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Welcome to the Eric Matexas show with your host Eric Matexas.

Hey there folks, you often hear me talk about how higher education in America is going to heck in a hand basket at the speed of light.

And by heck of course, I mean hell. So whenever there's any encouragement along those lines, perhaps I don't know, there's a college or university where that is not happening, I want to let you know.

And so some of you already know that I have an affiliation. I'm part of the standing for Freedom Center out of Liberty University.

And I get very excited when I talk to the folks who are there, particularly when I talk to my guest right now, his name is Ryan Helfenbine.

He's Executive Director of the Standing for Freedom Center, the Freedom Center. Ryan Helfenbine, welcome.

Hey Eric, it's good to be with you as always. And I really appreciate that introduction because in many ways as you look across this great nation of ours, you're seeing the fallout.

Across academia of this, what 20, 30, 40 year project of deconstruction, a long march through the institutions. It's coming everywhere.

Lots of Christian universities so called formerly Christian have gone the way of the dodo.

Well, I think, but even worse is that they, many of them still call themselves Christian. Look, we've seen this all before. Let's be honest, OK.

If you said in 1930, hey, I'm a Methodist. That might mean something. It probably did in 1930. But as the years pass, a lot of those churches just went wobbly and just became part of the culture.

And then really became the enemies of what they had formerly been. You see this in the Ivy League, Yale and Harvard and Princeton and all the Ivy League schools had been started as places meant to raise up Christian leaders.

As the decades passed, they, as the centuries passed, they went wobbly. But we're seeing it now with with Christian colleges. I'm not going to mention them, but I mean, I can, I can mention a few.

But the point is that parents who send their kids to most of these schools don't have any idea that when your kid gets to, I don't know what it is, Wheaton or Calvin or whatever, they may well be exposed, not just through other students,

but through faculty. Two ideas that you would be surprised and you would be thinking, well, gosh, I really thought I sent my kid there because I wanted to keep them away from these bad ideas.

So I'm not aware of details in, you know, with regard to the schools I just mentioned, but I talk to people. And it is shocking. So whenever I'm speaking to somebody from whether it's Hillsdale or Grove City or Liberty,

I don't want people to know. You're in that fight. It's an amazing thing that so few are fighting the way you all are, but it's just important for people to understand that there's a battle right now. They may not be aware of it.

Yeah, I fully agree. And what you're seeing right now, whether the older generation has fully recognized it. I mean, we saw pockets of it in the Commonwealth of Virginia up in Loudon County.

We saw pockets of it across the country when parents were at the school board meetings, raising cane about CRT. We're seeing deconstruction everywhere, right. And it takes eternal vigilance to ensure that a mission of a university of a seminary of a denomination is upheld that the confessional identity mentioned the United Methodist church.

I remember William F. Buckley's book, God's Man at Yale, written back in the 1950s. This struggle has been around for quite some time.

Well, some of these schools, I want to be clear. That's a great point. Buckley wrote that book in 19, it came out in 50 or 51. So he's writing about the Yale of the late 40s.

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