Q &A, Shepherd's Conference Q &A in 2018, basically said, I need to get kind of woke on race.

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I need to go that direction on race because I'm worried that my kids will go woke on LGBT. Lincoln Duncan, the guy who is excited about the immigration and really what's happening with mostly

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Catholics coming here from Central America and South America and Mexico who are going to replace white secularists, and so he's really excited about what's happening with immigration.

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Lincoln Duncan, who made the impassioned plea for Mississippi right after the George Floyd situation to change the state flag because he used a current, quote unquote, oppressed perspective of what the flag meant to define the state flag instead of going to the original sources and using authorial intent to define what it actually meant.

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I mean, I don't know. How far do we go with this? And this is off the top of my head with Lincoln Duncan. I talk about Lincoln Duncan in my book,

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Christianity and Social Justice Religions in Conflict. That Lincoln Duncan, he's no woke progressive.

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Okay, Duncan, and by the way, who just was on a, I just saw it, was it last week?

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I think he was on a show talking about racial reconciliation and how white people have gotten it wrong until, you know, for so long until basically he came along as kind of the, that's what

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I gathered from it. That Lincoln Duncan. Duncan's eulogy is a reminder that TISB has been on a long journey from RTS poster child in 2015 to working for Ibram Kendi's outfit in 2021.

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Indeed, even The Color of Compromise, a book which I have some stated disagreements. Really, what are they? What are they?

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Is surely not representative of where he is today. The fact is the summer of 2020 appears to have been a radicalizing watershed for TISB, as for so many others on both sides of the political divide.

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The college can hardly be blamed for failing in 2019 to predict the radicalization of the RTS graduate who had been recently been seen as emerging an

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African -American bridge builder in conservative reform Presbyterianism. This is wrong, this is wrong, this is wrong.

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I don't have a hard time saying this is wrong. His book, The Color of Compromise, TISB's book came out,

29:52

I believe it was January of 2019, long before he was a chapel speaker. May have been before he was invited, but the writing has been on the wall with TISB for a long time.

30:02

I don't really understand this. Let me show you what TISB said in chapel. And you need to understand, as I show this to you, realize, now, if there's evidence of this, show it to me, please.

30:13

I looked, I couldn't find anything. There seems to be no evidence that any of this was contradicted or refuted, apologized for, a separation made with among the faculty publicly, at least publicly made to the students.

30:28

Nothing, no distancing themselves from what TISB said here. In fact, there's a doubling down. There's professors complimenting

30:34

TISB even after he spoke. What's up with that? There's professors that even talk about Color of Compromise being this great book.

30:44

Before he spoke, what's up with that? So here's the tape.

30:49

Let's roll it. Here's some of the things TISB said while on the campus of Reform Theological. Sorry, not

30:55

Reform. Here's the things TISB said while on the campus speaking at Grove City College.

31:00

In case you weren't sure, this is the civil rights movement of our time. It's happening right now.

31:08

How you are responding in moments like this is exactly how you would have responded in the 1950s and 60s.

31:18

Did you hear me? How you are responding now is precisely how you would have responded half a century ago.

31:32

There's a movement afoot and it's not explicitly Christian. Much of it happens under the banner of Black Lives Matter and I'm sure everyone in this room has an opinion on the mission, on the movement, on the organization, but it's happening.

31:51

And my burden today is to help you realize the fierce urgency of this moment and to respond accordingly.

31:57

I say your action, dare I even say your activism, can take many forms, but what you cannot do, what we cannot do as a church is remain passive or silent in the face of oppression, in the face of the largest mass movement we've seen in the past 50 years.

32:18

My foundational conviction in this message is that we are living in the modern day civil rights movement.

32:26

Freedom, justice, democracy, especially for Black people and other people of color are in imminent danger.

32:35

Don't ever forget that the tip of the spear for the moment right now is anti -Black police brutality, we have to name that.

32:43

Racism is real, racism is a problem, and yet people don't take us at our word.

32:49

First of all, I have some sobering news. Many of you, unfortunately, are in the target demographic of whom

32:58

King called the white moderate. Faithful, believing

33:06

Christians, most of you, I'm assuming, theologically conservative, you're sort of in the center of that bullseye of what a moderate is.

33:20

I don't mean that each and every individual will act in that way, I just mean that in terms of your cultural and your social and your theological location, that's where you are.

33:35

So what can you do? Well, you happen to be in college, which is a season primed for building awareness.

33:48

So concretely, what can you do? Take the classes. I don't care if it's about race or it has

33:54

African American in the title and you think, oh, that's for them. No, it's for you. Go on the trips, attend the events, start the book club or the

34:04

Bible study, watch the documentaries, follow the activists online and on social media, fill your minds with an awareness of racial justice so that five, 10, 20 years from now, you don't have to say,

34:17

I never knew. Right, so nothing outrageous there.

34:23

I mean, he was in transition, I guess, and it was acceptable to have him at that point or at least more understandable to invite him in 2020 before the summer.

34:36

I don't know what to say to this. This is just absurd. I don't have any other word for it.

34:42

I think that that was somehow, this is before he worked with Kendi, so this is okay.

34:50

I mean, did anyone say anything? Did anyone oppose this publicly when it happened? I have no evidence of it.

34:56

I have the opposite, unfortunately. Let's keep going here.

35:02

In an email exchange, the editor of the American Reformer expressed concern to me that Grove City College was platforming TISB while not platforming faculty like me on woke issues.

35:12

Well, TISB came to campus for one day and I believe spoke twice. Then he left and he has not returned.

35:17

As for me, I lecture for several hours every day on campus to classes that are full. I speak in chapel every year.

35:22

I write things almost weekly at places like First Things in World that whack wokeness. Okay, we don't care about everywhere he's been.

35:30

The concern in all of this is what's the college's stand? What stand are they taking? Did they invite

35:37

TISB to expose students to other views and then knock those views down and refute them? Or did they invite

35:42

TISB because they actually support TISB's message? And was that the public message going out?

35:48

It doesn't matter what all the things that Carl Truman does. So he writes for World and okay, he can whack wokeness all he wants in these other places.

35:55

Al Mohler can do that on the briefing, right? But what about your backyard where you actually have influence?

36:01

What about, this isn't a relevant question. This has nothing to do with the thing parents are concerned about.

36:07

The college launched its great lecture series by showcasing me on identity issues as they culminate in today's identity politics.

36:14

The college arranged for me to speak to a Washington DC group of Capitol Hill staffers twice in the last 18 months, one on sexuality identity, one on race.

36:21

Even in the last three years, I have taught classes on campus criticizing. So he's giving his whole, you know, I'm not woke.

36:27

Let's see what else he says. He's a vocal opponent of LGBT movement.

36:35

I have received nothing but support from college administration. Okay, well, that's great to hear, but are they supporting two contradictory views?

36:44

Is that what we're hearing then? That makes gross city college, even with all of its moral failings and human flaws, a remarkable place.

36:51

Okay, so I guess we're landing the ship now. So before we land the ship completely, can I just do this? Let me play for you.

36:58

Let me do this. Let me play for you some other clips, okay? I wanna play for you the chapels that surround

37:04

Jomar -Tisby's, right? Jomar -Tisby's in the center of a bunch of other chapels and they include professors.

37:10

They include students on the campus. I'm gonna roll the tape for you and I'll let you decide what you think about this.

37:17

Whether this characterizes the institution, whether this is a cause for concern, whether the institution is putting a stamp of approval publicly to the students on social justice, you tell me and I will let you draw your own conclusion.

37:29

I think Jesus would say black lives matter. I truly do, but I don't think he would discount any other race, why?

37:37

Because we're all created in an image of God. White people, look in the mirror, ask yourself if you are in these positions and if you feel like you were being marginalized and oppressed, how would you want to be treated?

37:50

Pursue some of this justice with your black brothers and sisters. It will go a long way,

37:57

I'm telling you, it truly would. And I would say this, right?

38:04

Like until you are just as outraged and broken by these things, we won't see things change because people won't show empathy.

38:17

And in black people, right? Like I see one in the room, don't forget who

38:23

Jesus is. Like you were forgiven too. So when you feel like people are hurting you, continue to give grace.

38:30

Talk to us a little bit about what it's like to be a student of color here on our campus.

38:38

What do you feel like it's, what's it like that the experience of students of color on our campus? Just give us maybe a little anecdote or a little story that gets at that, and then we'll come to Jonathan.

38:48

So I don't personally have too many experiences related to my skin color, unlike some other people on campus.

38:56

But one memory that I do have was when I was volunteering at the Chinese New Year all campus event, a woman from the community came up to me and asked, how do you say thank you?

39:06

Obviously insinuating the Chinese version and not the English version of the phrase. I had no clue.

39:12

I mean, I'm Korean and not Chinese, but it made me pretty uncomfortable just due to the insensitivity and carelessness of the question.

39:23

It was like a little degrading and patronizing. Like I was a child answering this for entertainment, but I think that's probably the worst experience

39:32

I've had. For the most part, I've had a lot of positive experiences on campus with my friends and the acquaintances

39:38

I've made. Jonathan, how about for you, Jonathan? What's the sort of, give us just a snapshot into that.

39:47

Maybe talk a little bit about your own background too. Yeah, so I'm half white, half

39:52

Indian. And a lot of people actually, I wouldn't say that I have like a defining experience on campus about my race, but because most people just treat me as sort of a white dude, because I don't really look that Indian.

40:09

And it's interesting because a lot of times I'll kind of be in a conversation and something will get brought up about, whether it's like Middle Easterns or Indians, and I'll say something,

40:20

I'll be like, oh yeah, that makes me uncomfortable. Like I am Indian. And then people will immediately get super, super like quiet and like uncomfortable.

40:28

And so that's happened quite a few times. I'd say that's probably like the most, the number one thing I see like related to me with my race.

40:35

And I think that's one of the things about you, about Jamar Chisby's book as sort of helping us fill in some gaps in our history that many of us didn't really benefit from in our education.

40:48

Mackenzie, how about you? What about this idea of colorblindness, et cetera? I have a very similar answer to that.

40:55

Like history is very important because like ideas of racism and racial prejudices have been like so perpetuated in society.

41:04

Like they've infiltrated like government systems, public safety, education, and religious systems as well.

41:11

Like, I don't know if some of you call sprinkles like Jimmy's, but that term is derived from a brand name called

41:19

Jim Crow. And so like at this point, like, yeah, we need to treat all of our neighbors with love and respect, but also taking into account the shared history.

41:30

As Jamar Chisby comes to campus, as Cedric Lewis preaches on Thursday, a link to our little series called

41:37

Justice, Race, and Reconciliation. Hear this through the eyes of first Peter five here, lift them up, especially those who are marginalized, those who have been mangled by injustice and those who have been murdered, right?

41:58

Lift them up, get down in humility, seeking to understand, ready to confess as we address these issues of race and reconciliation.

42:15

Get down in meekness, readiness to learn and stand fast in faithful courage, not standing still, standing fast, stepping out to be a bridge builder, busting barriers, part of the resistance, seeking reconciliation.

42:37

Black History Month will find nearly every congregation, no matter their race or ethnic creed, sharing some type of service or traditions of predominantly black churches.

42:51

But then what? The next week we're back to our old selves again, back to that familiar congregation where everyone or nearly everyone looks like us, thinks like us.

43:10

We bask in that familiarity, it's comfortable to us.

43:18

Then our worship and the church on earth should aim to look more like heaven.

43:28

You see, there's no segregation in heaven. Heaven is fully integrated.

43:34

Somewhere along the journey, we've gotten off track. And I'm not saying be colorblind, not a big fan of that term.

43:48

Instead, I'm saying to you, we need to embrace, celebrate and value those differences. We may express our love for God in a different way, our skin pigmentation may be different, but the spirit of Christ unifies us.

44:06

That's our common ground. That's what we build from. Begin a dialogue. Include people of all different backgrounds, seek to understand each other, hearing each other.

44:22

Scripture tells us to be quick to listen and slow to speak. We're not doing that.

44:27

We enter conversations with a goal of being right. I'm not gonna spend any time refuting any of the things that you just heard.

44:36

We do that a lot on this podcast. Let me just go through the people that you just heard. You just heard from though, from Grove City College.

44:44

You heard Christopher Merrick, Assistant Director of Residence Life, Resident Director of Kettler Hall.

44:50

And then you heard from H. Colin Messer, Assistant Dean of the

44:55

Calderwood School of Arts and Letters, Professor of English. Well, he was the one that was leading the panel of students.

45:03

So that was him asking the questions there and complimenting Color of Compromise. You have

45:08

Donald D. Opitz, the Chaplain and Senior Director of Christian Formation. And then you have

45:14

Cedric E. Lewis, a guest lecturer on entrepreneurship. So all these people are receiving salaries from Grove City College.

45:23

So parents are paying for their children to go learn from these particular individuals.

45:30

And we are now supposed to believe, because Carl Truman has come out and said so, that this was just some kind of an aberration.

45:38

I mean, he downplays it so much that Jamar Tisby, he really wasn't as radical when he was invited and when he came.

45:44

And we were really more teaching about it, not teaching it. It's good to expose students to these other ideas.

45:51

And it doesn't reflect the institution. It's just, it's this aberration. And we're finding out, no, it's not.

45:59

And it didn't take me long. It took me maybe a couple hours just listening to some lectures to find this all out.

46:05

You can go to the Grove City College's chapel lectures and you can go listen to yourself. And if they take them down, by the way, that's gonna show more than anything that they've compromised.

46:13

And so I hope they don't do that. That's a typical thing that schools do when they're caught with the hand in the cookie jar.

46:19

Let's keep going. To finish this article, he says Grove City College is a remarkable place.

46:25

He talks about, let's see, let's keep going here.

46:31

Most of this is fluff. Honestly, it's irrelevant. Is Grove City College perfect? No more than I am, but I am a conservative and a

46:37

Christian that means that I believe certain things are true. Make no institution, can ever make no mistakes.

46:43

So he admits that there could be a mistake. He's got 200 faculty, a large staff, a student body of more than 2 ,000, and more than 800 courses taught each semester.

46:52

Grove City College is too big for even the most perfect administration to micromanage. Really, because this seems like this, micromanage.

47:00

Yeah, this is a chapel. I mean, look, here's the thing. This is, the institution puts itself behind the chapels.

47:06

It decides who they're gonna invite. It decides the theme. This was a theme running through the chapel.

47:12

And you have people that are high up in the institution endorsing this kind of stuff. And the bigger thing here is they never refute it.

47:20

They never make a statement against it. They never admit that they've done a boo -boo.

47:27

There's an error here. That's a big problem. He says that the test of people's character is not whether they live a perfect life, but how they handle their mistakes and failings.

47:36

I agree. Then the test of an institution's integrity is how it addresses those things which have not gone as planned or have proved unexpectedly counterproductive.

47:44

Grove City College's management of this continuing challenge is smart and effective. It strives to hire excellent scholars. Okay, there's no apology anywhere here.

47:51

There's nothing to help guide students who have now been indoctrinated, nothing. He says, I do appreciate my friend praying for me.

47:57

I hope that he prays for all of us at Grove City. We'll stand firm and be faithful. Okay, this is ridiculous.

48:03

This is the kind of stuff. Okay, so if this was everyone, if this was every single person, this is the kind of thing that would just make me just say, what's the use?

48:13

Give up. I'll go move to some place I like and I'll do some kind of,

48:19

I'll go back to what I was doing before. I'll do repair work. I'll forget about exposing these things because it makes no difference.

48:26

But that would be incorrect thinking because the elites, and I pointed this out many times before, the elites are mostly like this.

48:34

And you would, I hate to say this. It would shock so many of you though. It shocked me. That's how I know. The people

48:40

I thought who would be the biggest ones to take a whack at this stuff are the ones that actually soft pedal it at their own institutions.

48:48

They're the ones that are helping it gain acceptance. That's what Carl Truman is.

48:53

He's so concerned about defending the institution. He can't see what's right in front of him, it seems. And you know, on my own opinion to correction, on what

49:01

I'm saying, sure. But I don't, what are you gonna say? That the videos didn't happen? That there's some big massive apology and retraction that I haven't seen?

49:11

That there's, I mean, none of that exists. So what's the response? The response has to be that we disagree and we're gonna make a change.

49:19

And I think what the parents petitioned that they have is perfect. Fire these people, make a statement.

49:26

We don't wanna send our kids to an institution that does this. We're better off sending our kids to the local community college where we can keep an eye on them.

49:33

Then, and we know they're gonna get error. Then to send them to a Christian college where we think that they're getting good stuff and we don't have to pay attention and actually no, they're getting error there too.

49:44

And in fact, that's even more dangerous sometimes cause you're not expecting it. And it's couched in so much biblical language that you think that this is just the truth.

49:52

This is just the gospel. This is just Christian ethics. It's not. So I do, you know,

49:58

Grove City College is not a place I've ever been. It is a place I looked at going. I was accepted there actually to go as a student.

50:04

And it was just, it was too expensive at the time. So my family, despite what some people probably think, just because I have a

50:12

Scotch -Irish English skin does not mean my family had a lot of money and we couldn't afford it.

50:17

Even with scholarships and stuff, it just wasn't gonna work. So I didn't end up going there. But it was a school at one time that I wanted to go to.

50:25

I thought it would be a great place to go. And now I don't even know what to say. There's no integrity.

50:30

There's no backbone. There's no humility in any of this. And those are the things that are important.

50:36

Those are the things that make up virtue. You don't have virtuous people running this place. They cannot be honest with themselves.

50:43

And I'm sure I'll take some hits for this. I mean, I'm going against Carl Truman here, but look, I've done it with so many other people.

50:50

When two plus two doesn't equal four and it equals something else, I'm gonna say, look, it equals four.

50:55

It equals four. So that's Grove City College. And I hope that helps. Link is in the info section if you just want the montage of chapels clips.

51:04

So you can go see it. I'll put it there. And I hope that helps you. I know this isn't the most encouraging message in Christmas, but I did feel like I needed to make a follow -up and kind of double down on this to help parents and students out who are going there at least see what's going on.

51:18

And look, the hope is that people are fired, that there's retractions made and apologies made.

51:23

That's the hope. And that there's a reform at the school. So, and they bring in speakers who actually will really take a whack at it.

51:31

There's hardly any out there, but find the ones that are. I can help with that. I can share who those people are.

51:37

In fact, half of them probably, they've been so damaged and no conservative will come to their aid because they don't wanna be called racist or something.

51:45

But there are still some that may be acceptable. And we can talk through that, but there's options.

51:53

You don't have to do this. You don't have to promote these evil ideas and these people promoting them and give them a platform and then not say anything.

52:02

You can stand firm. You can actually have a backbone. It is possible. And that's only possible though if you're thinking about the court of heaven and not the court of men.

52:12

If you think about the court of men, you're gonna always be calculating. You're gonna always be thinking about your political alliances and security.

52:20

Who are my friends? If things go bad here, where can I jump to? You're gonna be calculating all the time and it's gonna lead to compromise.

52:27

But if you just stick with the truth, then God will take care of you. And I've seen it. We see it with Russell Fuller.

52:32

We've seen it with Bobby Lopez. We've seen it with a lot of people who have ended up getting canceled and losing their jobs.

52:38

God puts them in another place to do something else. And so anyways, that's my encouragement is take a stand and don't back down to this stuff.

52:46

And if you're any parents that were listening to this, then please turn the heat up. Don't, whatever tactics they use against you, whatever they are, just keep reflecting it back on them.

52:59

Like, look, whatever you wanna say about our motives, you wanna question us, you wanna smear us, you wanna smear anyone who would talk about this, has nothing to do with our motives, who we are, what we're doing.

53:10

Is it true is the central question. Is what you did, is what you said, did it happen? Have you taken action to correct it?

53:18

If not, then why not? And that's the only question that really matters in all of this. All right, don't let them change the subject.

53:25

God bless. And I'm going to a Christmas concert tonight and hopefully we transition.

53:32

Hopefully as we get closer to Advent and to the celebration of the birth of Christ, we can transition in our minds as well to some of those things, because it is important.

53:44

And I have had enough requests to do the old Christmas thing. So I think I will figure out a way to do it. And we'll put our minds in better places, but this is necessary work.