LOS ANGELES (ChurchMilitant.com) – A woke professor at a prominent Jesuit university is under fire after threatening to target student grades if students fail to include their gender pronouns in assignments.
Shige Sakurai
Dr. Christopher Miller, professor of Jainism and Yoga studies at Loyola Marymount University (LMU), told students in an email that “all are required to include their pronouns next to their name in their blog posts.”
“I will count this toward your grade when I check for your name each time I grade the blogs,” Miller warned in September while issuing instructions for the new academic year. “Our own LMU provost links this article in his own signature after he identifies his pronouns.”
In his email, Miller posts a link to an article titled “What Are Personal Pronouns and Why Do They Matter?” from the website Mypronouns.org created by “Shige Sakurai (they/them).”
Sakurai is a biological male who boasts of being the first American to acquire a nonbinary driver’s license.
“Actively choosing to ignore the pronouns someone has stated that they go by could imply the oppressive notion that intersex, transgender, nonbinary and gender-nonconforming people do not or should not exist,” Sakurai writes in the article recommended by Miller.
Miller changed his own name to Christopher “Jain” Miller after he converted to Jainism. (Jainism is one of the three major religions of India, born as a rebellion against Hinduism around the sixth century B.C. It retains central Hindu beliefs like karma and reincarnation.)
Miller described his conversion in a now-deleted tweet:
I have been reborn and my Jain identity has emerged. I am Dr. Christopher Jain Miller. I have always wanted to be a Jain, and (perhaps not by coincidence) on Easter Sunday, 2021, I officially became Jain with the blessings of JAINA (Federation of Associations of North America).
“This was not a conversion to a new identity, but rather an emergence of what is already there,” Miller explained, citing a Jain authority who said that “from the Jain perspective, everyone is a Jain whether they realize it or not.”
Miller began promoting Jainism at LMU after the Jesuit university accepted an endowment of $800,000 from Jain apologists Dr. Nitin Shah, Dr. Sulek Jain, Drs. Meera and Jasvant Modi, Mr. Harsha and Mrs. Raksha Shah.
Following his new religion’s strict teachings, Miller became a vegan and stopped killing ants and spiders that invaded his home. His family gave up furniture and started sleeping on mattresses on the floor.
Although technically atheistic, Jainism includes gods, goddesses and protective deities who are often the focus of independent Jain cults. Men admitted to the monastic Digambara (Sanskrit: “Sky-clad,” i.e., naked) sect shun all property and wear no clothes.
The LMU Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts, founded and run by the Society of Jesus, appointed Miller to be the first Bhagwan Mallinath professor in Jain studies. Teaching Jainism serves to fulfill “the university’s Jesuit mission at large,” LMU said.
Donors Renuka and Vinod Shah at Jain Center, Southern California
“We must reimagine salvation by emphasizing its social dimension, thereby challenging the exclusive and narrowly individual understanding,” Prof. Nancy Pineda-Madrid, holder of the T. Marie Chilton Chair in Catholic Theology at the Jesuit university, maintained.
Speaking to Church Militant, a Jesuit professor attempted to trace the “devolution” of Jesuit educational institutions of higher learning in the United States.
“The fall of Jesuit universities has been well-documented in the book The Dying of the Light: The Disengagement of Colleges and Universities From Their Christian Churches, lamented the priest, who asked not to be named.
He elaborated:
The study focuses on two Jesuit universities and their decisions to compete with Ivy League schools and accept huge amounts of money from the government (with strings attached). That hubris has been exposed in the cold light of reality. However, the desire to maintain large universities (instead of small colleges we were very good at running before the late ’50s) and accept government funding is still with us.
Church Militant has learned that the Jain endowment to LMU is part of a strategy by wealthy American Jains to promote Jainism in the United States by portraying it as the most peaceful religion in the world, owing to its rigorous adherence to the doctrine of non-violence (ahimsa).
In June, Jain donors gave the University of Illinois’ religion department a sum of $1 million — the largest gift in the department’s history — to teach Jainism. Earlier, research scientist Mohini Jain donated $1.5 million to the University of California, Davis to promote Jainism.
Jain sponsors have also poured millions into the coffers of 27 other universities in America to promote their religion — while rejecting accusations of proselytism and cultural appropriation (most lecturers/professors of Jainism and their students are White American or European).
A university source told Church Militant that LMU had already adopted a “shockingly woke policy on gender pronouns.” As part of its “Chosen Name Project,” LMU permits students to add “preferred gender and pronoun identities” to their personal information page.
Judge Thapar
“Some examples of people who are most likely to benefit from this opportunity include transgender and gender-nonconforming members of the college,” LMU advises. “The terms ‘it’ or ‘he-she’ are slurs used against transgender and gender-nonconforming individuals and should not be used.”
“Sexual orientations and gender identities that aren’t heterosexual or cisgender are often described by the acronym LGBTQ2S+. LGBTQ2S+ is an acronym that stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer or Questioning and Two-Spirit,” the university notes.
LMU had a total endowment valued at nearly $476 million at the end of the 2019 fiscal year.
In March, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit ruled that universities cannot compel professors to respect student pronoun preferences, as such speech is protected under the First Amendment.
“Public universities do not have a license to act as classroom thought police,” wrote Judge Amul Thapar, a graduate of the Jesuit-run Boston College and the first federal judge of Indian descent.
LMU’s Bellarmine College is named after Jesuit saint Fr. Robert Bellarmine whose most influential lectures were published under the title “Lectures Concerning the Controversies of the Christian Faith Against the Heretics of This Time.” The lectures are an uncompromising statement of Catholic doctrine.
Church Militant contacted Dr. Miller for comment but received no reply as of press time.
On Monday, Church Militant reported on Jesuit universities indoctrinating children and students with teaching material in the field of neo-Marxist critical race theory.
