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When Louisiana's 2022 legislative session began in March, culture wars and other hot-button issues loomed large in Baton Rouge. But as the session moved along, something interesting happened: legislators sidelined or killed a majority of the harshest, most retrograde bills that had been proposed.

To be sure, writes Political Editor Clancy DuBos, lawmakers passed some truly awful bills, but Louisiana remains just barely outside the ranks of some of our knuckle-dragging neighbors in the South.

In this week's Gambit, Clancy counts the victors and the vanquished and, in a first, the stalemates in his annual legislative recap,"Da Winnas and Da Loozas." Flip through the digital edition below for more.

Cant see the e-edition above? Click here.

Also in this week's Gambit: The NOLA Project opens "School Girls, Or the African Mean Girls Play" at Loyola; Blake Pontchartrain tells readers about the posters at the 1984 World's Fair; Bar Pomona and Jamboree Jams serves small-batch jams, wine and more on St. Claude Avenue; Mason Hereford releases his first cookbook; Jason Berry's "City of a Million Dreams" documentary opens at The Broad Theater plus news and more.

If you can't find a Gambit in your usual spot, we've got you covered. Our e-edition is available to download at bestofneworleans.com/current and read at your leisure.

If you enjoy this weeks issue, please share this digital edition on social media.

And as always, New Orleans, thank you for your support.

The Gambit staff

Clancy DuBos counts da winnas and da loozas of the 2022 legislative session.

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Read the latest Gambit: Clancy DuBos recaps the 2022 legislative session - NOLA.com

Seven months ago, Republican Glenn Youngkin defeated Democrat Terry McAuliffe in a closely watched gubernatorial race in Virginia. The story coming out of Virginia was the outsized role of education issuesspecifically, critical race theory (CRT) and parents rights. But Virginia left a big question unanswered: Was education uniquely potent in that racefueled by a debate gaffe that portrayed McAuliffe as unsympathetic to stressed-out parentsor would it linger and resurface for the 2022 midterms?

If the answer to that question wasnt clear then, it certainly is now. Schools will feature in many races this November. And Democrats should embrace that. For all their reticence to engage on education over the last few years, its hard to imagine friendlier terrain for Democrats in the 2022 midterms than K-12 schools.

Since Youngkins win, Republican governors and legislators have run wild on culture war issues in schools. Florida alone has seen the passage of a Parental Rights in Education law (also referred to by many as the Dont Say Gay bill) that limits discussion on gender and sexuality in schools, a Stop WOKE law that limits discussion on race in schools, state guidelines that withhold medical treatment from transgender children, and book bans premised on the idea that even math textbooks are infused with CRT. Nationally, school-board meetings remain contentious, with implications for who serves on those boards and what decisions they make. And now, tragically, schools are front and center again in the aftermath of the mass school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.

This isnt the first time that schools have featured prominently in American politics. Politicians have long seized on culture war issues in schools, from the teaching of evolution to busing for racial desegregation. And K-12 education routinely ranks among the most pressing issues to voters in state and local elections. Parents care enormously about their kidsand a lot of parents voteso we shouldnt be surprised that education matters in U.S. politics.

But there is something unusual about todays politics of education.

First, theres the breadth and pace of policy activity, largely from Republicans, that derives more from political opportunism than real challenges in schools. At a time when wed expect policymakers to be preoccupied with COVID-19 recovery efforts, weve seen a dizzying stream of anti-CRT and anti-trans initiatives instead. Even advocates of more conventional conservative ideas in education, like private school choice, are calling for Republicans to attach those causes to culture war battles.

Second, and related, at a time when Republicans have been assertive in K-12 education, Democrats have been astoundingly timid. On issue after issue, Democrats have stood by as Republicans nurtured extreme ideas into politically advantageous issuesand, often, actions that negatively affect students. Maybe Democrats motivation has been to keep from elevating or dignifying bad ideas with a response, but it hasnt worked. Many of those bad ideas festered and then found their way into education policy and practiceand many still could, like ludicrous proposals to equip teachers with guns to prevent school violence.

Frustratingly, Democrats have repeatedly ceded the opportunity to frame these issues for the public even though most Americans would have been sympathetic to their position if they had. For example, Democrats allowed mask mandates to become a touchstone about government overreach (the Republican framing) rather than a whatever-it-takes push to keep schools open. Then theres gun violence in schools, which in reality has always been a problem of gun violence, not schools, despite the focus on hardening the places were kids learn and play. There are transgender student issuesreal ones, about reducing suicides, bullying, and mental health problems for an extremely vulnerable group of childrenthat Republicans made about a few kids playing sports. And thats just the beginning. Do most Americans really support book bans and burnings, a both sides treatment of the Holocaust, or bounties for teachers who mention systemic racism? I cant imagine they do.

If Democrats lean into these issues, theyll find that most voters agree with them. In fact, when Politico asked Youngkins advisors about McAuliffes mistakes, they pointed to disbelief that McAuliffes team let Youngkin off so easy on education.

More than leaning into any single issue, though, Democrats need an overarching message on K-12 education. Republicans have deployed parents rights to great effect politically because its simple, emotive, rooted in concerns that many Americans have about the country today, and vague enough to justify an array of policy arguments. (Ill dig into the emptiness of parents rights as a policy framework in an upcoming post.)

I am not a political strategistand wont even try to come up with a catchy sloganbut I suspect theres a message available to Democrats that satisfies those criteria and would, to some extent, co-opt the parents rights message. Its about sparing kids from our ugly, broken politics. If theres one point of bipartisan agreement in recent polling, its that Americans are sick of politics and polarization. A CNN/SRSS poll from May 2022 indicates that more Americans are burned out than fired up about politicsand thats true for every single subgroup reported (by gender, race, age, income, education, party identification, and political ideology).

Id like to see Democrats actively make the case, now and in November, that we owe it to kids to keep grown-ups messes from spilling into their livesand that its Republicans who are using schools to wage culture wars. Whether that means doing whatever it takes to keep guns out of schools or, as one Democratic strategist put it, fighting back against Republicans who want to check your kids genitalia, its long past time for Democrats to stop tiptoeing and start engaging forcefully on K-12 education.

Read more:
Democrats should engage in education politics so kids dont have to - Brookings Institution

What should Christian public engagement look like as we move forward in this era? So far in this series,Ive laid out some of the challenges facing traditional Christianity, and why its no surprise that some on the right claim a more combative posture is necessary for pushing back against harmful ideologies and practices in society.

Some Christians seem to believe that confrontational or combative approaches to public theology are inherently sub-Christian. This is not the case. Christianity has a long history of people willing to speak truth to power, to call into question the reigning ideologies of the day in the name of Christ the King.

Too often, the negative label of culture-warring Christians gets applied solely to Christians who oppose ideologies common on the left. When left-leaning Christians call out politicians or pastors who support sinful beliefs or behaviors common to the right, they get described as prophetic and courageous. This is unfair. Culture warring requires two sides, and one can be a left-wing culture warrior just as easily as a right-wing one.

But, speaking of being prophetic, sometimes, we think courage and boldness consist in bloviating bluster, destroying the opposition, owning the libs, or mocking the nutcases we find on the other side of the aisle. No. It takes little courage to be bold in opposing those whom your closest friends, family members, or online followers would expect you to oppose. What takes courage is to police your own side, to call out the problems not only in the culture but in your particular subculture, to buck the consensus of your own tribe and go against the people whose favor you usually enjoy. Compromise always involves capitulation, but capitulation can happen in more than one direction.

It seems likely that we will see a return to something akin to the older culture-war mentality among younger evangelicals in the years to come. Rather than rule that option out of bounds, I think it better to offer some encouragement and caution for younger evangelicals who are enthusiastic about this mode of public engagement.

First, lets dispense with the idea that warfare has no place in Christianity. I remember restraining my laughter when, 15 years ago or so, progressive Christians were protesting the unbiblical martial imagery of many Christians and churches. In taking aim at conservatives, they were shooting the Bible.

The language of spiritual warfare is pervasive in the Old and New Testaments. Jesus blessed the peacemakers and called us to turn the other cheek, and yet he said he came to bring division, not unity. His was the sword that separated son from father, and daughter from mother. The apostle Paul used martial imagery, as did the other apostles. We are on a spiritual battlefield. The response to such circumstances is for the church to be, dare I say, militant. Downplaying the stakes fails to do justice to the Bible itself.

In this battle, Christianity is on offensenot in a way that implies we should seek to be offensive, to take it as a badge of honor when others are offended. No, to speak of Christianity on offense is simply another way of describing the image Jesus gave us when he said that the gates of hell will not prevail against his church. Jesuss statement imagines the church moving outward, plundering hell, and pushing back the forces of darkness. Passivity has no place in the Great Commission.

But the danger for Christians who apply the New Testaments warfare motifs to political engagement is that we can easily misidentify the enemy. The apostle Paul makes clear we do not wrestle against flesh and blood. Its the church moving forward into battle against the powers and principalities that hold people captiveagainst the evil forces that wreak havoc in our world, the supernatural realities the Bible describes as present and persistent.

We must distinguish the serpent from his prey. This is why we seek to convert our opponents, not own or destroy them. We seek their rescue, not their ruin. As weve seen, winsomeness is not a strategy for cultural engagement, as if we could win cultural arguments simply by being nice, but lest we forget, we are deeply invested in winning over our opponents. As Augustine taught, we stand against the world for the good of the world.

The challenge for culture engagers is that we downplay the againstwe become so focused on working for the good of the world that we adopt a conciliatory, affirmative posture that never runs into a hard line of antithesis, and thus we avoid any adversarial stance toward the world. The challenge for culture warriors is that we get so wrapped up in the drama of standing against whats wrong that we are seized by contempt and resentment, and we forget who we are fighting for. In the Scriptural imagination, our fight is for our opponents, or at very least, for the people who will be harmed by what our opponents propose.

Culture engagers can easily neglect the reality of the spiritual warfare and eternal stakes. But culture warriors can lose sight of that spiritual battlefield, just in a different wayby reducing the cosmic picture of powers and principalities to temporary, earthly policies and positions (and the people who hold them). Jesus is clear: even if our neighbors become our enemies, we are to love our enemies, pray for them, and do good to them. This is the Christian way. Contempt must be killed.

No wonder we need the armor of God. An army that stays behind its walls has little need for that kind of protection. Pauls metaphor assumes Christians will take a public and firm stand in the world so we can battle in ways unlike the world, as shining warriors who pierce the darkness, whose victory is always cross-shaped because Christs soldiers must be known for self-giving love.

Another caution for culture warriors is the possibility of fortifying the outer facade of Christian faithfulness while being hollowed out on the inside. Despite my concerns with Rod Drehers Benedict Option, I appreciate his insight that we cannot offer to the world what we do not possess. We cannot reach a culture if we have not built a culture of our own.

When the apostle Peter wrote a letter of encouragement and exhortation to Christians in distressbelievers who lived on the margins of society, maligned and falsely accused, some imprisoned and a handful martyredhe reminded them of their status as strangers and temporary residents and then called them to abstain from fleshly desires that war against you (1 Pet. 2:11, CSB). Peters focus wasnt on the battle being waged against them by unbelieving authorities; he started with the daily struggle going on in their hearts. In other words, Peter appeared less concerned about what unbelievers might do to the Christians physically than about what sin would do them spiritually.

Heres the lesson for us: by focusing all our attention on the external threats to Christianity, we can miss the real and persisting internal threats that wreck our witness. Yes, transgender ideology may be an external threat to the religious freedom of Christian organizations, but surely pornography use in our congregations is the more pervasive and widespread tragedy of our day.

One can pin the decline of church membership and attendance in the past 50 years to cultural trends that make it more difficult to be a Christian, but this view would only make sense of some of the decline. The internal rot in our churches has contributed as much to our decline as any outward government pressure. The internal challenges we face are just as deadly as the external threats. Dont miss the frightening prospect of Christians who might win a culture war and lose their souls.

I must point out one more challenge for the neoReligious Right to consider: the possibility of friendly fire. Anyone who has been in war before knows that one of the common dangers is friendly fireto be wounded or killed by someone on your own side. The fog of war makes it easy for allies to be treated as enemies.

Culture wars are impossible without friendly fire and casualties among allies. And I fear we are already witnessing this development among those who push for a return to the culture-war mentality. We shoot our brothers and sisters.

Often, casualties from friendly fire do not occur because of differences in doctrine, but because of questions of wisdom and discernment. Because some churches and leaders adopt a different approach to cultural engagement, we may doubt their doctrinal soundness, ascribe pernicious motives to them, or label them compromisers or cowards.

It is far too easy for Christians, devoted to a righteous cause, to turn their attention from the battlefield to the barracks and seek to weed out anyone who doesnt fight for the cause in the same way. Like the disciples ready to call down fire from heaven on a village, many who get caught up in the culture war too quickly call down fire on their brothers and sisters who may view and interpret the situation differently.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to cultural engagement. Christians with a different political calculus, with various regional sensibilities, temperaments, or experiences, may choose different courses of action. Debate over the best course of action is good and necessary. But culture warriors and culture engagers alike must be careful not to criticize unfairly or demean brothers and sisters whose different choices are not out of line with confessional faithfulness but flow from prudential judgments about how best to be faithful in the public square.

In the next column, I want to explore this idea further. Different parts of the body may have different roles to play. The local church is the most important among Christian associations but its by no means the only one. In the various spheres of culture, we need organizations and informal networks of people to operate in their strengths, and they need to mutually reinforce one anothers work. We need the whole body of Christ, with different congregations with different skills and gifts and passions, doing whatever it takes to serve Christ faithfully and show the world the beauty of the gospel.

This is the seventh column in an ongoing series. If you would like my future articles sent to your email, as well as a curated list of books, podcasts, and helpful links I find online, enter your address.

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Encouragement and Caution for Culture Warriors - The Gospel Coalition

Not that many years ago, knowledgeable Argentines took a keen interest in the culture wars raging in Europe and North America, especially the ones which pitted leftists who defended the Soviet Union against those who drew attention to the criminal nature of the Communist regime. No doubt some still try to keep track of the ideological scuffles that are going on, but these days even the most fervent progressives find it hard to take seriously the issues that obsess presumably intelligent people in those parts of the world. Despite the efforts of Kirchnerites in search of a cause to import fashions that originated in the United States, the notion that replacing sexist vowels with a resolutely neutral X would help put an end to millennia of injustice has not made much headway, and Argentine sportsmen sorry, sportspeople have yet to make fighting racism by taking the knee an obligatory pre-match ritual.

This is just as well. Not only Argentines but a great many others, including Europeans and North Americans, have far more important things to worry about than pronouns (with their going where he or she used to be), or ones proper place in the hierarchy of victims of white supremacy which, according to almost everyone of note in the English-speaking world, including Joe Biden and his underlings, is behind almost everything that is bad. At a time in which entire categories of people are steadily being rendered surplus by technology-driven economic development and the gap between the well-off and the rest is getting wider, the lefts adoption of identity politics can be seen as an attempt by those at or near the top to persuade themselves and others that they owe their good fortune to their superior virtue, which is why they continually berate ordinary working-class folk for their crass refusal to see the light.

Reports from the culture-wars front certainly make strange reading. If you want to send North American or British politicians scurrying away in terror, all you have to do is aim a microphone and camera at them and ask: What is a woman? Confronted by that dreadful question in a Senate hearing before becoming a member of the US Supreme Court, Ketanji Brown Jackson spoke for many when she said there was no simple answer and, not being a biologist, she was unable to come up with a complicated one.

Like many others, the lady feared that if she provided a straightforward definition of womanhood she would be ferociously attacked by a very small but astonishingly influential minority of individuals who pretend to believe that any man can become a woman overnight if he so desires. Some crafty male sex offenders have exploited official willingness to believe such declarations in order to get sent to womens prisons where, to no great surprise, they have taken full advantage of the opportunities made available.

After failing to bring capitalism to its knees so it could be replaced by an economy micromanaged by bureaucrats, politicians and their hangers-on, opponents of the established order gave up that particular struggle to devote themselves to fighting against traditional beliefs and ways of doing things. After overrunning legal and social barriers that all but a handful of diehards agreed should be done away with, they mounted an assault on just about everything that somehow or other reminded them of a benighted past and went on to demand reparations for whatever indignities minorities of any kind had ever suffered. For a while, they carried all before them, but they are now meeting resistance from the many who accept that, imperfect though the society they live in undoubtedly is, it is still far better than almost any other, and, in any case, are sick and tired of seeing decent people lose their jobs after being accused of Orwellian wrong-think.

Among those pilloried by the neo-puritans of the relentlessly moralising woke brigade is the author of the Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling, who after making some perfectly sensible comments about the differences between men and women was bombarded with death threats and subjected to a campaign to hound her out of public life. As one of the wealthiest women on planet earth, she is able to withstand the abuse, but many other victims of cancellation culture have been less fortunate. People who decades ago wrote or said something that could, no matter how implausibly, be interpreted as sexist, anti-trans, imperialistic or racist have suddenly found themselves in the firing line. Even having a remote ancestor accused of such crimes can get you into trouble: the poet Ted Hughes was blacklisted, post-mortem, by the British Library after it was assumed that, as a relative of Nicholas Ferrar who was born in 1592, he had belonged to a family deeply involved in the slave trade. As it happened, Ferrar died childless and wrote a pamphlet attacking slavery.

This would be bad enough if it were merely part of a game of the kind undistinguished intellectuals like to play, but it is more than that. Affirmative action designed to compensate people of colour for what their forefathers endured is not only breeding resentment among whites and East Asians but is also encouraging advanced thinkers to look for a racial bias in mathematics and the hard sciences which according to them are manifestations of the European mind and therefore alien to people of a certain ethnic origins.

Similar prejudices are making themselves felt in other fields. For years, cultish enthusiasts for the idea that sex or gender is only a cultural construct so everyone is entitled to chose their own have been preying on adolescents to induce them to let themselves be pumped full of drugs and undergo reassignment surgery, often with tragic results for those who otherwise would have emerged unscathed from a bout of what specialists in what was, until quite recently, a marginal subject call gender dysphoria.

They are also raining blows on womens sports by insisting, with the support of people like Biden, that athletes who grew up as men, with all the physical advantages that gave them, but then transitioned, should be allowed to compete in them. Some who have done so have won the events they entered by quite ridiculous margins; this was to be expected as there are thousands of males who, if rebranded as females, could smash the world records set by women.

Just how all this will end is anybodys guess. Watching it with a mixture of satisfaction and concern are members of the Chinese politburo who, along with Vladimir Putin and his supporters, see it as a gratifying symptom of a Western death wish but fear that their own populations could catch the same disease. Perhaps it will prove to be just a passing phase. Unless it does, the future will be as bizarre as Aldous Huxley imagined in Brave New World and, perhaps, as oppressive as George Orwell predicted in 1984.

related news

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Turning the world upside-down - Buenos Aires Times

On a breezy Sunday afternoon, Biola University is a postcard of serenity. A soft light filters through a small prayer chapel where a plain wooden cross stands in front. At its base someone has left a message on a scrap of paper.

For the record:

Correction: An earlier version of this story said students at Biola University sign Articles of Faith. Actually, prospective students sign a statement of faith when applying to Biola. Faculty and staff sign the universitys Articles of Faith.

Jesus, you are my guide, the joy of my heart, the author of my hope, the object of my love.

Ascetic and minimal, the room invites conversations with God. Wall niches contain similar handwritten notes.

I pray that you draw me back to you. Teach me what the weight of the cross means fully.

Biola is a private Christian university in La Mirada, whose mission is to equip its students in mind and character to impact the world for the Lord Jesus Christ. They know the work will be difficult. So much around them is thought to be sinful.

Jesus Im afraid. Your people have hurt me. My brothers and sisters in the church, betraying Black brothers & sisters with racism and hate on their lips. And Biola is no better.

Biola University in La Mirada pays tribute to its past with a trompe loeil hanging on the side of a campus parking structure that features an image of its founding institution, the Bible Institute of Los Angeles. Its Italian Renaissance high-rise featured two JESUS SAVES neon signs that were familiar landmarks in the citys skyline.

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

Biola has attempted to shelter its students and itself from the social and civil disturbances of recent years, but its efforts have been marginally successful. Like evangelical institutions across the country, the university is facing growing disillusionment among young Christians who believe their faith should be more progressive and socially minded.

They resent how politics has shadowed their relationship with God and believe that Christs lessons of humility, tolerance and love have been forgotten amid the Christian communitys embrace of the Big Lie, former President Trump and culture-war dog whistles such as LGBTQ restrictions and anti-mask and vaccination declarations.

Evangelicals are losing their young in epidemic numbers, said David Gushee, a nationally known pastor, ethicist and author of After Evangelicalism: A Path to a New Christianity. Smart, young minds rarely color within the lines, and if they cant ask questions and get decent answers, they will bail.

One of Southern Californias oldest religious colleges, Biola has seen its enrollment drop, has trimmed next years budget and is trying to stay relevant for students while not alienating faculty and alumni.

The tension, said Richard Flory, executive director of the USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture, helps us read what the future of evangelicalism in America might look like.

::

More than 100 years ago, Charles Darwin forced Christians to an uncomfortable reckoning over the Bible. Either creation took six days, God flooded the world, Jesus performed miracles and the prophecies are true, or none of that ever happened or ever will happen.

When Texas preacher Thomas Horton took the stage before 4,200 congregants in downtown Los Angeles on Easter 1915, he made clear that the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, founded seven years earlier, stood for Scripture without error or misstatement.

We believe in the old Bible and the whole Bible and have no confidence in anyone who seeks to unsettle this belief, he said.

Hortons charisma, together with the money and zeal of Lyman Stewart, co-founder of Union Oil Co., helped spread fundamentalism around the world.

Their success led to the construction of an Italian Renaissance high-rise with twin 13-story dormitories for fledging theologians. Its two rooftop, neon-red JESUS SAVES signs were landmarks in the citys skyline for decades.

But as fundamentalism spread, it was challenged. In 1925 during the Scopes monkey trial, when a Tennessee jury convicted a high school teacher of introducing evolution to his classroom, its anti-science stance was ridiculed.

Biola College, later known as Biola University, opened in 1959. The Bible Institute of Los Angeles developed the campus in La Mirada with the fundraising help of evangelist Billy Graham.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

By the 1940s, Christians began turning toward evangelicalism, a less dogmatic version of the faith, and in that spirit, the Bible Institute of Los Angeles opened Biola College (later Biola University) in 1959. Evangelist Billy Graham helped with the $3-million fundraising drive.

Today students can take classes in criminology, physics, accounting, gender studies and cinema. They sign a statement of faith during the application process, and each year faculty sign Articles of Faith pledging allegiance to the truth of Scripture as it articulates Gods vision for humanity and prescribes a course for living in this broken world.

University President Barry Corey quotes Isaiah to rebuild the ancient ruins and raise up the age-old foundations in arguing that Biola graduates are ready to make the necessary repairs.

Our students whether they are screenwriters or accountants, policy wonks or research nerds are Gospel witnesses, Corey said. We want their vocations and lives to be a reflection of their Christian faith and a longing for others to know the redeeming love of Jesus.

But some students and faculty wonder if that is enough.

::

It grieves me deeply when students dont feel like they are welcome here.

Biola University President Barry Corey

To argue that the Bible is without error means more than accepting its origin stories. It means accepting that the problems of the world derive from Adams sin and can be solved only by Christ. For some that means the Second Coming.

As dean of faculty for the theology school, Scott Rae, said last year about climate change: Our best hope for the planet is that Gods coming back to reclaim it and to set things right and to heal what had been previously broken.

Rae qualifies that statement (Im not suggesting we passively wait, he said; we have responsibility now), but the role of Christs return has divided the evangelical community especially as it wrestles over its response to oppression and injustice in American society.

For some Christians, the path ahead is simple: Pray, proselytize and prepare your hearts. For others, fixing and reforming the world cant wait.

Earlier this year, Biola University hosted its annual three-day conference focusing on the schools missionary work and designed to ignite students hearts for the glory of God. Inspirational notes were given a public forum.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Handwritten notes fill niches in the walls of a small prayer chapel on the Biola campus. The messages celebrate a love for Jesus and the word of God and express more intimate worries and concerns.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

The party line, said one Biola professor who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity out of concern of reprisal, is that Jesus died for your sins and to have a personal relationship with Jesus is to have eternal life. Anything else is a distraction. But we think the Gospel is also about bringing healing, restoration, justice and love to a broken world.

The debate has taken on red and blue hues.

In some parts of the university, there is a flowering of a more progressive, justice-oriented Christianity, said a colleague who also asked not to be identified. In other parts, there is pushback, a fear of a liberal Christianity that strays from Biolas conservative roots.

Dissent is hard to find at a university known for its culture of niceness. Yet fractures are conspicuous.

Not long after the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, the opinion editor for Biolas student-run news site called on millennials and Gen Z to help guide Christians away from their support of the Trump presidency.

That editor, Evana Upshaw, cited Scripture to argue that, just as Moses encouraged the Israelites entering the promised land not to repeat the sins of earlier generations, young Christians need to chart a new course toward hope and healing.

Our faith, now synonymous with unwavering support for Donald Trump, is causing many to question how Christians could sell out women, immigrants, Black people, Indigenous people, people of color, the LGBTQ+ community and the poor for the sake of political power, she wrote, concluding that Gen Z sees the hypocrisy of Christians today. ... Its time to pass the torch.

Reaction was quick. Readers, commenting online, branded the piece as propaganda, racist and trash, riddled with unfounded assumption and presumption.

When the faculty advisor asked Upshaw, who identifies as Black/biracial, to start publishing more conservative opinions, she felt sidelined.

I didnt want to fight it. I felt like I was the only one giving Black issues a voice, and I was exhausted, said Upshaw, who eventually transferred to another university.

Race, as much as politics, cuts through campus life at Biola. In 2020, during Black History Month, posters of African American leaders were defaced with a racial slur, and the university held a lament session for students to talk about discrimination on campus.

Corey acknowledges that polarization and the toxic nature of the culture have found their way to Biola.

It grieves me deeply when students dont feel like they are welcome here, he said. Were in the business of helping students think deeply and express themselves in a reasonable, civil and humble manner, but this is taking more work than it did 15 years ago.

With a mixed student body (43% white, 20% Latino, 15% Asian and 3% Black, with the rest identifying as other races and ethnicities), some argue that if Biola wanted to create a more inclusive culture, it would remove the 30-foot-tall Jesus mural on the side of the art building.

Completed in 1990 by L.A.-based artist Kent Twitchell, the bearded figure in a red robe overlooking the student union has long been controversial. Eyes peering skyward, he holds a leather-bound Bible.

The image is not only historically inaccurate, but it enables and reinforces dangerous racist ideas of white power, white supremacy and white saviorism, alumna Brianna Eng wrote in a letter to the university last year. Since graduating in 2018, Eng has lobbied for its removal.

Completed in 1990 by muralist Kent Twitchell, The Word is a 30-foot-tall portrait of Christ overlooking the student union. The image is controversial for students who question its historical accuracy and believe it reinforces concepts of white power and white saviorism.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Corey is accustomed to defending the mural, arguing that it is a source of important conversations on our campus about where we are and how to move forward.

But Megumi Nakazawa wishes the conversations were more robust. Nakazawa, 20, who will be a senior this fall, grew up overseas and was not prepared for the contradiction she found in American life between Christian values and their application.

She cited the shootings of Asian women by a white Christian man last year in Georgia and the difficulty some people had acknowledging race as a factor in the killings.

That was when I started to think of Christianity as causing more harm than good, she said, and the argument from the pulpit that the most Christians can do to improve the world is make sure their hearts are in the right place sounded empty.

We talk about theological principles of justice, Nakazawa said, but it is not applied to whats happening outside of campus.

::

When former Biola professor Lisa Swain considers the division on campus, she is reminded of the schism that emerged last year within the countrys largest evangelical denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention.

The debate focused in part on the question of racial diversity after Christian symbols and Scripture were appropriated by white nationalists.

It begs the question of what it means to be evangelical, Swain said, and who gets to decide.

A larger conversation, Swain said, is taking place within the Christian community over the role of authority. By claiming to know Gods intentions, institutions such as Biola signal a greater interest in protecting power rather than grace.

To relax its power, Biola would have to acknowledge different interpretations of Scripture, she said, and give students an opportunity to apply faith to their lives as they see fit.

Ethicist Gushee wonders if Biola can afford this stance. Christian universities, he said, are being watched by heavy hitters in the evangelical world who will quickly call out any institution that they believe is straying.

Straying has consequences at tuition-dependent institutions such as Biola, where undergraduate enrollment has fallen 18% from 2014 to 2021 and $5 million has been cut from next years budget. These declines are mostly related to the pandemic but give benefactors and donors additional leverage over the universitys future.

Corey, the university president, has made it clear that Biola will not veer from its original mission.

For Biola, faithfulness into our strongest years to come will be possible if, and only if, we do not forsake what our founders gave us, he wrote last September, signaling commitment to the universitys fundamentalist roots.

Some wonder if this stance might help explain the departure over the last two years of 46 faculty members, especially women and those of color.

Rae, the theology school dean, defends Coreys commitment to Biolas original mission and expresses no interest in Biola becoming the equivalent of a Cal State University school, but with a veneer of Christianity.

What we have seen, Rae said, is that schools who have doubled down on their original identity and committed to biblical faithfulness are the ones whose enrollments are actually growing.

The recent appointment of Matthew Hall as provost seems to confirm this intention.

Hall, formerly with the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, questions critical race theory, believes church is far more consequential to eternity than any earthly political development and argues that adherence to biblical truth will reward not just students and faculty but also donors.

Gushee is not surprised the university would follow this course.

Conservative Christian universities play a kind of trick here, he said. They say they are returning to their founding principles, but their responses are remarkably similar to whatever conservative Republican politics looks like at a given moment.

Right now, he added, that is culture wars-oriented, white reactionary politics, and if this reactionary politics shuts down urgent educational discussions, it is the students who lose.

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Frustrated by Biolas doctrinal rigidity, a group of students and alumni gathers Sunday evenings off campus to listen to one another and share their doubts and concerns about Christian faith. They call themselves the St. Thomas Collective.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Frustrated by the universitys doctrinal rigidity, some current and former Biola students are having their own theological discussions. They gather two miles off campus at a United Methodist Church every other Sunday with the belief that faith is more than an either/or proposition.

They call themselves the St. Thomas Collective for the apostle who questioned the resurrection until the crucified Jesus stood before him. Christian in spirit, nondenominational in practice, they want to provide what they havent found at Biola: a nonjudgmental space for open inquiry.

The group started in 2016, initially meeting in a garage to voice their questions and doubts and wild ideas. They currently have up to 50 members at large.

This is the community that Biola should be trying to hold on to, USCs Flory said. Most young people dont care about religion, but if you have young people trying to grapple with their faith so they can make sense of it, given the world they experience you should listen to them.

On a recent Sunday, nine members sat in a semicircle in front of the altar sipping tea and munching Oreos.

A senior majoring in Christian ministries, Jaloni Wilson Ford recently attended a meeting of the St. Thomas Collective for the first time. From an early age, his path to becoming a pastor seemed clear, but he now has his doubts.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

From an early age, my family told me I was going to be a pastor, said Jaloni Wilson Ford, 22, a senior majoring in Christian ministries. All that I did was to lead me to God, but over the last five years, Ive done a 180- or at least a 90-degree turn, questioning traditional understandings of God.

Most grew up in their parents church. They said prayers before each meal, read the Bible at night and understood that they were being kept safe from the world. Now they were stepping out on their own.

When I got to Biola, I saw a lack of consistency between the biblical values of loving your neighbor and the way many students treat and talk about others on campus, said Brandon Hall, 22, a senior majoring in human biology.

They hold no ill will toward Biola and are not ready to leave the university. But Samantha Smith, who graduated in 2019 with a degree in psychology, remembers feeling alone and frustrated as a student.

Professors had their cookie-cutter answers, she said, and friends told her how wonderful God is. Everybody was on the Jesus train, where the choices were either hop on or burn.

When Sophie Byerly arrived at Biola three years ago, she wondered if she had made the right decision to attend the university. Each day felt like a test among those who could profess their faith as the most on fire for God. Her faith practice was more quiet, more questioning, which drew her to the St. Thomas Collective.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Sophie Byerly, 21, a junior majoring in music therapy, started at Biola three years ago, and each day felt like a test among those who could profess to be the most on fire for God.

Her practice was more quiet. As a teenager, she aspired to be the radically good person that Jesus wanted his disciples to be. Now she is trying to decide whether or not to believe in Christianity.

Originally posted here:
Column One: CRT, Trumpism and doubt roil Biola University. Is this the future of evangelical Christianity? - Los Angeles Times