Rebecca Grace

AFA Journal staff writer

Second in a series

September 2006 – Students may not sign up for it as a class, but Leftist Indoctrination 101 is now part of the core curriculum being taught on college and university campuses nationwide. (See AFA Journal, 8/06.) The world of higher academia is a cultural pretzel of postmodernism, relativism, humanism, secularism and liberalism that leaves students tied in an unbiblical knot of twisted worldviews. 

In an attempt to make sense of this entanglement, culture critics Matt Kaufman, columnist for Boundless.org, and Nancy Pearcey, author of Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity, offer their insight. 

Two critics’ assessment 
In an interview with AFA Journal, Kaufman made the following remarks regarding the general mindset on today’s college campuses:

• “On the one hand, the reigning theory is supposed to be [that] you can hold any ideas you want, you can believe whatever you like, you can practice whatever lifestyle you like because college is a place of freedom, free inquiry of the mind and free exploration of different ways of living and so forth. At the same time, you have what’s now famously called political correctness.” 

• The college arena is “an environment that can … be very confusing to students. I think they get very mixed messages, and I think it probably encourages a lot of them to just play it safe and be very conventional, politically-correct types [who] say the proper approved liberal things … and don’t cross any groups that might call them racist or sexist or religious fanatic or homophobe or anything like that.”

In Total Truth, Pearcey makes the following parallel claims about the present culture and its influence on students: 

• “Not only have we ‘lost the culture,’ but we continue losing even our own children. It’s a familiar but tragic story that devout young people, raised in Christian homes, head off to college and abandon their faith. Why is this pattern so common? Largely because young believers have not been taught how to develop a Biblical worldview. Instead, Christianity has been restricted to a specialized area of religious belief and personal devotion.”

• “The reason it’s so important for us to learn how to recognize this division is that it is the single most potent weapon for delegitimizing the Biblical perspective in the public square today. Here’s how it works: Most secularists are too politically savvy to attack religion directly or to debunk it as false. So what do they do? They consign religion to the value sphere – which takes it out of the realm of true and false altogether. Secularists can then assure us that of course they ‘respect’ religion, while at the same time denying that it has any relevance to the public realm.” 

A professor’s perspective
Combining Pearcey’s claims with personal experience, Richard G. Howe, Ph.D., a writer in Christian apologetics and a former professor of philosophy, theology and apologetics at both state and Christian universities, offers an understanding of how and why leftist indoctrination has a stronghold on today’s campuses. 

AFAJ: As a state university professor of philosophy, how much leftist indoctrination did you notice on campus? 
RH: [M]any Christians may be surprised that in many secular universities, being a Christian is not necessarily looked down upon, especially in philosophy departments. There are, of course, exceptions where there is a greater intolerance of being a Christian. However, while being a professing Christian is usually accepted, being a conservative is not. 

What I mean by this is both in a theological and political way. It’s OK to be a Christian, but just don’t espouse the exclusivity of salvation in Christ (i.e., don’t try to say that Jesus is the only way to heaven) or don’t espouse the inerrancy of the Bible or any form of creationism. These are usually highly criticized. Further, trying to be a political conservative usually results in your being thought of as odd, or naïve, or unthinking.

AFAJ: In what specific areas of campus life is the liberal agenda most obvious?
RH: Some of the most vocal presences on campus regarding both leftist political thought as well as anti-Christian thought are the free-thinkers. They are a student group that goes by a number of names. One national coalition is the Campus Free Thought Alliance. They have a presence on many universities. They are unique because they constitute a concerted effort to oppose the views of Christians. And while one might argue that there is not any necessary connection between being atheistic and being politically liberal, I have found that the free thinkers are consistently far left.

AFAJ: What increase, if any, of this leftist indoctrination have you experienced over the years? 
RH: There is no question that the level of conversation has increased tremendously. This has to be because, not very long ago, the only voices one could hear in the public were liberal. … Now that the conservatives have gained a platform to begin to challenge the liberal monopoly on the airwaves, the liberals have certainly started talking louder and being more shrill (thinking that they will be more convincing if they can only drown out their opponents). 

AFAJ: How have you seen the spiritual climate of campuses change? 
RH: Certainly some of the questions have changed due to the increase of postmodernism, characterized by its tendency to embrace relativism at a number of levels. For example, within my Christian life time I have seen the change from the time that Christians could conduct apologetics with the assumption that the audience all understood what it meant for a claim to be true, to today when even the notion of truth itself has to be defined and defended. … This says something about where we have come as a culture (including the campus).

Another issue is the one most recently discussed in Nancy Pearcey’s book Total Truth. An illicit fact/value dichotomy has infected much of our culture, including the college campus. A fact/value dichotomy says that there are certain things that are objective, public, and rational on the one hand, and certain things that are subjective, private, and emotional on the other. 

Now there certainly is a legitimate dichotomy. The distance the Earth is from the Sun is a fact. Whether broccoli tastes good is a value. People cannot disagree on the former and be rational, but rational people can disagree on the second and be rational. The illicit fact/value dichotomy, however, puts the wrong things in one category or the other. 

The most notable is that the reigning view holds that science deals with facts and religion deals with values. Science is objective, public, and rational, while religion is subjective, private, and emotional (or experiential). This is illicit. The existence of God is just as much a fact as the existence of black holes. That Jesus died for our sins is just as much a fact as the historical truth that Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the War Between the States. Admittedly the manner in which one argues for these different claims varies, but they are facts nonetheless. 

This illicit fact/value dichotomy complicates, for example, the creation/evolution debate since the evolutionists try to characterize creationist thought as religion, all the while banking on the fact that people will think that, since it is religion, it has no place in any kind of public, rational discourse and certainly has no place in the science classroom. They win before the battle even begins when they can successfully frame the whole discussion within this illicit fact/value dichotomy. 

AFAJ: How did your faith impact your role as a professor? 
RH: I have made no secret in my classes that I am a Christian. As such, there have been situations where the word got out, so to speak, and many of the Christians on campus who needed to take a philosophy course were racing to get into my classes. This, by the way, may say something about what these undergraduate students were experiencing. The fact that, in their minds, it would make a difference whether their teacher was a Christian or not, must say something about what they are experiencing in those classes where their teacher was not a Christian.

AFAJ: How do you share your faith without being accused of “proselytizing?”
RH: Perhaps it is much easier for someone who teaches philosophy since, by its very nature, philosophy delves into cosmic questions. … Many of the philosophical answers to these questions have been offered by Christians over the centuries. … 

Further, I have tried to make myself available outside of class to deal more personally with the students and these issues. It is much more appropriate and allowable to do so outside of class. I see myself as an instrument of God’s truth. … On most occasions, I give the student the various views on a given topic. In doing so, I try to be fair about the case for both sides and point the students to resources where they can do their own research (all the while not being shy to tell the students my own views if they are interested).

A noble approach
Howe’s approach to sharing his faith in the classroom is a noble one considering the spiritual mindset of today’s campuses where students recognize a variety of beliefs as long as they don’t have to accept them as their own. 

“[Therefore] we need to liberate the Gospel from its cultural captivity, restoring it to the status of public truth,” Pearcey concludes in her book. “Only by recovering a holistic view of total truth can we set the Gospel free to become a redemptive force across all of life” – including the college campus.