Forty years ago, Richard Hofstadter dismembered the opponents of freedom of thought in his Pulitzer Prize-winning work Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. Evangelical Protestants, with their emotional revivals, were ranked as prime offenders. “The nature of the evangelical spirit itself no doubt made the evangelical revival anti-intellectual,” he wrote, “but American conditions provided a particularly liberating milieu for its anti-intellectual impulse.”1 By the 19th century, Hofstadter argued, this impulse would reach across denominational lines, weakening the importance of liberal education for generations of believers.
At first glance, the recent dispute over accreditation for Patrick Henry College in Purcellville, Virginia, an evangelical college that requires the teaching of six-day creationism, might suggest that not much has changed. The dust hasn’t yet settled over last year’s decision by an national accreditor to withhold approval. Officials at Patrick Henry insist that debate must always be balanced by dogma, while critics describe the school’s loyalty oath, demanding that faculty adhere to a “Statement of Biblical Worldview,” as an obstacle to academic freedom. The accrediting body, the American Academy for Liberal Education (AALE), ruled that the oath controls curricula and teaching in a way that “inhibits the acquistion of basic knowledge.” Specifically, the organization doubted that students would learn basic science.
Patrick Henry launched a noisy counteroffensive, calling the judgment “tainted with religious discrimination.” College President Michael Farris said the accrediting body denied the school’s right to believe differently from the norms of academia. “I think we are victims of the evolutionist thought police,” he complained. The college immediately challenged the ruling, sending the issue to the AALE’s Board of Directors.
Following a review, the board agreed in November to grant the school “pre-accreditation” status—the first step to full academic approval—but not before Patrick Henry amended its policy. Creationism remains the correct creed, but the new statement instructs science faculty to fully explain evolution and other alternative theories. “We have never objected to their Christian beliefs. But we have certain standards, and Patrick Henry didn’t meet them,” says AALE president Jeffrey Wallin. “This is exactly the way standards are supposed to work.” College officials maintain they merely clarified existing guidelines. Nevertheless, Farris has adopted a more conciliatory tone: “We are very heartened by the action of the AALE and look forward to working with them in the future.”
Whatever the future holds for Patrick Henry—the pre-accreditation phase lasts five years—the controversy raises fresh questions about the future of Christian higher education. The AALE is no friend of Bible-bashing relativists. The organization approves only colleges devoted to a classical liberal education, among them some of the most conservative and forthrightly religious programs in the country. Its dispute with a fundamentalist school can’t be described simply as a clash between faith and the scientific method, between Christianity and secularism, or even between orthodoxy and liberalism. At issue is an argument over academic standards, academic freedom, and the intellectual traditions that sustain them, touching on all of these conflicts but not reducible to any of them. The views that prevail will help redefine the content and purposes of education—a struggle by no means confined to Christian institutions.
The Academy in Crisis
Patrick Henry was founded a little over two years ago to challenge the secular ethos of American higher education. The school offers a “classical American education,” with majors in government and classical liberal arts. There are courses in Western civilization, the American Founding, and American-style democracy. Before joining the college, Farris led the Home School Legal Defense Association, an experience that gave him a passion to send Christians into the political system. Patrick Henry’s Virginia location puts it close to Washington, D.C., and its students—mostly homeschoolers—can earn credit by doing policy work for lawmakers. The stated mission: prepare Christian students for public leadership in a nation desperately in need of moral renewal.
The AALE was launched in the early 1990s by academics who saw universities facing a moral and intellectual crisis brought on by radical ideologies. Pseudo- academic fads had replaced the core curriculum, these dissenters believed, while old ideas about the aims of education—to discover truth and cultivate virtue—were jettisoned. Jacques Barzun, the Columbia philosopher and historian, said he helped found the organization because “students haven’t learned to think, and the leading universities are leading us down a pit.”2 AALE president Wallin, who worked for conservative Bill Bennett at the National Endowment for the Humanities, noted a widespread failure to educate students in America’s political principles. A recent survey of students at 55 top universities found that over a third didn’t know the Constitution established the division of powers. “Liberal education means handing down the truths of the past and being open about inquiry,” Wallin says. “It is the most fundamental kind of learning for a free republic.”
In 1995, the AALE was recognized by the U.S. Department of Education as the only national accreditor for liberal arts colleges. (Among other benefits, accreditation allows qualifying institutions to receive federal financing and research money.) Unlike the nation’s six regional accreditors, the AALE promotes colleges with a core curriculum—majoring on literary classics, the political and cultural history of Western civilization, and the founding principles of American society. While the AALE requests evidence of “rigorous and substantial” exposure to liberal learning, other agencies focus on specific disciplines such as medicine or the law, or on administrative matters such as credit hours, student life, or budget issues.
Faith-based schools receive respectful treatment from AALE accreditors. To date, the agency has approved nine colleges, all considered conservative, most of them overtly religious. Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula, California, was accredited two years ago as a Catholic institution which demands that intellectual life “be conformed to the teachings of the Christian faith.” Southern Virginia University, also recently certified, adheres to the articles of faith of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “We assume that faculty know the theology of the church and basically live by it,” says Monte Nyman, academic vice president. At the Baptist-affiliated Baylor University in Waco, Texas, faculty are “asked point blank” about their religious views and expected to endorse a statement of faith, says Frieda Blackwell, an associate dean who chaired the school’s accreditation committee. “The mission of Baylor is integrating academic excellence and Christian commitment,” she says. “That shows up in every document people get from us.”
Orthodoxy, Narrowly Defined
On the face of it, that’s not much different from policies at Patrick Henry. Moreover, the school applauds the AALE’s critique of the academy and its commitment to classical education. So why did a conservative accreditor blink? The answer goes to the heart of the fundamentalist temptation: a willingness to suspend legitimate debate for the sake of theological conformity.
According to Patrick Henry’s “Statement of Biblical Worldview,” all courses dealing with man’s origins—in science or theology—must present strict creationism as the only acceptable view. Under its revised statement, the school expects biology faculty to provide “a full exposition of the claims of the theory of Darwininan evolution.” Nevertheless, professors must teach a literal reading of Genesis 1, meaning the world was created in six 24-hour days, as the biblical and biological truth. Employment policies are no less exacting: “All faculty for such courses will be chosen on the basis of their personal adherence to this view.”
It’s hard to find a comparable standard among Patrick Henry’s evangelical peers. The Coalition for Christian Colleges and Universities, the lead association for evangelical schools in America, places no similar rule on its members. Yet the 101-member coalition could hardly be accused of going soft on orthodoxy: Only colleges that require faculty to profess personal faith in Jesus Christ are allowed in. Member schools begin with the Bible as God’s special revelation; man’s creation in the image of God is a given. Nevertheless, the precise mechanism of human origins remains debated at most Christian institutions.
“None that I have ever seen would attempt to tell a faculty member anything of this level of detail,” says coalition president Robert Andringa. “Most of them do not try to dictate an institutional view on a controversial issue within the faith.” Not even Bryan College in Dayton, Tennessee, named for William Jennings Bryan—the fundamentalist firebrand in the Scopes “monkey trial”—insists that faculty embrace six-day creationism. “We accept what the Book of Genesis says without trying to parse that out specifically,” explains Ken Froemke, the school’s dean. “The Bible isn’t a science book.”
What troubles some academics most is not Patrick Henry’s conservative theology per se, but the intellectual temperament behind it. Prior to the 1920s, most evangelicals accepted scientific evidence for an old earth. Some, such as fundamentalist theologian B.B. Warfield, allowed for a version of evolution in an effort to describe God’s method of creating plants, animals, and even the human body. “Creationism was not a traditional belief of 19th century conservative Protestants or even of early 20th century fundamentalists,” writes Wheaton College historian Mark Noll in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. Nevertheless, many fundamentalists eventually adopted what Noll calls a “super supernaturalism,” in which they demonized the ordinary study of nature.3
Patrick Henry College and its defenders demur. They say an unapologetic statement of belief is exactly what’s needed in higher education; too many formerly Christian schools dumbed down the faith to achieve academic respectability. As Farris told Christianity Today, academic élites seem determined to “divorce Christianity from what they consider the secular areas of life.”4
He has a point. Beginning in the 19th century, liberal Protestants tried to make education “nonsectarian” by dwelling on the moral benefits of faith. Doctrine eventually became a dirty word, and many Christian schools abandoned their religious identity altogether. The result was the exclusion of religiously informed points of view from academic pursuits. “It is a story of secularization,” concludes Notre Dame historian George Marsden in The Soul of the American University. “The free exercise of religion does not extend to the dominant intellectual centers of our culture.”5 By holding fast to a statement of faith, Patrick Henry is standing against the secular tide. Says Paul Bonicelli, the college’s dean of academic affairs: “The best way to ensure that is to stay as solid as you can on that [creationism] teaching.”
Nevertheless, the vast majority of Christian schools—Bible colleges, seminaries, universities—have eschewed Patrick Henry’s approach as doctrinaire. By defining and applying Christian orthodoxy so rigidly, they say, the school risks shutting down legitimate academic debate. “What academic freedom is all about is the pursuit of truth,” argues Anthony Diekema, former president of Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. “When you leave nothing open to that pursuit, there’s bound to be concern within the academic community.” For its part, the AALE says it will monitor Patrick Henry to make sure academic standards are being met. “They were approved with conditions,” Wallin says. “If they’re not teaching standard science, there will be a problem.”
Dogma from the Left
Despite the polemics of some scholars, academic freedom has never been conceived without restrictions; it always comes with obligations to host institutions and the public good. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) made this plain in a 1940 “Statement of Principles,” reiterated in a statement last year: “Whatever the legal scope,” the AAUP said, “it is clear that the First Amendment protection of individual academic freedom is not absolute.”6
Indeed, secular institutions regularly place limits on faculty—formally and informally—based on their own ideological commitments. Professors who don’t toe the party line on issues such as race, gender, or sexuality have little hope of tenure; others face censure, isolation, or other penalties. Postmodern icon Stanley Fish routinely derides the vocabulary of academic freedom as a pious sham.
A religious worldview is no more an obstacle to intellectual inquiry than a secular one—maybe less so. Institutions guided by faith, expressed in doctrinal statements, once defined the landscape of American higher education. The emergence of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and scores of other schools can’t be understood apart from religious belief. As Hofstadter himself acknowledged, clergy of the colonial era “spread enlightenment as well as religion, fostered science as well as theology, and provided models of personal devotion to things of the mind.”7
At Princeton in the 1770s, president John Witherspoon, an evangelical minister, scorned the impulse to elevate “spiritual” knowledge at the expense of tough intellectual labor. “We see sometimes the pride of unsanctified knowledge do great injury to religion,” he admitted. “On the other hand, we find some persons of real piety, despising human learning, and disgracing the most glorious truths” of Christianity.8 Educators saw the pursuit of God and the pursuit of knowledge—scientific or otherwise—as intimately connected. As late as 1924, the founding bylaws of Duke University could proclaim “the eternal union of knowledge and religion set forth in the teachings and character of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”9
Those days are long gone in élite institutions, however, replaced by a deep discomfort with religious viewpoints. Phi Beta Kappa, the nation’s premier honor society, routinely discriminates against colleges with religious qualifications for faculty.10 The AAUP—which once called fundamentalism “the most sinister force that has yet attacked freedom of teaching”—has censured schools for firing professors for religious reasons.11 After a visit to evangelical colleges, sociologist Alan Wolfe concluded that loyalty oaths represent a “proclivity toward illiberalism.” Writing for The Atlantic Monthly, Wolfe claimed that agreeing to such oaths could not be a voluntary act, much less a source of academic excellence. Indeed, he even suggested that religious identification of this kind feeds a culture of “fanaticism and paranoia.”12
Anyone who grasps the nature of Christian faith, however, finds these arguments bizarre. From the days of the Apostles, Christianity has been a religion awash in historical and theological claims, starting with this one: “If Christ has not been raised from the dead,” Paul told the church in Corinth, “your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.” Here is a religion defined by doctrines: statements about God, man, evil, and redemption. That’s why believers are always hammering out creeds and confessions, and joining churches and associations that teach them. Without doctrine, the faith has no meaning and Christian service—to say nothing of Christian martyrdom—carries no rational purpose.
For thoughtful evangelicals, robust faith informs their intellectual quest as well. For them, the academic task is too weighty for sentiment alone; it must be shored up by the mind’s love of God, by theology. The observer who visits the finest evangelical colleges and misses this fact is akin to the medical examiner who begins an autopsy on a body still very much alive: There are clear vital signs, but he’s been blinded to them by gloomy assumptions.
Democracy on Trial
Critics of religious schools love to quote fundamentalist preacher Billy Sunday. “When the Word of God says one thing and scholarship says another,” he quipped, “scholarship can go to hell.” Thoughtful believers, however, also warn of anti-intellectualism. Calvin College’s Diekema, author of Academic Freedom and Christian Scholarship, says he fought numerous battles during his 20-year tenure. “Academic freedom remains the essential foundation of intellectual life in our colleges and universities,” he argues. “It is an indisputable anchor of our free society.”
If Patrick Henry hasn’t fully learned this lesson, its liberal detractors are worse off: Their view of freedom has produced intellectual chaos. As Reformation leader Martin Luther once put it, sinful man is like a drunken fellow who falls off one side of his horse, only to get back up and fall off the other side. Luther’s drunken man is looking more and more like an Ivy League professor.
In a 1992 essay for Time, Robert Hughes excoriated intellectuals for empty theorizing while Soviet Communism disintegrated and Chinese Communism was bloodied by the Tiananmen Square massacre. “The world changes more deeply, widely, thrillingly than at any moment since 1917 … and the American academic left keeps fretting about how phallocentricity is inscribed in Dickens’ portrayal of Little Nell.”13 Hughes shouldn’t have been surprised. Much of the academy—discarding both moral and scholarly ideals—has been hobbled by intellectual vertigo for decades. Before Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind came Robert Nisbet’s The Degradation of the Academic Dogma, and before that the 1945 Harvard Report, an attempt by a group of professors to envision a new purpose for the university in light of wartime threats to democracy. The committee came close to recommending a return to classical education. “The goal of education,” it said, “is not in conflict with but largely includes the goals of religious education, education in the Western tradition, and education in modern democracy.”14
Not even the heartless evil of September 11, however, could produce a similar statement among today’s academic gatekeepers. The war on terrorism, in fact, has stirred little serious reflection on the nature of religious conflict or America’s political and spiritual resources to counter it. Instead, university-bred élites have treated us to lines like this: “We all know that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”15 That suggests not merely an intellectual crisis in the academy, but a moral one.
Indeed, Allan Bloom argued poignantly that students were being denied access to the foundations of republican virtue—having in mind the Bible no less than The Republic or The Federalist. “A life based on the Book is closer to the truth, [because] it provides the material for deeper research in and access to the real nature of things,” he wrote. “Without the great revelations, epics, and philosophies as part of our natural vision, there is nothing to see out there, and eventually little left inside.”16 More recently, Bruce Cole, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, cautioned against neglecting the deepest sources of democratic values. “Defending our democracy demands more than successful military campaigns,” he told an audience at New York University. “It also requires an understanding of the ideals, ideas and institutions that have shaped our country.”
In this sense, the Western moral tradition represents a much deeper rebuke to secular liberals than to religious fundamentalists. As Cole warns: “A nation that does not know why it exists, or what it stands for, cannot be expected to long endure.” The purpose of an open mind, G.K. Chesterton once advised, is the same as that of an open mouth: to shut it on something solid. By being forever open on nearly all questions, the secular academy has severed the link between real intellectual inquiry and moral conviction. Schools dedicated to the liberal arts tradition, especially those upholding Christian orthodoxy, are in the best position to mend the breach.
Joseph Loconte is the William E. Simon Fellow in Religion and a Free Society at the Heritage Foundation and a regular commentator on religion for National Public Radio.
Copyright © 2003 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
1. Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (Vintage Books, 1962), pp. 95-96.
2. William H. Honan, “A New Power in Accreditation,” The New York Times, August 6, 1995.
3. Mark Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Eerdmans, 1994), pp. 185-208.
4. LaTonya Taylor, “Christian College Denied Accreditation,” Christianity Today, July 8, 2002.
5. George Marsden, The Soul of the American University (Oxford Univ. Press, 1994), p. 6.
6. “Academic Freedom of Individual Professors and Higher Education Institutions: The Current Legal Landscape,” Donna R. Euben, Staff Counsel, American Association of University Professors, May, 2002.
7. Quoted in Hofstadter, p. 122.
8. Varnum Lansing Collins, President Witherspoon, Volume 2 (Reprint: Arno Press, 1969), p. 198.
9. The statement can be found on a plaque at the center of the West Campus, Duke University.
10. See George M. Marsden, “Church, State, and Campus,” The New York Times, April 26, 1994.
11. Marsden, The Soul of the American University, p. 325.
12. Alan Wolfe, “The Opening of the Evangelical Mind,” The Atlantic Monthly, October 2000.
13. Robert Hughes, “The Fraying of America,” Time, February 3, 1992, p. 46.
14. Marsden, The Soul of the American University, p. 389.
15. The head of Reuters news agency, quoted by William Bennett in Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism (Random House, 2002), p. 46.
16. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (Simon & Schuster, 1987), p. 60.
