The men’s basketball team at Oral Roberts University has made quite the splash after upsetting number two seed Ohio State and seven seed Florida in the first two rounds of the NCAA Tournament, also known as March Madness.
But the team’s success has also drawn attention to the university itself, which has received negative coverage from the media peanut gallery because it upholds Christian morality.
USA Today’s Hemal Jhaveri, for example, wrote a piece on Tuesday titled “Oral Roberts University isn’t the feel good March Madness story we need.” She comes right out and says that their evangelical Christianity is “wholly incompatible with […] values of diversity and inclusion.”
“Founded by televangelist Oral Roberts in 1963, the Christian school upholds the values and beliefs of its fundamentalist namesake, making it not just a relic of the past, but wholly incompatible with the NCAA’s own stated values of equality and inclusion,” Jhaveri says. “While the school has been soundly mocked on social media for its archaic standards of behavior and code of conduct that bans profanity, ‘social dancing,’ and shorts in classrooms, it is the school’s discriminatory and hateful anti-LGBTQ+ policy that fans should protest as the Golden Eagles advance in the tournament.”
Later on Jhaveri writes that the team should be banned from NCAA competition altogether because of their “anti-LGBTQ+ policies” and general “bigotry and exclusionary fundamentalism.” Not a joke: “The fact is, any and all anti-LGBTQ+ language in any school’s polices should ban them from NCAA competition.”
She concludes: “Often, athletic accomplishments and victories on the court make up for moral failings all the time. In this case though, whatever the Oral Roberts men’s basketball team manages to do on the court can’t obscure the dangerous and hateful ideology of its core institution. It’s always nice to root for the underdog, but in this case, there’s very little to actually cheer about.”
This is a disturbing piece, no doubt. It’s also instructive on how the left refuses to leave people alone. They’re ideological imperialists in that they want everyone to conform to their “diversity, equity, inclusion” code of morality, and they’re increasingly vocal about its incompatibility with authentic Christianity. Running away from the left is therefore not a viable, long-term solution. The culture war will only be won by confronting and defeating them.
