A person in Louisville connected to the Whitefield Academy e-mails with more details about what has happened to the school and its personnel since the gay kid with the long list of disciplinary issues was dismissed the other day (I wrote about it here):

The Head of School, [name], has received death threats against his home, his person, his family, and of course his place of work, as has the High School principal [name]. The school itself has received, via social media and the mail, threats of harm, danger, murder, mayhem, attack, and destruction. There was a threat for teachers to watch themselves in the parking lot getting into their cars, that they would be targets. One teacher was actually attacked unsuccessfully (perhaps the only real intention of the perp was to scare her) by a close call from a car feigning a sideswipe while she was getting in. Highview Church has been threatened as well.

I’m keeping this reader’s name out of it, though he gave me permission to use this material. He’s not on staff at the school, but he is in a position to know what he’s talking about. He doesn’t need to draw this kind of hatred onto himself.

Can you imagine being a teacher at a Christian school, and seeing a car barreling down on you, swerving at the last minute, just to scare you, because of hatred? That’s happening at Whitefield. All from the #LoveWins crowd. Christians who stand against them, no matter how peaceably, have to be prepared for this. Don’t fear, but be ready, and prepared to act. This is not a game. You can be quite sure that the mainstream media, which first publicized the half-truth of why this kid was dismissed from the school, will not come back to report on all the death threats and threats of violence being made against the school. It doesn’t fit the Narrative.

Let’s go back to this 2015 piece about “Professor Kingsfield,” the pseudonym of an elite law professor, whose name is known to me, commenting on the future for traditional Christians after the Memories Pizza horror. You’ll recall that Memories Pizza was the small-town Indiana pizza parlor mobbed by haters after its owners told a TV reporter that they would not cater a gay wedding. My piece appeared about a month before the Obergefell ruling. I identified Kingsfield as a closeted Christian in an elite law school. From that 2015 piece:

Kingsfield said we are going to have to watch closely the way the law breaks regarding gender identity and transgenderism. If the courts accept the theory that gender is a social construct — and there is a long line of legal theory and jurisprudence that says that it is — then the field of antidiscrimination law is bound to be expanded to cover, for example, people with penises who consider themselves women. The law, in other words, will compel citizens to live as if this were true — and religious liberty will, in general, be no fallback. This may well happen.

What about the big issue that is on the minds of many Christians who pay attention to this fight: the tax-exempt status of churches and religious organizations? Will they be Bob Jones’d over gay rights?

Kingsfield said that this is too deeply embedded in American thought and law to be at serious risk right now, but gay rights proponents will probably push to tie the tax exemption on charities with how closely integrated they are within churches. The closer schools and charities are tied to churches, especially in their hiring, the greater protection they will enjoy.

The accreditation issue is going to be a much stickier wicket. Accreditation is tied to things like the acceptance of financial aid, and the ability to get into graduate schools.

“There was a professor at Penn last year who wrote an article in the Chronicle of Higher Educationcalling for the end of accrediting religious colleges and universities,” Kingsfield said. “It was a Richard Dawkins kind of thing, just crazy. The fact that someone taking a position this hostile felt very comfortable putting this in the Chronicle tells me that there’s a non-trivial number of professors willing to believe this.”

Gordon College has faced pressure from a regional accrediting authority over its adherence to traditional Christian sexual morals re: gay rights.

“Accreditation is critical to being admitted to law schools and medical schools,” Kingsfield said. “College accreditation will matter for some purposes of sports, federal aid, and for the ability to be admitted by top graduate schools. Ghettoization for Christians could be the result.”

“In California right now, judges can’t belong to the Boy Scouts now. Who knows if in the future, lawyers won’t be able to belong to churches that are considered hate groups?” he said. “It’s certainly true that a lot of law firms will not now hire people who worked on cases defending those on the traditional marriage side. It’s going to close some professional doors. I certainly wouldn’t write about this stuff in my work, not if I wanted to have a chance at tenure. There’s a question among Christian law professors right now: do you write about these issues and risk tenure? This really does distort your scholarship. Christianity could make a distinct contribution to legal discussions, but it’s simply too risky to say what you really think.”

The emerging climate on campus of microaggressions, trigger warnings, and the construal of discourse as a form of violence is driving Christian professors further into the closet, the professor said.

“If I said something that was construed as attacking a gay student, I could have my life made miserable with a year or two of litigation — and if I didn’t have tenure, there could be a chance that my career would be ruined,” he said. “Even if you have tenure, a few people who make allegations of someone being hateful can make a tenured professor’s life miserable.”

“What happened to Brendan Eich” — the tech giant who was driven out of Mozilla for having made a small donation years earlier to the Prop 8 campaign — “is going to start happening to a lot of people, and Christians had better be ready for it. The question I keep thinking about is, why would we want to do that to people? But that’s where we are now.”

I pointed out that the mob hysteria that descended on Memories Pizza, the mom & pop pizza shop in small-town Indiana that had to close its doors (temporarily, one hopes) after its owners answered a reporter’s question truthfully, is highly instructive to the rest of us.

“You’re right,” he said. “Memories Pizza teaches us all a lesson. What is the line between prudently closing our mouths and closeting ourselves, and compromising our faith? Christians have to start thinking about that seriously.”

“We have to fall back to defensive lines and figure out where those lines are. It’s not going to be persecution like the older Romans, or even communist Russia,” he added. “But what’s coming is going cause a lot of people to fall away from the faith, and we are going to have to be careful about how we define and clarify what Christianity is.”

“If I were a priest or pastor, I don’t know what I would advise people about what to say and what not to say in public about their faith,” Kingsfield said.

More:

On the political side, Kingsfield said it’s important to “surrender political hope” — that is, that things can be solved through political power. Republicans can be counted on to block the worst of what the Democrats attempt – which is a pretty weak thing to rely on, but it’s not nothing. “But a lot of things can be done by administrative order,” he said. “I’m really worried about that.”

And on the cultural front? Cultural pressure is going to radically reduce orthodox Christian numbers in the years go come. The meaning of what it means to be a faithful Christian is going to come under intense fire, Kingsfield said, not only from outside the churches, but from within. There will be serious stigma attached to standing up for orthodox teaching on homosexuality.

“And if the bishops are like these Indiana bishops, where does that leave us?” he said [Note: Indiana’s Catholic bishops declined to stand up for the state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act law — RD]. “We have a problem in the current generation, but what I really worry about is what it means to transmit the faith to the next generation.”

“A lot of us will be able to ‘pass’ if we keep our mouths shut, but it’s going to be hard to tell who believes what,” Kingsfield said. “In [my area], there’s a kind of secret handshake that traditional Christians use to identify ourselves to each other when we meet. Forming those subterranean, catacomb church networks is not easy, but it’s terribly vital right now.”

Read the whole thing. This was five years ago. Longtime readers will recall that right after Memories Pizza, I received a call from a man who said that his elderly mother, who had spent six years of her youth in a communist prison as a Catholic prisoner of conscience, told him that what happened to Memories Pizza is the kind of thing that happened when communism took over her country. Specifically, mob action against individuals the state deemed to be class enemies. That was what made me start asking immigrants to the US from former communist countries if they were starting to see things happening here that reminded them of what they had left behind.

Yes, I heard, over and over. And now, I will have a book coming out in September, filled with advice from Christians who endured communism, telling us today what to watch out for, and how to deal with it.

I am going to dedicate the book to the memory of Father Tomislav Kolakovic. I bring him up a lot here, but I really can’t talk about him enough. He was a real prophet. When he arrived in the Slovak region of Czechoslovakia in 1943, escaping the Gestapo in his native Croatia, Father Kolakovic began to organize cells of young Slovak Catholics. He foretold that communism was eventually going to be imposed on the nation, and that would mean persecution for the Church. He knew that the state would clamp down hard on the clergy, and that if the life of the church was to continue, it would depend greatly on an educated, well-formed, courageous laity. The cells he formed, and the networks, came together to pray, to study the Bible, to hear lectures, and to learn the art of resistance (e.g., he taught them how to handle an interrogation).

Five years after the priest began forming these cells, Czechoslovakia became a communist dictatorship. The Church was put in a vise grip. But thanks to the work that Father Kolakovic and his disciples had done, the Slovak Catholics were ready.

I don’t believe that we will face that kind of persecution. But there is an incredible amount of hate in this country, and it is being stoked by activists on the Left, and a sympathetic media. Who can say for sure what is coming next, or how soon it will arrive? I was a bit startled to re-read the Kingsfield quote about the importance of forming “those subterranean, catacomb networks.” Yes. When Father Kolakovic began his work, lots of priests and even bishops at the time looked upon him as an alarmist. But it all came down on them hard and fast.

UPDATE: Reader Michael Martin, beginning by quoting me:

I don’t believe that we will face that kind of persecution.

Rod, Every time you record the ever-escalating violence against traditionalist Christians in the U.S., you keep repeating this mantra. Are you just trying to avoid “scaring the horses” here?

Let me tell you what is happening now. When I was in university, and for many years afterwards, I obsessively studied the Nazi and Communist periods, to try to understand how a country like Germany, which produced Schiller, Beethoven, Goethe and Brahms, could descend into such madness.

One of the things I did was to watch as many Nazi propaganda films as I possibly could, to figure out how Goebbels, Streicher, et al., managed to condition the German people to first accept, then participate in, atrocities against Jews, Gypsies, Poles, and other Slavic peoples. They did it via a series of films demonizing Jews in particular. The most notorious of these films was Jud Süß (Suess the Jew), which had a radicalizing effect upon young Germans in particular. Thus by the time war broke out, the German people were desensitized and conditioned to wage a war of extermination.

As for the current sequence of events, the following passage (by a German philologist) from Milton Mayer’s They Thought They Were Free expresses the escalating series of events quite well:

You see, .. one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, ‘everyone’ is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there would be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’

And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.

We are watching a rerun of the “old movies” of the 20th Century. I am firmly convinced that, once the loony Left gets into power, that Nazi and Communist levels of persecution and extermination will take place. Don’t believe me? Then read this: “I’ll Straight Up Get Armed”: Second Bernie Organizer Loves Gulags

These people mean what they say and they will ultimately do what they say.

Well, I say that because I genuinely don’t believe that it will get that bad — I could be wrong! — but also because I don’t want to feed into people’s sense that if it’s not as bad as it was under communism, then it’s nothing to worry about. It can get plenty bad without being like the Soviet Union and its satellites.