University of Chicago: Why Milo Scares Students, and Faculty Even More

An article published by the University of Chicago’s Divinity School, entitled “Why Milo Scares Students, and Faculty Even More,” explains exactly why Breitbart Senior Editor MILO causes panic on college campuses across the country.

Rachel Fulton Brown, an Associate Professor of Medieval History at the University of Chicago, writes about why MILO is feared on college campuses in the article published by the University of Chicago:

The issues that Milo talks about are usually considered political, but in fact have to do with people’s deepest convictions: the proper relations between women and men, the definition of community, the role of beauty, access to truth. Milo professes himself a Catholic and wears a pair of gold crosses around his neck. He speaks about the importance of Christianity for the values of Western civilization. As he put it in one interview: “[Western civilization] has created a religion in which love and self-sacrifice and giving are the highest possible virtues… That’s a good thing… But when you remove discipline and sacrifice from religion you get a cult.”

None of these issues, most especially the civilizational roots of culture and virtue in religious faith, are typically addressed in modern college education in America. Rather, they are, for the most part, purposefully avoided. Judging from my own experience of over 30 years in the academy, it is considered a terrible breach of etiquette, horribly rude even, to mention your religious faith if you are a Christian, never mind suggest that it in any way affects your work as a scholar. This relic of the self-censoring of the late 19th century is now so deeply embedded in American academic culture that most people are not even conscious of it. The real problem, however, is that while discussion of Christian theology may no longer be at the center of university education, religion still is—we just don’t call it that anymore.

Not to address these issues openly does not allow students to keep an open mind. Their minds are already open—and being filled with what they are given in place of religion: multiculturalism; race, class, gender; the purportedly secular ideals of socialism and Marxism. Particularly for those students, and faculty, who have little to no religious education outside of school, these ideals have become their faith. This is why students and faculty find Milo so threatening. He not only challenges them to examine beliefs they have never been taught to question. Thanks to his near charismatic appeal as a speaker, at least for those who attend his talks rather than stand outside protesting, he holds out the possibility of conversion, of changing hearts and minds.

You can read the piece in its entirety here.

Professor Rachel Fulton Brown previously wrote “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to MILO,” for Breitbart News.