Not even a good Christian education will teach you how to spell “infidels.”
Radically conservative Christian colleges are targeting students all over the country — and they’re literally looking to go medieval on your ass:
The students and teachers call what they are doing “classical Christian education.” They believe it’s much more than memorizing Latin declensions and Aristotle’s principles of rhetoric, though they do plenty of that. Doug Wilson, 54, the pastor who spearheaded New St. Andrews’ founding, puts the college’s purpose simply: “We are trying to save civilization.” He’s not alone in his mission. The C.C.E. movement began in the early 1980s among Protestant evangelical private schools and home-schoolers who scorned most conservative Christian colleges, which were long on classes in business management and Bible prophecy but short on history, literature and ideas. Now the movement boasts a host of home-schooling associations and curriculum companies, more than 200 private schools and college programs around the country. Evangelicals at New St. Andrews are using dead languages and ancient history to reinvent conservative Protestant education. As Matthew McCabe, an alumnus, puts it, “We want to be medieval Protestants.”
Nothing says “fine education” like wanting to regress a few hundred years. And, sorry dear readers, but you aren’t eligible to apply:
N.S.A.’s philosophy is that cultural change begins with right worship and community rather than with political activism. College life revolves around Christ Church and Trinity Reformed Church — both members of the Confederation of Reformed Evangelical Churches, a denomination based on “historic Protestant orthodoxy” that Wilson co-founded in 1998. The college handbook forbids students to embrace or promote “doctrinal errors” from the 4th through the 21st centuries, “such as Arianism, Socinianism, Pelagianism, Skepticism, Feminism.” If drawn to such ideas, they must “inform the administration immediately and honestly in a letter offering to withdraw from the College.” Cultural revolution cannot tolerate heretics.
And it gets a little scarier:
A few faculty members at New St. Andrews also had links with a largely defunct offshoot of Van Til’s thought called Christian Reconstructionism. The movement’s founder, Rousas John Rushdoony, wrote that Christians should gradually take control of society and reinstate Old Testament law — including the execution of adulterers and homosexuals. Most N.S.A. faculty members are quick to distance themselves from the movement, but not Doug Wilson.
Wilson emphasizes his flexibility when it comes to Old Testament law. “You can’t apply Scripture woodenly,” he says; instead of executing them, “you might exile some homosexuals, depending on the circumstances and the age of the victim.” He adds: “There are circumstances in which I’d be in favor of execution for adultery. . . . I’m not proposing legislation. We’re saying, Let’s set up the Christian worldview, and our descendants 500 years from now can work out the knotty problems.” Gene Veith, who is provost of Patrick Henry College and active in classical Christian education, fears Wilson’s views are a handicap for the movement. “One of the frustrating things for me is that people sometimes associate the classical Christian education movement with Doug Wilson, so some people are sort of afraid of it,” he says.
Yeah, I would say it’s reasonable to be afraid of a movement that embraces members who openly seek to execute homosexuals and aldulterers. (What about fornicators? Are we ok?).
And while some try to “distance themselves” from the more extreme views of the movement, it’s not necessarily because they disagree — it’s because it’s strategically sound:
Wilson and others at New St. Andrews say they are laying the groundwork for the long-term reinvigoration of evangelical intellectual life — and for Christian cultural ascendancy. Time and again, they assert that they are not trying to influence politics and that the antagonism they face is persecution. “The Gospels make it clear that as we’re faithful, we can expect opposition,” says Peter Leithart, who teaches theology. It’s hard to deny, however, that Wilson goes out of his way to provoke. “The object was to take over the town with the Gospel of Jesus Christ, but to do it in an underground fashion,” says Wilson’s father, now nearly 80 and still running his ministry. “One of the principles of war is surprise. You don’t tell people what you’re going to do. Doug told them, and he gave them someone to shoot at.”
They start a school where several of the faculty members think that gays and aldulterers should be killed, and when the community balks, it’s the Christians who are being persecuted. I suppose this is an example of the “Christian world view,” which cannot be understood by bad Christians like myself.
More interesting, though, is the ongoing idea that we’re in a war, and that Christian soldiers must rely on the element of surprise. The war language has been going around in Christian circles for a while now, and it’s really terrifying. I wrote about this a bit when I reviewed Jesus Camp, and it’s certainly nothing new, but it seems to be increasingly common. Right-wing Christians throw around terms like “war” and “soldiers for Christ” with startling regularity; they truly seem to be under the impression that they’re going to battle with the dominant culture, with Islam, with secularism, with anything that isn’t hyper-conservative and Jesus-based. They, and the political parties that represent them, hold up Islam as an example of a scarily and violent religion, invoking the term “jihad” to send chills down the spine of every red-blooded American.
Yet these Christian soldiers are promoting their own holy war.* And no, the vast majority of them aren’t using terrorist tactics. But some of them are — they’re bombing abortion clinics and gay clubs, and targeting doctors and reproductive health care providers. Beyond that, they’re aiming for a full cultural take-over and an assault on secularism in the vein of radical political Islam. And that’s not something I want in my country.
*Yeah, I know there’s a lot of discussion about the proper translation of “jihad.” I’m using the translation that most Americans assume to be accurate.