A roundup of news and commentary from around the interwebs.
***
From Al Mohler:
A moment of truth is coming for every Christian school, every evangelical institution. The hour is coming when we will know where every Christian college stands, what every Christian school teaches, and whether these institutions will take a stand for Biblical truth or collapse into the monoblob of progressive ideologies.
That moment has come for a major Christian institution in Louisville, Ky. Christian Academy of Louisville, one of the largest Christian school systems in the United States, operates four campuses and enrolls more than 3,000 students in kindergarten through 12th grade. Organized by a coalition of independent Christian churches, it has been closely identified with those churches and has provided a viable schooling option for Christian families throughout the region.
A Senegalese football player – Idrissa Gueye – is being accused of dodging a football match so that he wouldn’t have to wear a shirt featuring a rainbow flag to mark the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia. Two of his Senegal team mates – both of whom also play in Premier League – have come out in support of Gueye. The issue has been further exacerbated because Gueye is Muslim and the match was being played between Paris Saint-Germain and Montpellier, which is significant because Muslims have regularly been accused of seeking to impose practices that are deemed at odds with the secular values underpinning their state. Which is interesting because the former colonial power of France wants to insist, in the name of not having values it disagrees with imposed on it, that its values must be imposed on everyone else whether French or not.
LGBT activists have more missionary zeal these days than the once-Christian denominations they’ve conquered—and they have no qualms about forcing their values on others in the name of tolerance. We’ve swapped one form of colonialism for another.
In 2020, a fearful public acquiesced to an extraordinary extension of expert jurisdiction over every domain of life, and a corresponding transfer of sovereignty from representative bodies to unelected agencies located in the executive branch of government. Notoriously, polling indicated that perception of the risks of Covid outstripped the reality by one to two orders of magnitude, but with a sharp demarcation: the hundredfold distortion was among self-identified liberal Democrats, that is, those whose yard signs exhorted us to “believe in science”.
In a technocratic regime, whoever controls what Science Says controls the state. What Science Says is then subject to political contest, and subject to capture by whoever funds it. Which turns out to be the state itself. Here is an epistemic self-licking ice cream cone that bristles at outside interference. Many factual ambiguities and rival hypotheses about the pandemic, typical of the scientific process, were resolved not by rational debate but by intimidation, with heavy use of the term “disinformation” and attendant enforcement by social media companies acting as franchisees of the state. In this there seems to have been a consistent bias toward scientific interpretations that induced fear, even at the cost of omitting relevant context.
Read the whole thing if you’re interested—Crawford pulls together a lot of disparate threads.
