Strange Gods

A commentary on the current state of universities.

“Now therefore put away, said he, the strange gods which are among you, and incline your heart unto the Lord God of Israel.” Joshua 24:23

“Life rumbles on,” as my uncle says, which my friends and I are appreciating as we face our final semester of law school at the University of Cape Town. UCT’s high standard is notorious among other law schools. Over the last three years, a solid legal foundation has been laid in us by world-renowned lecturers, and for this, we are deeply grateful.

The word university, like universe, stems from the Latin universitas, meaning ‘the whole’ or ‘entire’. Universities should be institutions of free speech, critical and creative thinking, and rigorous debate - they are meant to be whole. They should teach us how to think more than what to think.

However, at UCT and most universities today, we are told exactly what to think. Many lecturers teach us highly politicized ideas as a matter of fact, with no room for debate. We are given a thin slice of the whole.

We are taught that truth is relative, that tolerance is the supreme virtue, and that diversity is our greatest strength. We are told that we can create our own identities, that autonomy is more noble than obedience, and that self is God.

Christianity is seen as a colonial tool of the white man. Capitalism is seen as inherently racist, and socialism as progressive. Marriage is considered dispensable and malleable.

We are taught that the destruction of Apartheid can never be healed. The thieving ANC is hardly blamed for our current inequality crisis - Apartheid and colonisation are considered the only culprits.

Perhaps the idea that is worshipped most in our hallowed halls is equality. Everyone must receive equal treatment all the time.

The best of these ideas have an element of truth - they are half-truths. They partly address injustices and partly describe reality. Capitalism can be racist, but that does not mean it is intrinsically racist. These ideas are gross and convenient oversimplifications used to support an ideology. Reality is not so simple, and I think most people know this.

Without even saying what I think of these ideas, teaching them as unquestionable facts is morally wrong and pernicious, everywhere, but particularly in an institution that claims to be liberal.

The way that these ideas are fervently taught and defended can only be described as indoctrination, and even more fundamentally, as worship - worship of strange gods.

The consequences of this indoctrination are numerous, from seemingly benign to destructive impacts. Students become highly proficient at copying down what the lecturer says verbatim. We are training to be scribes and minute takers. Words go from the lecturer’s mouth right onto our paper without engaging our brains. And then we regurgitate these ideas in exams. Most students use laptops, which uses the brain even less. The skill of listening and recording is, of course, important, but of all the things a university should teach us, it is at the bottom of the pile.

We therefore struggle to problem solve, think critically and independently, and make coherent arguments. But ask us exactly what the lecturer said, and we will tell you, backwards if you like.

This gap in our learning is exposed when we engage with a lecturer who thinks critically. They quickly pick up that we are arguing with someone else’s words, and not logic. This is the main reason why many students do not last in legal practice. A lawyer is not a note-taker. A lawyer is a problem solver.

Students cannot entirely be blamed for thinking this way, as our judges do the same. The courts routinely use words like dignity, equality, and freedom, which supposedly have objective meanings, to mean whatever they like in support of their decision. Language has been corrupted.

The second, more serious consequence of ideological teaching is that it creates disharmony between the races and sexes.

Children so easily make friends and enjoy themselves in any situation because they see other children first as people, and not first as a black boy or white girl. They assume the best of people and do not assume that a white man is racist or a black woman is incompetent. Children want to have fun more than they want to be right.

Here are three encounters to illustrate the third consequence of ideological teaching: ideology trumps reason, every time.

In jurisprudence (the philosophy of law), we were forced to endure two weeks of bizarre and confused lectures on the Anthropocene, with the central message being that humans have destroyed the planet beyond all hope, and it is too late to do anything about it. Besides being anti-human, what this had to do with the philosophy of law, none of us knew. This is textbook radical climate change ideology.

Last year, there was an ‘open’ panel discussion on the legalization of sex work. Naturally, most of the students and academics argued that prostitution should be legal; however, one brave first-year man stood up and challenged this. He coherently countered their position on legal grounds, questioning how legalizing sex work empowers women and promotes their dignity and freedom. I was not there, but I heard that he was eviscerated and chastised for his ignorance. This is textbook radical feminism.

In environmental law, one lecture was titled “The Sentience of the Chicken.” The lecturer argued that many animals experience emotion and are sentient like humans, and they should therefore receive the same legal protection. Astonishingly, chickens have personalities.

When I challenged this with science, I was met with a barrage of retorts that made any meaningful dialogue impossible. The lecturer supports the ‘eco-centric’ belief that humans are not superior to nature, but are a part of it, and even subordinate to it. Nature was viewed as some pathetic and broken entity that desperately needs our help. The idolization of nature was borderline paganism.

Overall, the lectures so highly prized the environment that human worth and the joys of being human were all but forgotten, or worse, vilified. You got the feeling that everything we do is bad, and that the pinnacle of human existence is to be sitting at home in the dark eating kale chips.

Leo Tolstoy said that foolishness comes from education, and the above stories show it. The most foolish man is the one who thinks himself most right, and it is this intellectual pride that grips academic institutions.

With such arrogance comes the guise of morality and righteousness. The ideologues truly believe they are being progressive and breaking free from archaic and oppressive ways of thinking. They truly believe they are virtuous. They are Pharisees with red pens.

The most impressive thing is how well-drilled these ideologues are, like an international secret service. Students at liberal universities all over the world think the same. They have specious ideas, they are intellectually arrogant, and they act with piety. This all leads to the conclusion that the issue is more spiritual than intellectual. The irony is that if you were to tell them this, they would laugh.

When Satan tempted Eve in the garden, when he tempted Jesus in the wilderness, and when he tempts us, he does not provide us with compelling arguments to sin. He does not invite us to think critically because then we would see the truth. Rather, he tells us half-truths. He plays at our emotions. He oversimplifies. He tells us that we are right and we deserve it. We gradually become like him and truly believe that we are right and righteous. But Jesus said, “And if the light you think you have is actually darkness, how deep that darkness is!”¹

Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote of this long ago in his macabre and tragic masterpiece, The Devils. The novel is eerily prescient in how it accurately predicted the Russian Revolution and today’s political climate. The overarching message is that atheism leads to society’s destruction.

Dostoevsky’s inspiration for the novel was Matthew 8:28-34, where Jesus casts demons out of two men and sends them into a herd of pigs, who then rush down a steep bank into a lake and are drowned.

In the novel, the protagonists represent the devils, as they are vehement promoters (worshippers) of atheism, nihilism, socialism, rationality, intellectual egoism, and self-reliance. They are enlightened liberals. They have no identity and so they fill it with these ideas, which are not merely intellectual; they are spiritual, and the ideas spread like a disease. Underlying their ideas is the same belief underlying communism: society can be built on reason alone.

The devil’s ideas enter the public, the herd of swine, and cause chaos and death - drowning. They murder and wreak havoc throughout the story, but they all ultimately end up dying themselves, mostly by suicide. The chief message is that Satan wants us to abandon God because he knows that this leads to death.

At the conclusion of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, the protagonist, Raskolnikov, dreams about a plague of microscopic creatures that burrow into people’s bodies. These creatures are spirits endowed with intelligence and willpower, and they cause widespread anarchy, anxiety, and senseless murder. People forget what is wrong or right. In response, everyone advances their own solutions, but there is no consensus. The world is engulfed in fires and famine, and everybody and everything perishes, as the plague spreads.

Never before has it been clearer how false ideologies spread like viruses and cause pain and death. There is compelling evidence that Karl Marx was a Satanist. Think of the destruction that his ideas have caused.

But in Raskolnikov’s dream, some survive… “In the whole world, there were only a few who were saved – a pure, select group, destined to found a new race and a new life, to renew and purify the earth, but no one had ever seen these people anywhere, or heard their words or voices…”

I started a Bible study at UCT a year ago. The response from the students has been immense, as most sessions have had about fifteen students present, who have enjoyed speaking freely without fear of rebuke.

God’s Spirit continues to move in these desolate spaces. We are far behind enemy territory, but God is building His resistance. Whatever space you are working in, I encourage you to bring Christians together. I encourage you to raise Christ’s name.

The main reason why students come back every week is because our God is not strange. His ideas do not infect, spread, and kill; they lead to life itself.

He does not demand that we be ashamed and guilty; He has taken on our guilt. He does not demand that we deal with all the woes of the world; He promises to do so Himself. He does not demand that we achieve holiness through our deeds; He is Holy.

He is not a God of confusion but of clarity. He is the One Truth, and He tells us to love others and to love Him. He leads us to lofty and beautiful things like humility, hope, faith, fortitude, repentance, joy, and salvation. He leads us to heaven.

God created us in His image, and we therefore have an unassailable identity in Him. He alone is what we should worship, because worshipping anything else leads to death.

Let us put away the strange gods, and incline our hearts unto the Lord God. And if these strange gods cannot be put away, then let us come together and worship the true One.

1. Matthew 6:23