Personally, I don’t think being rich automatically makes one good or bad, and the rich and well-connected certainly have their place in the pageant of salvation: it took a wealthy, connected man named Joseph of Arimathea to bring Christ Jesus down from the cross and get him enshrouded and entombed before sundown, on Good Friday. His help and participation have an assist to Easter, and all of its promise.

Newhart wasn’t discouraged from speaking before Legatus because they are wealthy, though. He was persuaded not to go there, because we Americans now live in a perpetual high school environment, and at the moment, the “cool kids” are telling everyone else in the cafeteria who it is okay to befriend and who is to be shunned for being, like, a social-zero. So. Uncool. What a year or two I called tolerance disconnect is now beginning to border on purposeful blacklisting. One either says the right things, at all times, and dares not debate a point, or hold to a contrasting religious belief, or even cite the inborn right one has to the freedom of one’s own conscience — of one’s own way of thinking — or one is to be shunned and bullied until one either submits or goes away.

Because if you’re not reflecting the views of the cool kids back to themselves, you must disappear.

I wrote about this a little in my book, Strange Gods, where I talk about how The Church of What’s Happening Now can have no truck with the Church of what came before.

Sadly, these high school tactics — unless the bullying cliques are called out and their power to cry “ew, cooties! Non-person alert at that table!” is negated — always devolve into something more nefarious, socially and spiritually ruinous, and out-of-alignment with a value so basic as allowing someone the freedom of their own minds.