The Temptations of Christian Colleges

Roy Alden Atwood
New Saint Andrews College

 Transnational Association of Christian Colleges and Schools Conference ▪ Presidents Luncheon Address
TRACS 25th Anniversary ▪ Virginia Beach, VA ▪ November 11, 2004

Each new Christian college admitted to TRACS should be a sober reminder that American Christians have proved much better at starting new colleges than at keeping them faithful over time. We are part of a long and glorious tradition of historically Christian colleges. Our nation’s earliest colleges, Harvard (1636), Yale (1701), and Princeton (1746), were once stalwart Christian institutions which began, like our own, with great enthusiasm, faithful founders, godly faculty, eager students, and sacrificial supporters, and they started strong. But each in turn wandered into theological liberalism and unbelief within two generations. Why? And why does this story of strong starts and weak endings keep recurring in Christian higher education? Why have so many historically Christian colleges been apostate longer than they were orthodox? And what is to prevent the newest Christian college—or any of our TRACS-member institutions (including my own New Saint Andrews College )—from following the same tragic path?   

The reasons for the abandonment of the old paths, the faithful road, are manifold, but they are often linked to a common blindness that overcomes administrators, faculty, alumni, and churches to the temptations peculiar to our Christian colleges. And such temptations abound. They often appear insignificant or inconsequential initially, but when yielded to have had consistently devastating effects on institutional faithfulness. Sadly, the history of Christian higher education is littered with examples of institutions that did not adequately guard themselves against such temptations and fell into grave personal and institutional sins from which they have rarely recovered.

To identify and to resist these temptations, college boards, presidents such as ourselves, and our supporting churches need to ask some tough questions and honestly consider how our own academic institutions will answer them. Consider just two:  

▪ What are our Christian institutions doing today that seems harmless, ordinary, or “just the way it’s done,” but will bear a bitter harvest tomorrow?

▪ Why are so many Christian colleges academically and culturally indistinguishable (once you strip away chapel and a few Bible and theology classes) from their secular counterparts?

A brief review of the experiences of various Christian liberal arts institutions in America suggests that we have not been consistently vigilant or faithful in resisting the temptations unique to higher education. The histories may vary, but the stories of institutional drift toward unfaithfulness are remarkably similar—and surprisingly predictable.

Temptations are dangerous precisely because they are so attractive and seem so appealing at the time. No man is tempted to commit sexual sin with an ugly woman. Likewise, no Christian administrator is tempted to publicly prostitute his institution with ugly secularism.  Christian college trustees, faculty, students, and supporting churches rarely self-consciously abandon their foundational biblical principles or intentionally turn their institutions into pagan ones.  Instead, institutional apostasy and spiritual drift take time, moving almost imperceptibly in small steps over several years. Those small, incremental moves, however, have made the history of “historically Christian” colleges an especially tragic one.

The process of Christian institutional decline and apostasy has actually accelerated over the past 50 years as academic secularism has established deeper roots and broadened its authority through such seemingly innocuous sources as regional accreditation, professional affiliations, and federal financial aid. Christian colleges that give high priority to gaining public recognition and reputation typically lose their ability to recognize the antithesis between belief and unbelief. They thus gain the academic world and lose their souls as Christian institutions. While many may resist the big-E-on-the-eye-chart of institutional sins, Christian colleges have historically failed to preserve their Christian integrity by loving (secular) academic respectability, professional accolades, and institutional growth more than the Lord of higher education.

As those responsible to God and His church for the spiritual and academic integrity of our Christian colleges, we must get much better at recognizing and resisting the temptations peculiar to our Christian institutions—and in a hurry. If we don’t, the history of our own Christian colleges may look a lot like the rest of those that have been apostate longer than they were faithful.                                                   

The temptations peculiar to Christian colleges are many and varied. Let me highlight just 10 of the most common temptations to stumble colleges in our Christian tradition.

Financial Temptations

1.      The Temptation to Call Financial Folly an Act of Faith: This usually involves reaching beyond our financial means or “stepping out in faith” when the money is simply not there. The Book of Proverbs warns against sexual sins and financially folly as the two big temptations common to the saints. Christian academic institutions are especially vulnerable to temptations about money because we tend to have so little of it and we often compare ourselves to government schools, which have a seemingly endless supply of our tax dollars. Often yielding to this temptation is the bitter fruit of covetousness and impatience, and unwillingness to seek first the Kingdom, and to let God add His blessings in His good time and in His way.  

2.      The Temptation to Pretend Government Money Has No Strings Attached: It is tempting to seek funds wherever they are lawfully obtained, and today that means the federal financial aid system. But building a Christian college on a fundamentally anti-Christian system of academic financial aid is sheer folly, though it is often justified as “just the way things work.” Creating financial dependency on a government program at war with the Gospel puts our Christian academic institutions at risk financially and spiritually when the government announces in the not-too-distant future that we can no longer “discriminate” on the basis of sexual preference or orientation. Money temptations come in various forms and “helping the kids” this way is a particularly insidious evil because it plays on our sentiments and sympathies. Turning away from federal financial aid may seem like kicking puppies, but it is more akin to loving discipline and faithful obedience. This is perhaps the most dangerous and least acknowledged temptation responsible for stumbling many of our Reformed colleges.

Curricular Temptations

3.      The Temptation of Academic Consumerism: Secular colleges often offer any major that will get students in the door, and Christian colleges have parroted them blindly.  The decline of American higher education is closely tied to the move toward specialization at the undergraduate level and the proliferation of specialized degree programs. The very first academic major was not offered in the United States until 1878 at Johns Hopkins University . The fragmentation and decline of the undergraduate curriculum that followed, driven by industry and consumer demand, has been largely unchecked ever since. A Christian college that uncritically embraces the consumer demand model of education will soon be serving up secularism to increasingly pagan student consumer market and have no principled reasons why it can’t add yet another program or degree. And if the consumer is always right, then students, not the faculty, are in charge of the curriculum—and the asylum.

4.      The Temptation to Confuse Vocational Training with Education: The pragmatism of our age encourages academic vocationalism to produce highly trained, poorly educated graduates. The abandonment of the classical Christian model in higher education and the ascendancy of vocational-technical training at the collegiate level in the United States began with the 1862 Morrill Act, Congress’s opening of the higher education front in Civil War. It was no accident that the federal government passed what amounted to a direct attack on classical Christian higher education in the midst of the War Between the States, for this war was not just about slavery or national unity, but about the fundamental relationship of Christ to the Republic. The predominantly Unitarian North opened the academic front in the War with the clear purpose of undermining the place and prominence of America’s historically orthodox Christian colleges and universities, whose time-honored classical and Christian curricula had mentored virtually every major leader in the New Nation since Harvard’s founding by devout Puritan Calvinists in 1636. Horace Greeley, the militant abolitionist and socialist editor of the New York Tribune (infamous as the American publisher of Karl Marx’s communist editorials), declared in 1858, “We want a seminary which provides as fitly and thoroughly for the education of the Captains of Industry as Yale or Harvard does for those who are dedicated to either of the Professions.” The Morrill Act was the North’s strategic move to displace the Christian worldview with a secularized American civil religion over time. It attacked America ’s classical Christian education tradition and sought to reconstruct the nation on purely economic, technological, scientific, democratic, and secular (and most definitely not Christian) foundations. The leaders of this federal academic assault were devoted secularists who understood better than most Christians the religious issues at stake in the national culture war. Horace Mann, the so-called father of the American government school system and a former Calvinist turned radical Unitarian, encouraged “daily reading of the Bible, devotional exercises, and the constant inculcation of the precepts of Christian morality in all the Public schools” so it would disarm critics who knew where his secular vision for technical “education” would lead. Using the rhetoric of religion, Mann sought to outflank pious evangelicals with god-words while establishing a new educational system at war with the Word of God. The Christian community has been living in the ruins of this academic civil war ever since. If job training and career placement are the chief goals of higher education, then industry, not Christian principles or the Bible, will soon set the standards for that training. Besides, colleges simply cannot compete with most businesses or industries in providing the latest technology, hands-on experience, or seasoned, working professionals as trainers. Colleges that embrace vocationalism will struggle to maintain their Christian standards and to retain their academic integrity over time.

5.      The Temptation to Reduce Education to Information Transfer: Many, if not most, Christian colleges have abandoned the biblical notion of paideia (Eph. 6:4), that is, the godly nurturing of the whole Christian person, body, soul, and mind, and have replaced it with a Gnostic vision of stuffing students heads with disembodied ideas. Distance learning has also accelerated the transfer of data and information between people. That may have its place, but its tendency to reduce education to the transfer of data from one head to another has undermined education in its richer, deeper biblical sense. In a culture prone to technological idolatry (assuming the latest technology is an improvement to our lives), Christian colleges must resist abandoning their duty to nurture students deeply in the Christian way of life through close personal mentoring by godly professor-scholars. To yield to this temptation is to risk turning Christian higher education into Gnosticism.

6.      The Temptation to Give Enrollment Priority over Principle: Colleges are often tempted, typically for financial reasons, to admit students, who would otherwise not gain admittance. This is basic Christian Academic Ethics 101, but in difficult economic times, the temptation is real and strong. This may be an especially strong temptation for new or struggling institutions. Another angle to this temptation is for Christians to think like egalitarians and believe everyone must have a college education (otherwise we’re “discriminating”). As Calvinists we recognize that not all people are academically gifted or called to be college educated. And our Savior is not education. The lowered academic standards at major universities stems from this devotion to messianic character of higher education. Christian must resist the temptation to think of college education in egalitarian terms.

Professional Temptations

7.      The Temptation of Professionalism in Higher Education: Secular academic culture often encourages (even demands) secular definitions of professionalism to be the common currency among faculty in higher education. Advanced specialized training, “terminal” degrees, paper credentials, certification or licensing, grantsmanship, research productivity, and similar criteria are all that secularism can lean on in evaluating faculty competence. But the Bible regards all these as worthless without spiritual maturity, personal integrity, holiness, and an upright heart. Credentials without character are the acids of academic modernity and poison to a Christian college. A college that insists on Ph.D.s more than faithful faculty with a love of the Word, their subjects, and their students may meet accreditation standards, but condemn their institution in the process.

8.      The Temptation of Bowing to the Idols of Secular Paradigms: Accreditation agencies and professional societies often expect Christians to play by the same academic rules and standards established by those who radically reject the biblical foundations for the Christian academy. There is enormous pressure to bow the knee to the idols of the postmodern age, such as “academic freedom,” “diversity,” and “outcomes assessment.” Accreditation and federal financial aid often hang in the balance. However, if the antithesis between belief and unbelief is not manifest in how faculty members conduct their basic teaching, research, and service, then their institutions will lose their distinctively Christian character in short order. Christian administrators and faculty need to start thinking more critically and Christianly about the presuppositions of our contemporary academic culture and the idols that drive it.

Institutional Temptations

9.      The Temptation of Giantism: The seductive idea that bigger means better regularly tempts many board members, administrators, supporters, and constituents. For colleges, however, unbridled growth is often the beginning of woes and the end of principled decisions about staff hiring, facilities expansion, and curriculum development. Uncontrolled (or poorly managed) admissions will put enormous pressure on hiring more faculty members, and soon almost any warm body with a degree that can fill a podium will do. Once a college fudges on the spiritual and character qualifications of its faculty and staff in order to meet the demands of institutional growth, abandoning other Christian virtues will be easy. The edifice complex often follows, with more and bigger buildings that require more students to keep them filled. Bigger enrollments and buildings never guarantee institutional health and faithfulness. Historically, the inverse is true.

10. The Temptation of Misplaced Comparisons: Colleges must resist comparing themselves to others institutions like them today. Consider this historical reality check instead: most of our Christian college graduates today would not even be admitted to Christian colleges in the 18^th and 19^th centuries or earlier. We really have slipped that far academically and intellectually. Most of our institutions are doing a much better job than the government colleges and universities in educating the next generation. But they are not our standard. Academic standards have declined so far over the past century and a half that we’re still crawling up just to reach bottom. Let’s raise the bar back up to at least the level of our forefathers for the sake of Christ and His Kingdom and the generations to come.      

Conclusion

Pray that our colleges, young and old, would resist these and the many other temptations to abandon our biblical foundations and to disobey the Lord of the academy. If nothing else, the tragic history of Christian higher education shows us that we’ve done a poor job of maintaining academic faithfulness over time. Merely following the tradition of our academic forefathers or maintaining the status quo means our colleges’ orthodoxy will be short-lived. Pray that God would not only make our colleges faithful today, but for generations to come by being biblically faithful in our finances, curricula, professional standards, and institutional goals. And may we resist the various temptations peculiar to higher education that would cause us to be apostate longer than they were orthodox. God bless each and every one our TRACS institutions and God bless TRACS.

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