Seeking to be more politically correct or ‘woke’, Andrews University created a Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity position in July of 2017. They selected Michael Nixon as vice president for Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity (or DIE for short).
In April of this year, Andrea Luxton announced that Michael Nixon was leaving Andrews University for Beacon Health System.
The big question then was “What will become of the benighted DIE position?” Would it be eliminated in favor of a renewed thrust on our Adventist Identity and Mission? Would it continue at Andrews University, like a weed choking our biblical identity into oblivion?
Some individuals connected with Andrews University were lamenting yesterday that the VP of Diversity position was “scrapped” and a new position called ‘Assistant for Mission and Culture’ was created. This could be beneficial for the University.
A few words about equity in our culture:
Equity
How did we end up with Hamas rallies on university campuses throughout America over the last month? Equity.
America began with the idea of equality, that all people should be treated equally so that regardless of where they started out, everyone had the same rights and their lives had the same value.
Proponents for ‘equity’ say that this was unfair because different people were starting out in different places. What they really needed was a level playing field by imposing ‘equity’.
Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity destroyed equality. Equity dismisses the idea that people would be treated equally. For them, the only way to achieve equality is through an indefinite period of inequality: raising up some people and pushing down others. Organizations, from the White House to Corporate America and liberal universities vowed to ”embed equity” into everything that they did. And it was all political.
The further away we get from equality, the more we find ourselves in the abyss of equity where the only morals are political, the only crimes are political and the only people that matter are politicians and the only enemies are conservatives or people on the other ‘side’.
The cruel god of the partisan (SDA or otherwise) is politics. People and biblical truth and the Adventist Message are routinely sacrificed to him, but he offers them nothing except a permanent sinecure for the priests wielding the knife.
Over the last six plus years, the moral DNA of Andrews University was rewritten so that everything from freedom of expression to the Adventist Message had to be measured in terms of identity politics and social justice. Even the most basic moral questions were weighed on the paradigm of oppressor and oppressed. Critical Race Theory meets John Nevins Andrews.
In the process they forgot that morality can only exist in a society that believes in equality. Equity is obsessed with outcomes—which is another way of saying that the ends always justify the means. And that’s immoral.
The right has problems too, but the left never lets go of bad ideas. It just rebrands them. Equity is just the same old program of promising to make everyone equal through a temporary totalitarian ‘evening out’ period. Under this umbrella, there is no room for individuality or freedom of conscience, and the only morality is political.
Equity (or DIE) is all about forcibly ‘evening out’ humanity while intersectionality connects all liberal causes. Equality is about giving everyone the same opportunity to make of life whatever their desire and ambition can combine to make of it. For Christian believers, the equality that matters most is the solid ground of divine forgiveness at the foot of the cross. It is here that the converted and repentant Nazi soldier stands equally forgiven beside the Jewish Christian survivor of the Holocaust.
Where the equality of the Everlasting Gospel sees us as individuals, equity reduces us to members of a group operating within a political context. This was the modus operandi at Andrews over the last six years. To the woke, our lives are sacred only to the extent that our death or cancelling serves a political purpose. Do black lives matter? Only when they’re taken by a police officer, not by the stray or intentional bullets of a gang member over a long weekend in Chicago.
Equity fixates on the past and the future, but has little interest in the present except as a meeting point of the two. It destroys the present to avenge a resentful past and makes impossible plans for the future. It dehumanizes people under the guise of humanizing them. It convinces them to support discrimination to end it, to adopt hate for the sake of love, and to walk in bitterness so they can be happy.
I’m pleased that Andrews has scrapped this position. Removing weeds from the garden gives the beautiful plant of the Everlasting Gospel a chance to flourish.
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“I have given them Your word; and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. I do not pray that You should take them out of the world, but that You should keep them from the evil one. They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. Sanctify them by Your truth. Your word is truth” (John 17:14-17).
