Do Christian students have a prayer in the classroom?
For profs and students, religious revival in academia can be a heavy cross to bear. ~ I feel as if I’m drowning in an intellectual maelstrom, a vortex from which there is no release.” Although way more emo than I’d care to admit, that journal excerpt about my first week of Directed Studies indicates my inability to cope with the baptism-by-fire I would undergo in DS with respect to my faith. When faced with the question of the Bible’s historical accuracy in Literature, I chuckled nervously; when faced with Hume’s reasonable atheism, I scratched my head and doodled in my notebook. Even texts sympathetic to my belief seemed to verify that Christianity was a quaint historical artifact rather than a living, breathing, intellectually plausible system of belief.Much to my parents’ relief, I was still praising the Lord and chewing on Communion wafers at the year’s end. Had I matriculated in 1999, academics might have spurred me into agnosticism; in 2003, though, a nascent network of students and faculty existed to convince me that my belief was worth preserving, even at Yale. And though I didn’t know it at the time, I had entered college amidst a groundswell of post-9/11 academic religious interest. That resurgence coincided with a rapidly growing community of Ivy-League Christians who take their cues from the few professors they know to be believers. As a result Christianity—once the pariah of modern intellectualism—is slowly reinventing itself as a viable academic perspective on campus. What ramifications this has for the 21st-century secular classroom is a disputed question, but one thing is sure: If you listen closely, you can hear Bertrand Russell turning in his grave.
My decision to continue believing in a living God—despite Nietzsche’s pronouncements to the contrary—was largely due to the efforts of a faith community which, after an era of marginalization by the secular establishment, is exploding on Ivy League campuses. Moreover, Yale appears to be leading the pack with respect to this trend. According to statistics cited by the Christian Post, an online Christian news outlet, membership in fellowships such as Campus Crusade for Christ has, over the past 20 years, increased by 163 percent at Brown, 500 percent at Harvard—and 700 percent at Yale. Such growth stems from many factors—most notably, the influx of Asian-American students, many with deeply Christian roots in Korea and China, as well as the fact that evangelicals have climbed the socioeconomic ladder over the past 30 years, a trend which has empowered them to pay the high cost of an Ivy League education.
The Christian population explosion has coincided with an unprecedented revival of intellectual interest in religion after decades of indifference. While there were only six seniors majoring in religious studies at Yale as recently as 1999, that number has since ballooned to 30. After a recent internal curriculum review, Harvard, traditionally known for being more secular than Yale, is considering requiring a course in religion towards the undergraduate degree.
Along with virtually every other professor interviewed, Philosophy Professor John Hare, whose “Philosophy of Religion” class routinely reaches maximum capacity, cited the events of Sept. 11, 2001, as a trigger for this seismic shift in attitude. “It’s clear now how much is at stake for our world with regard to these religious questions,” Hare said. The secularist concept that faith and reason are mutually exclusive certainly seems to be on the way out. “Back in the ’80s, and even into the early ’90s, people would regularly come up to me and ask why we were teaching religion in university,” said Carlos Eire, chair of the religious studies department. “No one asks that any more.”
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Considering that I’m still mildly traumatized from a Directed Studies lecture in which I was told that the book of Job was a veiled advertisement for atheism—a point I eloquently and maturely refuted by writing “bullshit!” throughout my lecture notes—I was pleased to hear last year that a group of DS veterans had organized a Christian discussion group for the program. Each week, a rotating collection of ex-DS upperclassmen—including Forrest and Chu—meet with currently enrolled freshmen to discuss their readings from a Christian perspective. The group, which held its first meeting of the year on Wed., Oct. 4, is intended to provide a supplement to classroom interpretations of Directed Studies texts—many of which are rooted in the Christian tradition.
While Christians frequently gather to talk about their life experiences, the DS discussion group is intended to be a little more focused than group therapy. At the meeting on Wednesday, the group discussed possible ways of structuring the discussion to avoid tangents unrelated to the material: they could either dissect one particular author’s viewpoint in light of Christian theology, or choose a theme with which to compare Christian and non-Christian ways of thinking (paradigms of heroism in Greek and Hebrew literature, for example.) Group members are wary of being perceived as a indoctrinators trying to keep freshmen from the unforgivable sin of thinking for themselves. Instead, they provide a very different vision of their purpose. “People assume that what one gets in Yale classes is an unbiased exploration,” said Forrest, who leads the discussion group. “That’s not true. Classes like DS offer a good but flawed take on the big questions. We’re trying to show that our beliefs can be preserved in the face of that.”
Chu added that a crucial goal of the DS discussion group is to raise questions among fellow believers, rather than simply project answers onto a text. “A lot of texts subtly impose a worldview on you, which you can passively buy into if you’re not actively thinking about what the text is saying. We’re asking ‘Should I accept this evaluation of the truth? How does this square with what I believe?’”
But not much philosophizing took place at the preliminary meeting, which only one freshman attended; instead, the group debated whether to ask non-Christians to come. David Lee, JE ’10, was initially uneasy about diluting the essence of the group. “It’s good to have a group where we can confirm each other and get our doubts out in the open,” he said. “What happens if a lot of non-Christians show up and cause Christians to start doubting their faith?” Recalling my own experience in Directed Studies, I could sympathize with Lee’s anxieties. Without the kind of support network offered by a discussion group, I spent a week lost in spiritual crisis, a kind of lethargic unease unique to anyone who has ever had to question their basic assumptions about the universe. Nonetheless, Forrest countered that the group doesn’t need to exclude non-believers in order to preserve its mission. He pointed out that non-believers who “ask hard questions” can only heighten the level of discourse. Ultimately, the group decided to remain open to non-Christians, while staying true to its unique mission.
Studying Aristotle with a Bible in one hand is just one example of how a Christian community is no longer content to quietly survive amidst secular hostility, but rather seeks to establish a flourishing presence in the classroom. Since 2002, St. Thomas More has annually invited nationally-recognized Catholic intellectuals in law, culture, and science to spend a day on campus lecturing and meeting with students. The United Church of Westville, a church I regularly attend, last year invited Hare to deliver a sermon on the role of the Christian scholar in the university. Meanwhile, Yale Students for Christ regularly hosts discussion panels and weekend retreats featuring such Christian academics as Greg Ganssle, a longtime member of the Directed Studies faculty. Indeed, professors known for straddling faith and reason are necessary models in an environment where, despite a renewed openness to religious discussion, Christians are still often left feeliing that they have something to prove.
As religion once again becomes a central concern for scholars across the nation, and Christian students and professors alike seek to recover their faith’s tarnished intellectual reputation, the consequences of Christian belief in the classroom—for certain departments, at least—are more visible than ever. Depending on the discipline, however, those consequences can take radically different forms, ranging from a heightened level of inquiry to complete misunderstanding between teacher and pupil.
It is no secret that science and religion do not always see eye to eye. However, Chemistry Professor Michael McBride said that he has never faced ridicule for his Christian beliefs: “People judge me on the basis of my science and teaching.” McBride, who teaches a Sunday School course on science and the Bible at Whitney Ave’s First Presbyterian Church, said that his faith informs his scientific research because as it impels him to study what he sees as the works of God’s hands. “It takes nothing away from the wonder of creation to understand how it works,” McBride said. For him, the subject of creationism inspires considerably less wonder: “It’s nonsense, and gives religion a bad name to people who think.” In McBride’s opinion, Christians should abandon creationism and focus on environmental care, or what he calls “the stewardship of creation.”
In the philosophy department, religion obviously forms an integral part of the curriculum: Christianity has a natural place amidst the clamor of ideas and theories. But although Hare was forthright with regard to his own personal beliefs—“I believe a life in Christ is deeply desirable”—he emphasized that, for a Christian professor, such faith must be balanced by objectivity at the podium: “I have to be fair to both sides, and not give all the good arguments to my side and the bad ones to the other.” As for Christian students of philosophy, the archetypal desire to know the truth is particularly pressing. Philosophy professor Shelly Kagan, himself a Jew, observed that Christian philosophers feel a special obligation to reconcile their beliefs with their studies in a way that members of other faiths might not share. “Judaism does not give central place to having some officially sanctioned set of beliefs—dogma—in the way that most versions of Christianity do,” Kagan said. “I imagine that threats [to belief] are perceived more commonly among Christians than among Jews.”
For students of literature, the academic notion of what constitutes a good piece of prose comes into direct conflict with the virtues prized by the booming Christian fiction industry. John Crowley, who teaches creative writing, was raised in a Catholic home, but “walked away from the faith without really examining it.” As a result, Crowley is sympathetic to Christian students, but is frustrated that the popularity of Christian thrillers like Left Behind might give those students an incentive to disregard his instruction. “I’ve had students who make God do all kinds of things that are convenient to the plot of their stories,” Crowley said. “But if I tell my students that they’re violating the rules of good fiction, they can just join the ranks of Christian authors who do it all the time, and whose audiences don’t have a problem with it.”
According to professor Carlos Eire, a practicing Catholic, the study of religion itself can have unpredictable effects on a student’s personal convictions. Eire, who is the chair of the religious studies department and specializes in the history of the Protestant Reformation, noted that the student evaluations he has received have ranged from “This course made me experience a religious conversion” to “This course destroyed my faith.” But although Christian students might think it lamentable that a class could cause someone to leave the fold—particularly when that class is taught by a Christian professor—Eire accepts this phenomenon as an inevitable consequence of the discipline, and refuses to treat Christian students with kid gloves.
As questions of belief become more prevalent in the life of the academy, Christian students in the Ivy League may be tempted to view their swelling numbers as an opportunity for a kind of academic militancy. One thinks of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty College, a fundamentalist Baptist institution in Virginia, whose debate team, currently ranked first in the country, believes it can argue America’s best minds into a renaissance of Christian values. But, in a week when a group called the National Organization for Gaining Acceptance of Your Sins (or the acronym NO GAYS) posted flyers and sent a campus-wide e-mail describing Jesus as a homophobe, the us-versus-them aggressive attitude of Liberty College seemed less appealing than ever. “The most important thing we can do [as Christian students] is to not fall into stereotypes,” said Ellen Ray, CC ’09, a DS veteran. “We have to show that we can approach things with an open mind.” In that respect, the Christian and secular scholar may have more in common than either might think. READ SOURCE
posted by CATHOLIC PRESENCE @ 8:44 PM
