Finding the Soul of Christian Higher Education, Part One

The Overwhelming Fear of Mission Drift

If I were to pick up my phone and ask Siri, “What is the opposite of the argument I’m making in my Fearless Christian University book?” I am certain that the two pieces from Robert Benne on the Christian Scholars blog would be her answer.

Titled “The Struggle for Soul in Christian Higher Education: Burtchaell was Right and I was Wrong”, they appeared on Thursday and Friday. These two pieces were no doubt shared on various Christian University internal listserves. As I mentioned in my last newsletter, my friends Chris Gehrz and Scot McKnight both highlighted them in their weekly digests on Saturday.

The fear of Christian institutions “losing their way” is the basis of the opening chapter of my book. One of the prime examples Christian university presidents, trustees, and supporting pastors like to throw out is that of Harvard. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve heard this in speeches over my four decades in Christian Higher Education.

The version I heard most often went like this: Harvard was founded to train an educated clergy for the masses. It adopted the seal emboldened with the slogan “Veritas” (Truth).¹ Today, however, Harvard is fully secularized and doesn’t held to Capital-T Truth. If we in Christian Higher Education are not constantly on guard, we will suffer the same fate.

The actual story is more complicated. The focus on ministry was overly limiting in terms of building long-term enrollment. Furthermore, by the first quarter of the eighteenth century, enlightenment ideas were coming from Europe and being introduced at Harvard.² While Harvard has never lost its place as a networking opportunity for societies upper classes (with some exceptions), its leaders made conscious decisions to shift the direction of the University. It was not the gradual drift proclaimed in all of those speeches I heard.

Which brings me to Benne’s argument. In Part One, he reflects on what he learned from conversations with James Burtchaell in the mid-1980s. A series of articles from Butchael coalesced into a book, The Dying of the Light, published twenty-five years ago³.

When Burtchaell’s articles came out, we were given tools to understand what had happened. We could almost put our college’s name in every reference to Vanderbilt that Burtchaell made. His work was enormously helpful to understand what had happened and gave us clues about how we might take measures to mitigate the secularization process and perhaps rebuild a viable Christian college.

My readers may know that Vanderbilt isn’t on the standard list of Christian Colleges. In fact, Benne’s own experience focuses on changes in Lutheran schools over the past several decades. Still, Burtchaell did have some words for those schools that we would recognize. Benne writes:

Other schools—Azuza [sic] Pacific and Calvin—were assessed quite positively, but Burtchaell had little confidence in their futures as Christian schools. The light is dying and “There was, in the stories told here, little learned rage against the dying of the light.” There is only a smoldering stump left; we will have to start all over again in the future.

Now we’re into territory I know. While Azusa and Calvin have had challenges around finances and how to respond to LGBTQ+ concerns, they are still clearly Christian schools. They are far from “a smoldering stump”.

At the turn of the Twenty-First Century, Benne contributed his own views on Christian Higher Education:

I developed a typology that sorted out the six. Two were what I called “orthodox,” because all members of the faculty and staff had to be Christians of a certain tradition. They were Wheaton and Calvin. The other four were what I called “critical mass,” wherein the administrators of the school kept roughly two-thirds of the faculty, staff, and student body composed of members of the sponsoring tradition. The Christian vision was the guiding paradigm for the life of the school.

I even argued for a third type—“intentional pluralism”—in which the Christian vision was given a “place at the table,” even though most of the faculty, staff, and students were not committed to the formative role of religion in the school. That type fit my school, Roanoke College, at which the presidents during the 80s and 90s seemed to guarantee a “place at the table” for serious Christians in the faculty, staff, and student body.

It is clear that Benne (and many others) think that being an “orthodox” school is the way to go.⁴ I don’t really like his use of orthodox, in part because common parlance leads to Eastern Orthodox or Orthodox Judaism. This is not what he means at all. A better descriptor could talk about the centrality of the Christian mission without creating a condition in which every other school is somehow “unorthodox”.

But that orthodoxy can be defined in multiple way. Benne focuses on denominational tradition as reflected in the administration, trustees, faculty, and student body. My friend Josh Tom, sociologist from SPU shared his response on their faculty listserve⁵:

In these posts, and the book it references, this spiritual declension narrative is sociologically naïve (the worst kind of naïve), with little understanding that institutions necessarily change over time in response to broader social changes. If schools like SPU admit non-Christian students it’s because we cannot keep a student body of only Christians in 2024 when 40-50% of Gen Z identifies as a religious ‘none’. If schools drift from denominational ties it’s because denominationalism is a feature of American religion that is rapidly dying. A 21^st century Christian University will look different than a 20^th century one because the world it inhabits, cares for and witnesses to is different.

Like Harvard, Christian universities are responding to shifts in the broader culture. Most schools could not survive only on the members of the sponsoring denomination (if there is one). Not only are students less institutionally tethered, but Christian universities have become more generically evangelical.

That doesn’t constitute mission drift. To be a member of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU), the school must (among other things) identify the centrality of its Christian mission and require faculty and staff to be Christian. CCCU members would all fall in Benne’s orthodox category.

It seems to me that Benne has a narrower definition of orthodox that I have. Consider how he describes his experience at his Lutheran school in the second of the posts:

Soon after I returned from by sabbatical at Valparaiso, I was asked by the new president to lead a task force to write a proposal for a substantial Lilly Grant that would enable the college to strengthen the Lutheran teaching on vocation in its curriculum. Our task force wrote a strong proposal, but one that had two fatal flaws. The task force did not prepare the faculty adequately for such a serious proposal, and the president did not take ownership of the initiative.

During one of the longest mornings of my life, a strong majority of the faculty—led by a cabal of secularists—thoroughly rejected the proposal. While I was quite embarrassed about the flaws in our task force’s approach, I think in retrospect that no strong proposal could have survived. The later history of the college more or less confirms that.

The first paragraph identifies some of the challenges of defining mission. If the faculty aren’t involved in the debate and definition of that mission, an imposed view from outside won’t hold. And without the president spending precious political capital, it is doomed to fail.

And yet I’m caught by his description of the process in the second paragraph; “a cabal of secularists”. This reflects an oppositional stance that is far too common in Christian Higher Education — '“they” are out to get “us”.

Benne ends the second post with a shout-out to a recent book by Baylor’s Perry Glanzer and colleagues. Christian Higher Education: An Empirical Guide contrasts over 500 colleges and universities on a specified set of criteria. I have a copy and will be exploring Glanzer’s argument in Part Two on Wednesday. Here is Benne’s takeaway:

Nevertheless, the [Glanzer] book is extremely important. It reinforces Burtchaell’s insistence that a serious Christian school must have high standards of hiring. It has to have an explicit, orthodox, Christian mission and it has to hire administrators, faculty, and staff for that mission. It has to have a fully informed and committed board that insists on those things happening. Above all, it needs a president committed to an orthodox vision who is willing to insist on a board that understands and supports it, as well as one who insists on hiring according to that vision. Without that there will be a slow accommodation to the secular, elite culture that is so insistent in the “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” ideology. Indeed, if a college or university has swallowed that ideology whole, orthodox Christianity will move out as it moves in. (Some Christian schools have “massaged” that ideology enough that it might not be fatal, but it is still very worrisome. For others, it will be fatal.)

I can fully agree with the first half of that paragraph and argue as much in my book. I do, however, argue that the proper mission focus is on students and how their Christian university experience prepares them to be the future leaders most colleges claim they want. There needs to regular conversation about that mission across all constituencies and re-articulation of that mission in the current moment, not just holding on to the view dominant in the past.

The second half of the paragraph suggests that something else is in Benne’s mind. The “slow accommodation to the secular” results in “swallowing [DEI] whole”. This, in turn, provides evidence that the Christian university cannot remain orthodox. I would argue that institutions can address the secular without losing their way.

This, then, is the inherent tension in Christian Higher Education. As I argue in my book, all members of the Christian university community must hold the mission and its pedagogical assumptions in high regard. This informs hiring, curriculum, promotion, vision, and strategic planning. At the same time, the Christian university must adapt to the changes in student concerns, the broader political landscape, and the best of current scholarship.

To err on the side of the former will make it more difficult to recruit current students. We could call it mission irrelevance. To err on the side of the latter, introduces the idea of mission drift that so many college presidents have railed against.

The only solution is to hold those realities in tension, be willing to adapt, and trust the Spirit’s leading.

1. Unless you’re James O’Keefe.

2. Adam Laats addresses these shifts in the first chapter of Fundamentalist U.

3. Published by Eerdmans, which happens to be my publisher.

4. I would note that while Burtchaell thought that Calvin would lose its way, Benne thought it was orthodox.

5. Josh has been an enthusiastic reader of my stuff, so echoes of my arguments are not surprising.