‘Fundamentalist U’
Author discusses his new book on evangelical higher education
I’m interested in fundamental questions about education, politics and culture. I want to know more about competing visions about saving America by creating good schools.
For questions like that, the network of interdenominational evangelical colleges and universities is the obvious place to start. No other family of institutions has been as successful in promoting a dissenting view of the right way to educate students at all levels. In short, I think these colleges should be of primary interest to anyone interested in American politics and culture. After all, our culture-war disagreements aren’t between educated people on one side and uneducated people on the other. Rather, they are fiercest between two groups of people who have been educated very differently. more…
Fascinating interview. Here are a couple more quotes too interesting to pass up:
In one sense, the institutions in my book — a network of interdenominational evangelical colleges and universities that first came together in the fundamentalist movement of the 1920s — has some huge advantages when it comes to teaching students how to live moral lives. Unlike many mainline and secular schools, evangelical colleges have never doubted that moral instruction was their primary purpose. To that end, evangelical schools have always insisted first and foremost on maintaining strict rules on student behavior.
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In all the archives I visited, this was the most pressing question in all the letters I read, in all the editorials and whisper campaigns and snarky gossip among evangelical intellectuals: Is College X or Y still “true”? A primary goal of the fundamentalist movement of the 1920s was to find a way to save higher education from the slippery slopes that had — according to the fundamentalists — destroyed evangelical schools in the late 1800s.
Since the 1920s, conservative evangelical intellectuals and college administrators have spent considerable resources to both remain true to their religious identity and to prove beyond any doubt to the wider evangelical community that they did so. This was more than a quirk; it was an institutional life-or-death issue.
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