few in the media and academia are finally recognizing that neither place is friendly to conservatives or evangelicals. That recognition is refreshing!
When liberal journalists come out and confess their bias, it's tempting to say, "The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem." But don't. This is good news.
Writing at the New York Times recently, columnist Nicholas Kristof took that hard first step. The title of his piece says it all: "A Confession of Liberal Intolerance."
"We progressives," he writes, "believe in diversity, and we want women, blacks, Latinos, gays and Muslims at the table, so long as they aren't conservatives." (Or, one might reasonably add, evangelical Christians).
Kristof and fellow liberals profess a love for tolerance and diversity. But when it comes to the most important kind — diversity of thought — he admits that the gatekeepers in academia and the media actively stigmatize those who hold views different from their own.
"We're fine with people who don't look like us," he writes, "as long as they think like us."
Universities, once recognized as bastions of tolerance and diversity, bear perhaps the greatest blame. Kristof cites studies showing that just 6 to 11 percent of humanities professors are conservatives. Fewer than one in ten social-studies professors call themselves conservative. For perspective, consider that twice that number identify as Marxists!
And lest anyone blame this on conservative self-selection, a third of academics openly admit that they would be less likely to hire a qualified candidate who voted Republican. Black evangelical sociologist George Yancey says he faces more discrimination on campus for his Christian beliefs than he does off-campus for the color of his skin. This aggressive bias turns classrooms into hard-left "echo-chambers" where only one side of any debate is ever heard.
Kristof took his concerns to Facebook, where he asked his mostly liberal followers why those who pride themselves on tolerance can be so intolerant. The replies he got were stunning.
"Much of the 'conservative' worldview consists of ideas that are known empirically to be false," commented one fellow liberal.
Why stop with conservatives? asked another. "How about we make faculties more diverse by hiring idiots?"
Wow. Kristof was understandably dumbfounded. "My Facebook followers have incredible compassion for war victims in South Sudan, for kids who have been trafficked, even for abused chickens, but no obvious empathy for conservative scholars facing discrimination."
Read more; Liberals Confess to Their Intolerance
The Bible Guild
What if Jesus meant every word He said?