David French writes in the National Review that Christian students in American universities need to fight back:

Ever since the Battle of Indiana, Rod Dreher has been quoting anonymous e-mails and other conversations with conservatives in higher education. The message from each of them is roughly the same: It’s worse than you think, if our views were known, we’d have real trouble on campus, and the campus is closing to Christian thought — with even Christian campuses bowing to the PC gods.

I have two responses to this. First, anyone facing social exclusion or career adversity because of their Christian or (especially) Christian conservative beliefs has my sympathy. Imagine, for a moment, working your entire life towards a career goal and then realizing that all that work could be rendered meaningless if your colleagues understand that you believe the Bible, that you can recite every word of the Apostles’ Creed (and mean it). Imagine the financial insecurity and the stress on your family at the thought that the wrong word at the wrong time could cost you your hard-earned job. I’ve been a Christian in Ivy League higher ed — both as a student and a teacher — and I know what it’s like. It’s not easy.

Second, man up anyway. You’re part of the problem.

Except advocating Christian doctrine about sex, sexuality, gender relations, and a host of other issues is already banned in the codes of student conduct and speech codes in all significant universities — particularly those in the Ivy League.

It’s already an offense that can result in expulsion to be an honestly professing Christian, at least of the older strain. So what French is advocating is for Christian men to up and get themselves expelled.

I don’t really care what you do or don’t do on the American campus. What should be made clear is that these institutions belong to the left, entirely, that they’re not nonsectarian institutions, and that any conservative who goes there is going to be a hated minority at best, and become themselves subverted at worst.

People like French seem to be under the bizarre delusion that they have some sort of right to attend an institution run and managed by the political opponents of the people that he’s writing for. They don’t — and there’s a lot of precedence for conservatives rolling over for some of their most important beliefs being made impossible to express on campus. These institutions belong to the left. Leave them to the left. And deny them any resources you can, by any means, because they’re sectarian political institutions.

Man is a god-fearing and god-believing beast, and it is extraordinarily rare to find even a single individual, even among the most fire-breathing atheists, who prove themselves entirely immune to the pull of spiritual thinking.

If they aren’t debating the number of angels dancing upon a pin, they are debating how many turbolasers can fit on an Imperial Star Destroyer. If they are not debating about whether or not a given action will enrage Apollo, they are debating about whether or not a certain action will be good or bad for the economy of the nation.

Marxists in particular are often accused of harboring beliefs akin to the Millenarians (in that, after the Communist revolution, there will be no more class strife, and prosperity will satisfy all wants), this tendency is quite often shared even outside their circle.

Christopher Hitchens argued in “God is Not Great” that the literary tradition of the West could supplant the role of religion in providing moral guidance and social structure. Given that the literary tradition of the West has been increasingly suppressed under the rule of secular governments, this notion has few obvious contemporary champions, and seems to be rather muddled, given that the majority of the authors in the canon before the 20th century were devoutly religious.

The Hitchens position is one rather similar to that of the various societies for ethical culture, which are tied up in the history of the Fabian Society.

Instead of endless disquisitions on the Trinity, we have infinite disquisitions on the nature of magic in the Harry Potter universe and whether or not Jedi derive their powers from midichlorians or from some mysterious spiritual source. This is not really secular in the way that many secularists will want to portray it as.

Humans are given to abstraction, speculation, worship, and some measure of superstition. It’s not a question of how to eliminate that impulse, but how to channel it in an effective way.