Religious Leaders Shouldn’t Be ‘Inclusive’ –
“Inclusion” is a big element of our culture today.
For example, we are looking for a new rabbi at my synagogue, and there have been several focus groups querying congregants about what they are most looking for in a new religious leader, so I attended one. The trait overwhelmingly mentioned as the most attractive was whether or not he or she was “inclusive.” It beat out what one might expect in normal America to be listed as the most important qualities: virtuousness, honesty, merit, God-fearing, Bible-centered, knowledge and scholarship about Judaism, charitableness, leadership skills, competence, empathy, humility, and kindness. Why has this occurred? And why care?
The Growth of ‘Inclusivity’ in America
Why this has occurred is complex. We are certainly no longer in normal America, a situation that has been a couple of centuries in the making as traditional American, Western, and Judeo-Christian values have come under assault. Read Mark Levin’s best-seller American Marxism, Carl Truman’s profound Strange New World, Dennis Prager’s excellent Still the Best Hope, or watch some of the fine lectures on the Internet by people like Victor Davis Hanson, Ben Shapiro, James Lindsay, Chris Rufo, Heather MacDonald, Robert George, and Jordan Peterson to understand the long and complex history and philosophy behind this assault.
Why we should care is pretty obvious. Why shouldn’t one care about the core values of America? It would be devastating and destructive on a biblical scale if those values are replaced by Marxist ideology, an ideology that has shown its evil and human destructiveness in every place and in every time it has become the dominant value system in a society.
Some may argue the emphasis on “inclusion” in a new religious leader merely means people are looking for a man or woman who embraces and welcomes a variety of minor theological and practice differences among congregants — all under the overarching umbrella of recognizable and traditional Judaism and American culture. Maybe. Perhaps, the argument would be that it is a call for a new leader to welcome a discussion about what constitutes tsneis (modesty) in clothing or how much charity should be given each year. That is true. That may be what “inclusion” means to some.
However, I would argue that is not what it means. Never before in our American or religious history have words like “inclusion,” “diversity,” and “equity” come to the forefront as they have today. Never before have they been so distorted and twisted compared to their Jewish and American meaning. They have been put there by people with a strong and passionate belief that traditional American, Jewish, and Christian values must be removed from our culture — values to be replaced by those of Marxism.
Just listen slowly and carefully to the new purveyors of this ideology, people like Barack Obama and Joe Biden, our media elites, our college professors, and public school teachers, who have regularly, and with great pride, told us they are here to transform America. Everyone should understand what this means: American culture is to be destroyed, and in its place is to be something radical and new. It goes by many names, “liberal,” “progressive,” “woke,” “critical race theory,” “critical gender theory,” and the like, but what it all comes down to is Marxism and its variants. It is an Americanized form of a poisonous ideology.
‘Inclusivity’ Means Undermining Traditional Values
So, without impugning any particular definition of “inclusion” to individual fellow congregants at my synagogue, here is what it typically means as one travels from one Marxist-infected institution to another.
“Inclusion” means embracing the core Marxist notion that all human relationships are to be assessed in terms of power, race, sex, sexual proclivity, or ethnicity. For example, our little white kids are now told they are part of a powerful and, therefore, oppressive class, while our little dark-colored children are told they are the powerless victims of such oppression. “Inclusion” means destroying the traditional American and Judeo-Christian notions that say every person is made in the image of God and that human relationships are to be fundamentally measured by the character and behavior of a person.
“Inclusion” means celebrating sexual nihilism and irrationality. For example, it means, as just occurred, welcoming a four-year-old boy dressed as a girl into the nominally Jewish pre-K class of my granddaughter. It means my rabbi just had a “Jewish” ceremony for the utter fantasy of a “nonbinary” human. “Inclusion” means excluding the core moral and scientific truth about male/female reality and their distinction.
“Inclusion” means what the recent Marxist prime minister and now Harvard professor said: “If you don’t hear it from the government, it’s not true.” “Inclusion” means excluding basic American and Judeo-Christian ideas and the moral concept of free speech.
“Inclusion” means utter rejection of our Second Amendment. “Inclusion” means excluding the truth that a man can only be free if he recognizes a God-given or natural right to own and carry a powerful gun.
“Inclusion” means politicians forcing most children to enter our government’s public schools in order to become advocates of Marxist ideology. “Inclusion” means excluding parents who reject this regressive radical anti-American and anti-Judeo-Christian ideology in our schools.
“Inclusion” means embracing the Marxist lie of gender affirmation, where physically healthy and mentally disturbed young people regularly undergo barbaric chemical and surgical mutilations of their bodies. “Inclusion” means excluding the Jewish and American truth that such young people must be protected from gender negation, physical and emotional abuse, evil people, and ideologies.
“Inclusion” means accepting the Marxist falsehood that marriage is defined by whomever you love and may include a person of the same sex, a group of people, and soon a brother or sister or father or daughter. “Inclusion” means excluding the Jewish, Christian, and American truth that marriage is defined by the union of one unrelated adult man and one woman.
“Inclusion” means embracing the Marxist notion of big government. “Inclusion” means rejecting the Jewish and American idea that the individual and his liberty are at the center of our culture and a small, limited government is there primarily to protect such freedom.
“Inclusion” means holding the Marxist idea that an unborn boy or girl is not a living human being and that child may be killed at will. “Inclusion” means excluding the Jewish and American notion that an unborn child is a precious living person.
“Inclusion” means embracing identity politics where merit no longer undergirds achievement and reward, while approved skin color, sex, sexual proclivities, and ethnicity elicit rewards. “Inclusion” means excluding the three-thousand-year-old Jewish and two-hundred-year-old American notion of reward based on merit — a notion that has allowed for extraordinary human flourishing in the West and America.
“Inclusion” means welcoming the Marxist contention that America is a benighted country full of racism, sexism, homophobia, capitalist greed, and Islamophobia. It includes the ideas that America was founded on slavery, that its founders were terrible men, and that our Constitution is a white supremacist document. “Inclusion” means excluding the American and Jewish truth that these are grand lies and that this country is the greatest experiment in human freedom and goodness.
“Inclusion” means embracing the Marxist goal of crushing Western civilization by overthrowing the material engine that runs it — fossil fuels. “Inclusion” means excluding the truth that science is in its infancy in understanding climate and the moral truth we should each be profoundly grateful for fossil fuels and all they have done and continue to do for human flourishing.
“Inclusion” means the Marxist notion of destroying the West by destroying national borders and the meaning of citizenship. “Inclusion” means excluding the centuries-old moral notion of citizenship and national sovereignty.
Hence, I personally have no interest in any new rabbi, pastor, or priest holding “inclusive” views. Judaism, Christianity, and its allied American values are what I and millions of other Americans care about. “Inclusive” clergy, with their core of Marxism and thin veneer of Judaism or Christianity, are part of the destruction of the liberal and good America we are seeing today.
Howard Sachs is a husband, father, grandfather, physician, serious Jew, and very patriotic American who is doing what little he can to stop this Marxist destruction of America.
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