Turns out, though, that at least one UI celebration has been banned — and I’m not talking about the kind where drunken students go on a rampage. (Though for the record, that sort of thing is discouraged too.)

So what’s a secular liberal to do with the fact that the social movements he reveres were entirely driven by Christians — by professional preachers, in fact?

The forbidden celebration was originally scheduled for halftime during a late February game. Since that was Black History Month, the university had booked some black singers. But at the last minute, university officials pulled the plug on the performance, once they learned that the singers planned to use — well, the wrong sort of language.

No, not the F-word or even the S-word, but the G-word. As in “God.”

The singers were called SoulEssence, an a cappella group of UI students. Turned out that their songs included one called “Thank You, Lord,” whose title alone was enough to land it on the no-play list. And then there was “Lift Every Voice” — a.k.a. the Negro National Anthem — which included such lyrics as these:

God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who has brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who has by Thy might
Led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee;
Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee;
Shadowed beneath Thy hand,
May we forever stand.
True to our God,
True to our native land.

Once officials learned of those horrifying lyrics they promptly cancelled the songs, lest someone, somewhere in the audience be offended. “We want [the halftime show] to be as entertaining as possible to as many people as possible without being controversial,” an official explained.

All this raises certain questions. Like “Just what did the university think it was getting when it signed up a group named SoulEssence anyway?” (“We are a minority group that sings songs about God and our culture,” said one member, Amanda Burrell. “Perhaps someone should have inquired into our repertoire.”) Or “C’mon, would a basketball audience really have found being exposed to such a show so awfully, intolerably ‘controversial?’ ” (UI players have often said publicly that their team prays together before games, and one player — Roger Powell — is a licensed minister popularly and affectionately nicknamed “The Rev.” No one’s been heard to complain.)

But I don’t think those are the really interesting questions. I’ve got a few others, beginning with: Just how do you go about observing an event called Black History Month while ignoring the Christian faith?

Christianity has been central to black Americans’ experience for centuries. It’s played a huge role in sustaining them through centuries of slavery, and through decades of discrimination thereafter. For all that time, the church was the central institution of the black community. The evidence is everywhere, and nowhere more than in the music. Wonderfully moving songs like “Lift Every Voice” aren’t aberrations, they’re typical. When Miss Burrell speaks in one breath of “songs about God and our culture,” she’s simply recognizing that “God” and “our culture” are historically inseparable.

No one really tries to deny Christianity’s driving role in black history. Yet, as I say, some people do try to ignore it. (That’s doubtless why UI officials were so antsy about it; not that they personally objected, but they were afraid someone else would.) Which brings me to the big question: Why would anyone want to ignore it?

The answer, I think, has to do with liberalism, and its conflicting attitudes toward race and religion.

On the one hand, liberals (most of them white) think of themselves as black Americans’ best friends. Whether or not they actually spend much time with black people, they at least feel strongly sympathetic and supportive: They focus on the offenses blacks have suffered (as they do with other groups they see as oppressed and downtrodden, though some groups don’t have as strong a claim to that status). They celebrate the antislavery and civil-rights movements as the most heroic struggle for social justice in American history.

But liberals’ feelings toward Christians are ambivalent at best, wary or hostile at worst. Many of them say they only oppose the “religious right” (which is “intolerant” and “judgmental”) and profess to admire “true Christianity” (which is “inclusive” and “caring”). But any authentic Christianity creates huge stumbling blocks for them. Scripture itself is full of “intolerant,” “judgmental” stuff that’s too clear to dismiss as a distortion by the “religious right.” It stubbornly insists that there is only one true faith and one way to God, namely Jesus Christ; that the sole source of truth is God, not society or personal choice; that morality is firmly set and doesn’t change with the times, no matter what’s popular. That’s Christianity 101.

So what’s a secular liberal to do with the fact that the social movements he reveres were entirely driven by Christians — by professional preachers, in fact? You can see his problem. If he lauds his heroes’ Bible-based conviction that God created men equal, he’s stuck with a God who also says lots of things he hates to hear, including things that affect his sex life. Worse yet, this God insists that His Word is indivisible and non-negotiable; there’s no room for picking and choosing the most desirable parts, while insisting that others can be rejected on the grounds of some “right to choose” rooted in an individual’s preferences.

This leaves the liberal only one alternative: He can embrace a selected group of social values the Christians proclaimed, while trying not to notice their Source — and hoping other people don’t notice either.

He can trumpet civil rights and racial equality and human dignity as “values” in a man-made morality that’ll be considered reliable not because it’s founded in God’s Word, but because it just feels right to nice people. He can work himself into a passion for these causes, trying to convince himself that he’s a “good person” who doesn’t need to measure his morality by everything the Bible says, much less degrade himself by submission to a Savior. (No one who hates bigotry and cruelty can be hell-bound, right?) He can hope Christians get into the habit of measuring themselves the same way he does, selecting passages that accord with his morality and passing quickly over passages that conflict with it.

He can try all that and maybe reap some short-term success. But ultimately, he’s fighting a losing battle. That’s because God is not silent. God keeps speaking to people’s hearts and minds, through His Word written millennia ago and through His people continuing to proclaim it today.

And God keeps reminding people what He has done. Which brings us back to events like Black History Month.

Sad to say, today’s black culture isn’t what it once was, as folks like Bill Cosby and even Chris Rock have been pointing out: The ravages of family breakdown that have swept America on the whole have taken their worst toll in the inner city. But you don’t have to romanticize history to be thankful for the faith that has shaped so much of black American life for hundreds of years. And to remember that faith is to be reminded that the church is still a vibrant force, confronting today’s evils as it did yesterday’s and providing a light in the darkness to lead those who call out:

Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee;
Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee.