Pronouns Reveal Their Religion
Even just a few short years ago, you would not find professors announcing their pronouns in work email signatures. But now, it is more common than not to find an email from a professor ending with an assertion about pronouns. What happened? How did this become a fad among the radical elite?
It is a clarifying step due to philosophical ambiguity. Ambiguity is due to the reality that words can have multiple meanings. We look at context in a sentence, paragraph, or chapter to help us figure out which meaning to give to a potentially ambiguous word.
Philosophical ambiguity operates in a similar way, except we don’t look at the sentence we look at the philosophical assumptions. Take the word “God.” This word means different things in different religions. To say that everyone believes in “God” is misleading because of how many meanings the word can have.
This same philosophical ambiguity applies to “male” and “female.” In Christianity, general revelation and then chapters in the Bible like Genesis 1 define what is meant by “male” and “female.” But what if you reject Christianity? These same two words have different meanings in other religious-philosophical traditions.
The secular professors have looked for ways to distance themselves from Christian belief for some time. This occurs in teachings about origins, human development, human society, and morality, and it isn’t surprising it would be applied to gender. There is a good reason for this because of how personal gender is. The non-Christian sees that the use of “male” and “female” in our culture borrows from Christian ideas and rejects this by rethinking gender.
That part isn’t surprising at all. Nor is it surprising that theological issues like the nature of God aren’t at the forefront of the cultural debate. Sexuality is a personal and experiential subject that comes into people’s minds in a way that the knowledge of God does not. In the history of new religious movements in the United States, you will find that many times they involve not only a different concept of God and Christ than does orthodox Christianity, but they also try to change how humans approach sex and marriage. This can be by prohibiting sex, or by doing away with monogamy and with other variations. We are simply seeing the continuation of this practice in our day.
What is different now is the attempt to make everyone conform to this new movement in public education. Announcing your pronouns is a way of alerting others to your religious beliefs. And others are expected to do the same. So far at ASU, we have not had a mandate to include pronouns, but it is an expectation among the secular professors. It is a way of identifying who is part of the group and who is not “going along.”
In the past, the secular humanist approached the liberal arts with the appearance of neutrality. That appearance is gone. Christian beliefs about God creating man and woman for a purpose that includes marriage are now deconstructed as biased. But what is put in their place? And is it coherent? No. It is just another return to the will to power and rejection of God’s revelation.
Parents and students, you need to know what to expect from these professors. You can see from their sponsored events and class titles that equal time is not given to competing ideas. Pretended neutrality and toleration are gone.