Why Bari Weiss’ resignation from the New York Times matters to evangelicals and to American culture

Bari Weiss resigned from the New York Times this week. Why is this news so relevant to you that you should read this Daily Article about her?

Let’s begin with her unusual story. She is not your stereotypical conservative: She has dated an actress and a female reporter and was married to a man for four years. She attended a synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, while growing up in that city, then spent a year in Israel after high school. 

Vanity Fair described her as a “Trump-loathing theater nerd” and a “liberal humanist whose guiding principle is free expression in art, love, and discourse.” Following President Trump’s election in 2016, she was hired by the Times for the purpose, she says, of “bringing in voices that would not otherwise appear in your pages: first-time writers, centrists, conservatives, and others who would not naturally think of the Times as their home.” 

However, over the last three years, she says she has been “the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and a racist . . . [and] publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action. They never are.” 

Her experience could be discussed as an example of “cancel culture,” a topic we discussed yesterday. For today, however, I want to focus on another statement in her resignation letter. At the Times, she discovered that a “new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.” 

This…