Christian Education as a Cognitive Minority (Part 1)

Carl E. Zylstra

“When making an educational decision, the biggest choice you face is whether you are going to attend a Small Christian College or a Big Pagan University.” That was the way a friend of mine put it when recruiting Christian students to the college which he served as president. He himself at one time had been a tenured professor at one of those big name “Big Pagan Universities”. But now as a Christian college president, he wanted all new Christian high school graduates and their parents to be clear about the stark choice before them.

Nevertheless, it took me a while but I’ve finally become convinced that my friend was right. The western academic culture really has blown right past the secular humanist myth of neutrality and pretty much landed in downright open paganism where nature is worshiped and individual human choice is exalted as the ultimate norm. More and more it seems pretty evident to me that the Christian worldview as articulated by all levels of Christian education from early education through graduate schools has now become pretty much of a cognitive minority in the western educational system.

And yet not everyone sees it that way. My friend told me that he would always get vigorous retorts every time he made his case. And the one time I quoted him in a piece I published, I received similar “vigorous” reaction. Apparently some Christians still believe that we live in a secularly neutral intellectual/cultural public square where all viewpoints are welcome on an equal footing. By contrast, others, like my friend and me, are convinced that the intellectual platform of Western culture has pushed a sincerely biblical worldview all the way to the margins of the discussion, if it is allowed to participate at all.

What troubles me is that this divided perception of our current state of affairs increasingly cuts right through the middle of those involved in giving leadership to traditionally Christian educational institutions. And yet, at least to me, it seems increasingly hard to deny that a thoroughly Christian way of expressed biblically shaped thought has become, frankly, a cognitive minority in the present day.

Indeed the critical question seems to be whether, as a cognitive minority, the Christian way of thinking about the world and human responsibility still retains any intellectual credence at all within the academic public square. After all, we live in a day when faculty are denied tenure in state universities for advocating debatable propositions such as intelligent design and newspaper columnists are terminated for arguing self-evident propositions such as that there are only two biologically determined genders. Or, as I used to respond when people complained about a supposed lack of academic freedom in Christian colleges, “Good luck trying to teach your personal belief in the sanctity of one-man/one-woman marriage in your local state university.” Most recently in America the public policy argument has shifted to questioning whether any education permeated with such Christian perspectives deserves the right to be accredited by their regional commissions and whether federal student aid can legitimately be applied in institutions committed to such a confessional approach to Christian education.

To me it seems clear that that confessional Christians now have become a cognitive minority within dominant (and rapidly paganizing) western thought and culture. We live in a day when the intellectual public square has been sanitized from consciously biblically based perspectives and is increasingly being sterilized from even unconscious thought patterns that might just happen to align with traditional biblical teaching. Indeed, Christian education is pretty much the only place left to nurture that cognitive minority worldview. The myth of neutral common education has been stripped away. Secularism has revealed itself as being far from neutral but, rather, is itself a gateway religious impulse on the path back to the blatant paganism that predated Western thought and has continued to swirl around its edges ever since. And like all religions, the new secular paganism that dominates the present intellectual milieu has embarked on its own inquisitory effort at driving all dissenting heretics off the field.

The only question is whether we acknowledge this new setting or not. Christian faculty and teachers sometimes tend to think that if only they would make the argument more clearly, then their unbelieving graduate school advisors, whom they so admired and whose approval they still seek, would surely bestow their approval. Students also can be so imbued with the spirits embodied in the digital atmosphere they breathe 24/7 that it literally makes no sense at all to them when educators propose alternative biblically grounded ways of thinking, acting, and living.

As far as administrative leaders go, my suspicion is that they are rapidly dividing into two camps. There are those who (whether under pressure from faculty or students) still seem to think that they can finesse Christian worldview just enough to gain respectability among their “industry” peers. On the other hand there are those who acknowledge that sincerely Christian educational endeavors represent a true cognitive minority. And, while not terminating discussion and engagement, this second camp acknowledges that we are standing on quite a different foundation – and are about quite a different enterprise – than most educators around us. As a consequence, with them we will never completely agree. There was a time in western culture where we could admit such a division of perspective while still believing that the creation as structured by God would ultimately push back, forcing everyone, at least to some extent, to acknowledge its reality. However, in an era where even basic assumptions regarding the genetic foundation of human sexuality are considered outside the bounds of civic -- and civil – discourse, it seems pretty obvious that the new intellectual paganism has little interest in conforming to even the most obvious structures of reality.

Nevertheless all this leads to some really good news for today’s seriously Christian educators. For, in the end, it turns out that the current cultural environment is far more similar to the context within which the original biblical message was formulated than have been the last 1500 years of Christianized western thought. Perhaps, in fact, this new state of affairs may provide us as Christians with a greatly enhanced understanding of the Bible once we’ve checked our privilege that was gained in the Constantinian and Justinian reforms of Western culture. It may just be that the Bible, which guided the old Hebraic/Christian cognitive minority in its conflict with Egyptian, Canaanite, Babylonian, and Roman paganism will now provide even greater light for those who need to maintain its message as the newly marginalized cognitive minority of the 21 st century. Besides, it should never be forgotten that the majority-world Christians never have operated as anything other than a cognitive minority within their culture together with all the agony and downright martyrdom that brings (See Countries where it’s Most Dangerous to be a Christian in 2020).

But for those who aren’t yet convinced that the ground of western thought has so dramatically shifted beneath us, my next blog installment will return to the question of what on earth happened to bring about this seismic shift in Western Civilization.

And for those who are puzzled over why so much of the current debate seems to center on the place the values of human sexuality play in our cultural divide, that will be the final chapter in this three-part series.

Carl E. Zylstra serves as Vice-Chair of the Board of Directors of the International Alliance for Christian Education. A highly regarded leader in Christian education, he previously served as president of Dordt College in Sioux Center, Iowa.