The editors at Crisis cut a very provocative paragraph, reproduced below:
The situation is especially grim among professional theologians, where the Body Snatchers are working their sci-fi magic with impunity. In the first volume of Jaroslav Pelikan’s Christian Tradition, whose fifth volume was already cited above, the author mentions in passing that in the first several centuries of the Church most theologians were bishops, while in the Middle Ages most were monks, but in the modern period most theologians have been professors. This seemingly irrelevant factoid from the sociology of history actually reveals something important—and dangerous. Liberalism in religion first drew its strength from the Wars of Religion in the wake of the Reformation and then gained strength in the multicultural global setting of vastly different religions and cultures. In order to avoid a repeat of the Thirty Years War, but now on a much worse global scale, governments must regard each religion as equally valid and worthy of rights before the law. But validity before the law is by no means the same thing as validity before the bar of the truth, and when the liberal ethos enters an intentional, believing community constituted by a particular revelation, havoc is bound to follow. Especially in the United States, the values of tolerance and non-discrimination have become more than a mere litmus test for citizenship but are now enshrined in the laws that govern how universities may operate. Combine that ethos with the fact that more and more theology professors owe their allegiance more to norms of academic “respectability” than to the politically incorrect gospel of St. Paul, and suddenly the Pod People have a legally safe redoubt.
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