From John Witherspoon to Peter Singer: The Method and Madness Behind Survivors Safe Space Invaders

One of the things that attracted me to Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust is that Survivors has always been more about doing pro-life than just talking pro-life.  If we are to succeed in abolishing abortion in America, then we must win the Culture Wars.  If we win hearts and minds to Truth, then the laws will follow.  Survivors puts the evidence of the abortion holocaust on display, right in the thick of pro-death darkness and deception. So when Survivors’ founders (and pro-life hall-of-famers!) Jeff White and Cheryl Conrad recruited me to run their outreach after hearing me at the American Renewal Project, it didn’t take much convincing for me to jump onboard (CBN’s Brody File Interviews Joe Salant).  As a cultural/pro-life apologist who follows Os Guinness, Francis Schaeffer, Greg Koukl, and Scott Klusendorf, I want to make practicing apologetics in the public square a priority.

Secular humanists long ago understood the importance of winning control of academia.  While American Christendom suffered a period of intellectual decline and political apathy during the first three quarters of the previous century, the secular left swooped in, filled the vacuum, and took control over universities -- the same universities that were originally founded as battlegrounds for the best ideas to make early American society advance the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Princeton University’s sixth president was an erudite clergyman named John Witherspoon, who travelled through the colonies on recruiting trips right before the Revolutionary War.  Witherspoon preached the Gospel and argued persuasively for the harmony of faith and reason as well as the necessity of virtue and religion to good politics.  One of those recruited students was none other than the Father of the Constitution, James Madison himself, drawn to Princeton by Witherspoon on such a trip to Virginia. Witherspoon’s leadership had such an impact Princeton became known as “the seedbed of the Revolution.”  Six months after he signed the Declaration of Independence, the college became the site of one of the most important victories of the Revolutionary War, as General Washington caught the British off guard at the Battle of Princeton.

Today, Princeton University’s faculty scoffs at the worldview of John Witherspoon. It’s current Professor of Bioethics, Peter Singer, holds the view that 200 pigs collectively outweigh the value of one human being.

Recent advancements in the field of Christian apologetics (defense of the Christian faith), combined with aggressive activism in the pro-life movement and re-engagement of Evangelical Christians in the political sphere has put the secular humanist monopoly of American academia in severe jeopardy.  Biblical ethics with the moral imperatives thought central to the survival of freedom in the American Republic by founders such as John Witherspoon, are making a comeback in the battle for the soul of the culture.  In addition, modern technology has made the task of the pro-lifer - demonstrating the humanity of the unborn - virtually a walk in the park.

As a result, the American left is retreating intellectually, poisoning the scholastic well with slogans, ad-hominum (personal) attacks and the other usual debase elements of cultural Marxism.  To protect their glass house of faulty philosophy and the historical revisionism needed for their effort to deconstruct and fundamentally transform America into a humanist utopia, secular leftists in academia have taken to creating a victim mentality in intellectually conquered students and sheltering them from ideas of faith and virtue central to the founding of the American Republic in ‘safe spaces’.  A ‘safe space’ is a place in an institution of higher learning where students and faculty can be protected from ideas deemed politically incorrect by the secular thought police.  Generally, the entire institution is now officially a ‘safe space’, save for a small ‘free speech zone’ designated for the vocalization of thought crime.  It’s something straight out of George Orwell’s famed dystopian novel 1984.  Students are taught they possess the inalienable, state-ordained right to receive ‘trigger warnings‘ (official caution some concept may be emotionally disturbing - allowing them to vacate the sound spectrum before their feelings get hurt). Lists of microaggressions (unintentional thought crimes, loosely associated with involuntary bigotry) have actually been constructed and distributed to students on prestigious universities such as Stanford.

If the secular left cannot win by arithmetic, it always turns to authority. It is totalitarian in mindset. This is easily witnessed in recent world history.

Survivors has firsthand experience invading college and university safe spaces with the truth of the abortion holocaust, dating back several years, when two female Survivors pro-life activists, sisters Thrin and Joan Short were assaulted by a porn professor (you read that correctly!) named Mireille Miller-Young at the University of California Santa Barbara. The incident made its rounds through the news cycle (the liberal media buried it, of course).  The Short sisters were displaying images of abortion victims in a designated free speech zone, when Miller-Young (her dissertation is titled, “A Taste for Brown Sugar: The History of Black Women in American Pornography), according to the (must-read-hilarious!) police report, “felt triggered” got physical with the Survivors activists and, as the Daily Caller has it, “Filched the sign and waddled away.”

This incident highlights, as well as numerous others in recent memory, the vulnerability of the hold that secularism has on American academia.  The very concept of a university (grounded in the concept of “unity in diversity” - may the best idea win) is utterly made a mockery by the current guardians of academia’s ‘safe spaces’, ‘trigger warnings’, and ‘microaggressions’.  How far has American academia fallen from from John Witherspoon to Mireille Miller-Young? Far enough to disgust and provoke the American people to select a game show host over a seasoned politician associated with the views of the liberal intelligentsia for highest public service post in the Republic!  

Just like the Revolutionary War turned at the Battle of Princeton, the tide has turned in the American Culture Wars.  Adherents of a biblical worldview were prematurely declared irrelevant by the snobs of higher education.

The side of Joseph Fletcher’s and Peter Singer’s situational ethics and lily-livered illiberal authoritarianism has suffered a devastating hit and Survivors are, once again, on the front lines to finish the job  We are rolling out our Safe Space Invaders effort, which uses the direct evidence of the American abortion genocide and pro-life/cultural apologetics to confront student bodies and faculty across the once-respectable higher education spectrum of our great nation with the Truth that American progressivism is an illogical and (literally) murderous ideology worthy of immediate, eternal defeat.

I will be joined by several well-equipped and winsome pro-life apologists (such as Living Oaks Community Church (Newbury Park, Ca) Pastor Jon Noyes and University of California at San Marcos Students for Life President Nathan Apodaca) and other pro-life ministries willing to roll out in this fantastic task of defending the lives of the most innocent in our society (who are being slaughtered brutally at a rate of one every thirty seconds) in the pink kitten’s den of Mireille Miller-Young’s unAmerican ‘safe spaces’.  In doing so, we hope to be a vital cog in the rational machine that runs over American secular leftism for good and ends the abortion holocaust!

The Survivors Safe Space Invaders program launches immediately, with scheduled dates on SoCal ‘safe spaces’ for the end of fall quarter already posted, and will resume with the commencement of winter classes in 2017.  We will be posting weekly blogs with video clips of our interactions with students and faculty.

Here’s how you can join me in the effort:

Prayer - Ultimately this is a spiritual battle, with unseen forces working behind the scenes for and against the victory of Truth in American higher education.  I covet your prayers for the Safe Space Invasion!

Join Me - I would love for you to put your boots on the ground with me. Check the schedule and email joe@survivors.la. No experience necessary!

Refer Me - Please spread this message far and wide on social media and if you happen to know a professor that will let me address their class and contend, that would be epic.

Support Me - Survivors Safe Space Invaders need Truth and Life lovers to give in support. All donations tax deductible.

See you on the field (or in the ‘safe spaces’)!

For God, Country, and the Preborn,

Joe Salant

Outreach Director

Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust.