When I speak at churches across the country, the conversation after my talks often turns to the state of Christian higher education. I’m a professor at a Christian institution, and Christian parents and grandparents need to know where highschool graduates can go to have their faith deepened fairly than undermined. These concerns have only grow to be more pressing given the continuing rise in young people wandering away from the church and describing their religious convictions as “nothing particularly.”
The query many Christians have for me is which colleges are “secure” or “real” Christian schools, which normally means people who have a really conservative theological ethos. For those that aren’t acquainted with the world of Christian higher ed, it may well be difficult to discover these schools from outside the campus community, and oldsters often (reasonably) conclude an establishment’s stance on human sexuality is the best indicator of a school’s commitment to Christian orthodoxy.
LGBTQ questions are indeed vital, and so they can function a proxy for an establishment’s broader theology. But by itself, this isn’t a reliable formula for locating a great Christian college. A faculty may stake out a daring position on sexuality and yet capitulate to what I’d suggest is essentially the most missed and subsequently most insidious threat to Christian education in America straight away.
It’s not progressive theology. It’s a pervasive consumerist anthropology.
Theological anthropology concerns our assumptions in regards to the nature and purpose of humanity. And by “consumerist anthropology” I mean the assumption—often subconsciously held—that folks are essentially consumers who should maximize their earning potential so that they can eat as many entertaining experiences and products as possible.
When I speak with anxious parents and grandparents, I often try to clarify this aspect of the faculty search by asking them to assume a two-dimensional grid, a chart with an x-axis and a y-axis. The x-axis they already know: That’s the familiar range of progressive to conservative theological commitments. But I need them to start to see the y-axis, which runs from that consumerist anthropology to a formational one.
A formational anthropology doesn’t imagine students as consumers who must get a marketable degree resulting in a high-paying job. It sees them as people bearing a tarnished imago Dei that, by the grace of Christ, might be burnished through disciplined, focused effort.
As Paul’s analogies in 2 Timothy 2 suggest, a university with a formational anthropology will shape the coed experience based on the assumption that Christians must live like disciplined soldiers, committed athletes, and hard-working farmers, reaping the wealthy satisfactions of formative work under the guidance of clever mentors. This formation can develop the moral virtues and practical skills that enable us to rightly love God and our neighbors.
In his 1943 book on education, The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis labels the opposing ends of this y-axis by way of a distinction between profession training or “applied science” on the one hand and virtue and wisdom formation on the opposite:
There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating each from the wisdom of earlier ages. For the clever men of old the cardinal problem had been conform the soul to reality, and the answer had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the issue is subdue reality to the desires of men: the answer is a method.
The difference here is whether or not an academic institution should aim to offer students the abilities and techniques they need so as to satisfy their desires—or whether it should form students’ souls to know and desire what’s true, good, and exquisite.
Formational education is usually criticized as irrelevant or useless. In his introduction to The Evidence Liberal Arts Needs, Richard A. Detweiler summarizes the prevailing view that if a level doesn’t have immediate profession outcomes, it’s not invaluable. In his essay “The Gift of Good Land,” nonetheless, writer and farmer Wendell Berry gestures toward the very practical consequences that moral formation has on the form and effects of our work. Career training, he explains, is a great and vital thing, nevertheless it have to be united with formational education, not isolated and treated as an end to itself:
The requirements of … charity can’t be fulfilled by smiling in abstract beneficence on our neighbors and on the scenery. It must come to acts, which must come from skills. […] How can you like your neighbor if you happen to don’t know construct or mend a fence, keep your filth out of his water supply and your poison out of his air; or if you happen to don’t produce anything and so don’t have anything to supply, or don’t handle yourself and so grow to be a burden? How are you able to be a neighbor without applying principle—without bringing virtue to a practical issue? How will you practice virtue without skill?
If virtue without skill ends in ineffectual warm fuzzies, skill without virtue ends in careerist consumerism. Hence, Christian education must offer not merely a training in skills but additionally a criticism of those skills and the formation of the discipline and wisdom needed to make use of our skills in love. Without such charity, credentials and skills grow to be technique of satisfying consumer appetites.
Clearly, no Christian college brands itself as offering degrees within the service of consumerism. They make the selections they think they have to to maintain their doors open. Yet the result’s that far too many institutions give lip service to Christian moral formation while organizing themselves around a consumerist vision of education.
You can often get a way of this reality within the marketing literature: It touts exciting recent student amenities, career-oriented majors, a discount usually education requirements, and an undue emphasis on college athletics and e-sports. One of my friends describes the Christian college where he used to show as a “minor league sports franchise with a fundamentalist VBS attached to it.”
That pairing of very conservative theology with consumerist anthropology could appear surprising, but so far as I can tell, there’s no correlation between the x-axis and the y-axis: Theologically conservative colleges aren’t any more prone to invite students into rigorous mental and moral formation than are theologically progressive colleges. (The two colleges where I’ve taught occupy very similar places theologically but dramatically different positions of their anthropology, which is why I’m very grateful to be working where I’m now.)
Moral therapeutic deism might be coded left or right politically, but its adherents still imagine God as an enhancement to their preexisting desires and aspirations. And the true tragedy is that insofar as they simply cater to the superficial desires of 18-year-olds, colleges fail to ask young people into the deeper joys and satisfactions of Christian formation, mental rigor, and disciplined work.
So how, beyond the brochures, do you tell one form of Christian school from one other? As an outsider to an establishment, it may well be difficult to inform how committed it’s to forming students into kingdom residents. Every institution has different departments or enclaves that lean a method or one other.
And, in fact, I do know plenty of great, committed Christians who never attended college or who earned a level at a secular school. They pursued discipleship and mental formation through other means. Attending a Christian college is definitely not the one strategy to undergo the vital work of conforming your soul and mind to Christ, neither is such work accomplished when a student receives a diploma from even one of the best of faculties.
Still, for those serious about locating where schools fall along the y-axis of theological anthropology, listed below are some things to ascertain:
- Is the required core curriculum small or mostly choose-your-own-adventure style? A formational school will hold on to a bigger foundational curriculum that requires all students to think theologically about God, humanity, and our world. Some colleges now offer a two-tiered model, during which most students take a watered-down general education curriculum while a select group of honors students takes a more rigorous set of courses. This isn’t ideal—spiritual formation shouldn’t be reserved for the academically advanced—but I suppose it’s higher than total capitulation.
- How many courses are offered online or in large sections, particularly undergraduate and general education courses? Does the goal appear to be merely information delivery or skills acquisition, or is there a commitment to rigorous formation and in-person mentoring?
- Does the chapel program consist of praise songs and a TED Talk a few times every week, or are there opportunities for college students to be mentored in small groups and attend chapel events that dig into the weighty matters of religion and life?
- Does the faculty present itself as a Christian summer camp with nice dorms and cafeterias—plus graduates get jobs? Or are there indications that the college goals to form students within the wisdom, virtues, and habits of mind vital to live their lives in service to the dominion of God? Are students invited to rise to a challenge?
Comfortable dorms are good. College athletics are good. VBS is even good—for elementary students. But none of those are essential to the mission of a Christian college, which must be to ask students into a sturdy mental community rooted in sincere Christian commitments.
Even when you realize what to search for, though, it’s harder to locate colleges along this y-axis than the x-axis. Perhaps, nonetheless, the rise of AI will come to function a proxy for colleges’ anthropology just as sexuality statements have grow to be a proxy on theology. My recent tip for folks and graduating seniors could also be: If a Christian college guarantees to show students leverage AI for maximal productivity and satisfaction, don’t trouble to use.
Jeffrey Bilbro is associate professor of English at Grove City College and editor in chief on the Front Porch Republic. His most up-to-date book is Reading the Times: A Literary and Theological Inquiry into the News.
