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Nashville was on the short list (with Milwaukee the alternative) to host the 2024 GOP convention, but our Democrat-besotted city council would have none of it and so turned its back on a financial windfall. A local PR firm dumped country music star Jason Aldean, whom they’d served for seventeen years, when his wife, Brittany posted, on Instagram, “I’d really like to thank my parents for not changing my gender when I went through my tomboy phase.” And thanks to Daily Wire columnist Matt Walsh, Vanderbilt University Medical Center was exposed for pushing child mutilation under the rubric “gender-affirming care,” and the backlash forced a pause in the practice. (Yes, VUMC has been a separate nonprofit since 2016, but at separation, the CEO assured us that it would “remain seamlessly connected to Vanderbilt University in fundamental ways.”)
What’s going on? Is Nashville turning into Portland? Well, some powerful forces are conspiring to push us that way. The “Athens of the South” (with a full-scale replica of the Parthenon to underscore that notion) is home to a raft of colleges, many of them with Christian roots. Such schools typically step onto a conveyor belt toward theological and social compromise not long after their founding. Some walk determinedly against the flow, but most ride along quite happily, even running ahead.
Vanderbilt is a case in point. In my 1970s grad school days in philosophy, we witnessed a convictional free-for-all, with the nasty San Francisco Mime Troupe performance one night and a film mocking Jane Fonda and her fellow NVA enthusiasts shown on another. Boston University president (and Howard Zinn nemesis) John Silber made a speaking visit, but so did Noam Chomsky, who valorized the VC. Conflicting narratives and insults flew freely, and we got a good dialogical workout. But a school that, at its 19th-century inception, was a university (unified around regard for Methodist tenets), and in my day a multiversity (with departments and faculty members doing their own chaotic, ideological thing), is now a monoversity (with cancel-wielding wokeness reigning supreme). This became clear a decade ago when Christian groups denying leadership to homosexuals were stripped of their campus status, the conservative Carol Swain was pushed off the law school faculty, and a black lesbian became dean of the divinity school (thus accomplishing an intersectional trifecta).
Not surprisingly, the public schools have jumped on the CRT bandwagon, and generations of children are becoming virtue-signaling racialists. And though Nashville is swelling with refugees from the blue madhouses of the coasts and upper Midwest, the influx includes a fair number of adepts who migrate to the benefits of this destination city, while grimly determined to replicate the culture which poisoned their points of origin. And they are met eagerly by fifth columnists embarrassed by the Grand Ole Opry and longing for fraternity with our social betters. In the meantime, they find comfort in our libraries, whose “banned books” displays “courageously” coax gentle readers to pick up Atwood and Kendi and a selection of gay normalizers, with nary a peep over Amazon’s refusal to sell Ryan Anderson’s When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment. (Of course, “banned” rarely means “banned,” but rather “somewhere/sometime denied public-funded purchase and commendation while the book was freely available to individuals and private institutions”; but “banned” has more frisson and helps librarians feel like heroes at the ramparts.) Meanwhile, PR/HR-driven institutions and corporations of every stamp are falling all over themselves to get on board with DEI agendas, as are churches that stake their fortunes on cultural winsomeness and that tweak or jettison the clear counsel of Scripture to serve their emotional druthers.
Big forces at work, but let me mention a “little friend” inflicting weekly razor cuts, the Nashville Scene, a free, “alternative media” tabloid you find on racks throughout the city, including the alcoves of our public libraries. Its roots extend, manifestly, to Village Voice Media. To be sure, it carries useful information on our city’s doings — the offerings and schedules of our restaurants, entertainment venues, sports teams, and even religious institutions (with, for instance, the Jewish High Holy Day schedule).
The ads are a mixture of the conventional (realtors, LASIK surgeons, attorneys) and the prurient, thanks to suggestive photos from the “adult” establishments.
