As I was finishing up this edition’s humor column for the “Director’s Cut,” a discussion popped up on one of the Internet mailing lists I subscribe to that addressed seriously, some of the issues I had just been poking fun at; advanced education for Christians. The discussion list focuses on issues of Christian Culture and has many highly qualified, intelligent, well-educated and articulate members who have a passion for a comprehensive Christian faith. It is always a pleasure reading what they write; and always challenging to disagree with them; there are some BRIGHT people here!

The particular issue that relates to my humor column concerned Christians who “feared” allowing their children to attend “Ivy League” or “brand name” institutions of higher learning. The argument goes something like this; “If we want to capture the culture for Christ, then we need to have our best and brightest achieve the best education possible.” Many were concerned that some Christians would be short-changing their children, let alone the goal of winning the culture, UNLESS our kids attended the “best” schools. After all, how can we re-build Christian civilization when our children attend at best, second and third rate academic institutions? Should not we be committed to capturing the BEST schools FOR Christ, rather than avoiding them? After all, a society is built upon its ideas; if Christians can regain intellectual prominence, then surely the culture will follow?

I am sympathetic to this position; but I also have some concerns - serious concerns. For it seems to me that over the past four hundred years of Christian civilization in America, the academics have been far more successful in capturing our children, then we have been in capturing those institutions for Christ.

Why is that? Surely the faith of our fathers is not some anti-intellectual gibberish that cannot withstand serious academic scrutiny? Why should advanced academic education put the faith of our children in danger?

My short answer is the same as the one the Apostle Paul gave, “Do not be deceived, bad company corrupts good morals.”

First, look at the statistics over the past fifty years and compare the number of college graduates with the number of Christians who apostatize; clearly there is a trend wherein broad evangelicals tend to lose their “faith” as a result of their college “experience.” Of course there is the sensuous lifestyle without moral restraints that may well entice some Christian kids into immorality-thus either side-tracking them for a while, or making them leave the faith to justify their immorality (it happens more than you think).

However I think the “cause” may be more subtle. Most people want to be accepted and liked; taking a public stand FOR the gospel in an environment where Biblical principles are ridiculed and held in contempt places enormous pressure on the individual to conform; pressure that most Christian kids are just not equipped to handle. For the average Christian student, all it takes is is a couple of “C’s” and they will fold like a busted flush. Blame it on the inadequate Christian worldview they started with, the compromised, privatized faith they accept, or whatever; the reality is that most Christians will have their faith, in one degree or another, undermined in secular universities.

Let me use one anecdote as an illustration; a good friend of mine became a Christian at about the same time as I did in the Air Force. We attended the same Christian fellowships, read the same books, memorized the same Scriptures and participated in the same kinds of evangelistic and discipleship ministries. We both left the Air Force at about the same time, both went to Christian colleges, then seminary and then grad school; me at the University of Lancaster in England, he to Aberdeen University in Scotland.

After two years at Lancaster I dropped out of the program. Even though I thought I was being “clever” by choosing an area of study where I would NOT have to compromise the faith by interacting with German liberal theologians (that’s why my dissertation was in the sociology of religion rather than in theology, hermeneutics, etc.), I was unable to get my Christian presuppositions past my academic supervisors. Now, to be honest, there was also another dynamic; I did not really understand how the English university system worked for doctoral students. A doctoral candidate is a classic “mentoring” program where the student’s relationship with his academic supervisor is just as important as his scholarly work. After all, it is expected that he has the competence to complete the degree program; otherwise he would not be accepted in the first place. No, what is really important is that he “fit” within the academic community. And no better way has been found to demonstrate that then in developing a close, personal relationship with his “mentor.”

In my case, I was expected to buy my supervisor free beer; in the two years, I only had three meetings with my supervisor, all which had to be scheduled weeks in advance. Each time we met in the college bar where it was assumed I provide him with free drinks and he would regale me with stories of famous drunks he had been on. I am not kidding here - for once I am not exaggerating something for the sake of a good joke. And oh, for the record, he was Scottish!

But I didn’t know that. I went to the library every day, took copious notes, developed highly structured outlines and after completing the “academic” part, went out into the field to see if I could prove my thesis with actual scientific research. After accepting my research proposal, and two years of rigorous work to demonstrating the scientific credibility of that thesis, as I was about to write my dissertation, I was told, “Your basic assumption is not academically acceptable.” Needless to say, I was a bit shocked.

It seems that the questionable “assumption” I had made was that “religion is a cause of social change.” Even though I spent most of the literature review demonstrating that sociologists had concluded that “religion is a cause of social change” I was told that this was “unacceptable” because the prevalent presupposition at the university was that “religion is a RESULT of social change.” You see, the evolutionary hypothesis was so strong, that despite “academic freedom” no conclusion could be accepted that went against the prevailing, humanist presuppositions.

As a result, I wasted two years and thousands of dollars with nothing but two 5 X 8 boxes of notes on index cards.

My friend on the other hand passed his oral exam first time round and was awarded his Ph.D. in New Testament from Aberdeen. When he sent a copy of his dissertation to us at the ministry where I was then working, I said to my boss (who also knew this dude); “I can tell by the title of his dissertation that he has compromised the faith.”

My boss was outraged that I would judge a man without even reading his dissertation. I replied that there was NO way our friend could EVER have written on that topic, in a modern university and get it past the examination committee WITHOUT compromising the faith. The academic world will just not allow politically incorrect conclusions to be published under their authority.

My boss still didn’t believe me. So, without reading the entire dissertation, I simply turned to the table of contents, found the relevant section, and read aloud his conclusion. My boss was shocked at what our friend had written (and a little impressed that I had nailed it!).

You see, my friend at Aberdeen had chosen to do some original exegetical work on Pauline theology regarding the role of women in the church. Right away, I KNEW that he could never actually allow the Bible’s message concerning role differences in the ministry to be defended because that conclusion CANNOT be accepted by modern egalitarian men. Therefore, he could never get an “orthodox” interpretation of 1 Timothy 2:11ff past his examination committee.

So somewhere, he made a decision. Either he wrote what they wanted him to write, despite his convictions to the contrary (therefore being deceptive) just to get the degree he had worked for so long (and for which he paid so much) OR he allowed his academic supervisors to convince him that the Bible was wrong. I suspect the second since my friend spent several hundred pages trying to reconcile his belief in the inerrancy of Scripture with the “errors” of Paul on women’s ordination. In fact, after actually reading his dissertation I coined a new phrase; “hermeneutical gymnastics” to identify the convoluted reasoning Christians will use when Scripture insists on a position which the culture condemns.

Either way, to get his degree, he had to sell out the faith.

A good man, yes in many respects, even a godly man, at best had the sharp edge of his faith dulled by his academic experience; at worst he became nothing more than a traitor willing to exchange fidelity to the eternal word of God for the approval of men. Though I have lost touch with him over the years, no doubt he is teaching somewhere in a Christian college today. I hope and pray that over the years he has repudiated his compromise of godly doctrine; but my life experience has been that men will find ways of justifying erroneous conclusions-and heaven knows there are enough churches, denominations and yes, Christian colleges and seminaries who will welcome him BECAUSE as a fully accredited academic from a prestigious institution, his conclusions JUSTIFY their own aberrant theology.

I on the other hand, was left with no advanced academic degree and no resources available to try again at another university. My GI Bill benefits were gone, my savings were exhausted, I was thirty-one years old and had now been married for 7 years; we wanted to start a family and I needed to find work.

So I took a degree from an unaccredited, distance learning institution that would allow me to use my original research and write the dissertation I wanted.

However, I had two outstanding men who served as my academic advisors; R. J. Rushdoony was one of them. And if Rush thought what I researched and wrote was “good” then at least, if nothing else, I KNOW that my original work was worth the time and trouble and the expense. In fact, the research I did back in 1983 is the basis of everything I have taught and written since then.

And yes, having that kind of degree is only one step up from useless. No college or university would ever hire me because quite simply I do not have the correct union card. So one pays a price for alternative education; a high price.

However, in the grand scheme of things, who has paid the higher price-me, or my friend? For you see, he had to sell his integrity for his degree. Granted, he is probably making a whopping $50,000 a year as a college professor in some small, Christian Liberal Arts college, but his faith has been seriously compromised, and he is compromising the faith of every one of his students.

I think sometimes, some of the people on the discussion list I mentioned earlier have unrealistic expectations of what the “average” Christian can accomplish. In many respects, these people are “elite” in that they read, think, write, discuss, ponder and consider what it means to have a consistent, comprehensive Biblical worldview. But that is NOT where the average Christian is at, and though THEIR kids, after being catechized, instructed in family worship and rigorously trained in the faith from a young age (not to mention possess genes that put them in the top 2% intellectually) might well do OK in a secular, high profile academic environment, the ‘average’ Christian might not fare so well.

Granted, my experience is limited and cannot be over-generalized; but every single faculty member I ever had in Christian college and seminary bore the scars from their highly regarded, Ivy League secular graduate programs. It is not that they “lost” their faith, but that they had been compromised. Why do you think so many Christian academics in various seminaries and Christian colleges sell out on Six-Day Creation? Is it not just because being a creationist was too uncomfortable to maintain against the constant evolutionary propaganda they were bombarded with?

In one of the research studies I examined for my own doctoral work at Lancaster, sociologists of religion showed that when men abandon a Christian worldview for a secular one, it was very rare to comprehend both systems and compare them; making a rational decision between the two based on the merits of each. Instead, men found themselves in social situations where their religious beliefs made them outsiders. Therefore, over time, they dropped those distinctive beliefs and practices just to “fit in.”

Sure, some Christian kids will make it through; but at what cost? How many of those who are “weak” will abandon the Faith? How many will just keep an “inner core” of private, subjective conviction, but essentially live and think like humanists in every other area? Is that not one of the main appeals of pietism in the first place; a sincere personal religion that does NOT bring one into conflict with social and cultural norms?

These are some of the concerns I have every time this issue comes up. Christians every generation have seen their institutions, and their children go heterodox since the founding of this country because we have been in love with prestigious academic degrees. Harvard was founded so that Puritan ministers would not have to go to Oxford or Cambridge which had sold out. Yale was founded because Harvard had sold out. Princeton was founded because Yale sold out. Westminster was founded because Princeton had sold out…

What they all share in common is the insistence that their professors have accredited degrees from prestigious universities; universities that have already abandoned the faith. Does anyone else see a connection here? The students pick up the errors of their professors, and when THEY become professors, pass those errors on to their own students. And after a couple of generations, we have to start all over again.

I do not know if I have any answer; but if you are headed in the wrong direction, the first step is to STOP DRIVING and try to figure out where you went wrong. The current system has not worked, is not working and SOMETHING different ought to be tried.