Christian Universities and "Formational Anthropology"

Jeff Bilbro's excellent Christianity Today article

One of the chapters of my book opens with this description of admissions brochures or webpages at Christian universities:

Perusing a Christian university webpage (or those of state institutions for that matter) doesn’t give as much information as one might want. A quick examination of a half-dozen admissions pages show very similar patterns. There are between six and ten smiling students, many in university-branded attire, looking like they really enjoy each other’s company. Of course, they were likely rounded up by an admissions photographer and may not even know each other. There will be an appropriate balance of females to males roughly matching the gender ratio of the school. There will be one or two students of color (overrepresenting their proportion in the student body).

There will be the requisite chapel photo, perhaps showing the student band leading worship while other students stand with their arms raised to heaven. There will be the classroom photo showing a faculty member lecturing or leading a discussion while an eager coed raises her hand to contribute. Of course, sports photos are a must as a way of introducing school pride from the get-go.

The new student no-doubt knows that many of these photos are staged and don’t exactly reflect the daily lived experience of students who attend this particular Christian university. Nevertheless, these images are important in setting expectations for the idealized Christian university student. Those images of happy, sociable, inquisitive, spiritual students have an impact of how new students come to see themselves.

This passage came to mind when I read Jeff Bilbro’s excellent article Wednesday in Christianity Today. Jeff is an associate professor of English at Grove City College. Prior to that, we were colleagues at Spring Arbor for eight years. He is the author (along with another former SAU colleague Jack Baker) of Wendell Berry and Higher Education: Cultivating Virtues of Place.

In his CT article, Jeff observes that many parents are worried about how liberal Christian universities are and whether they are a safe place for faithful students to attend without losing their way. But he says issues like human sexuality or CRT or evolution are not the key issues to worry about. He states it like this:

Theological anthropology concerns our assumptions about the nature and purpose of humanity. And by “consumerist anthropology” I mean the belief—often subconsciously held—that people are essentially consumers who should maximize their earning potential so they can consume as many entertaining experiences and products as possible.

When I speak with anxious parents and grandparents, I often try to explain this aspect of the college search by asking them to imagine a two-dimensional grid, a chart with an x-axis and a y-axis. The x-axis they already know: That’s the familiar range of progressive to conservative theological commitments. But I want them to begin to see the y-axis, which runs from that consumerist anthropology to a formational one.

A formational anthropology doesn’t imagine students as consumers who need to get a marketable degree leading to a high-paying job. It sees them as people bearing a tarnished imago Dei that, by the grace of Christ, can be burnished through disciplined, focused effort.

Regular readers of this newsletter know that this is very much in harmony with the themes of my forthcoming book. I’ve written before on the problems of the “students as consumers” metaphor. Consider this paragraph in Jeff’s piece:

You can often get a sense of this reality in the marketing literature: It touts exciting new student amenities, career-oriented majors, a reduction in general education requirements, and an undue emphasis on college athletics and e-sports. One of my friends describes the Christian college where he used to teach as a “minor league sports franchise with a fundamentalist VBS attached to it.”

He explores four contrasts between the consumerist and formational models that relate to core curriculum, the nature of chapel, the type of pedagogy that is common, and the image the college puts forth (see the last line in the previous block quote).

I spent 39 years in Christian Higher Education as both faculty member and cabinet level administrator. Jeff’s article send me down a memory hole in an attempt to figure out 1) did we ever articulate formational values? and 2) if so, when did things change?

My first institution celebrated Christian community and close relationships between students and faculty. There was required chapel three days a week (that often served the needs of senior administrators more than students). The school used a marketing pitch I wasn’t crazy about — You Belong Here — but it did center the notion of belonging.

My third¹ institution had a unique core curriculum that focused on students developing their sense of moving in a complex world. A small school, it struggled to match the buildings and amenities at our larger competitors. We may have been tempted to be more consumerist (especially in the degree completion program and certain undergrad programs) but it wasn’t a dominant ethos.

If I were to hypothesize as to when a full consumerist model took hold, it was in my fourth institution and resulted from the Great Recession. Admissions directors were talking about letting parents know that the university was a good investment. Parent complaints were taken at face value and accommodated, regardless of the responsibility of the students. The core curriculum had not undergone a serious examination in 25 years.

My last institution disinvested in the liberal arts and social sciences to create room for STEM and other ready vocational programs like Sports Medicine. Enrollment has still struggled but a cultural transformation has imbedded like an earworm in a Star Trek episode. Paradoxically, the school doubled down on its commitments as a Christian alternative to secular schools while weakening the formational aspects of a Christian education.

So is it too late to shift the operating philosophy? Not necessarily. But, as I argue in my book, it takes intentional effort to move in the formational direction.

So what might admission brochures look like in a formational model? It’s not my field but I have some initial thoughts.

It would be important to highlight students who moved from embracing simplistic answers (even on politically charged topics) to being able to articulate multiple perspectives from a Christian stance. It would show, as Jeff suggests, Bible studies that have led students to develop an ability to articulate a deep theology that avoided proof-texting in support of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (Jeremiah 29:11, anybody?). It would highlight a community life that truly embraced diversity, not because of DEI, but because the community embraces the unique contributions of every student and faculty member without denying their lived experience. It would still celebrate sports but would focus more on the benefit participation brought to the student than on winning percentages.

Embracing the formational model may actually give a market advantage to Christian universities. The nearby state school may have an InterVarsity chapter but it still operates on a vocationally focused, student experience, floating river and recreation center ethos. It may be hard to compete with the state school from a consumerist standpoint. But a formational model might just win the day.

Jeff’s article resonated with me for one other reason. It focused on how a Christian university’s mission is lived out on the ground. Another chapter in my book describes the separation that exists between the trustees and administrators on the one hand and the faculty and student life professionals on the other. The former may recite the mission statement at convocations and board meetings but the latter see what the lived mission really is. Attending to that lived mission and making necessary changes in response would be a great step in shifting the philosophy from consumerist to formational.

1. At my second institution I spent most of my time running a degree completion program it owned in another state.