A tale of two schools

Baylor claimed to be one of the world's largest Christian universities. But when it came to light that the school attempted to bury a rash of predatory assaults by members of its nationally known football program, Christ's call to love your neighbor was nowhere to be found. Along with several of the Ten Commandments.

Instead, Baylor proved the truth of Christ’s words that we cannot serve two masters. Eventually we will choose one or the other, and we always choose money, to our own detriment and destruction.

In the aftermath, I wondered how many people who weren't physically assaulted by Baylor football players were nonetheless spiritually assaulted by the school's response. I would imagine it became even more difficult to convince a skeptical generation of Christ's lordship, when leaders of the institutions that claim his mantle behave so un-Christlike when needed the most. That's why I suggested the school needed to forget football success for a while and show some real Christianity for a change.

I didn't want them to shut down the program, because that would then take scholarship opportunities away from the young men who had done nothing wrong. Instead, I suggested they forgo all profit from football and either donate it to, or create their own, foundation for abused and battered women.

However, Baylor saw it differently. So the school fired a bunch of people and then gave its new coach a lucrative, guaranteed eight-year contract to begin building its disgraced football program back up posthaste.

Needless to say, that may be a recipe for football resurgence (although the team was 1-11 last fall and last place in its league), but it's a highway to hell when it comes to showing Christ in the world.

Progressives at Michigan State University are now in the same boat.

A publicly funded, state-run school like so many others in America, where progressive utopianism is the zeitgeist, failed to live up to the promises its feminists made to a generation of young women for 20 years.

While it was pushing back on mansplaining, it allowed a man to become the worst convicted sex offender in American history. While it was on the march to assure proper pronoun usage, an appalling "war on women" marched on with gusto.

No old boys’ club can be blamed for this. Many of the administrators that the victims first told about the abuse were women themselves, including the pioneering female president of the school, who was in a position of on-campus authority the entire time Nassar was "practicing." But they now claim to have no memory of being told such things, or have little to no fault for what happened.

What are we left to conclude, then? That for all the progressive calls to arms about valuing the voices and experiences of women throughout the nation’s cultural institutions, it is abundantly clear from the heartbreaking narrative pouring out of Michigan State that some voices are more equal than others. And those would be the voices that can easily be manipulated as cheap political clickbait.

Wear a pussy hat and march on Washington in the name of killing babies or fake pay equity claims, and you are among the chosen ones. But have a man use your genitals as his plaything in the name of medical science, and you might just be a silly girl over-reacting to something she doesn’t fully understand.

This is what feminism has given us: not the empowerment of all women, but the elevation of a caricature at the great and dangerous cost of reality. Nassar was “The Handmaid’s Tale” come to life. He wasn't agitprop. He literally was the monstrous, heteronormative patriarchy incarnate – everything about "toxic masculinity" every women's studies professor has ever warned us about.

Nor was he a key cog in unraveling some multimillion-dollar venture at the school, which is the temptation Baylor faced with its golden goose football team.

Nassar served what are now politely called "Olympic sports." Which used to be known as "non-revenue sports," because they generate no revenue. They are financial losses and subsidies. Therefore, if there was ever a time for a school to truly show its worth and the courage of progressive conviction, Michigan State had every incentive to do so here and make an example out of a fiendish straight white male for all the watching world to see.

Instead they vaulted his prestige all the way to the U.S. Olympic Team, which helped him broaden his pool of potential victims all the more.

Here's what this means: We are broken, and we can't do this alone. The "Christian school" is just as likely as the secular progressive school to lose its way when anything other than God becomes its god.

Baylor claimed to stand for divine justice, but it really just stood for football (read: money) as lord. Michigan State claimed political correctness as its guiding light, but had a prince of darkness on its payroll for decades.

On the surface, they appear to be two different stories. One is a private, religious school driven by the ultimate cash cow sport. The other is a secular public school brought down by a sport that doesn't make any cash.

However, their sins are the same. They made something other than God out to be god, and the innocent people God calls us to protect suffered mightily as a result.

Don't miss a minute of Steve Deace on CRTV! Sign up today!