Onward Christian Scholars

The Ivory Tower continues to deride Christian education as anti-intellectual despite mounting evidence that the latter is more conducive to genuine scholarship than the former.

“Religious persons have other interests than ‘apologetics’ and have concentrated on them, for better or for worse,” retired English professor C. John Sommerville writes in The Chronicle of Higher Education. “As a result, for a generation or more, religion has seemed to be devoid of intellectual merit.”

“If religiously Christian and Jewish scholars are allowed to be themselves in their academic roles, they will have to do a lot of thinking about how they might make a contribution.”

“‘Sin,’ ‘Trinity,’ ‘incarnation,’ and ‘creation’ are words that would nowadays be greeted with incomprehension in the academy,’ Dr. Sommerville explains. “Yet they are all pregnant with meaning for our debates.”

“To introduce them into discussion under antique terms will invite rejection.” That is exactly what happened at the University of California at Riverside. When graduates of Calvary High School applied at UC-Riverside, they found that the university would not recognize all of their credits.

“Calvary’s literature class, ‘Christian Morality in American Literature,’ was rejected because it ‘does not offer a non-biased approach to the subject matter,’” Naomi Schaeffer Riley reports in Education Next, a quarterly journal. “But, as Calvary and [the Association of Christian Schools International] ASCI pointed out, the UC approved courses such as ‘Feminine Perspectives on Literature’ and ‘Ethnic Experiences in Literature.’”

“In the humanities, course syllabi, new programs and departments, and collegewide curricula have changed markedly in recent years, often focusing on identity questions,” W. Robert Connor writes in the Chronicle Review. “They have provided opportunities for students to explore questions of racial, ethnic, and gender and sexual identities and have transformed curricular structures and professional patterns.” “Faculty members, as well as students, care about those questions and, as a result, write and teach with passion about them.” Connor is president of the Teagle Foundation.

“But, at the same time, older structures that used to put the big questions front and center have often failed or faded,” Connor relates. “Those include core curricula, great-books programs, surveys ‘from Plato to NATO,’ and general-education requirements of various sorts.”

“Because the texts and problems in such courses often deal with civic, moral, cosmic, or theological topics, it was hard to escape some big questions or some of the approaches used to deal with them,”

Consequently, students, such as those who matriculated at the aforementioned Calvary, may be more prepared to answer the “big questions” than their professors are. “They may complain, as nearly two-thirds of the respondents in a UCLA survey did, that their professors simply don’t provide opportunities to discuss the meaning and purpose of life and other spiritual or religious matters.”

Those students certainly arrive in class more prepared for school than their counterparts from secular, mostly public, institutions. “Students at Christian schools score significantly higher than do their public-school counterparts on the math, reading and science sections of the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP),” Riley reports.

“To explore whether that assumption is accurate, I called George D. Kuh, a professor of higher education at Indiana University in Bloomington, and asked him if he could confirm or refute it from the data he has collected through the National Survey of Student Engagement,” Connor recalls. “He and a colleague, Robert M. Gonyea, analyzed responses from 150,000 students at 461 four-year colleges to determine the relationship between participation in various religious or spiritual practices and ‘deep learning,’ or the ability to analyze, integrate and synthesize information from various sources and apply it to new experiences.”

“Their study found that what they termed ‘spiritually enhancing activities’—worship, meditation and prayer—had no negative effect on ‘educationally purposeful activities.’” Meanwhile, a Princeton survey “found that students who participated in religious rituals once a week studied longer and reported higher grade-point averages and greater institutional satisfaction than their peers.”

On the other hand, given the previously noted nature of those institutions, that “greater institutional satisfaction” on the part of religious students may not necessarily be a good thing.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.