New York Times Magazine features New Saint Andrews

The New York Times, not exactly known for its ideological neutrality or friendliness toward conservative or evangelical instiitutions and causes, published a 2,500-word story on New Saint Andrews College in the Sept. 30, 2007 edition of its Magazine.

"Although the article overplayed the differences between New Saint Andrews and some of our sister evangelical colleges and inflated some minor issues into major ones, the article was generally fair and accurate," Roy Atwood, the College's president observed.

Molly Worthen, the author of the article, is a doctoral student in religious studies at Yale University. She spent 10 days in Moscow conducting dozens of interviews with faculty, students, and members of the Moscow community. The College gave her open access to the staff and students, and several famlilies opened their homes to her during her visit. Photographer Reuben Cox spent four days in Moscow taking hundreds of pictures. Only one photo (above) ran in the magazine.

Below are excepts from the article:

Excerpts from

Onward Christian Scholars

By MOLLY WORTHEN

Published: September 30, 2007

Every Friday afternoon in Moscow, Idaho, a strange commotion overruns Main Street. A stream of young men and women parade down the sidewalk, wearing black academic gowns that billow and flap as they walk. Some pore over Latin textbooks or thumb flashcards of ancient Greek vocabulary, nearly tripping at the curb. They are students at New St. Andrews College on their way to disputatio, a weekly assembly held in a movie theater downtown. The college itself has no room large enough to accommodate all 150 students at once: it occupies a single unassuming brick building a few blocks away, one that a stranger might mistake for the refurbished husk of an old savings and loan. Passers-by on their way to the Pita Pit or Hodgins Drug barely give the students a second glance. Not a few residents, however, have fought hard to keep them out of downtown. Founded in 1994 by the elders of a fast-growing and radically conservative church, New St. Andrews represents a new philosophy of evangelical education — one that has inspired a national movement and makes local liberals nervous.The students and teachers call what they are doing “classical Christian education.” They believe it’s much more than memorizing Latin declensions and Aristotle’s principles of rhetoric, though they do plenty of that. Doug Wilson, 54, the pastor who spearheaded New St. Andrews’ founding, puts the college’s purpose simply: “We are trying to save civilization.” He’s not alone in his mission. The C.C.E. movement began in the early 1980s among Protestant evangelical private schools and home-schoolers who scorned most conservative Christian colleges, which were long on classes in business management and Bible prophecy but short on history, literature and ideas. Now the movement boasts a host of home-schooling associations and curriculum companies, more than 200 private schools and college programs around the country. Evangelicals at New St. Andrews are using dead languages and ancient history to reinvent conservative Protestant education. As Matthew McCabe, an alumnus, puts it, “We want to be medieval Protestants.”

When you ask teachers and students what sort of school New St. Andrews is, they often cite one school they are not: Patrick Henry College, the evangelical college in Purcellville, Va., with a reputation for training home-schooled Christian students to wrest the reins of power from “secular humanists” in Washington. “We believe in a much longer view,” says Joshua Appel, a professor at New St. Andrews. The curriculum is modeled on the vision of “New England’s First Fruits,” a 1643 Massachusetts Bay Colony pamphlet describing the college lately founded in Cambridge. Besides required coursework in Latin and Greek, students at N.S.A. study natural philosophy (mostly taxonomy and creationist science), the Western literary canon, Euclidean geometry and theology; they also practice public speaking at a weekly declamation. Students drag themselves out of bed for classes that meet at 7:30 am, only half an hour later than classes once did at Puritan Harvard.

*************

The school has adopted trappings of Oxford and Cambridge: professors are called “fellows,” and students dress in academic gowns for thesis defenses and public final exams. Proudly Anglophile, faculty members lead a summer tour of English castles and abbeys. C. S. Lewis and G. K. Chesterton are ubiquitous on class reading lists — revered for their godly wit and their fondness for fine drink. N.S.A.’s campus is proudly wet, in deliberate contrast to the average fundamentalist Bible college.

The Oxbridge traditions; the college’s nine-point Latin grading scale (from Summa Cum Laude down to a failing Minime); the nameplates (in honor of Augustine, Calvin and the Presbyterian theologian J. Gresham Machen) that take the place of room numbers outside its three modest classrooms; these constantly remind students that they attend a Christian college with class. Donna Foucachon, an American who moved to Idaho from Lyon, France, with her French husband after their sons chose to attend New St. Andrews, said that the N.S.A. education impressed her French brother-in-law, who “is an extremely cultured, educated man who worked in government and ate with the shah. He’s not of the same [religious] persuasion as us, but he looks at what they’re studying, and he says, This is true education.” N.S.A. aims to turn on its head the historian Richard Hofstadter’s old stereotype of the resentful evangelical bumpkin who equates intellectual life and high culture with privilege and social status he doesn’t have.

These flourishes are also intended as proof of intellectual seriousness. “I’m critical of evangelical anti-intellectualism — the attitude that it’s not important to learn because we’ll all be raptured soon,” says Matthew McCabe, the N.S.A. alumnus, who is now pursuing a Ph.D. in medieval English literature at the University of Toronto. “I’m also critical of the view of pragmatists, who are receptive to education but only to pragmatic ends.” Fundamentally, the college tries to reunite faith and reason: to devise a medieval antidote to the post-Enlightenment confinement of religion to Sunday morning. In a community this tightly knit, where weekends bring more bonding at church, marathon Sunday brunches and endless “psalm sings” (if you come to N.S.A. without having mastered four-part fugal harmony, you’d better learn quick), the pomp and ritual further bond students from 31 states and five foreign countries into a band of cultured missionaries.

*************

The phrases that N.S.A. students are trained to use — like “Christian worldview” and “presuppositions” — are the tag lines of the theological tradition that partly inspired their college. In the early 20th century, a Dutch theologian named Cornelius Van Til introduced a kind of theology called presuppositionalism. He argued that no assumptions are neutral and that the human mind can comprehend reality only if proceeding from the truth of biblical revelation. In other words, it is impossible for Christians to reason with non-Christians. presuppositionalism is a strangely postmodern theory that denies the possibility of objectivity — though it does not deny the existence of truth, which belongs to Christians alone.

According to critics, this school of thought equips young Christians to read and discuss non-Christian ideas without ever taking them seriously. “The trouble is that once you’ve figured out someone’s presuppositions, you can write them off as right or wrong without having to deal with their arguments. . . . It becomes anti-intellectual,” says Darryl Hart, a historian who has taught at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, the birthplace of presuppositionalism. Token “anti-Christians” like Margaret Sanger, Karl Marx and Charles Darwin appear on N.S.A. syllabuses, but students say these rarely generate serious debate. Darwin, for his part, remains only “a curious event in the history of modern secularism,” Matthew McCabe says.

****************

New St. Andrews’s chronic spats with liberals in town belie the claim that one can wholly separate the noble liberal arts from the crass business of politics. “For years, evangelicals have been fighting abortion and evolution with rubber-band guns, but there’s all this great stuff from thousands of years ago, when they were wrestling with similar questions,” says Joanna Gray, a 24-year-old alumna. “It’s there to be found — you just have to study and find it.”