Engaging with Mormons (Corey Miller) Part 3

Viewpoint on Mormonism, the program that examines the teachings of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from a biblical perspective. Viewpoint on Mormonism is sponsored by Mormonism Research Ministry. Since 1979, Mormonism Research Ministry has been dedicated to equipping the body of Christ with answers regarding the Christian faith in a manner that expresses gentleness and respect. And now, your host for today's Viewpoint on Mormonism. Welcome to this edition of Viewpoint on Mormonism. I'm your host, Bill McKeever, founder and director of Mormonism Research Ministry, and with me today is Eric Johnson, my colleague at MRM, but we also have as our guest Dr. Corey Miller. He's a good friend of ours.

He's been on this show in times past. Corey grew up in Utah as a seventh-generation Mormon before coming to Christ as a teenager. He is currently the CEO of Rocio Christi.

That's RocioChristi.org if you want to check out their website. Rocio Christi is a campus apologetics ministry. We want to talk about a book that Corey has written titled, Engaging with Mormons, Understanding Their World, Sharing Good News. But we've kind of gotten sidetracked a little bit because what Corey is involved in with Rocio Christi, I feel is very important for us as Christians to know and understand because our faith, the Christian faith, is certainly under attack in our culture. How do we respond to this? Can we respond to this? What should we look out for?

Is it wise sending our kids to secular universities totally unprepared for what they may face there as far as attacks on their Christian faith? Now, Corey, welcome back to the show. Yesterday you were talking about what Rocio Christi does as a ministry on our college campuses. I want you to continue explaining to our listeners what you are doing, and also there's an important court case that is coming up this month. Maybe you could talk about that as well.

Sure. So we're on about 125 university campuses from Rutgers to UCLA, and we're trying to equip students there with historical philosophical and scientific reasons for following Jesus. We also have a high school division, Rocio Christi College Prep, that we worked in tandem with the churches, and a professor division, RC Prof. You can't really take back the universities or make an influence there if you're not going after the most influential post. And then an international scope as well. Up in Canada, we have an MA apologetics program launched from the Philippines. We're in South Africa, a study center in the UK and other places. We're facing off with a lot of legal proceedings.

We don't have the Constitution outside of the country like we do here, but here we've been in about 30 cases of that with two federal victories, and we've got one coming up at Supreme Court. And that regard proclaiming the gospel on campuses, free speech, free association, and speech zones. I never thought during my lifetime the freedom of speech would be under such attack as it is right now. I remember commenting to my guys, I've got a bunch of youth group guys that I meet with weekly, and I told them, I said, you know, I knew you would probably face something like this, but I never thought in my lifetime that I would see what is happening, and it is happening so quickly. Would you agree that this is probably something that snuck up on a lot of Christians?

Well, let me ask you this. Do you think the church is prepared for this? I don't, and I think we're sending our children to Molech, not even to be able to survive, much less thrive in the university. It's a tragedy that we lost the universities originally, but now we're facing it even in the church and not sure what to do with ourselves. Now, Corey, you wrote an article for the Christian Research Journal titled How We Lost the Universities and How to Reclaim the Voice of Christ. We want to talk about that article that you wrote.

Give us a little bit of an overview of what that article entails and why you wrote it. Yeah, I wanted people to see that, you know, there is this idea that there is faith and then there is fact, or there is faith and there is reason. Look, the Christian religion is a knowledge tradition. Knowledge is central, not peripheral. We were the ones who founded the universities in Europe and in America.

Up through 1840, all university presidents were also members of the clergy, and up till 1890, church and chapel attendance were still required at every university in the country. And between 1880 and 1930, there's a story that can be told, and I wrote the article on it, on how we lost the universities and how we can but must reclaim them if we are going to have a substantial impact going forward in America and beyond. Corey, you wrote this in the introduction. I think it's an interesting paragraph.

This is what you said. Losing the American universities to post-Christian secularism is one of the greatest tragedies of world history. Why does it matter? It matters because the university is the most influential institution of Western civilization. From it come our journalists, artists, doctors, lawyers, businessmen, political leaders, K through 12 educators, and future professors. As goes the university, so goes the culture. Indeed, as goes the US university, so goes the world.

Ideas have consequences. Corey, what do you mean when you talk about post-Christian secularism, and why is this view so dangerous to a Christian worldview? Yeah, here I mean to oppose or contrast secularism, not with sectarianism, like a denomination, but with a non-Christian, non-religious, sometimes very hostile to religion viewpoint. It's parasitical in that we started the universities, and it took over and kicked us out essentially. Christianity provided the basis for our belief in God to the sanctity of human life, to freedom found enshrined in the first amendment and so forth.

Following the building of the Western civilization on the back of Christianity, having begun all the major and great universities, and even building the governmental system that we enjoy, and hospitals, and an economic system, and nations. We've been sidelined and benched, and secularists have found a brilliant way to get Christian parents to pay for the apostasy of their own children, the universities. Corey, you give a statistic that Harvard's faculty in 1990 was about 40%, far left or liberal. Would you say in the last 30 years that that shifted to the left even further?

Sure. Probably 96%, according to recent data, of Ivy League faculty, including Harvard, give campaign contributions to one political party. In the New England area where Harvard is at, and I was just there about a month ago, I've been to most of the colonial schools, the ratio of left to right professors is 27 to 1. So imagine if you have 100 professors, you might have three conservatives, and maybe one will speak up and then get beheaded after, as an example. I can't even imagine that small percentage speaking up in light of our cancel culture today. I mean, if you were to even voice your opinion, you're not even allowed to have a dissenting opinion in our culture today, which is frightening. Right. And that's the foreign invasive idea that we're facing right now, between the left-right divide of the past, the classical liberal tradition, which is an intramural debate between small L liberals and conservatives.

We've now got this cancel culture coming in. In the past, we believed Voltaire's statement. I may disagree with what you say, but I would defend it to death your right to say it, liberals and conservatives alike. Now you've got Stalin's statement that ideas are more powerful than weapons.

We don't allow our enemies to have weapons, so why should we let them have ideas? And so not only do we have this political orthodoxy, there's no viewpoint diversity on campuses, but you've got a political orthodoxy at such a level that it creates not just an echo chamber, but there become blasphemy laws and you dare not violate one of these blasphemy doctrines in the university if you want to keep your post. That is frightening, but you're absolutely correct. It certainly does seem to be elevated to the position of a religion, and you're right. If you speak against what the religion says, you are committing blasphemy.

I've seen this in a lot of the reactions to dissenting voices. They treat you like you're a blasphemer. How difficult is it, Corey, for a person who's a Christian to get tenure in one of these university settings? Well, first you have to get through and navigate a successful PhD.

Second, you have to get a job, and on the job market today, more and more, at least in philosophy, you need to put not just expertise in logic and ethics, but gender studies or something like that, which means you have to have written on it and studied it. And then you get a job, then you've got to finally get tenure, and then you are up for full professor. So there is a long haul, and many people are taken out along the way. I look at it like storming the beaches of Normandy.

It needs to happen, but there are going to be significant casualties along the way, and that's what's happening. You make an interesting observation. You recommend that Christian professors and full professorships, they should do something before they retire. What do you think they should do? In contrast to assistant professors and PhD students who may be with us for the next 30 years, you've got full professors and administrators, which lean even farther left. But for those Christians who are still there at the top, just before retiring, they need to think about rehiring. They need to be thinking about building a legacy. They need to think about what they're doing not as a job, but a vocation, not as an occupation, but as a calling, and think about the future generations that they inherited.

What can they pass on? Corey, you're a philosophy adjunct professor at a public college. What is it like to be a Christian professor in a secular field like yours? I have taught nine different courses over 12 years at Indiana University, and whether it's in religious studies, logic, philosophy, New Testament, I always feel like I'm forced to use course textbooks that are atheist or agnostic or certainly aren't Christian and absolutely not evangelical. And I've been called on the carpet when I even got remotely close to doing that. And it's because there is a political orthodoxy and there are assumptions being made.

And so you have to be very tactical, not just technically knowledgeable in your field, but you have to be tactical if you want to stay in the game and not get sidelined. Now, there's going to be a parent listening right now, and you're scaring the heck out of them because they're going to send their kid to a college that possibly could change their mind. What advice are you going to give to that parent and the child who's thinking about going to a secular university? Yeah, listen, the ratio of left to right, it's 12 to one for those 65 and older getting ready to retire.

It's 23 to one for 40 and under, 27 to one, as I said, in New England. But the parent thinking, oh, gee, we need to send Johnny then to take at least a religious studies class. He's going to the secular university. No, in that department, it's 70 to one.

Crazy. And so people might think, well, we should send him off to a Christian college. Well, phase two is starting to happen there. And I recruited 20 Christian colleges or seminaries per year. And I can tell you, it's easier to count the number that aren't being infected than those that are. At least you know what you're going to get when you go to Harvard. You have no clue when you go to somewhere like Fuller Seminary. So what parents and pastors need to be doing is training their kids, the next generation, not only to survive, but to thrive. This is a post-Christian America and the secularists dominate the universities. You have no idea what you're up against. We're not dealing with culture as if it's, you know, in Acts chapter two in the synagogues.

We're on Mars Hill and we've been there for at least a generation. So if you're going to do evangelism, you need to do apologetics evangelism. Your kids need to be prepared to defend what's coming even in the Christian universities.

So it should be a prerequisite now. Youth pastors need to jump on that. Parents need to, and pastors need to. We've been talking to Dr. Corey Miller. He is a former Mormon who is now involved in a Christian apologetics ministry called Rocio Christi. And he's the author of the book Engaging with Mormons. And folks, we are going to talk about the book, but I do feel that there's a lot of other good information that we can glean from Corey's experience working in the secular universities that is very important for all of us as Christians.

If you have children or even grandchildren that are contemplating going to a secular university. So tomorrow we're going to continue this conversation with our good friend Corey Miller. We'll see you next time.