The Patriot Post® · Conservative College Students Live In Fear

“If you voted for [Donald] Trump, you’d better be f—ing scared!”

Such was the greeting Kathryn, class of 2019, received as she entered the Student Commons area at St. Olaf College on November 9. “Everyone clapped and applauded,” Kathryn states. “Obviously, it didn’t feel super safe.”

Another conservative student, fearing for her personal safety after the election, decided to take a leave of absence and eventually transferred to a different university entirely. “[My professor] started every class basically just ridiculing Trump for about 20 minutes,” the student says.

Josh, a freshman, sums up the attitude that many conservative St. Olaf students have adopted: “I keep my head down.”

St. Olaf is a private liberal arts college affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) and located in the quaint town of Northfield, Minnesota. At an exorbitant $55,000 a year, St. Olaf touts a tolerant and inclusive mantra, stating on its website that they “value intellectual curiosity” and encourage students to “explore the deeper meanings of faith” through their curriculum. The ELCA is one of the largest Evangelical denominations in the country and eight years ago underwent a tremendous split as church elders ruled to allow homosexual men and women to serve as pastors. This enormous shift to the left caused many evangelicals to join more conservative synods such as the Missouri Synod and the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod, or the more moderate Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ, or North American Lutheran Church.

Yet St. Olaf makes the ELCA beam with pride; last month, the college invited former Communist Party USA candidate Angela Davis to deliver a lecture. “This country is responsible for so much misery in the world,” Davis stated, to which the entire hall rose in a standing ovation. Davis also mocked Trump, repeating, “Make America White Supremacist Again.” More applause. St. Olaf has also hosted other radical leftists, such as Al Sharpton and Dolores Huerta. St. Olaf’s only recent venture to the right was inviting Republican Newt Gingrich to a political action rally, which was heavily boycotted by the majority of the student body.

Recent poll results reveal that 80% of St. Olaf’s students voted for Hillary Clinton on November 8. The night after the election, students held a candlelight vigil for “The Death of America” and engaged in a collective “primal scream” to vent their frustration with the election results. Puppy-petting clinics, coloring books, free counseling sessions, and Play-Doh were made available to students for weeks afterwards.

Even though St. Olaf’s College Republicans chapter didn’t endorse Donald Trump and refused to staff phone banks for him in the general election, the Campus Republicans Club President, Emily S, reported a student threatened to beat her up and called her a “f—ing moron.” She also overheard many other statements of students threatening to physically attack the next Republican or conservative they encountered.

“The week around the election … I could not go to class. I didn’t feel safe, I actually went home for a while,” former student Katy I said. “People were saying [things] like, ‘F-you,’ and, ‘I wish you were dead,’” on social media.

It’s obvious that Democrats have hit a historic low. One might think this would cause them to re-examine their beliefs rather than bullying others into submission. Or not.

St. Olaf has joined the parade of most American liberal arts colleges as they beeline to the hard left. Even though the college is world-famous for its “Christmas Fest,” a Christmas-themed concert of religious music, the four-day choral festival is Olaf’s only openly Christian event, bringing in close to $1 million annually from ticket sales and tours. Daily chapel services are offered during the week, but students aren’t required to attend; services are often led by visiting speakers, and it’s common for pro-homosexual and blatantly anti-Christian agendas to be touted before the closing hymn.

St. Olaf strongly reinforces the ELCA in backpedaling from the Bible and cloaking their denominationally approved heresies and apostasies with a thin veneer of generic God-talk to keep the donors happy. As Olaf is well on its way to becoming a sanctuary campus, it will come as no surprise when the college finally drops the yoke of Christian identity entirely and fully embraces the radical intolerance of the Left.

Now more than ever, St. Olaf’s motto Fram Fram Kristmann Krossman (Forward, Forward, Men of Christ) sounds like a bait-and-switch.