The religious landscape amidst gray secular cultures

It’s my first post of the New Year, and there is much to talk about for 2009. But since all the American media really seem to talk about is economics and Obama, why not take a look at education?

I’m reading a book published in 2005 by a Jewish journalist who chooses to explore the structure of religious colleges throughout the United States, prying into the inner workings of a good variety of conservative and liberal religious universities. Naomi Riley’s God on the Quad is subtitled How Religious Colleges and the Missionary Generation Are Changing America. As one might guess, her main focus is the conservative side of the fence. It’s a great book for anyone curious about the sociological effects of conservative religious education on the young adult mind.

There is a lot of important information packed into it, although she does play around a bit much with personal testimony from the students. But the important aspect of her special take on the issue is her concern with the formative influence of these environments on the student body. The amount of faculty from highly accredited universities, she reports, are no less found here than secular universities. And the schools she visits are widely regarded as the most conservative. Among the many are Bob Jones University, the evangelical school historically known for its racial segregation policies, and Brigham Young University, the staunchly Mormon school. The latter has some of the most rigidly prescribed student/faculty etiquette I personally am aware of.

To accuse these schools of intolerance and imposing “sheltered” environments upon the students is a bit mislead, even though many of them are undoubtedly guilty of racial discrimination and maybe some forms of “homophobia” (which I still don’t exactly know how to define). Naomi’s emphasis is the direction these schools provide and the amount of social responsibility the students’ acquire while staying there. Social responsibility was the biggest one. You don’t find this in secular universities as much, and it is progressively dying. The biggest problem is that secular universities do not offer a definitive social context in which students find their particular role. Even if there is a bit of an amorphous social framework one might be able to identify in secular universities, they’re hardly intelligible. The ones that do are often pigeon-holed as “liberal” or “conservative”, and not much else after that.

The mistake of the secular universities is that they are concerned about providing students with a neutral education, but a “neutral” education isn’t an achievable reality. I don’t have a problem with attempting to be as objective and disinterested and even “neutral” as possible when treating very controversial topics. It’s my conviction that this is an important principle behind Western academia. The difficulty is, however, when the secular institution excludes the possibility of other ideals and values which are typically understood to already be favored or canonized. The Western religious ideals, in turn, receive a stale treatment, and there is no treatment of even medieval ideals (a topic you would expect to be an underdog by now) as anything worth plausible philosophical consideration. I’ve encountered such travesties time and again. At the end of the day, because we have practically assumed this postmodern position in most classroom settings, the less favored still only get a half-baked treatment. What people usually grab is an attractive idea romanticized in all sorts of aesthetically gratifying language; they leave behind everything that home once meant to them, under the impression that it was all just a scam to keep them under mom and dad’s hand. Religious schools, although they many lack the much needed consideration of other cultural ideals in opposition to their own, at least answer a very basic human need. They offer stability and direction, a social framework where explicit criteria is available for them to approach dialogue. And many of these students do end up receiving graduate degrees from schools like Harvard, Yale, and William and Mary.

Maybe religious universities do offer a “sheltered” education, or a “close-minded” approach – however you might categorize it. The point is that the secular universities can not avoid it either. They give up a meaty representation of an important philosophy in their anxious desire to openly respect the other students. Either that, or their curriculum treats most traditional religions with a terribly off-set bias, without the students consciously aware they are receiving such a bias.

There’s more to ask about these religious schools and how much they will actually maintain their intellectual and religious integrity. I imagine much of that will unfold as the U.S. continues with different political and economic policies. Demographics will change, but I do not doubt that the strong religious cultures will continue to prevail in an increasingly fragmented nation.