As a modest contribution to the general welfare, I have once again taken on a task that state universities, despite their ever-expanding bureaucracies, seem unable to perform: helping parents and students decipher the course catalog before they accidentally enroll in an ideological boot camp.
This year’s expedition into Arizona State University’s listings produced a familiar discovery.
The challenge is recognizing ideological conformity when it hides beneath academic jargon and historical subject matter.
For fall 2026, ASU offers eight courses with witchcraft, magic, or the occult in the title — and exactly one with Christianity.
Think about that for a moment.
At one of the largest public universities in the country, students can choose from a small festival of courses on witchcraft, while Christianity receives a single titled course.
The predictable defense is already forming: These are history classes. They merely study witchcraft as history; they do not promote it.
If only the syllabus cooperated.
One ASU syllabus from this summer says the course will examine how the identity of the heretic and the witch was constructed against its binary opposite, the “orthodox” Christian. It then turns to “religious Othering,” especially “the female as Other,” and asks students to explain how centuries-old witch persecutions continue to shape their own lives.
A student scrolling through the catalog may think, “Witchcraft? That sounds like an interesting history class.” What the description does not announce plainly is that the course has already selected its moral and political framework before the first reading begins.
Allow me to translate the academic dialect into ordinary English.
The syllabus contains three ingredients that appear with remarkable regularity across what I call the oppression-studies curriculum.
First, orthodox Christianity is cast as the principal villain. The word “orthodox” is not merely descriptive. It identifies the force against which everyone else must be understood. Those troublesome Christians, always insisting that the Word of God is true.
Second, history is organized around a fixed binary of oppressors and oppressed. The key term is “Othering.” Outside the university, the word means little. Inside it, “Othering” functions as a philosophical skeleton key.
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Whatever the subject — witchcraft, colonialism, literature, economics, architecture, or even mathematics — the conclusion is expected to fit the same template: One group possesses power, another is marginalized, and scholarship consists of exposing the machinery of oppression.
Questions about whether Christianity is true, whether Christ is who Christians say He is, or whether salvation is real disappear from view. The course’s operating question is not “What is true?” but “Who has power?”
Third, the historical narrative must be applied directly to the present. Medieval Europe is not studied merely to understand medieval Europe. Students must show how the old oppression continues now.
History becomes raw material for a contemporary moral narrative in which Christians are still preventing women from having a little fun — even if that fun occasionally involves necromancy. Dead people need friends too.
Once you learn the pattern, whole sections of the catalog become easier to read.
The subject often matters less than the interpretive framework. Whether a course concerns witchcraft, fairy tales, Shakespeare, climate, coffeehouses, or design, the destination frequently remains the same. Society is assumed to be organized by systems of oppression, and every topic marches toward that conclusion.
That’s precisely why parents and students need help reading college catalogs.
Course descriptions are often written in a dialect that obscures more than it reveals. The average 18-year-old has no reason to know that terms such as “Othering,” “lived experience,” “deconstructing,” “intersectionality,” “hegemonic,” or “dialectic of oppression” may signal not simply a topic but an entire philosophical system.
Learning to recognize those signals is an exercise in intellectual discernment.
At the most elementary level, discernment means making distinctions. Ideas have presuppositions. Professors never merely present facts; every course is organized around assumptions about reality, morality, human nature, and truth.
For Christians, some distinctions remain basic. The Word of God? Yes. Communion with Satan? No. That binary is not about power. It is about truth and goodness, and it should not require four credit hours to sort out.
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Once students grasp that first level of discernment, they are prepared for the next: watching how quickly the narrative shifts when necessary.
One day, witchcraft is presented as a genuine spiritual tradition unjustly maligned by Christianity. The next, it is described as a social category invented by Christians to oppress women.
Those claims are difficult to reconcile, but reconciliation is beside the point. Both preserve the same moral architecture: Christians remain the oppressors, and everyone else becomes the oppressed.
The hardest courses to identify are not those that openly advertise ideology. Those are easy enough to avoid. The greater challenge is recognizing ideological conformity when it hides beneath academic jargon and historical subject matter.
The sooner students learn to decode that language, the sooner they can decide where to spend their tuition dollars and intellectual energy.
College is expensive enough without paying thousands of dollars to hear that orthodox Christianity is the principal menace of Western civilization — and discovering only after the drop deadline that you accidentally enrolled in Witchcraft 101.
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