By David Gushee
I have experienced vastly different versions of Christian higher education at places ranging from Palmer Seminary in Pennsylvania, to Southern Baptist Theological Seminary during the early Al Mohler era, to Union University under the presidency of David Dockery, and now Mercer University under Bill Underwood. I have also guest-taught at schools ranging from Canadian Southern Baptist Seminary in Alberta to Evangelical Theological Faculty in Croatia to Fuller Seminary in California. Lectures have taken me to many other schools of all types. My reflections emerge from all of these experiences and from reading, and are not intended as critique or praise of any one individual or school.
Many observers of North American higher education have tracked the decline and loss of Christian identity at hundreds of schools initially founded with an explicitly Christian mission. This trajectory includes some of the nation’s most prestigious universities, such as Harvard and Vanderbilt, all the way down to smaller colleges that were once suffused with a Christian mission but lost that mission along the way.
It is a sad thing to watch a school in the process of losing its Christian mission and identity or having already lost it. Experienced eyes can track the process through such markers as gradual changes in the stated mission of the university, declining interest in or commitment to organized university religious activities such as chapel, and changes in hiring practices so that faith commitment is no longer valued.
Reasons why Christian universities abandon their Christian identity have been well documented. They include efforts to achieve high status in secularized higher-education circles, the difficulty of finding faculty who meet both academic-excellence criteria and faith criteria, the pressures of accreditation standards, especially in the professional schools, the implicit or explicit conditions attached by large donors and the generally liberalizing effects of participation in an ever-more-secularized American culture. Sometimes it is as simple as the decision-making of one or two university presidents who just did not prioritize the Christian identity of the school.
In the world of Baptist higher education in the South, the partial or entire loss of Christian mission of so many Baptist universities cannot be fully explained by these broader national trends. The pressures of resurgent Baptist political-religious conservatism, especially in the denominational wars of the 1980s and 1990s, helped to drive many Baptist schools not just out of the reach of conservative Baptists, but right out of Christian identity as well.
There is a tragic dimension here. Think it all the way through: Schools that were founded by Baptists, to educate Baptists, and that still had a large number of Baptist students, faculty, and staff, believed it was necessary to abandon any official Baptist mission, identity or affiliation — all because of the pressures imposed by certain kinds of Baptists who did not think that the schools were Baptist enough. The result in many cases was that the schools eventually stopped being not just Baptist but Christian altogether.
The critics got exactly the opposite of what they wanted.
All of this dovetailed with broader national trends toward culture wars and “red-state”/“blue state” polarization beginning in the 1980s. The result, I think, is that today there are two main kinds of fully, partially or formerly Baptist schools in the South.
“Red” Baptist schools retain a strong Baptist Christian identity involving considerable fusion of religious and political conservatism. Their upside is clarity and internal unity about mission and identity; their downside can be a tendency toward a narrow ethos and subtle encroachments on academic and personal freedoms. Many students graduate with robust faith, while some are driven away from Christ because of the religious-political narrowness associated with Christianity on those campuses.
“Blue” Baptist schools gradually abandon or weaken their Baptist Christian identity because they fear that to be robustly Baptist or Christian would mean that religious and political conservatism would hijack their mission. Their upside is a broad ethos and expansive academic and personal freedoms (except for where rigid liberal orthodoxies prevail); their downside can be a lack of clarity about their mission, and many missed opportunities to help impressionable young students bring a robust Christian faith with them into adult life.
I believe that among these “blue” schools that have in some way retained their Baptist Christian identity there is today an opportunity to reclaim, redefine and strengthen it.
One option is to coalesce around a Jesus-following, Kingdom-of-God focused, politically independent, Matthew 25 kind of mission. They can graduate students passionate about loving, serving and advancing justice alongside the abused, abandoned and despised of this world — the way that Jesus did. Such a mission will find many eager takers among this generation of students. It already does.