It is no secret, folks. American colleges and universities are bastions of liberal thought and indoctrination. At elite schools, liberal faculty outnumber conservative faculty nearly nine to one if recent polling data is accurate.
This is wonderful news for non-Christians and liberal Christians. For the rest of us, however, this should give us cause to think through the wisdom of punting the college decision to our children. In other words, letting our children completely own the decision of which college to attend.
Update: Brian at the Worldview Warrior offers some thoughtful counter points to my commentary. He makes good points. I especially like his swimming analogy. Brian, incidentally, is a VTU grad. Perhaps he wants to weigh in with his own opinion on the worldviews observed at VTU by Andrew (cited below).
2nd Update : Brian shares about his experience at VTU. Brian took an engineering track and had a wonderful experience. He never ran into a Marxist on campus. Those Marxists Andrew found must be over in the literature deparment ;) Brian is an excellent example of an ambassador for Christ who was intentional about living out his faith and ushering in the kingdom. You may think I mean that he went around handing out tracks and witnessing to people. And you would be wrong. Go read his commentary and pay special attention to point 9.
I have had this conversation before on this blog with my friend Jason (see the comment thread). I respect Jason's view and think his argument has merits. He has a point. If every Christian withdrew from secular colleges and universities, who would be left to be light in a dark place? How are we being faithful to the cultural commission or the great commission by abandoning the secular campuses of America.
It is hard to argue with that point. I don't think we should abandon them. We need to invade them. We need to send missionaries, however, and not raw recruits. That is the aha! moment I had this morning. The decision of sending a child to a secular university is similar to the decision of sending a missionary overseas.
In our denomination, sending a missionary overseas is a big deal. We work closely with several missions agencies : Mission To The World (MTW) and World Harvest Mission in particular. A good missions agency will have a good screening process to determine the fitness of a candidate for the mission field. The mission field is a hard place. It is not for everyone. There is a giant bullseye on your chest as a missionary. The idea is to screen, interview and do everything possible to make sure that a missionary candidate is not being set up to fail.
As a ruling elder in my last church, I was involved in the missionary screening process. I was interviewed by MTW about some candidates. MTW regularly turns down candidates. They take the recruiting process very serioiusly. I have tremendous respect for them because of that.
I see the college decision as almost the same thing. Putting your child into a hostile environment is a gutsy call. If your child is ready, then do it. But you need to take an honest look at their spiritual readiness and worldview readiness. You need to view them the same way you view a missionary and ask, are they going to engage the culture redemptively, or are they going to succumb to it?
Here is an excerpt of a letter written by an 18 (or 19) year old graduate of Faith Christian school named Andrew. Read what he says about his experience as a college freshman at Virginia Tech.
"Another part of classes that I have picked up on is that most of the material is taught from a definite secularist, naturalist perspective. Evolution is assumed to be an absolute and irrevocable fact by professors here, as much so as e=mc squared or the very fact that we exist.
In my psychology and chemistry classes, I am taught that human beings are chemical machines, lacking any soul, mind, or free will and instead controlled by chemical secretions in my brain. The world is closed, deterministic and without purpose.
On the other hand the philosophical mindset of most teaching at the university is definitely postmodern to the extreme. I have been taught in several of my classes … that no true morals exists, there is no right or wrong, there is no objective truth, there is no over arching meaning to life, and that no perspective or opinion if any more valid than the other. It is crazy and logically self-defeating, as well as contrary to God's teachings, but it's what flies among the so-called intellectual establishment on American universities.
It's amazing to see how many classes are politicized as well, always with a Marxist perspective. I am constantly being bombarded with propositions that American society is inherently unjust, that our Constitution and our founding are jokes, that capitalism is evil, that white males are the world's oppressors …, that Christianity is bigoted, homophobic and intellectual suicide … that our country is a two-class system of a few wealthy oppressors and hordes of people who can barely survive and that humanity is bound on a course of social progression that will someday end in a Star-trek style utopia.
In my freshman seminar, we were forced to take a "diversity test" to find out our tolerance of minorities, minority religions, alternative sexual lifestyles, etc. … and most students were labeled unconscious oppressors and bigots. I was chastised for being a member of an organization that excludes other belief systems (Christian ministry group) … the left wing is so entrenched on campus that I have to just shrug it off."
Andrew is ready. He is equipped to engage. He can take on the false ideologies of the day. Though he admits to being discouraged by it (in another part of the letter), he can take the heat. The secular campus will be an area where his faith will grow as he engages false worldviews on a daily basis. He is a missionary.
How about your 17 year old?