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Higher Education
- by: Ray Ciervo 26/03/2008
Are your teens equipped to deal with college and career? Can their faith survive?
Anyone who has played baseball for any amount of time can probably remember a "bad hop" ball bouncing off a small rock and hitting them in the face. I think I held the record for the amount of times I was hit by a bad hop! I can remember these instances vividly. They seemed unfair and painful.
But there is an even more unfair and painful situation that many of our young people are facing right now...and at the moment, many of them are not prepared for it. It is when they go off to college to pursue their dreams through an academic education.
Some Christians in high school experience uncomfortable situations when their values are challenged. This is only the beginning of what they will face when the go to college. Statistics tell us that 50% of them will lose their faith in college. That percentage escalates if they are not plugged in to a campus group or local church.
A Hostile Environment
What is it that they face? Other than being away from home in a new environment where there are virtually no rules, they face - in many cases - a militantly secular attack on their Christian faith. It is no exaggeration to say that education has been hijacked by people who utterly oppose Christianity.
In his book, Tenured Radicals, author Roger Kimball announces the goal of a radically left policy:
Their object is nothing less than the destruction of the values, methods, and goals of traditional humanistic study.
Kimball's book is from a secular point of view but discloses how the radicals of the sixties have taken over the educational system, especially in liberal arts colleges. He points out that "traditional education" which was concerned about the classics has been hijacked by these "tenured radicals."
The unaware Christian enters college believing his faith is strong enough to endure a secular environment. What they are unprepared for is a militant attack on their values. It is not simply an unfriendly environment but one that is hostile.
The attack comes from two vantage points. From one side comes postmodernism, proclaimed as the enlightened way to view the humanities: the world, history, literature, and the social sciences. Its goal is to deconstruct everything and everything. Its main platform is that there are no absolutes, especially truth. Everything is socially constructed. There is no fixed point for anything. All is in flux.
The other attack comes from the "hard" sciences: biology, chemistry, and natural sciences. Here it is a militant Darwinism which attacks the believer's faith in the Creator. The Darwinian Theory is taught as absolute "science" and everything else is "myth," especially Christianity. Christians are "uninformed," simple people who have never looked at the evidence of Christianity.
It almost seems like a clever pincer move on the part of the education system. Both the social and hard sciences frontally attack and undermine the confidence of the believer. It causes doubt and instability.
Add to this peer pressure and a unruly lifestyle and you can understand how the church loses some of its brightest young people in college.
What's going on here? This is a simple battle of ideas...a battle of worldviews. In essence, Christians are unprepared to defend their worldview in the academic arena. They cave into the pressure of the professors and other students.
Recognizing different worldviews is a key to this problem. A worldview is the grid through which an individual interprets all the data he receives through the senses and the mind. It is sort of like wearing a pair of colored glasses. If you wear the proverbial "rose colored glasses," you see the world rosy. If you are a secularist, you interpret the data through "secular glasses" and so on.
Christians ought to have the "biblical kingdom of God glasses." We ought to be interpreting all the data we take in through the kingdom of God. Not only ought we be able to interpret the data that way, but to defend why we see things this way. This is where the battle of ideas is being fought. Some Christians may know what they believe but not why they believe it.
Consider this in 2 Corinthians 10:5 (NASB update):
We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and [we are] taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.
The prerequisite to destroying speculations and every lofty thing is having a knowledge of God. Christians need to know God, Who God is, and what God is like, in order to destroy the speculations and lofty things raised against Him. All too often, Christians do not exhibit a strong Christian worldview. Religion is simply part of their secular worldview. It isn't the lens through which they are interpreting the data.
What's At Stake?
What can the Church do? What can the individual do? The answers to these questions are not easy and require work. They require research, learning the arguments then engaging the world. But what's at stake? The youth of our churches and the very future of the Church is at stake. Look at these statistics.
The Nehemiah Institute conducts a "PEERS" test of individuals to rate worldviews in the areas of Politics, Economics, Education, Religion, and Social Issues. It grades the test by placing the marks in four other areas. The scores fall in one of four categories: Christian Theist, Moderate Christian, Secular Humanist, and Socialist. Between the years 1988 and 2000, the average score for teens in Christian Schools rated as "moderate Christians." Christian teens in public schools landed in the "secular humanist" category. To make matters worse, these scores had fallen more than 30% for those in Christian schools and 36% for those in public schools. We are clearly losing the battle of ideas, but that can change.
Let's get on board and employ new teaching and methods to equip the Church for their role in evangelism and equipping the next generation.
(This article was published in One to One magazine and also on: www.facingthechallenge.org)
