At long-time readers know, I’ve been predicting for a long while that we would probably see violence as the evangelical right finds itself moved inexorably toward the margins of our civic life. Today — What do you know? — Albert the Pious grouses about the marginalization of evangelicals.
We are seeing LGBT organizations, exactly as the Chief Justice of the United States indicated in oral arguments in the same-sex marriage case last year, they are moving to defund and to culturally isolate any institution that stands over against this moral revolution. The kind of pressure we’re looking at here is not at all subtle. It’s an overt attempt to try to marginalize Christian institutions that will not join the moral revolution and to marginalize them, in this case, where it might hurt a very great deal.
The threatened penalty here is exclusion from participation in the NCAA. That is absolutely massive when it comes to American higher education and to the larger context of American culture. We’re looking here at an overt attempt to try to state that these Christian schools are outside the cultural mainstream and simply don’t belong. The moral revolutionaries are now arguing that these colleges and universities based in Christian conviction do not belong on the list of federally approved institutions for federal student aid. They are also now arguing directly to the NCAA that that organization legally defined as a voluntary association is obligated by its own claim to LGBTQ-inclusive policies to divest in terms of relationships from all religious-based institutions that in the eyes of the LGBT revolutionaries now discriminate. We’re looking here at exactly what we’re going to face in many other arenas. Some already are present, including in the economic arena in terms of America’s major corporations, in professional arenas including professional organizations such as the bar associations and medical associations.
Mohler, wholly lacking a well- or even poorly-tuned sense of irony, fails to note that in the days when his club made the rules the others were ‘culturally isolated’ in prison.
The NCAA is a voluntary association, of course, like the Southern Baptist Convention, and it can have its own rules — like the Southern Baptist Convention, which is quick to discard churches which fail to maintain an acceptable level of hostility to gays, transgenders, women who want to be clergy, on and on.
That shoe kind of pinches when it’s on our li’l buddy’s foot, though. Ho-hum.
So far as federal student aid for schools out of compliance with Title IX … that’s difficult to call. The law makes allowances for theological conviction, but it probably wouldn’t take much to strike-down that allowance when it contradicts settled public policy. However that falls out, the revocation of Bob Jones University’s tax exemption has to be causing sleepless nights for a lot of seminary officials.
And, of course, evangelicals are the most important demographic bloc supporting Donald Trump, that cartoon-Mussolini whose rallies are so often the scene of low-level violence and, always, cataracts of red-faced bluster and rage against the … others; that’s got to be bugging Mohler, too. After all, those are his folk, his army of simpletons, and instead of the polite and treacherous hissing expected of Baptists, they are flat-out howling their malice — and anybody with two eyeballs can watch it, live and in color, on CNN.
When Trump goes down, so will the evil-tempered yahoos who backed him go down — and there goes the fiction that evangelical leaders like himself are kingmakers. He faces the very real prospect that the money is going to start drying-up, and the near certainty that his political influence is going to dry-up, too. No wonder he’s having a bad day.