A Dangerous Church? The Elephant in the Balliol College Freshers Fair
by David Robertson, theweeflea:
I return from a lovely break in Croatia to discover yet another one of those ‘snowflake/University bans Christians’ stories. But this is one with a difference. It involves one of the world’s top Universities, Oxford. The problem with Balliol College’s now retracted ban of the Christian Union is not that it shows up the flakiness of the snowflake students, or the censoriousness of the attempted ban, or even what Richard Dawkins called the ‘pompous idiocy’ of the decision.
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Are Oxford Students Oppressed?
There is something deliciously ironic about an Oxford college talking about oppression and neo-colonialism – as though it were the standard bearer for the poor and the oppressed. Of course when they speak of ‘the marginalised’, they don’t mean the poor or those on the edges of their society – they are pushing the narrative that marginalised is now about ‘social progressivism’. This allows them to retain their material and social privileges whilst claiming to be poor and marginalised.
The wealthy elites who largely run our culture, whether in the educational, media, legal, political or business spheres are far more likely to be in the vanguard of social progressivism. It is the Oxbridge, Eton, Edinburgh and Harvard elites who are desperate to be seen to be socially progressive. It’s a form of virtue signalling by the privileged that costs them nothing, and costs the poor everything. For example, the ‘A,B’s’ preach the sexual revolution but 75 per cent of them are bringing up their children in traditional marriages. The equivalent figure for the ‘D,E’s’ is 40 per cent. Bourgeois morality enables the wealthy to have their flings and mistresses…often at the expense of the poor.
Christianity is a Religion of and for the Poor
It has ever been thus, but the idea of a privileged elite attacking Christianity because it does harm is laughable. Christianity is a religion of and for the poor. But those who sought to make this ban and create a ‘safe space’ are of course not thinking about the poor – who have far less a chance of going to an elite University – not because they are less intelligent, but because they often don’t have the privileges of a private education, stable family or the connections afforded by living in a ‘nice’ area of town.
Read also: The Balliol ban: Why, as a gay celibate Christian, it affects people like me by David Bennett, CT
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