By Steve Berman

I call this the “truth blindness” switch.

They claim that religions should have no exclusive claims to truth, but that their worldview contains all the exclusive claims to truth. Yet they deny there is such as thing as exclusive, objective truth (which, in itself, is an exclusive, objective truth).

I’ll cite two recent cases in point here, although there have been examples since well before C.S. Lewis published “The Abolition of Man.”

First, Sen. Bernie Sanders doubled down on his flat-out-wrong criticism of Trump’s nominee for deputy budget director, Russ Vought.

Vought had published a defense of his alma mater, Wheaton College, here at The Resurgent, in January 2016, which Sanders took to be prejudicial since it involved specific theological differences between Islam and Christianity. Of course, the questions Vought addressed were central to the actions Wheaton took in the first place—dismissing Dr. Larycia Hawkins because she claimed Islam and Christianity had compatible concepts of God.

Specifically, Vought correctly interpreted Scripture to reject Hawkins’ flawed interpretation.

This is the fundamental problem. Muslims do not simply have a deficient theology. They do not know God because they have rejected Jesus Christ his Son, and they stand condemned. In John 8:19, “Jesus answered, ‘You know neither me nor my Father. If you knew me, you would know my Father also.” In Luke 10:16, Jesus says, “The one who rejects me rejects him who sent me.” And in John 3:18, Jesus says, “Whoever believes in [the Son] is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.”

Sanders had an issue with that passage because it claimed Muslims “do not know God because they have rejected Jesus Christ his Son.” On CNN’s “State of the Union,” Sanders said that Vought’s belief in Christianity were a way to “essentially say ‘Islam is a second-class religion.’” He characterized it as feeding into Islamophobia.

Ignoring the fact that Sanders’ argument about the Constitution somehow protecting one group’s private religious beliefs from a private individual’s beliefs (who happens to work for the government) is spurious and wrong, he is also missing the enormous point that he just played God in determining which truth claims in religion are valid and which are not.

For Sen. Sanders’ benefit here, let me illuminate a real truth.

Religions are supposed to have exclusive claims to truth. They are supposed to be mutually exclusive in important ways. Therefore a professor at a Christian college who “shows solidarity” with Muslims by claiming their version of theological truth is equal to Christians’ truth, is disclaiming the central exclusive truth of Christianity, that Jesus Christ is the one and only path to God.

I believe this is exactly the argument Vought presented. But Sanders, being a liberal, is blind to the fact that he believes he has a greater exclusive truth than any religion. In the liberal mind, all religions are equal because they are equally false, while secular post-modern thought is true in all instances. Liberal exclusive truth is therefore to be accepted by all religions, which in their view are all “second class.”

Second, LGBT activists believe they have exclusive claims to “diversity” and “inclusion.”

The St. Louis Cardinals have made a laudable decision to host Christian Family Day this season, which they’ve done for decades. But LGBT activists have a problem with the speaker: former Cardinals player Lance Berkman, who they say is “divisive,” and “demeaning.”

Their problem is with Berkman’s past comments about Houston’s transgender bathroom access ordinance.

“The issue is, what to do about a 15 or 16-year-old boy who thinks he’s a girl and wants to shower with the girls. Maybe he is [transgender], maybe he’s confused. But I wouldn’t want him in the shower with my daughters. We shouldn’t have the rights of 2 percent of the population trump the rights of the other 98 percent,” Berkman said, according to the Houston Chronicle.

But these same activists have no problem with the Dodgers “kiss cam” on “Pride Night” blasting man-to-man mouth kissing on the jumbotron to everyone in the crowd (including Christians). Their solution to that would be to tell Christians to avoid going to the game if it’s uncomfortable (or more likely just saying Christians are hopelessly bigoted).

LGBT activism is really a religion anyway: the worship of self and pleasure wrapped up in sexual identity. But these same activists are calling for “diversity” and “inclusion.”

“Pride St. Louis is disappointed by the decision of the St. Louis Cardinals to provide a public platform for Berkman, an individual whose words and actions towards the LGBTQ+ are divisive and demeaning. We know that the Cardinals can do better, and we want to extend an offer to help them by co-organizing their official LGBT Pride Night at Busch Stadium. Let’s work together to promote love, diversity, and inclusion,” Pride St. Louis said in a statement, according to KTVI-TV.

Diversity doesn’t include Christians to LGBT activists, who believe their truth is greater than any other religion. Certainly they believe it’s greater than Islam, which holds homosexuality to be a crime punishable (and punished today, legally, by many Muslim countries) by death. Christians believe it to be a sin, leading to eternal condemnation—mainstream Christians do not punish homosexuals (certainly not throw them off buildings).

In fact, mainstream Christians of all denominations condemn the antics of groups like the heretic Westboro Baptist Church, which is not affiliated with any mainstream Baptist (or any other evangelical) group.

But the truth here is that LGBT activists are blind—willfully in many cases—to the fact that they present an exclusive truth that excludes Christianity, but couch it in “inclusive” language.

True diversity and inclusiveness recognizes that different religions and world views have an “either or” exclusive claim to truth, and that by one of them being right on certain key points, all the others must be wrong.

In Christianity’s case, that claim includes the fact that Jesus Christ is the one true way to God (John 14:6), and that only by obedience to Christ’s commandments, which condemn homosexuality among other sexual and moral sins, can anyone avoid the wrath of God (Romans 1:18-25).

Those claims are, in fact, and are supposed to be, mutually exclusive to the claims of Islam, that God has no son, and to the claims of LGBT activists, that homosexuality is an immutable characteristic that gives full license to engage in associated behaviors.

But liberals don’t get that. They are blind to the fact that their own truth claims are mutually exclusive. And they use that blindness as an excuse not to enter into real debate and discussion about the merits of their claims. All their attacks are ad hominem and therefore without intellectual merit: bigotry, divisiveness, and phobia.

It would be refreshing to see more liberals cease from their intellectual dishonesty and willful blindness.