The mission of Issues in Perspective is to provide thoughtful, historical and biblically-centered perspectives on current ethical and cultural issues.

A new poll from YouGov/The Economist points out that young Americans appear to be remarkably ignorant about one of modern history’s greatest crimes.  Some 20% of respondents aged 18-29 think that the Holocaust is a myth, compared with 8% of those aged 30-44.  An additional 30% of young Americans said they do not know whether the Holocaust is a myth.  “Many respondents espouse the canard that Jews wield too much power in America: young people are nearly five times more likely to think this than are those aged 65 and older.”  Quite surprisingly, The Economist reports that “the proportion of respondents who believe that the Holocaust is a myth is similar across all levels of education.”  Social media may be the culprit in embracing such outrageous ideas.  According to a Pew Research 2022 survey, “Americans under 30 are about as likely to trust information on social media as they are to trust national news organizations.  More recently Pew found that 32%of those aged 18-29 get their news from Tik-Tok.  Social-media sites are rife with conspiracy theories, and research has found strong associations between rates of social-media use and beliefs in such theories.”

Such unbelievable confusion about something so obvious, viz. the Holocaust, was also recently reflected in testimony before the Congress.  Three university presidents, Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, Claudine Gay of Harvard, and Sally Kornbluth of MIT, answered questions about antisemitism on their respective campuses.  Freed Zakaria of CNN argued that the testimony of these presidents “was the inevitable result of decades of the politicization of universities. America’s top colleges are no longer seen as bastions of excellence but partisan outfits.”  He further contended that they should “abandon this long misadventure into politics . . . and rebuild their reputations as centers of research and learning.”

Claudine Gay of Harvard is a case in point.  Pro-Hamas demonstrations on Harvard’s campus, which have resulted in life-threatening speech concerning Jewish students, must be understood in “context” she exclaimed.  Speech that calls for the eradication of the Jewish people cannot be forthrightly condemned because the “context” of why people feel this way is important.  As with the other two presidents, her refusal to condemn such speech was reprehensible.  Gay, therefore, two days later issued a statement after her appearance before Congress.  She declared that “words matter . . . I got caught up in what had become at that point, an extended, combative exchange about policies and procedures.  Substantively, I failed to convey what is my truth.”  As Wall Street Journal columnist Gerard Baker has argued, “Few phrases are as reliable as ‘my truth’ for identifying seasoned purveyors of cant and doubletalk.  Truth isn’t something that can be identified or modified by a possessive pronoun.  If my truth is different from your truth and your truth is different from her truth, these aren’t truths.  ‘My truth’ is the device deployed to elevate the particular viewpoint of a member of a particular group or identity, by claiming the validation of the ‘truth’ for a narrow ideological cause.  And this we saw [in mid-December] at that hearing—the narrow, exclusive intolerance of the ideology that has our universities in its grip.” Baker adds that “our universities are run by leaders who are models of the left-wing ideology that dominates so much of our politics and culture.  It deems the rights of certain people less worthy of protection than others, it divides the world into oppressor and oppressed.  You can call for the murder of all Jews, but say sex is biological and you will be punished . . . ‘Truth’ has been deposed and replaced with the monomaniacal ideology of the ‘My Truth’ crowd.”

Additionally, David Brooks offers a penetrating analysis of the situation on so many of America’s elite universities.

• “Over the past five weeks, Jewish students on America’s campuses have found themselves confronted with those who celebrate a terrorist operation that featured the mass murder and reportedly the rape of fellow Jews. They see images of people tearing down posters of kidnapped Jewish children. At M.I.T., Jewish students report that they were told by some faculty members to avoid the university’s main lobby—which had been the site of a pro-Palestinian protest—for their own safety. At Cooper Union, Jewish students were barricaded in the library by a protest that started out as a pro-Palestinian demonstration and quickly became, one student reported, ‘pure anti-Jew.’ Rabbi Nomi Manon, who has directed the Hillel at the University at Albany since 2011, told The Albany Times-Union, ‘Every Jewish student that I talk to feels a sense of impending doom, anxiety, fear or anger about the really marked rise in antisemitism.’ Shabbos Kestenbaum, who is a graduate student at the Harvard Divinity School, told The Forward, ‘The past few weeks have been the most isolating, saddening, maddening experience I’ve ever had.’”
• “Universities are supposed to be centers of inquiry and curiosity—places where people are tolerant of difference and learn about other points of view. Instead, too many have become brutalizing ideological war zones, so today the most hostile place to be an American Jew is not at some formerly restricted country club but on a college campus . . . It centers on a hard-edged ideological framework that has been spreading in high school and college, on social media, in diversity training seminars and in popular culture. The framework doesn’t have a good name yet. It draws on the thinking of intellectuals ranging from the French philosopher Michel Foucault to the critical race theorist Derrick Bell . . . The common ideas associated with this ideology are by now pretty familiar:

1. We shouldn’t emphasize what unites all human beings; we should emphasize what divides us.  2.  Human relations are power struggles between oppressors and oppressed groups.  3.  Human communication is limited. A person in one group can never really understand the experience of someone in another group.  4.  The goal of rising above bigotry is naïve. Bigotry and racism are permanent and indestructible components of American society.  5.  Seemingly neutral tenets of society—like free speech, academic freedom, academic integrity and the meritocracy—are tools the powerful use to preserve their power.”

• “There are many teachers and administrators who believe that they best serve society not by being open and curious and searching for the truth but by propagating this ideological framework.  One passage from a D.E.I. curriculum guide symbolizes for me the way ideological activism is replacing intellectual inquiry as the primary mission of universities. It’s for the faculty at California Community Colleges, and it advises: ‘Take care not to ‘weaponize’ academic freedom and academic integrity as tools to impede equity.’  In other words, spreading a specific ideology is more important than academic integrity.  Students have gotten the message that they are not on campus to learn; they are there to express their certainties and to advance a rigid ideological formula.   One upshot is that universities have become battlefields. Eboo Patel is the founder and president of Interfaith America, which over the past 20 years has worked on about 1,200 campuses to narrow toxic divides and build bridges between people of all faiths or no faith. Over these decades, he has concluded that far from creating a healthier, more equitable campus, this ideology demonizes, demeans and divides students. It demeans white people by reducing them to a single category—oppressor. Meanwhile, it demeans, for example, Muslim people of color, like Patel, by reducing them to victims.”

What is the solution to this cultural and ideological confusion and the intellectual anarchy so prevalent in American civilization today?  It is of course Jesus!  I offer an extended quotation from an essay I published in the Omaha World Herald this past Christmas:

“The incarnation [of Jesus Christ] reveals a divine principle governing the universe—a radical commitment to the dignity and worth of every person.  Because Jesus took on flesh, He entered our world and shared our experiences—love, joy, compassion; anger, sorrow, suffering, tears.  For Christians, God is not distant or detached; He is a God of wounds.  For that reason, we shun turning God into a set of abstract principles.  Indeed, the Gospels detail how Jesus interacted in this messy, complicated, broken world, through actions that stunned the people of His time—and still do so today.”

Historian Tom Holland reasons “That every human being possessed an equal dignity was not remotely a self-evident truth.  A Roman would have laughed at it . . . The origin of this principle [lie] not in the French Revolution, nor in the Declaration of Independence, nor in the Enlightenment, but in the Bible.”  And, as Holland also argues, even the ethical standards by which we judge the past are Christ’s standards.  The Greek and Roman gods cared nothing for the poor.  In the ancient world, violence was the right of the strong, and slavery was just a fact of life.  But Jesus championed the poor, repudiated violence, and said He had come “not to be served, but to serve and give His life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45).  His followers therefore mimic Him in founding hospitals, caring for the poor and, in the past, abolishing slavery.  And as theologian, Rebecca McLaughlin, observes, “Christians today comprise the largest nongovernmental source of poverty relief and anti-human trafficking endeavors in the world today.”

Thus, Christmas is a reminder that while ethical rules can be found on stone tablets, grace and redemption are final and fully found in the story of love—the divine becoming human. I did not enter Jesus’ world; He entered mine. The Incarnation declares that God cares.  As pastor and theologian Tim Keller affirmed, “He is so committed to our ultimate happiness that he was willing to plunge into the greatest depths of suffering himself.”  For that reason, Christians always connect Christmas with Easter, for the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus afforded the path to redemption, reconciliation, renewal and restoration.

See The Economist (9 December 2023), pp. 23-24; Gerard Baker in the Wall Street Journal (12 December 2023); Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal (16-17 December 2023); David Brooks in the New York Times (17 November 2023); and James P. Eckman, Omaha World Herald (24 December 2023).