I appreciate brgulker’s question about Adam Kotsko’s paper, Christians in Academe: A Reply. He said he thought Kotsko made some good points. I see it as a bit of a mixed bag, myself. I’ll respond here to a few excerpts.
I am speaking from long, hard experience, therefore, when I say that there is something toxic about conservative evangelicals’ stance toward academe. This stance is informed by what can only be called a thorough-going persecution complex. In the rhetoric of prominent conservative evangelical leaders, the secular world is not merely a realm that exists alongside Christianity. Instead, it is in active opposition to Christianity, seeking its destruction. The theory of evolution, for example, is not simply a scientific theory that happens to reach conclusions at odds with a literal reading of Genesis — it is a conspiracy aimed at discrediting belief in God.
I’m not in the academy now, but I’ll never forget the way a philosophy prof reamed me out for thinking there was anything in Christian thought or history worth giving two minutes’ attention. The specific issue is not worth rehearsing today, but time has proved he was wrong on it. The main thing I learned at the time was to keep my head down. He was wrong, but he was a full prof and I was a freshman. That was all I needed to know.
More recently I’ve edited two books about secondary school, college, and university instructors/professors being forced out of their positions because of their Christian beliefs. Speech codes mandating Christians shut up about certain beliefs abound. Is Christian belief under pressure in the university? Absolutely yes. Is the theory of evolution a “conspiracy aimed at discrediting belief in God”? That depends on who’s expounding it; there are some in whose hands it has exactly that purpose.
But these things depend partly on local circumstances. Business school students experience very little academic pressure. Biology and humanities majors get a lot more. These are based on national averages in the U.S., so it could be very different from one school to another. When I teach on staying Christian in college, I encourage students to be prepared for both the good and the bad. College was, by the way, the very best thing that could have happened to my spiritual life.
On every front, the conservative evangelical community perceives itself to be under siege, particularly its children, since indoctrinating children in secular ideology is the most effective means of undercutting Christianity.
There’s truth in that. Look, we are in spiritual battle. Isn’t that obvious? The university, along with the media, is the most important battleground in that conflict, and undercutting Christian belief is certainly the opposition’s main mode of attack.
Believing that evangelical students are under continual attack, conservative evangelical leaders encourage them to boldly defend themselves whenever possible. Overall, the attitude their most prominent leaders promote in conservative evangelical students is a combination of extreme paranoia and defiance (conceived as self-defense).
Not being there in the classrooms, I don’t know if Christian students are exhibiting irrational fears. I don’t know if their defense of the faith looks more like “self-defense,” “defiance,” or just being present intellectually and refusing to swallow whole everything that gets spoon-fed to them. I don’t think there’s any call for irrationality or fear. There’s hardly ever anything good to be gained by being disrespectful, so if that’s what he means by “defiant,” I hope it’s not happening; it shouldn’t be.
If Christianity is what we believe it is, then it’s strong enough to stand up to attack. If God is God, and if we’re following him, then we’re in good hands. There’s no need for fear, and no call for rudeness or disrespect. Still, when someone says something untrue or misleading about God, the faith, or morality, then what’s wrong with speaking the truth in love?
Conservative evangelicals as a group, therefore, are not just one among many excluded groups. Rather, they are sui generis insofar as they have constantly been encouraged, from a very young age, to expect and create conflict in the classroom.
It takes two to fight.
Above all, parents and pastors need to stop giving a blank check to anything that professes to be “Christian.” Conservative evangelicals have long been skilled at sniffing out what they consider to be pseudo-Christian liberals — developing some discernment on the other end of the scale would be a welcome shift.
I agree wholeheartedly. There’s some really soft stuff out there, and even some wrong stuff, that claims to be Christian. We need to be far more discerning.
Rejecting the more radical leaders must also mean rejecting their paranoid and frankly made-up ideas. For instance, evangelicals need to reject the fantasy of America as a “Christian nation” and recognize that it is precisely America’s secular state and prohibition of an established church that has allowed American Christianity to be such a dynamic, grassroots-powered religion instead of the empty formality it often is in European countries. Even if conforming to secular culture seems disadvantageous or constraining in the short term, treating it as an enemy is amazingly shortsighted. Evangelicals should be American secularism’s biggest supporters!
There’s a lot of truth in that, and a lot of confusion, all mixed up too thoroughly for me to treat it in the time I have today. In short, if secularism means giving equal opportunity to competing beliefs in the university, letting them all duke it out until the best one wins, that’s great, especially for academic settings. Sometimes, though, secularism means advantaging secular beliefs above Christian beliefs, which creates an unequal playing field. That’s not fantasy, that’s not a “persecution complex,” it’s reality in some settings.
That’s not to say Christian students should walk in to class convinced they’re about to get stoned and thrown out of Lystra. That’s a persecution complex. No, they should enter confidently, secure in who they are and who God is. If something comes up that opposes their beliefs, they should listen, learn, and respond on the basis of well-studied and developed knowledge, including the relevant knowledge from both the Christian side and the opposing view. That’s good, healthy interactive learning.
Similarly with evolution: Christians have always absorbed the best of worldly knowledge and literature. If Christians in the past have found it acceptable to learn about the carousing of pagan gods through studying the classical literature, surely learning about the theory of evolution can’t be a huge problem. Just as previous generations could study classical literature to learn grammar and rhetoric without thereby worshiping pagan gods, so too can contemporary evangelicals benefit from the practical medical knowledge that has resulted from evolutionary theory without denying their belief in God. And in fact I have never met an evangelical who would reject medical treatment from a doctor who believed in evolution — if modern biology, founded as it is on evolutionary theory, can be relied on in a life or death situation, objecting to its use in the low-stakes environment of the classroom seems misguided.
I agree that Christians should learn, study, and thoroughly understand evolutionary theory. I’m all in favor of us knowing what we talk about before we talk about it. But please, let’s not treat “evolution” as if it were univocal. Depending on the context, it means change over time, within-species variations of populations, descent with modification, universal common descent, and/or naturalistic universal common descent. To agree with evolution in the sense of within-species variations, and to accept medical treatment that’s been built upon knowledge of that form of evolution, does not commit one to accept evolution in all senses.
If conservative evangelical parents and pastors focused on encouraging their children to simply get as much as they can out of their education and had the courage to speak up against leaders whose extreme views only bring their community into disrepute, no one would have the occasion to ask if conservative evangelicals are discriminated against and no one would need to develop strategies to cope with the unique pedagogical challenges they represent — instead, they’d be among the most sought-after students. Professors can and should do more to work toward that future, but ultimately the responsibility lies with the conservative evangelical community itself.
Here Kotsko shifts from talking about the nature of the university to the character of Christian students. I’m in agreement with him on this, but not because I endorse his analysis of the situation. I agree because what he’s describing is the way Christian students ought to be regardless of circumstances. I think all of us should focus on getting the most out of our educations (in school or out). I think we should raise our voices in opposition to extreme, false views, both within and without our community. Christian students should be the most studious, the most respectful, the most inquisitive of all. They should also be, in the best sense of the word, the most demanding: they should demand excellence of themselves, and they should expect to be educated with excellence—which includes being taught the truth as well as having freedom to challenge respectfully what is not true.
Oh, for more Christians who will enter the university and stay there, committed to truth, committed to learning, committed to demonstrating excellence and love!
A very nice commentary, Tom. One reply I’d make to Kotsko is regarding this:
For instance, evangelicals need to reject the fantasy of America as a “Christian nation” and recognize that it is precisely America’s secular state and prohibition of an established church that has allowed American Christianity to be such a dynamic, grassroots-powered religion instead of the empty formality it often is in European countries.
One problem here is that these words are so damn malleable. What “secular” means, what “a Christian nation” means, etc. If Kotsko thinks that America was a secular nation in that it was meant to utterly exclude from either law or formality any idea which someone could construe as “religious”, he’s simply wrong. God – even if construed broadly, as a merely theistic God rather than any particular faith’s God – was seen as playing an instrumental role in the founding of this country, by the founders themselves. Many Christian values were, in and of themselves, not seen as some kind of threat to the secular. This has changed.
In fact, I think Kotsko has it backwards. The idea of America as being founded upon secularism, particularly in the sense that means nowadays, is nonsense. It is many supposed champions of “secularism” who react furiously to the smallest bit of religious symbolism in a city’s symbol, or in a court (The Ten Commandments, etc), or in any law which they suspect is favored primarily by religious, regardless of the justifications. Well, so long as it’s Christian symbolism or interests. NASA, meanwhile, is trying to build muslim self-esteem or such.
Stanley Fish’s “Are There Secular Reasons?” is instructive here.
Really, I understand Kotsko wanting Christians to be reasonable, not overreact or get paranoid. But frankly, sometimes there are institutional, cultural, and political threats to a person’s beliefs. And yes, re: evolution, “science” can very easily be abused, and misused, and misrepresented in the hopes of misshaping it into some kind of anti-Christian weapon. Just as it was abused and misused to support eugenics. Just as one bit of science after another has been misused and abused.
Crude:
Well put. We see science being abused here in the majority of DL’s personal opinions.