17 Comments

I was anticipating your conclusion. I went to a Christian liberal arts university that had mostly de-Christianized in the 1980s, but is now a thriving Christian university. Your book is needed because we need a way forward when the culture wars end and a generation has forgotten how to do Christian liberal arts well. As Andrew Ryder commented, our university functioned as a true third way regardless of our policies. We’ve seen how well it can work. And it is necessary. As is your work.

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It may be an unwinnable task, but work like yours is the only way forward I think. Just wonder if the right people can go against the tide long enough to make an impact.

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Thanks, Adam!

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I appreciate the ideas and perspectives of this poignant essay. I too, am a graduate of a Christian institution (a Nazarene one at that), where I was not a theology major of any kind. I found my program to be restrictive in thought and inadequately prepared me for doctoral-level work when it came time. As a person of color (Arab-American), I experienced more racism in my institution and found myself being one of the few people of color in any class I was a part at my Christian university. I do feel that this hindered my education in insurmountable ways, which would take too long to dive into in this comment.

The only term that I can use to describe my experience is “intellectually suppressed.” Instead of focusing on critical thinking and expanding our understanding of the universe and human interaction, many of my courses were taught with right-winged, conservative overtones that seemed to hurt the marginalized and perpetuate future behaviors for those willing to remain a part of the denomination (I realize this is an issue in many other churches; rather, I’m speaking from my OWN experience).

As I entered multiple graduate programs I found myself addicted (for lack of a better term) to the openness of thinking without judgement or boarders, to push the boundaries of the unknown, and to embrace science with no fear of a “faith” consequence for believing in facts. For the first time in my life I was free and it tasted so sweet.

As I stand on the precipice of completing my second doctorate and part of the faculty at a state university, I find myself reminiscing on my time at both my Christian and secular institutions. Most often, I think of what change could and would look like for students that grew up in fundamentalist families and churches as I did. Speaking from my experience: what would it look like to learn in an environment, in a Nazarene institution, with people from the LGBTQIA+ community that are welcomed and embraced? How could involvement in larger, more metropolitan areas, influence my former Nazarene institution and help students learn with and from the minority? What if additional scholarships and learning opportunities were afforded to people like me, Arabs, to learn and grow in Christian communities, even if these people were not christian? I have more and more conversations with my students, who also attended Christian institutions, and see that their experiences were not that different from my own, even though mine occurred well over a decade ago. Change is needed and I do believe, that one day, it will be inevitable.

Frankly speaking, I left the Nazarene church many years ago. Truthfully, I’ve left all church. As someone who values education more than anything, I was unable sit idly by, watching students take out an unrealistic amount of money to learn in concrete sectors of education that chose to eliminate critical thinking and allow a restrictive dogma to control the narrative.

I speak from a world of hurt because of my Nazarene institution. I also speak from a place of concern and hope. Hope that, one day, I will live long enough to see all christian institutions make these changes and promote an environment, free to think beyond the binary.

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Thanks, Jonathan. And thanks for subscribing!

Your idea of “intellectually suppressed” is n the mark. It’s the direct result of the fear that is intrinsic to too much of Christian Higher Education. It’s almost like the leadership doesn’t think the church and more importantly God, can handle more nuanced thinking.

Which Nazarene school? And what’s your current role?

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John,

You’re exactly correct. What they’re doing is diminishing the magnitude of God. I don’t want or need to follow a small god.

I went to Olivet Nazarene and I am currently in private practice as a pediatric audiologist in Joplin, Missouri and run the residency program. I am also part time faculty at Wichita State University in the doctor of audiology program as lecturer and clinical advisor.

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Taught at ONU from 1981 to 1990.

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I love the phrase, "faith consequence." I loved about my university experience most when it most seemed the only consequences to my thought would be intellectual--fact consequences, logic consequences, ethical consequences. It seems the hopeful paradox but frequent contradiction of the Christian college to embrace a pedagogy of faith that can stand up to reason. I think the politics of the institution make that more, not less, difficult.

Really appreciate your comment.

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One thing hardly anyone is examining is the prior question of WHY so many (evangelical) Christian colleges are struggling so much... why, if such institutions tend to be strongholds of Christian values etc, are enrollments falling and donors lacking even as the country's social/ religious/ political conservatism is strengthening again? One plausible answer is the declining religiosity and church affiliations of 18-20-year-olds right now, but another is this: many Christian families have bought the lie that higher education in general, including at Christian colleges, is too liberalizing; and that learning to think through the tough questions of their faith, at the intersection of social, ethical, scientific, cultural and political ideas, with the brightest and most engaged Christian scholars out there, is viewed as insufficiently 'faithful,' for that would compromise their faith commitments (narrowly construed as such parents see them)... this gate-keeping, insulating mentality is baked into most evangelicals, since it's part of their heritage. And this is also why certain places like Hillsdale, Grove City, and especially Liberty, are not suffering from the same enrollment challenges (they also, incidentally, are able to defy the typical trends, by enrolling about half men and half women students... perhaps because evangelical men crave the conservative ethos which counts them as (more) valuable?). In general this suggests that other Christian colleges have been losing, over and over, the argument for why students should enroll in Christian higher ed: the only argument that attracts evangelical students is 'this place will reinforce and reassure you of your religious/ political views', and colleges which struggle to get enough of them have to shift to 'this place will help you ask questions and explore ideas (including related to faith) for yourself'. It's a shame though that Christian families flock to the former and seem to be shunning the latter. What it's looking like is that places that label themselves 'evangelical' but where that gets questioned from the right, likely have to rebrand without that label, while nevertheless championing what makes them Christian.

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Yes. There are fewer traditional evangelicals in GenZ. Doesn't mean they aren't interested in faith. And competing with the established conservative outposts won't work -- they've already cornered that market. Also, the rise in the College Isn't Worth It crowd. Finally, the less conservative parents are comfortable sending their children to state school with a little InterVarsity on the side.

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Put differently: colleges using the 'evangelical' label where that gets questioned from the right, will struggle, and have to rebrand without the 'e' word... but will still have to champion their Christian values and their distinctive version of education. That's what it looks like from my struggling college in Seattle.

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I'll start with what could be a representative example of what you're up against. Christian institutions have been laughing at climate change for decades, and every decade another collective lie is added--that the gatekeepers of those institutions never did so. That they were merely being biblically-guided conscientious stewards while they elected and supported, every decade, land rapists. You're up against some other version of that. You're writing in the midst of a Philistine victory that has been partly secured by ostensibly Chrisian institutions. Tricky. Christian colleges hopped on board voodoo economics and preached the "greed is good" doctrine of Donald Gecko, pretending white businessmen were simply "succeeding by God's grace" while women were ill-suited for better professions and black women were welfare queens getting the government cheese. I'd rather have your Phoenix University, but we have The University of Phoenix.

Maybe my encouragement here is also a suggestion: Your audience might not be the thinkers and ethically composed leaders of a justifiable philosophical or institutional position. They're likely already with you. It may be who our audience has always been--students. The alt.right cultists, the Trump supporters, the solipsists and money worshipers, their greatest fear is an educated population. They talk about "indoctrination" in the universities for a reason they've made as obvious as their bloviating confessional approach could possibly make it: they are indoctrinators. And the Christian college has, too often, sided with that mode as well as, sadly, that mode's worst manifestations.

The line between indoctrination and education has always been drawn by the claim-to-evidence relationship. In a university worth being called that, the collection of colleges worked in frictional cooperation with one another. Your civil engineering and economics professors taught you how a suspension bridge was built, and your poetry and philosophy professors taught you the reasons people have for crossing it.

Trade schools are great when they're honest about what they are and do and when they're staffed by experts who can teach that trade. "Program prioritization," however, transforms universities into trade schools and so into lies. This has happened because hyperbolic individualism made corporate (not cooperative) has resulted in businessmen and greed-oriented trustees taking over a project they can't handle. The royal MBA class is, as an entity, utterly incapable of understanding what a college is, let alone what a college education is, and it is bluntly resistant to tracking the actual successes versus failures of a public university system that has existed since at least the late 1860s in the US. Asking an MBA to assess and apply the values of an educational institution is the equivalent of asking a BMW mechanic to reform psychiatry.

As for Christian colleges, the damage that has come from their seeing themselves as socially conservative institutions is only an extension of the toxic fiscal conservativism they've adopted especially since around 1980. The Christian college, it seems to me, has long had a problem with its spiritual and humanistic mottos belying its capitalist and individualist objectives. Christian students are ripe for indoctrination and all the fallacies that ensue (e.g. the idea of being "educated out of one's faith," or projecting their own indoctrination techniques onto those undesirable liberal groomers). Christian institutions may be the easiest to seduce by greed and philosophical myopia, because they are composed of belief-tending pedagogical models. That seems like an obstacle of audience, not just timeliness or efficacy, for your work.

I'm saying maybe it's impossible reason with the people you're trying to reach by using a message of pro-student reform, and maybe that's why you might feel discouraged (other than from the discouragement that I think is periodically inevitable during any writing project). Perhaps the timing of your work won't feel like such a problem if the audience of your work is carved into a different shape. I'm in the bleachers on most of your content, but I've been following this letter, and I recall something of our conversations over the last 35 years or so.

I don't know if "Christians" are up to what you ask. Too many of them are still cultists and haven't matured to a point at which they even question, let alone seek to change, the monarchy of the universe in which they believe and try to re-create here in the material world. It's a control model that has alienated people from the institution of the church, which is the institution behind the institution of the university, compounded by 21st century disinformation. Professors aren't just at war with mental incompetents like Lauren Boebert. They're at war with their administrators, many of whom may as well just use C-suite titles rather than calling themselves deans or provosts or chancellors. Professors have been divided against their colleagues in other colleges, too. Purdue's humanities programs are being demolished. The people from Construction Management who always vote red are making bank. An adjunct in the Krannert School of Business makes more than an Associate Professor of English. That's me thinking about what similar brands of power distribution you're finding in Christian institutions, and what audience might have the juice to change those. Hopefully this paragraph didn't veer too far from your book's objective.

Maybe the role for the professoriate in exile is to be what it has always been at its best anyway--a small subclass of people who help the next generation, twenty or so at a time or in apprenticeship, to know things instead of just believing them, and to change things after our generation has lost another fight with mass-stupidity. Are the students about who you're concerned your better audience?

Maybe the 2040s will bring back art and music, literature and theater, in a revival of the lost values of the current university system (secular or Christian). I'm actually seeing a better survival rate of the arts, and some lifted hope in their quality, in Christian schools--maybe because they can't afford the multi-million-dollar labs of bigger schools that usually attract more secular minds. Maybe the 2040s will be like the 1960s-70s, but without so much homophobia, misogyny, and racism. Your work might help that happen through Substack as much as (or more than) through a traditional publishing conduit. That's the best encouragement I can find. Not to be morbid, but I think in a mostly posthumous orientation nowadays.

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I really like the idea of a "professoriate in exile". I need to give some thought to what that might look like organizationally. It's what I intended with my FaceBook group but haven't been able to make that work as I'd hoped. I hope to move faster than the 2040s -- I'll be 95 at its close!

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Just to clarify the audience suggestion: I emphasized students (maybe graduate students) as an audience because that changes the timeline. If it feels too late for your thesis to gain traction now, for this generation of decision makers, and the current political climate doesn't change much during the next 4-6 years, then you could influence the next wave of professors and administrators to take on the power structure of Christian colleges that have rendered them too [insert adjective] to be the change you'd like to see. Here's to the 2030s, then, and you seeing a little more and faster reward for your effort. All empathy from here, John.

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Wondering about context: many small liberal arts colleges (I teach at one) have their roots as Christian colleges, but went secular at some point in the past. I suspect a clash between ideals, and a sense that the ideals of the college (faculty, students, etc.) no longer align with the affiliated church. I suspect the trustees play a huge role in all of this, and would be key to the kind of "phoenix" effort you envision. Are there any examples of Christian colleges that have made the transformation you envision? Or does "liberalization" of some sort mean excising the Church from the college?

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My background was entirely in institutions affiliated with the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU). One of their membership requirements is that faculty, staff, and administrators have a commitment to Christ. Breaking with the affiliated church is hard -- in many cases, the property is in the church's name. And the break can be seen as "liberalizing". Belmont broke from the Tennessee Baptists a couple of decades back and has done well at crafting a new identity.

In many cases, I think the trustees (and the church bodies they often represent) are the problem when they could be the group that opens doors. I'm reminded of an anecdote from my second institution: the new dean of students wanted to lobby his trustee student affairs committee to improve housing stock, so he took them on a tour. Their response? "Wow, I wish we had these kinds of desk chairs when we were students!" Because trustees have little contact with students, and what they have is closely curated, they really can't read the current situation.

I could name a number of schools that had started down the road I'm proposing 10-15 years ago. But that thinking stopped. Perhaps it was the rise of culture wars or financial challenges as their prior market strategies began to fail. Rather than adjusting to these new realities, they all seem have decided to go after the same small population of conservative evangelical students. The primary innovations came in adding/enhancing desired vocational programs (STEM, criminal justice, sports medicine).

There is still a market for faith centralizing, liberal arts oriented education that prepares students for the world they will experience at 30. But the current positioning leaves far too much of that market disinterested. I've argued for over a decade that the school that decides to embrace the complexity of the current moment will have a short-term hit but be wildly successful in the long run.

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John, I share your concern that it may be too late. But we do have to keep trying. There have been many times that I’ve thought the unique blend of virtues, quirks, and faults that is evangelical Christian higher ed has passed its prime and/or always was too weighted down with faults to be redeemable. In this moment, when even institutions which have “opened” more than others are doubling down on culture war political theology, it’s harder than ever to see how we get there. But if we can gather a critical mass of people and institutions, I think what you are describing is more needed than ever. Did we ever “need” the typical church-related Christian college of the 80s and 90s? Maybe, maybe not, though my experience in one definitely changed my trajectory. But we unequivocally DO need an alternative to both politicized evangelical education and supposedly neutral “nonsectarian” higher ed in the present. Can we make such a hybrid of deep, authentic inclusion and deep, authentic faith a reality? The only way it happens sustainably is with leaders on boards and in president’s offices who support such a vision. The past few years have made it clear that the affirming university with a more conservative but realistic or disconnected board can’t exist anymore. Was it healthy? I don’t know, but, speaking for myself, it was the best we thought we could do. Thanks for your work on and insight into these issues, and for doing it so publicly in this venue.

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