Some Tuesday Odds and Ends

Catching up after a weekend away

We spent the weekend in the Philadelphia area celebrating our grandson’s fourth birthday! It was a good time and his father made homemade cupcakes for the occasion. But being on the road meant that there weren’t newsletters on Friday or Monday. Tomorrow will be tough as well (more below) so I split the difference and wrote on a Tuesday. I’ll get back on regular schedule on Friday.

Fearless Christian University Updates

Thursday will mark two weeks since the book released. It’s been a thrill to see people responding and expressing an interest in what I’m up to. Here are some highlights.

On Friday, I met with the provost and some faculty from Eastern University to discuss the book. It was a good conversation, even though none of them had read it. I learned some interesting things about Eastern’s enrollment (less evangelical, more diverse than I would have predicted). We met in this room in the historic estate (which, coincidentally, is where I attended a Christian sociology conference in 2011).

Baird Library in Historic Walton Hall

Today, Scot McKnight continued his weekly analysis of the book chapters; today was chapter five on faculty/administrator/trustees relations. He acknowledges that what I’m calling for is optimistic and not within his own teaching experience. I admit to being idealistic but the current separation model doesn’t serve as well at all. He ends his analysis like this:

Christian universities are not public universities, and Christian universities are not seminaries, and seminaries are not public universities or Christian universities. There are distinctions and how these analogies work themselves out.

The role of seminary caught my interest because I’m driving over to Denver Seminary tomorrow to talk about the book. Thanks to Angie Ward for setting this up (and writing me a nice review on Amazon!).¹

One of the subscribers to this newsletter shared information about chapter two on his Facebook page. I was stunned to find that over two dozen people liked the post, only one of whom I already knew. So maybe there’s a receptive audience (at least among faculty).

On Thursday I have an interview with Inside Higher Ed.

Monday I Zoom in to Chris Gehrz’s senior seminar looking at issues in higher education.

I have two podcast interviews scheduled for the first half of March.

In April I head to the Religion News Association annual meeting. The publisher is providing promotional materials for the welcome bags.

Looking ahead, in the fall there will likely be what we used to call an “author meets the critics” session at SSSR in Minneapolis. I’ll also have books at their New Book Reception.

That’s a lot of travel for a retiree on a fixed income. My royalty rate is decent, but it would require a lot of book sales to recoup my investments. If you’ve ever considered becoming a paid subscriber (at whatever level), this would be a valuable time.

When Denominations Overreach

Two years ago, I wrote a post I called Revanchist Denominations. This was in response to several denominations (Free Methodist, Christian Reformed, and Nazarene) taking hardline stances on social issues. I wrote:

Where it will matter, on the other hand, is on the future of pastors and institutions. Denominations still control the processes of pastoral credentials and pastoral placement. They own and have majority board control of institutions of higher education. And so they have used those levers available to them to try retaking the contested territory.

This may work in the short term but not in the long term. Universities are struggling with enrollment already and revanchist strategies will scare some needed students away. Churches need pastors and the assumption that congregations will suddenly align with the new interpretations are naive. Even if pastors lose credentials and leave their churches, they will quite possibly take numbers of congregants with them wherever they go.

With this as background, I was shocked to read in Religion News Service last week that nearly three dozen CRC ministers shifted their papers to the Reformed Church in America (the older and less conservative of the Reformed denominations). The next day, RNS reported that a major ACNA (Anglican Church of North America) congregation was affiliating with the Episcopal Church. I can’t share specifics, but I recently learned of other congregations considering separation from their more conservative denominational body. This trend is likely to continue for some time.

The Structures of Christian Nationalism

I have been reading Katherine Stewart’s Money, Lies, and God about the connections between conservative funding sources and anti-democratic Christian Nationalist movements. She was interviewed by Robbie Jones and strongly endorsed by Kristin DuMez, so I got a copy. It’s very well done and exceedingly readable. I’m about a third of the way through. Look for a post on here once I finish it.

If you aren’t currently reading Holly Berkley Fletcher’s SubStack, you should start. It is about politics, the CIA, and other fun stuff. In today’s post, she wrote the following:

I grew up afraid, within a culture of fear. The white evangelical world view rests on a desperately overcompensating need to be right, and by virtue of their rightness, to win the culture wars and to convince, by law if needed, everyone else that they are right. I grew up on this. In fact, the only piece of Christian Nationalism that is new or shocking to me is the overt abandonment of democracy. That is new, because democracy isn’t working for the culture in which I grew up anymore.

In fact, instead of “winning,” many of its own children are leaving the faith. Despite hermetically sealing them in a home-schooled, evangelical bubble, still many of its children are leaving. The numbers of adherents are dropping, along with those of every other Christian or religious tradition in this modern, increasingly secular age.

And because white evangelicals’ faith, and their very identity, has been built on certainty and “winning,” they are now faced with an existential crisis. They are dizzy with fear. And as they stumble around trying to keep their balance, they are crashing into walls that have turned out to be the pillars of our democracy.

That second paragraph really caught my attention and brings me full circle to where I started today’s piece. The concern with “certainty”² fits a particular subset of the population.

I had a fruitful online conversation this morning with a friend at Seattle Pacific. We were commiserating about this hermetically sealed environment and how it fits the needs of only a subset of parents. There are however, a very large number of Christian university alums who would never think of encouraging their offspring to attend their alma mater. This seems to me a completely untapped market for Fearless Christian Universities to pursue.³

1. I would greatly appreciate any reviews people are willing to post!

2. I watched Conclave on the plane yesterday and this idea plays a major role.

3. I’m actually thinking about how to go about surveying this population of parents to find out whether they could see value in Christian higher education as I reimagine it in the book. If you know of a foundation that would find this interesting, hit me up!