"Both Christians and religious Jews are finding it increasingly difficult to practice their faiths through college groups on so-called mainline campuses in the United States"
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“Mainline campuses” is doing the heavy lifting here: a phrase that pretends to be descriptive while smuggling in an accusation. Weyrich frames the modern American university not as a messy marketplace of ideas, but as a gatekept cultural regime where “so-called” tolerance quietly curdles into exclusion. The sentence is engineered to turn a familiar liberal ideal - pluralism - into its alleged opposite. By pairing “Christians and religious Jews,” he widens the coalition beyond one embattled group and implies the bias is civilizational, not merely sectarian. It’s a politics of alignment: if you feel pushed to the margins, you’re invited to see yourself in the same story.
The intent isn’t only to describe hardship; it’s to certify grievance as evidence. “Increasingly difficult” is vague by design. It doesn’t need a case file, because it’s meant to resonate with a preexisting sense that elite institutions have become hostile to traditional religion, especially when religion makes moral claims about sex, family, or authority. “Practice their faiths through college groups” narrows the battlefield to institutional recognition, funding, and leadership rules - the bureaucratic chokepoints where culture wars get translated into policy memos.
Context matters: Weyrich, as a conservative strategist and critic, spoke in an era when campus battles over speech codes, nondiscrimination policies, and student-group access were becoming proxy fights over national identity. The subtext is clear: if the academy is lost, the “mainline” of America is lost too - and that loss justifies political counter-mobilization outside the university’s walls.
The intent isn’t only to describe hardship; it’s to certify grievance as evidence. “Increasingly difficult” is vague by design. It doesn’t need a case file, because it’s meant to resonate with a preexisting sense that elite institutions have become hostile to traditional religion, especially when religion makes moral claims about sex, family, or authority. “Practice their faiths through college groups” narrows the battlefield to institutional recognition, funding, and leadership rules - the bureaucratic chokepoints where culture wars get translated into policy memos.
Context matters: Weyrich, as a conservative strategist and critic, spoke in an era when campus battles over speech codes, nondiscrimination policies, and student-group access were becoming proxy fights over national identity. The subtext is clear: if the academy is lost, the “mainline” of America is lost too - and that loss justifies political counter-mobilization outside the university’s walls.
Quote Details
| Topic | Faith |
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