CHAPTER ONE
SPIRITUAL MEAT-GRINDER
It’s the first day of Philosophy 101. After mumbling a few words about the syllabus and how hard people will have to work for an “A,” the professor pauses and asks: “Before we begin, is anyone in this class a Christian?” A first-year student two-thirds of the way back in the vast lecture hall shifts uneasily. She glances around. Among the sea of students, hers is the only hand raised.(1)
*****
A twenty-three year old student has been sent to represent her church at its denomination’s annual national youth gathering. At a break-out session on homosexuality the group moderator prefaces the discussion by saying, “Let’s not bring a lot of preconceived notions to the table here... We shouldn’t think of the Bible as a moral authority for all time, but as a really good self-help book.”(2)
*****
An atheist in Swarthmore College’s senior class laments that there is so little dialogue between believing Christians and non-Christians because of “the discourse of tolerance that is such an important part of liberal campus life.” His observation? “Nonbelief is assumed” and “religion is silent.”(3)
*****
We would estimate that about one out of three teenagers is likely to actually attend a Christian Church after they leave home. (4)
I’d like to come right out and ask you a question. It might seem impolite and it might seem harsh. It’s a question about which there is almost a conspiracy of silence. Nobody seems to want to talk about it. But it’s a very real issue.
Why do so many Christians apparently lose their faith after high school? What is it about life after youth group that overwhelms so many Christians' faith?
I’m not trying to scare you. I’m just trying to get you to think about it.
I don’t have a complete answer to my question, and I’m not going to speculate on all the reasons. No doubt there are plenty. Beer (the party atmosphere), peers (the desire to fit in), and fear (of being known as a Christian) all play a part.
But I think one of the big reasons –- one that doesn’t get enough attention at all – is “the bubble.”
A Little Personal History
I’m writing this book to share some things I wish I’d known in my last two years of high school and after. Knowing these things would have made me more aware, would have helped me better understand my professors and fellow students, could very well have helped me get better grades, and might even have made me more popular with girls!
I became a Christian in the middle of my junior year in high school through Youth for Christ (YFC). I’d heard some Bible stories in the past, but I had never really heard the gospel—that God loved me and had sent his Son for me personally! Hearing the gospel for the first time was amazing. Finding other Christians and growing in faith with them was even better!
YFC stressed that in order to grow as a whole person, you needed to develop socially, physically, spiritually, and mentally. You weren’t to neglect any area of your life.
Being social was not my strong suit. But I had a chance to grow socially through rubbing shoulders with people at school, in YFC, in church, and through a little bit of dating.
I took care of the physical by participating in team sports (football and tennis, if you must know). My football team might not have been big, but we were slow.
Spiritually I grew through YFC Bible studies and events, through linking up with believers on my campus and by getting involved in a Bible-believing church. I also started reading my “Reach Out” Living New Testament and trying to spend time with God, if not each day, at least several times each week.
However, it seemed that YFC and the church expected that the mental part would take care of itself. You were supposed to simply put your nose to the grindstone, try to be a halfway decent student, and everything would turn out okay.
The only problem: it wasn’t that simple then, and it isn’t any simpler now. It used to be that being a committed follower of Jesus meant swimming against the cultural stream. Now you have to swim against the fire hose. And unfortunately, most young Christians simply aren’t prepared mentally for the entirely predictable challenges that college and the wider culture will present.
The Deal About College
I went from a medium-sized public high school to a small liberal arts college. Large or small, prestigious or not, community college or university, the college environment will work you in many ways. It’ll be a time of firsts: your first time away from home; (perhaps) your first serious dating relationship; your first time to be required to read three or four thousand pages—per class!
There is also time pressure, financial pressure, roommate pressure, grade pressure, and the pressure of choosing a field of concentration and a career path.
Duh, you may say. Okay. I’ll move on.
In college I met quite a few people who had walked away from Christian faith. It seemed to me that more people lost faith than held onto it. There was a spiritual meat-grinder churning away, but I was too busy trying to survive academically and spiritually myself to figure out what was going on.
One-on-one I was okay with people, but in public too often I allowed myself to be intimidated into silence. I just didn’t want to deal with the mocking and ridicule I knew would come. I tried to fortify myself spiritually by involvement in the Christian fellowship on campus, doing evangelism and by having dorm Bible studies. (5) There was one Christian professor who was really encouraging. By doing some extra reading I was able to overcome to a certain extent that lonely feeling you get as a Christian in an unfriendly spiritual environment by enjoying the company of great Christian minds such as J.R.R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and Frances Schaeffer.
Diversity and Multiculturalism
In today’s college environment, on top of all the old biases and arguments against Christian faith, there are some unique, new challenges.
Many campuses are pursuing ethnic and social diversity (a good thing) by means of multiculturalism (a questionable proposition). Multiculturalism is the doctrine that no culture ought ever to be seen as better than any other and that no culture ought ever be judged on terms other than its own.
What gets left behind in all this is exposure to diversity of opinions. A “diversity agenda” ought to mean encountering a wide range of cultures and opinions so students can become well-read and well-rounded. Unfortunately, the diversity agenda often ends up promoting a narrow band of approved opinion that is highly allergic to dissent. (6) On some campuses the pursuit of the diversity agenda can lead directly to racial and religious discrimination. A professor at Cornell Law School recounts:
I sat in admissions committee meetings at Cornell in which African-American students who expressed conservative points of view were disfavored because "they had not taken ownership of their racial identity." An evangelical student was almost rejected before I pointed out that the reviewer's statement that "they did not want Bible-thumping or God-squading on campus" was illegal and immoral. (7)
At Tufts University a Christian group was denied student funding because they would not allow an openly gay student to assume leadership. The group had to fight against much opposition to have their funding reinstated. (8)
Anti-diversity can be amazingly strong in certain academic departments. For example, on some campuses, whole departments of Middle East studies have become hotbeds of virulent anti-Americanism, anti-Israel and anti-Jew sentiments, with professors not even trying for a semblance of balance in the classroom. (9)
Speech Taboos, Thought Police and Christophobia
Recently at Dartmouth University, the president of the Dartmouth Student Assembly addressed the freshman class in an opening-week convocation speech. He quoted Martin Luther King, Jr., Shakespeare, and Bono. The Bono quote mentioned Jesus, then the student president did: “Character has a lot to do with sacrifice, laying our personal interest down for something bigger. The best example of this is Jesus. . . . He knew the right thing to do. He knew the cost would be agonizing torture and death. He did it anyway. That’s character.”
The vice president resigned in protest. The campus newspaper erupted in great indignation. The speech was denounced as a “reprehensible and an abuse of power” and “appalling.” The student president had “embarrassed” the college and himself. He had chosen an “inappropriate forum” to exercise free speech. In short, he had broken the taboo of speaking on a topic that was considered off-limits. He had violated “polite society” at Dartmouth by being a public Christian. (10)
In the 1980s and 1990s, some three hundred American universities enacted (semi-legal) speech codes designed to limit “offensive” speech. (11) Allegedly for the purpose of encouraging civility, tolerance, and appreciating differences, (12) speech codes often then evolved into attempts to police thought through restricting speech. (13) On some campuses free speech could only be tolerated in designated “free speech zones,” in effect making free speech off-limits everywhere else.
Strict speech codes have been used as weapons against individuals and groups. Enforcement can get ugly. One Cal Poly student was hanging up posters in a lobby advertising a black author coming to speak about how African Americans need to take responsibility for their own destiny and work to get up in the world. One woman became very offended. The student’s remarks were labeled “hate speech”; he was hauled before a student court and forced to undergo lengthy tribunals (during finals week), ordered to undergo psychological testing and to take “sensitivity” and “diversity” training, branded uncooperative when he refused, pressured to sign a “confession” that would have been entered into his permanent academic record, and threatened with academic probation and being thrown off campus! Only a lawsuit prevented Cal Poly from expelling the boy. The very clear message: Don’t mess with tolerance! (14)
Complicating the picture is Christophobia, an irrational, prejudiced, and judgmental reaction against Christ, Christians, and Christianity (“traditional” or “organized” religion). (15) If you “come out” as a Christian, you could very well be stereotyped as an intolerant, bigoted, fundamentalist, sexist, narrowminded, judgmental, ignorant, hateful, homophobic, holier-than-thou, hypocritical, sexually repressed, redneck, racist, genocidal, demagogic, warmongering, Fascist, Nazi, running dog capitalist, and/or neocolonialist pig. You’d be better off if you were Attila the Hun.
Taking the Log Out of Our Eye
A word should be said about Christophobia. Every religion has its dark side, and Christianity is no exception. If we’re honest about history, we have to admit that Christians (good intentions or not) have committed atrocities in the name of God. Some Christians have used the Bible to support white racial superiority. Euro-centric Christians have sometimes confused the kingdom of God with Western culture. The West has a legacy of slavery, witch-burning, the Inquisition, anti-Jewish pogroms, religious wars, and the colonialist oppression of indigenous and aboriginal peoples. And let us not forget how the Lutheran state church in Germany allowed itself to be co-opted by Nazism; German soldiers actually had Gott mit uns(“God with us”) emblazoned on their belt buckles.
It doesn’t help when some Christians project an “us versus them” image in which “we” are pure and moral while “they” are the opposite. This perilous path denies two huge biblical truths: (a) that all are sinners and (b) that our righteousness/purity only comes from Christ. We Christians need to have the humility and forthrightness to confess our sins and the sins of our ancestors honestly and fully. We and our ancestors have missed the mark. We lose our credibility if we don’t own up to this fact.
No Magic Bullet
The Christian bubble doesn’t just affect college students; it affects all Christians moving out on their own. There’s a church-wide lack in preparing young people to actually engage our culture. A simple-minded faith, a positive high school youth group experience, and a pat on the head are not enough.
Worse, the church has often painted Christian grade school and high school students into a tiny intellectual corner, feeding them a lot of either/or thinking. At the slightest hint that something might sound different from what they learned in Sunday School, kids are trained to stop listening and to offer conversation-stopping responses that amount to “I’m right and you’re wrong” or “I’m going to heaven and you’re not.” There’s a fearfulness and a brittleness of thinking that many churches unwittingly encourage, causing Christian kids to wither or withdraw from the culture rather than to engage it.
These attitudes not only lack compassion; they also lack Christian vision.
Now if you are a youth pastor or youth volunteer, please do not take offense. I thank and praise God for you. I don’t want to take anything away from what you are doing. Your ministry is immeasurably important. Teaching kids to walk with God, to love God’s Word and to resist the siren call of the world is sorely needed. All I am saying is this: the church also needs to prepare young people for the coming intellectual onslaught against the core of their faith.
You Can’t Always Get What You Want
Some Christian parents, sensing that secular colleges and universities are minefields their kids shouldn’t have to walk through, hope that putting their kids in an insulated and “safe” Christian college environment is the answer.
Like it or not, our society is now pluralistic – with many cultures, religions, philosophies and lifestyles living side-by-side, jostling each other, influencing each other, and to a certain extent, trying to convert each other to their version of what’s good and true. As good as a Christian college might be, there is no guarantee that at the end of four years a graduate will be any better prepared to function as an effective, confident public representative of Christian faith in our pluralistic society than a graduate of a secular university would be. He or she may merely have obtained four more years of putting off the inevitable confrontation with non-Christian thought.
Another issue is that there are many kids who go to Christian colleges who never had a living faith before they got there; others lose their faith at the very Christian schools that were designed to keep them in the fold.
Then there’s the Harvard effect: even colleges founded on Christian vision and principles can lose focus and gradually become, for all intents and purposes, secular. Many of the Ivy League schools founded to promote Christian character and virtue lost their Christian distinctiveness long ago. To compete for what they considered the best teachers, they loosened their doctrinal commitments. To appear to adhere to “academic freedom,” they invited professors to come and to teach directly against Christian faith. (16)
I’m not against striving for excellence. But striving for excellence at a Christian college must at least mean exploring the unique and wildly attractive Christian worldview while covering the same knowledge base taught in secular universities. It’s obviously not good enough to be taken over by non-Christian worldviews; but it’s also not good to totally insulate students in Christian colleges from anti-Christian influences. A good Christian university that’s preparing graduates to interact in a pluralistic world shouldn’t want to do that anyway.
Bottom line: You need to prepare yourself spiritually and mentally for striking out into the big world. Without some idea of the rocks and shoals you’re getting into, you can shipwreck your faith. It can happen to anyone at any time, inside or outside the college environment.
Just thought you might like to know.
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1. Personal conversation with Maddie Venezuela (Spring, 2000) on her experience at a local community college.
2. Personal conversation (July 2001) with Alison Lucic, youth representative from Community Presbyterian Church (Ventura) to the PCUSA General Convention in 2000.
3. “Spirituality on America’s Liberal Campuses: A call for dialogue” by Micah White. From Free Inquiry magazine, Vol. 21 No. 4. Found at http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/white_21_4 htm on 10/28/2004.
4. George Barna’s Third Millennium Teens (1999 – out of print). See also this Barna Update: “Twentysomethings Struggle to Find Their Place in Christian Churches.” Found 3/11/2005 at
http://www.barna.org/FlexPage.aspx?Page=BarnaUpdate&BarnaUpdateID=149
5. Here’s my big plug for finding vital Christian fellowship after high school: Yes, develop your own personal walk with Christ; but realize that the Christian life is not meant to be a Lone-Ranger experience. Get plugged in. Give of yourself somewhere.
6. See “America’s one-party state” in The Economist, 12/04/2004. Downloaded 12/4/2004 from http://www.economist.com/world/na/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=3446265. See also the website for Students for Academic Freedom at http://www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org.
7. Anecdote told by David French. Found at Best of the Web at http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110006697 (5/16/2005).
8. Andrea Billups’ article from the Washington Times (5/17/2000). Found at http://www.thefire.org/index.php/article/4167.html. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) website, a nationwide networking tool, documents cases of discrimination and infringement of protected speech on campuses across the nation.
9. A summary of Martin Kramer’s study Ivory Towers on Sand; seeRachel Zabarkes Friedman’s “Diversity at Princeton: The quieter front of the Middle East-studies battles.” (3/15/2005) at http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/friedman200503140748.asp.
10. See Stefan Beck’s “‘God Fearing’ Dartmouth” at http://nationalreview.com/comment/beck200509270812.asp and William F. Buckley, Jr.’s “Church/State at Dartmouth” at http://nationalreview.com/buckley/wfb200509271452.asp, both accessed 9/27/2005.
11. See Harvey Mansfield’s “The Cost of Free Speech,” a book review of Restoring Free Speech and Liberty on Campus by Donald Alexander Downs, first published by the Weekly Standard (9/28/2005) and republished on David Horowitz’s FrontPageMag website at http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=19615 accessed 9/28/2005.
12. Understood properly, all three of these values can be defended on biblical grounds. Jesus showed respect for all people based upon their common human dignity. He loved all people and persuaded them with his example, rather than forcing his opinions on them. His love was universal, a love that goes far beyond tolerance, although tolerance is a good start for most of us. Also, “all things were created by him and for him” (Colossians 1:16), so of all people He would be in the greatest position to appreciate the diversity in creation and cultures.
13. I am thinking of George Orwell’s great novel 1984 here. In 1984, the powers-that-be used the technique of doublespeak (the changing and reversing of the meanings of words in order to confuse opponents and deny them the vocabulary to contradict their doctrines)to enforce groupthink (conformity of thinking). Read Orwell’s essay at the end of the novel.
14. See http://www.thefire.org/index.php/article/25.html and See “Brainwashing 101,” a documentary film by Evan Coyne Maloney. Maloney records bias at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Brown University and the University of Tennessee. See http://academicbias.com/bw101.html (found 6/17/2005).
15. See George Weigel’s The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God (Basic, 2005). Weigel argues that Europe’s elites are Christophobic.
16. The historian George M. Marsden has traced this process in his book The Soul of the American University: from Protestant establishment to established unbelief (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
