TheLionRampant.net

An interesting excerpt from an article called, ‘The Evangelical Mind Revisted’:

Wheaton, Baylor, and Calvin are all institutions featured in “The Opening of the Evangelical Mind,” a 2001 cover story I wrote for The Atlantic Monthly. In that essay, I tried to show that many liberal stereotypes about faith-based colleges were wildly out of date. Fed a steady diet of Elmer Gantry and Inherit the Wind, cosmopolitan inhabitants of places such as New York and Boston are likely to treat evangelicals as hopelessly backward clingers to creationism and scriptural literalism. They believe that if conservative Christians go to college at all, the institutions they attend are little better than degree mills flavored with faith—places where dogma and revealed truth replace logic and open-minded discussion.

Such stereotypes might once have been true, I argued, but conservative Christians today are not like they were yesterday. No longer confined to the rural regions of the country, evangelicals attend megachurches in exurban America, work as mid-level professionals in large corporations, and have upwardly mobile aspirations for their children. For them, college is an opportunity to be welcomed rather than an iniquity to be denounced. The published faculty at Calvin and Wheaton are as distinguished as the prospective students who clamor to get in; the SAT scores among Wheaton’s entering classes rival those at some of America’s most prestigious secular institutions. You do not attend Calvin or Wheaton—or, for that matter, other first-rate schools such as Westmont in California, Gordon in Massachusetts, or Seattle Pacific University—to imbibe intelligent design or to read the Bible rather than Emily Dickinson. I contend that the protests at Calvin and the refusal to condemn once frowned-upon behavior at Baylor and Wheaton as sinful suggest just how far these institutions have moved away from fundamentalist pieties.

Will conservative Christian colleges and universities continue to move toward the mainstream of American life? Should they? And what will happen to their institutions of higher learning if they do? Colleges exist as the pivotal point between youth and adulthood. Given how many believers there are in this country, the ways conservative Christian colleges respond to the world around them will tell us a great deal about the kind of country America is likely to be 30 or even 20 years from now.

The full text of the article can be found here. Anyone know how to get a copy of his 2001 Atlantic Montly article he mentions?

This entry was posted by Ashley on Friday, March 24th, 2006 at 6:01 pm. This entry was tagged with Culture, Living the Gospel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.