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Piety, Doubt, & Evangelical Colleges

A professor laments the intellectual shell game within Evangelical colleges
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Edward Hamilton is a reader of this blog whose comments are without fail illuminating. But he really outdoes himself with this one:

Evangelicalism is gifted with a heritage of self-criticism. As the most radically reforming wing of the Reformation, it has to constantly subject itself to scrutiny on the level of private discussions and personal meditations. There’s no external formal body made of leading evangelical scholars that can set doctrine for the entire movement. The academic community (theological faculty at seminaries, but also faculty in general) are the closest thing we have to a functional magisterium.

I’ve taught on several different college campuses [and] the atmosphere on the evangelical campus where I am now has been the one where faculty feel the most subversive — the most out of step with parents, trustees, and administrators. Teaching at Gonzaga (Jesuit), I felt virtually no pressure for secrecy, nor tension between student/parent and professor expectations. Catholicism was a pretty thin veneer of social responsibility, and priests, nuns, and bishops were colorful local mascots. There were a handful of distinctly Catholic professors (mostly in the philosophy department), but they were mostly dismissed as cranks by everyone else. There was little need for the university as a whole to pretend to be more Catholic than it was, since no agent for external accountability was expecting it to be.

The evangelical college world is constantly under the twin pressures of advertising its separation from the degenerate culture (a vital selling point to many parents) and yet creating space for serious scholarship. That amounts to giving each faculty member the license to privately undermine aspects of evangelical doctrine, but only in a handful of directly relevant academic categories. At the same time, the institution as a whole will double down on overt demonstrations of cultural purity, in all of its ceremonies and PR work. Anyone on the outside, reading the copy on the brochures or the college website, must assume I live in the world’s most claustrophobic bubble of ideological conformity. Instead, I’m living in an enclave full of diligently plotting revolutionaries.

For the most part, professors are often sincere in the personal belief that most of evangelicalism is intellectually robust, except the little bit that intrudes on their turf. Old Testament professors in the religion department will feel free to use source-critical methodology you’d never hear Sunday morning. Psychology professors will subsume what would historically have been called “sinful” tendencies under naturalistic explanations. Humanities classes will be full of praise for secular art and literature, and patronizing dismissal of the poor quality of the stuff on the shelves of the local Christian bookstore. As a science professor, I think I’ve seen precisely ZERO examples of young-earth creationists in the science and engineering departments at two evangelical colleges (a sample set of around four dozen), and the number of times you’ll hear a science professor say anything in lecture that would offend Richard Dawkins is countable on fingers (aside from compartmentalized moments for prayer or devotionals). The aggregate effect is that students repeatedly hear a message along the lines of “Evangelicalism is perfectly healthy, except the bits of it that would interfere with this class” — which after 120 credit hours of classes amounts collectively to saying that it’s an intellectual desert.

The cumulative effect of having powerful spiritual experiences (short-term missions trips, campus rallies, richly toned formal prayers at ceremonies) coupled with a steady diet of deconstructionist pedagogy is that graduates will want to dispense entirely with the unwieldy intellectual baggage of the evangelical traditional, and use evangelicalism as a brand label for marketing and community identity. That’s what the university did, after all. I feel guilty about participating this state of affairs, but I’m not sure how to overcome its inertia. I feel a distinct envy for Catholics who can evince a sincere confidence in the infallibility of the Papal office, and avoid this interminable charade of exaggerated outward piety and compartmentalized private doubt.

Do you teach at an Evangelical college? Have you ever? Or, are you now or have you ever been a student at one? If so, what do you think of Prof. Hamilton’s observations?

UPDATE: Baylor’s Alan Jacobs has a strong response in the comments section. Here it is:

The first thing I would say about Professor Hamilton’s comment is that it’s plainly unethical. He names no names and offers no evidence, contenting himself with smearing pretty much everyone who teaches at evangelical colleges, including colleges where he has had no experience, making no distinctions and offering no exceptions. (Note that he claims to tell us, not about his own personal experience, but about “the evangelical college world.”) Perhaps he has been unfortunate enough to have colleagues who are as dishonest and corrupt as he says they are; if so, I pity him. But since my own experience of three decades in Christian higher education — during many years of which I served as mentor to faculty in a wide range of disciplines — is radically different, I can’t help wondering if he’s making a great many unwarranted assumptions based on a small and skewed sample size.

If I try to understand what his substantive accusations are, they amount to the following: evangelical scientists aren’t six-day creationists; evangelical biblical scholars don’t teach Sunday-school-style classes; and evangelical humanities don’t teach and celebrate popular Christian fiction. It is my fervent hope that every professor at every evangelical college can plead guilty to such charges.

Professor Hamilton sets up a simplistic binary world where evangelical professors can either (a) reaffirm every preference of fundamentalist churches or (b) become “diligently plotting revolutionaries.” Any serious evangelical academic will choose neither of the above. The overwhelming majority of the Christian faculty I have met see it as their goal to take their students beyond whatever they might have learned in Sunday school without undermining their faith — rather, the goal is to deepen it and strengthen it, often by removing, or at least minimizing, fear of the unknown. For instance, students don’t have to end up just like me to see that reading Wallace Stevens and James Joyce instead of Christian devotional fiction isn’t a mark of perfidy and heresy. They might even see that it’s possible to read Stevens and Joyce with care and appreciation and yet come away from the experience with a stronger Christian faith, rather than an eviscerated one.

The other day an old friend of mine forwarded a letter from a former student, someone who had grown up in a very conservative theological environment. She wrote, “I do not know how to capture my gratitude to you for challenging me. For helping me to learn to think and question. You changed my life. I was resistant at the time, and you planted the seeds that needed time to grow. Thank you. I am who I am now and doing the work that I do, in part, because of you.” I know many, many people like this woman — people who have told me that they would not be Christians today if they had not been exposed to a more expansive and more intellectually rigorous Christianity than they had learned at their home church (even if, as if often the case, they love their home church and are thankful for all that it taught them). People who serve the Church and the world as adults, but would not be doing so if they had been left with the minimal intellectual equipment Professor Hamilton prefers.

That’s what most of us who teach, or have taught, at evangelical colleges want for our students. I’m sorry that Professor Hamilton has managed to get through a fairly lengthy career without meeting any of us.

UPDATE.2: For the record, because John Wilson complained vociferously, I have no opinion at all about Evangelical colleges, because I know nothing about the culture there. I found Edward Hamilton’s comment to be provocative and interesting, as his usually are, and my endorsement of it is on the quality of the comment, not the accuracy of its substance.  As regular readers know, from time to time I post comments from readers whose perspective I disagree with, because I find them challenging. That’s all this was.

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