Sunday, 12 July 2009
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Check Your Brains at the Church Door: Is Christianity Anti-Intellectual?
I can still remember the one sentence that has turned me off to Christianity the most.It was my senior year of college, and I was at a dinner with the other senior members of the evangelical campus ministry of which I served on the leadership team. We were at the house of one of our most prominent donors, and over dessert, we were going around the table and sharing our plans for post-college.
As my teammates revealed their plans for medical school or business careers, my head started to spin with anxiety. After graduation, I was off to attend an Ivy League divinity school to study the Bible. Surely seminary was looked highly upon by these evangelical Christians, but only conservative ones. How would they react to my heading to the Northeast for an education from scholars who weren't quite convinced of all the same ideas they were?
Finally, my time to speak came. I took a deep breath and hazarded: "I'm going to seminary. I applied to Emory, Princeton and Yale."
The table fell silent. Finally, the wife of the donor couple fixed me with a steely glare and spoke the words, so etched in my memory:
"Well, may those schools not destroy you."
The awkward silence continued until someone re-steered the conversation, but the couple ignored me, the biblical black sheep, for the rest of the night. Her caustic words hung in my mind, suspended like a tapioca pearl, and they still haunt me to this day, even now that I've finished my "destructive" education.
This couple disapproved of my desire to learn at a secular institution, and several others were concerned about me: how was I going to keep my faith among all those 'liberals'? What if they said the Bible wasn't true? Was I sure I wanted to subject myself to this strange unorthodoxy?
And it's precisely this attitude that I find troubling, i.e. that education is a bad thing. Don't learn too much, so it goes, don't expose yourself to too many critical viewpoints, or you'll become brainwashed into unbelief. God wants you to be obedient, and you can only do that by being overly cautious about what you hear, see and learn. If a book says some scripture might be metaphorical, put it down and pick up something by Tim LaHaye. If your pastor says being gay is OK, flee and find a more orthodox church. Don't watch that documentary about how the world might actually be millions of years old.
Kevin Roose, a Brown University student who spent a semester at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University to observe the culture, says in his book The Unlikely Disciple that the school's squashing of alternative viewpoints and iron-fisted control over faculty are the reason it will "continue to wallow in academic mediocrity." For example, young earth creationism, biblical inerrancy and conservative politics are taught exclusively in the classroom, with no time given to evolutionary science even as a system for critique. Instead of teaching their students to explore, deconstruct and accept doubt as healthy, Roose says, Liberty does a detriment to a liberal arts education by insisting on championing a unilateral political and spiritual agenda.
If Christians believe that the Bible is the inerrant word of God, then liberal theology and liberal hermeneutics shouldn't be so frightening. What's the harm in learning about alternative opinions? If your faith can be shaken by a few nay-sayers, perhaps you're not realizing the true power of the reality of God. Education is not the enemy. We shouldn't avoid books by Enlightenment philosophers and lofty Ivy League scholars because they might say something we disagree with. Rather, we should peruse these authors and evaluate their ideas with our own acumen.
Do you think Christians are anti-intellectual?
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- From: jmisener@thepopsite
- Name: Jessica
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Comments (107)
Wow. I'm sorry they blatantly doubted your faith right there.
If you in your heart know who you are and what you believe, and in your mind see the truth, they can NEVER take that away from you.I feel that the best way to deal with new information of ALL kinds is to always ask "why?" or questions of it all.Logic most definitely has its place in the church, or God wouldn't have given us brainz.I've never met any Christians like that. That's strange. I consider myself to be a theological nerd and in an ever constant pursuit of knowledge. I personally think science compliments The Bible.
I'm kind of surprised that you took that womans comment to mean something about Education at all. If she would have said that to me, I would have assumed she was talking about christian morals and temptation at a large secular school, not my shaky faith that would be easily broken by an opposing view point on creationism or something.
i hope that whatever knowledge i have gained through education or private study, i use for him. lot easier to witness to a bee hive keeper if you know a little something about honey.
we are students. jesus is the teacher. we study heaven on earth and although are study is really about the things of God, he reveals himself through his creation. And while in these last days he speaks to us through his son, he still speaks in many and various ways. And in every educational field of study, if we are seeking him he will reveal himself in whatever arena we are in.
"Does not Wisdom call, and understanding lift up her voice? To you, O men, I call, and my voice is to the sons of men. Take my instruction and not silver, and knowledge over the choicest gold".
don't place yourself in a bad position
Anti-intellectualism spans many backgrounds. Anyone who doesn't know how to back up what they believe and doesn't want to make the effort to find out will lean toward anti-intellectualism. They will certainly find it easier to say learning makes you dumber then put in the effort to learn themselves.
First, I'd like to make it clear that I am not anti-intellectual. (Often writing these comments is a bit like having the ball in game of Rugby - everyone suddenly piling on top of you with their own opinions and enforcing them quite aggressively).
I think there is a valid place for intellectualism in Christianity, and indeed, in any religion; it keeps us questioning and re-evaluating. However, sometimes it dominates and it can become so easy to get caught up in what the original greek really says or whatever that we forget what the over-riding message is, which is to be like Christ and to love others like Christ does. Sometimes we're so busy discussing what we think about a particular passage, that we run out of time just to sit in God's presense, or love those who need our love the most.
It saddens me that so many blogs, just like this one, which should shine with Christ's love, being frequented mainly by Christians, are in fact full of aggression and competitiveness - 'one-up-manship' was definately not Jesus' way.
There's a brilliant quotation in a book I'm reading at the moment, called The Irresistable Revolution by Shane Claiborne:
"The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians but we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything but pledging yourself accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world? Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church's prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh priceless scholarship, what would be do without you? Dreadful it is fall into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament." - Soren Kierkegaard, Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard.
A little extreme for some perhaps, but also thought-provoking. And also made me chuckle :)
One of the biggest problems I had while at secular institutions (and I am sure it will happen at religious ones too) is that when you have the nerve to have a different opinion than what is being taught or what is liberal (even if it is backed with research), you most often receive a failing grade for the paper.
I actually had to just regurgitate what I was told to believe as the truth in order to get the A's in the class.
As I said, it probably happens in religious schools as well.
Note: It didn't happen to me at Liberty University. I often wrote alternative views to what is mainstream and they were accepted and I received high marks for them, as long as you showed the professor some actual thought and research went into your paper.
-Matt