When an academic says “diversity” he means

“utter craven ideological conformity by people of different flesh tones”.

A reader gives a little taste of this:

I’m not sure if you’ve seen this latest thing in Newsweek about how Harvard tried to add a very basic study of (gasp) religion into their core curriculum, but the initiative was shouted down by materialists such as Steven Pinker who would not hear of such a thing. Link here. I tried to put on my best Shea-esque hat (unworthy, craven follower that I am) and went after it…

Despite the fact that this writer has tried to establish herself as a “supporter” of the effort to teach religion (especially in her final two sentences and her slyly undermining comments about Pinker’s utopian view of Europe), she is clearly no friend of religion, nor does she really understand what the heck she is talking about – and the same is true even of those in favor of the religion-study initiative at Harvard.

…the importance of religion goes without saying. “Kids need to know the difference between a Sunni and a Shia,” is something you hear a lot.

…Harvard, its students, and the rest of us who need leaders better informed about faith and the motivations of the faithful.

…students should…equip themselves—in a rational, secular context—with a vocabulary for thinking about it [religion].

This is not about supporting religion – it’s a reduction and a pathologization of religious believers: they’re some kind of strange “unknown” and “understudied” addition to humanity that our dear “leaders” of the future simply MUST be “better informed” about. Who are these crazy, irrational religious people? What could possibly be motivating them? Gosh, we just have to STUDY them in a clean, well-lighted “rational, secular context.”

And another thing — Maybe I’ve been around the secular higher ed world too long but if I hear another line like this I think I’m going to scream:

college is a time to “unsettle presumptions, to defamiliarize the familiar, to reveal what’s going on beneath and behind appearances.”

Poppycock. College today is about little else than passing on the very much settled presumptions of the reigning intellectual elite to students. It is about defamiliarizing every belief but those held dear by the leftists who run everything. And it is utterly unconcerned with revealing “what’s going on beneath” its own unquestioned dogma. These include things like: White people are always oppresive. Brown and black people are always oppressed. Global warming (er, climate change) is caused by humans, and this is settled science. Anyone who opposes gay marriage is by definition an irrational homophobic bigot. Incandescant light bulbs are an abomination.

It’s the modern mono-versity – one verse, one voice, one opinion. So spare me the self-important preening about how studying religion will help kids to “grapple with issues” blah blah blah. That’s not what it’s about at all. It’s about pathologizing and deconstructing believers and putting them under the merciless microscope of secular materialism. Later there is this which reveals the underlying utilitarianism at the heart of it all:

Harvard grads will have jobs that take them to far-flung places, and they will live with people who are dramatically unlike themselves. They may live in a town where the school board is considering teaching creationism or the library is aiming to ban Harry Potter.

Ooooooh – those nasty, scary, “far-flung” regions! Full of strange folk who believe strange things! Why, whatever will the poor little “Harvard grads” do if they haven’t taken a CLASS about these people before they encounter them? It’s like a kind of enlightened anthropology.

Nowhere is there even a hint that studying religion might be more than just a means to an end — or more than simply a way to categorize and quantify yet another facet of human life, place it on the operating table to be measured, spliced, studied, dissected, and examined.

There’s nothing here about how real religion and honestly lived religious belief might be a valuable and even essential endeavor for its own sake, or a true ally of reason rather than an enemy, or even, perhaps — the surest guide to the deepest longings of the eternally restless human heart in the search for goodness, truth, and beauty.

Good luck to them in this initiative. It will all come to nothing unless they realize that Veritas is empty without Christo.

For what it’s worth, I once wrote about this phenomenon of having unbelieving technicians “teach” about religion in public schools. I’m agin it. If you want to understand a religious belief, talk to somebody who believes it, not to somebody who stands outside the belief regarding it as you might regard a frog for dissection. That doesn’t mean uncritically accepting all religious claims. Rather, it means *not* uncritically accepting the anti-supernatural biases of the modern academy, which are rigorously enforced and intolerantly imposed on all. It even involves rejecting the universal dogma of Higher Thinking Post-Moderns: namely, that all religions are equally superior to the Catholic Faith.