The Faith Harvard Forgot

The Real Reason to Question Her Right to Educate the Future of America

Even with ostensibly Christian influences still present on campus, few dare to actually preach the Gospel. Source: The Memorial Church of Harvard University

It is hardly surprising that the current administration, given its recent record of aggressive intervention, has begun threatening Harvard’s accreditation. In fact, the only surprising part about the July 9th press release from the Department of Education (DOE) is that it took so long to arrive at what has plainly been its intention all along. President Trump has made no secret of his belief that Harvard has abandoned her duties as an institution of higher learning in favor of political activism and liberal indoctrination. No one with even the most passing familiarity with Harvard should find this announcement surprising.

What is surprising, however, is the selective moral outrage over the supposed mistreatment of Harvard’s Jewish students, while ignoring the other groups harmed by her practices. I speak here principally of how she has treated Christians—the very community she was founded to serve and educate. It has been a long time since Veritas Christo et Ecclesiæ, Harvard’s original motto, was invoked with anything approaching sincerity. In April 2024, The Harvard Salient reported on a conference at her Divinity School (an organization that, to borrow from Voltaire, is neither Harvard, nor divine, nor even truly a school). There, a drag troupe notorious for its tasteless parody of nuns and Christian religious life performed for any students who wished to attend. This ought to shock the conscience. If it does not, I would encourage readers to imagine the same troupe mocking Rabbis or Imams instead. Even in this isolated example, we see clearly how Christianity is treated both by the University and by the wider society: it remains acceptable—indeed fashionable—to insult, mock, and profane Christianity, Christians, and Christ Himself, so long as the various other sacred cows remain untouched.¹ Were Harvard’s Christians to treat the beliefs of Muhammadans, Jews, Hindus, or anyone else with the same irreverence, nay contempt, with which their faith is treated, they would be escorted off campus in manacles.

This is merely the latest in a long series of events the University has permitted that denigrate Christianity. Just over a decade ago, Harvard was the planned host of a “black mass,” a blasphemous burlesque of the true Mass performed by The Satanic Temple (with participation from Harvard Extension School affiliates). Then-President Faust did issue a statement objecting to the event, but allowed it to proceed. To be sure, it ended up being something of a farce: after the Extension School Cultural Studies Club withdrew sponsorship for lack of a suitable venue (Harvard having originally been fine with using the Queen’s Head Pub), it was finally staged in a room on the second floor of the Hong Kong restaurant in Harvard Square, apparently unbeknownst to the owner. But this absurd ending shouldn’t obscure the core truth: Harvard administrators had no principled objection to hosting such a vile event on campus. Are we truly expected to believe that a similar parody of the practices held sacred by any other creed would have been permitted? Imagine a club sponsoring a “Draw Muhammad” contest. Since faithful Muslims consider the creation of images of living things, especially of Muhammad himself, to be sacrilegious, this would certainly provoke outcry from their community and would likely be barred by the University as hate speech or religious discrimination. Christianity alone seems exempt from these protections.

Consider also Harvard’s museums. Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology maintains a large collection of artifacts of American Indian origin, and, over the last few years, has been working with tribes to repatriate many of those items to the Peoples from whom they were taken. To be clear, I think this is a good thing. To keep things that are held sacred, against the wishes of those who hold them as such, is a violation of some of the most basic principles of good stewardship. Yet the Harvard Art Museums hold within them a large number of Christian works, to include holy icons, monstrances, and sacred vessels. These objects were made by people to be used in religious services, were taken from the people who used them for this, and are now displayed as things that are valuable only as objets d’art made of precious materials. Should the museums not offer the same consideration for these that they offer for American Indian pipes? Similarly, the University maintains and displays reliquaries, holding relics of Christian saints. These are items that the Church has prohibited the sale of from the 1st century, as an example of the sin of simony, or sale of holy things. Harvard has an obligation to return these articles to the Church, as they were, necessarily, stolen.

This contumely is not limited to relics. The Harvard Art Museums also exhibits Ai Weiwei’s 2011 installation 258 Fake, featuring television screens cycling through images. Many images seem innocuous, but a striking number depict the artist flipping off Christian churches. These images display, in no uncertain terms, the message fuck your church. This is as anti-Christian a sentiment as one could imagine, and it is the type of blatant hostility to Christ and His Church that Harvard would never dare tolerate toward other faiths. I saw this work of “art” twice a week, every week, last semester, displayed prominently in a hallway used by hundreds of students to reach a GenEd course. It is said that “the medium is the message,”² but so necessarily is what is displayed. By displaying it, Harvard tacitly endorses its message. To those that think this is an unfair critique, would anyone call it neutral if Harvard displayed images showing obscene gestures toward Black Lives Matter protesters or gay pride flags?

Harvard Sex Week,³ an annual event put on by the student organization Sexual Education by Harvard College Students, utilizes Harvard classrooms to encourage disordered and unnatural sex among the student body. That this, and the preponderance of curricula that normalizes behaviors that would have been until very recently seen as the height of deviance (homosexuality, sodomy, adultery, transvestitism, transsexuality, etc), are allowed to exist only serves to further highlight the argument that Harvard has nothing but animosity (or at the very least, flippant disregard) for the Christian cultural mores that created this country. Harvard itself also offers extensive “care” encouraging so-called queer identities, a practice that is not only an affront to Nature and Nature’s God but even more gravely harmful to the students drawn into it. The University provides “gender-affirming” hormone therapy, consultation and referral services for sex-reassignment surgeries, and a network of “LGBTQ+-affirming therapists.” The student health insurance plan covers hormone therapy, chest reconstruction, breast augmentation, genital mutilation surgery, and even gamete (sperm and oocyte) cryopreservation for those who have fallen prey to this ideology. Far from safeguarding student well-being, Harvard’s institutional embrace of radical gender theory facilitates profound and often irreversible harm, all under the guise of compassion.

Harvard University Health Services also makes readily available to students a range of so-called “reproductive health” options that betray any pretense of moral seriousness. This includes distributing potentially abortifacient drugs like Plan B, offering free or low-cost contraception and prophylactics, and even providing guidance on obtaining an abortion through its website. The student health insurance plan explicitly covers both medical and surgical abortions, ensuring that students may end the lives of their unborn children “at no cost.” This institutional support for the deliberate destruction of human life further reveals Harvard’s complete aversion to the Christian moral principles that once formed the cornerstone of Western civilization.

Harvard might argue that these programs and services do not make the University anti-Christian, but rather reflect an effort to support student well-being or maintain institutional neutrality. But neutrality in matters of truth and morality is a fiction. A university either embraces natural law or it rejects it. If it embraces it, it may—even by accident—find itself aligned with a higher moral order and, by extension, with God’s will. If it rejects it, as she plainly has, then it cannot help but function in opposition to the Christian vision of the human person. In doing so, she not only alienates faithful Christian students, but ultimately harms all students—though most will not realize it until the damage is done.

The fact is, Harvard offers an extensive, well-funded, and institutionally supported infrastructure for its Jewish students. The University hosts no less than four dedicated Jewish chaplains, a thriving Hillel with denominational prayer services, kosher dining through Harvard University Dining Services, and student leadership via the Harvard Hillel undergraduate board. Chabad at Harvard provides additional pastoral care, learning, and hospitality. Graduate schools boast their own Jewish student associations, while Jewish academic life is enriched by the Center for Jewish Studies and regular course offerings in Hebrew, Jewish history and Scripture, etc. Jewish holidays are marked with communal celebrations, and the University ensures formal religious accommodations including rescheduling exams for High Holidays. Put simply, Harvard has woven support for Jewish religious and cultural life directly into the fabric of the institution.

By contrast, traditional Christian students encounter an environment that not only fails to offer comparable support but often actively demeans their faith. There is no university-funded equivalent of Hillel for Christians, no dedicated campus ministry building owned and staffed by Harvard itself, no institutional dining provision for Christian fasting or feasting traditions, and it can, at times, feel like the course search was designed to mock Christianity. While Harvard carefully avoids offense to other religions and provides resources to support them, it extends few such sensitivities to Christians—instead treating Christianity not as a faith to be respected, but as an ideology to be criticized, ridiculed, and suppressed.

Yet the government has never objected to Harvard’s maltreatment of Christians. By contrast, student protests against real human rights abuses committed by a foreign nation—abuses funded in part by U.S. taxpayers—are immediately conflated by the DOE with bigotry against the Jewish religion itself. The DOE deliberately blurs the line between reasonable criticism of Israel’s actions and imagined hostility toward Jewish religious identity. Under this inconsistency, the label of “anti-Semite” is no longer reserved for true hatred, but weaponized against anyone who questions the policies of the Jewish state. Anti-Zionism is not, and never will be, anti-Semitism. It seems the Trump administration believes that protecting the perceived right of foreigners to avoid criticism outweighs the actual rights of American citizens to free speech and freedom of conscience.

If Harvard insists on rejecting essential truths about the human person and scorning the faith that once shaped her, then Christian students, faculty, and alumni must respond. Many already have by withdrawing their participation, tuition, and donations, but this seems the wrong approach. A cursory glance at the hagiology of any given day shows a number of confessors, martyrs, and virgins who suffered diverse tortures and ultimately died for their faith in Christ. To suffer in the anti-Christian climate of Harvard seems a far easier way to pick up a cross than to be thrown to beasts on the Colosseum sands or burned alive as a Roman candle.⁴

Stripping Harvard’s accreditation might well be justified—but not for the reasons the government thinks. Christian students who see those reasons must recognize that neutrality is impossible, and that the first step to saving Harvard is to demand an admission of her betrayal. Only in acknowledging her failure can she begin the process of reform. Christian students at Harvard should, in these moments of trial, turn to the book of Proverbs, and recall that “the just, bold as a lion, shall be without dread.”⁵ Stay. Bear witness. Speak the Truth clearly in the face of hostility. Do not surrender the University to those who would see her destroyed. It is in these confrontations that Christians at Harvard can begin to reclaim the courage and clarity that Veritas Christo et Ecclesiæ demands.

Editor’s Note: For the sake of clarification, institutions like Harvard Hillel, while utilizing Harvard resources and infrastructure, might not receive direct funding from the University.

1. Read: any religion other than traditional Christianity

2. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man by Marshall McLuhan, Ch. 1

3. Which our more Left-wing readers should likewise object to, as one of the many perversions that are common within late-stage Capitalism

4. A Roman candle, in this sense, is a fiery spectacle associated with Nero's persecution of Christians in Rome. Suetonius and Tacitus describe how Christians were covered in flammable materials and set ablaze to illuminate his gardens during public events.

5. Proverbs 28:1 DRA