Kerby Anderson

Last month, Nicholas Kristof stirred the political waters when he wrote an op-ed with the title, A Confession of Liberal Intolerance. The response to his piece led to a second one with the title The Liberal Blind Spot. He began his first piece by acknowledging that: “We progressives believe in diversity, and want women, blacks, Latinos, gays, and Muslims at the table — so long as they aren’t conservatives.” He concludes that liberals are fine with people who don’t look like them as long as they think like them. He quotes from Professor George Yancey, who is a sociologist who is also a black evangelical. Yancey, who has been on my radio program, says that he faced some problems as a black outside of academia but faced many more problems inside academia because he was a Christian. Nicholas Kristof seems appalled at the response to his first op-ed, hence the reason for his second commentary. Liberals have written that: “Much of the conservative worldview consists of ideas that are known empirically to be false.” Another asks facetiously: “How about we make faculties more diverse by hiring idiots.” Although he gives good examples of outstanding people in various fields that are evangelicals, his liberal friends will have none of it. That is why he is calling on his readers to begin to tackle their liberal blind spot. He cites a survey that shows that a majority of academics in some fields would discriminate against a job seeker that was an evangelical. He says that feels like bigotry. Part of the problem may be that liberals are isolated and don’t know any evangelicals. He reminds us of surveys that show that Americans have negative views of Muslims when they don’t know any. He says that he suspects that “many liberals disdain evangelicals in part because they don’t have any evangelical friends.” I applaud Nicholas Kristof for his observations. Sadly, I doubt it will have much of an impact on the millions of closed-minded liberals.