From
1987 to 1990, I was a faculty member at The King’s College, which at the time
was in Briarcliff Manor, New York. I voluntarily left in 1990. I was a moderate
Christian at this very conservative religious college. Some of my colleagues
had inquisitive minds, but many were simply closed-minded to anything outside
of conservatism. Many of them spent their time fighting one another in power
struggles and doctrinal disputes. The students got really tired of it and
eventually there were so few students that the college closed in 1994. Then it
reopened in New York City.
I
am so glad to be out of there. You see, I called it a conservative religious
college, not a conservative Christian college, because the only things they
really affirmed with any enthusiasm were the tenets of the Republican Party.
I
had stopped paying attention to The King’s College until I heard a news report
about the hyper-conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza. It turns out he was
president of the college from 2010 to 2012. D’Souza is the perfect example of
the belief that all you have to do to be saved is to worship the Republican
Party—that is, the extreme right wing of the Party. Moderate Republicans do not
count.
D’Souza
expresses this opinion most vividly in his absolute hatred of Barack Obama. In
a Forbes magazine article in 2010,
D’Souza said that Obama was “...trapped
in his father’s time machine. Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to
the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated
African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization
of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation’s agenda through the
reincarnation of his dreams in his son. The son makes it happen, but he
candidly admits he is only living out his father’s dream. The invisible father
provides the inspiration, and the son dutifully gets the job done. America
today is governed by a ghost.” D’Souza stops just short of saying that
President Obama is demon-possessed.
Even those aspects of history and current
affairs that most conservatives find disturbing seem to be pretty damn
acceptable to D’Souza. For example, he thinks that the European conquest of
Africa was just fine. According to Wikipedia, “In the second chapter of What's So Great About America,
D'Souza defends colonialism, arguing that the problem with Africa is not that it was
colonized, but rather that it was not colonized long enough.”
D’Souza also claims that the torture of
detainees at Abu Ghraib was the fault of liberals, not of certain members of the
American military or the Bush Administration. He said the tortures and
degradations (which the whole world saw on video) were caused by “the sexual
immodesty of liberal America”.
In May, 2014, D’Souza pleaded guilty to making
illegal campaign contributions in a senatorial race. He and his wife each made
contributions to the full legal limit, but then he made further contributions
through “straw donors,” one of whom was the woman with whom he was having an
affair. On September 23, he was sentenced to eight months in a halfway-house
rather than prison; five years of probation; and a fine of $30,000.
As I read the Bible, God considers it wrong to
have affairs and to break national laws and to lie about people (as D’Souza has
lied about Barack Obama). But D’Souza apparently thinks, or at least thought,
that he was exempted from God’s laws because of his worship of the Republican
Party. I wonder if his sexual immodesty will cause a new rash of tortures of
detainees.
Although The King’s College had the integrity
to pressure D’Souza to resign his presidency once the sexual scandals emerged,
I very much doubt that the College has opened itself up to reasonable thinking
any more now than it ever did in the past. I thank whatever God there may be
that I got out of there.
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