Why Are Christian Colleges Fighting Culture Wars? Fear

This interview is part of The Reconstruct, a weekly newsletter from Sojourners. In a world where so much needs to change, Mitchell Atencio and Josiah R. Daniels interview people who have faith in a new future and are working toward repair. Subscribe here.

At this point, the pattern of controversy at a Christian higher education program is somewhat predictable: A school hosts a speaker, a class, a student club, or some event geared toward racial justice, LGBTQ+ dialogue, or economic justice. This upsets conservative culture warriors who attack the school for “going woke,” “caving to DEI,” “teaching CRT,” “postmodernism,” “liberalism,” or some other shorthand meant to attack the school’s integrity.

It’s happened at Wheaton University, Grove City College, Palm Beach Atlantic University, Wheaton again, and Wheaton again. It’s happened in countless other instances that were not national news, and it’s debated in local churches each time a high school student starts considering attending a Christian school.

At the same time, many students, alums, and some faculty of these institutions are fighting to make their schools more inclusive. At Seattle Pacific University, for example, students and faculty protested the school’s policies against hiring same-sex-married faculty.

But it’s not all conflict all the time at Christian colleges. At many of these institutions, students and faculty walk together on a path toward God’s call to love one another.

John Hawthorne has seen the good and bad of Christian higher education up close for many decades. Since starting a job as a teacher at a Christian college in the 1980s and moving into administration in the ’90s, he’s watched the logic and incentives clash between what’s best for students, faculty, administrators, trustees, and donors.

At its heart, Hawthorne believes the conflict is the result of Christian universities allowing fear to drive their decision making, whether that be fear of losing funds, fear of mission drift, or fear of being accused of mission drift.

After retiring five years ago, Hawthorne began working on his book, The Fearless Christian University, which serves as a diagnosis and recommendations for treatment of those fears. In our interview, we discussed his path to caring so deeply for Christian schools, the future he hopes for, and how much of the problem is just money.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Mitchell Atencio, Sojourners:How did you come to care so much about Christian universities and colleges?

John Hawthorne: I actually fell into Christian universities and colleges. I married into it. I was at Purdue, and I was studying sociology. I met my wife, who had graduated from Olivet Nazarene University and had gone to Purdue to work on a master’s degree in math. We wound up meeting at church and hit it off. Because she still had a lot of friends that were back at [Olivet] and a lot of faculty members that she was particularly close to, we would make regular trips back.

I got to know people there, and particularly I got to know the chair of the sociology department. I’m in grad school, and I’m torn with this question about future decisions. Do I want to go to a reputable, mid-range state school and do research in the sociology of religion and be an evangelical voice within that space? Or would it be better to go and teach in a Christian liberal arts institution and try to shape a generation of students, who really had a very limited understanding of what sociology did and try to foster that kind of inquiry.

The weekend our daughter was born, in May of ’81, I get a call from the chair of the sociology department. He says, “John, this is Joe. Bruce quit. Do you want to come?” And I said, “Do I want to come interview or do I want the job?” and he said “Whatever.” I interviewed, took the job, and I taught there for nine years.

Late in that period, I was involved in an increasing number of important committees. I wound up wanting to go into administration. I moved to Sterling, Kan., taught sociology, and within a couple of years became the vice president for a nontraditional, working-adults, one-night –a-week kind of program. I wound up becoming the academic vice president at Warner Pacific College in Portland. I did that for a decade and then was hired at Point Loma Nazarene as their provost. I did that for almost four years. I got fired and wound up back in the classroom at Spring Arbor in Michigan.

I retired in May of 2020. A couple of months before retirement, I wrote myself a 30-page memo about my career and made observations. I thought I would be interested in just writing a series of essays about issues in Christian higher education. I can trace the first chapter of the book to those essays.

The notion of fear within Christian universities — and as expressed within the evangelical world broadly — is debilitating for what Christian universities should be trying to do.

What do you like about Christian higher education? What makes it a worthy endeavor?

There’s something unique about a residential, liberal arts institution with a strong centralizing message and a focus on holistic character development. My end goal of success for a university is when the freshman [turns] 38 — they’ve moved beyond their first job, they’ve got a profession and capacity, but they’re also people of faith and they’re people of character. They’re people with ethics and they do all the things that Christian universities claim to nurture.

That environment has an important role to play. I wouldn’t want to see them go away. One could go to the state school and be involved in a local church, InterVarsity, Cru, or a Christian study center. But it doesn’t have that kind of holistic character formation — it’s more segmented.

That’s what I think [Christian universities] bring to the table within the environment of higher education writ large.

What about the challenges? What makes the challenges for a Christian university different compared to a similarly sized liberal arts college that doesn’t have a faith component?

Things are challenging for all of higher education — not even just liberal arts institutions. Particularly within private schools, endowments aren’t big enough to handle the variabilities of the modern marketplace.

We’re over-leveraged in terms of scholarship discounts. We seem to think that we’re holding true to our mission when we keep shrinking programs and chasing new markets. One of the consistent themes of the book is my critique of administrators who decide that they need to kill the philosophy and humanities program in order to launch mechanical engineering or sports medicine or e-gaming. That puts those liberal arts institutions at a competitive disadvantage, because the state schools have more resources to be able to provide those products, and the liberal arts schools are trying to play catch up.

I also talk about the fact that if you’re chasing the programs students say they want today, it’ll take you three years to get the curriculum up and running and hire the faculty. By that time, the list the admissions department will tell you students are after is something else. So, rather than figuring out how to operate from the core strength of what they have been and what their core mission and identity has been, schools wind up chasing these other things.

I don’t want to minimize the financial pressures. They’re very real. And enrollments, are all over the map. There are schools who’ve done exceedingly well over the last decade, some who’ve done very badly over the last decade, and a bunch that kind of wobble around in the middle. I can’t find a predictable pattern for it.

There are some unique components that relate to Christian higher education that don’t relate to simply private liberal arts schools. A lot of it has to do with the role of both internal and external stakeholders that try to protect the institution against “mission drift,” — perceived mission drift, or the fear of the mission drift.

Somehow the Christian university has “lost its way” because it had a gay-straight alliance, or it softened its position on ABC, or — and I speak here to my administrative background — because some pastor reported an unnamed parent who told him that this thing happened in this class, and the school needs to make sure they shut that down.

I talk about Grove City College, and the whole “Jemar Tisby and Grove City have gone woke,” and the board of trustees having a special task force to explore whether or not Grove City has gone woke. [After Tisby spoke at the college in 2020, a group of alums accused the college of going “woke,” culminating in a 2022 letter from the school that called the invitation to Tisby a “mistake.”]

Anybody who knows anything about Christian higher education knows that there is no way under the sun that Grove City was woke or ever could be woke.

But that dynamic of “how do we circle the wagons and protect and make sure we’re all aligned with what people say we’re supposed to do” is a dynamic that I don’t think happens at Goshen College in Indiana.

But isn’t the big issue here just money and capitalist incentives? When donors and funders are more conservative than students, staff, and faculty, or even administration, this is going to happen, right?

Yes, money is a huge part of it.

Let’s talk about the recent blow-up at Wheaton College over whether the school should congratulate Russell Vought or not. [The school congratulated Vought, a Wheaton alum, in a social media post, for his appointment to the White House Office of Management and Budget. Wheaton then deleted the post, before publishing statements regarding the post and deletion.]

There’s one group that said Wheaton had gone woke. It was basically the same as the Grove City College letter, same argument. There was another group of alums who said, “If this is the way you’re going to be, we’re never going to give you any money anymore.”

[The second group, over 1,500 alums who signed “An Open Letter from Wheaton College Alumni on Project 2025 & Endorsing Russell Vought,” did not threaten to withhold donations, but did “ask that the college be mindful of public proclamations that translate as political endorsements—especially in cases where the issues, as in Project 2025, are antithetical to Christian charity.”]

So, it’s true that the older population — trustees and older donors who have long been givers to a Christian institution — will put strings on their funding.

It’s also true, though less evident, that there are blocks of those that graduated in the ’80s and beyond who say, “I’m not going to give money to these schools. I’m not going to send my kids to these schools,” exactly for the reason that schools have carved out these conservative positions.

So, yes, there’s risk about donor funding, and there’s money left on the table.

What is pedagogy?

This is probably not a technical definition, but pedagogy is about the art of teaching, the science of teaching. It’s what’s actually happening in classrooms, and I extend my version of pedagogy a little broader than just the classroom interaction. I would include student life programming, small groups, and conversations that happen among students around a dinner table. That’s all part of the weave of what the learning experience is all about.

I’m drawn to the work of Wendy Fischman and Howard Gardner on the difference between transactional and transformational goals in education.

Transformational education is, to me, a pedagogical goal. It says we’re interested in how you have grown and changed and deepened as a person. How you become a more responsible learner, increase self-efficacy, all those buzzwords. Whereas the transactional says, “check these boxes, sit through these classes, get a C, and at the other end somebody is going to hand you a diploma and you could cash that diploma in for a job.”

That’s an overly broad contrast, but one of those is a pedagogical goal, and the other one isn’t.

Where would you say pedagogy ranks in the priorities of Christian universities?

Depends on who you talk to. Faculty members, student life professionals — the dean of students, activities, and residential life people — have that clear sense of what they’re trying to do. Administrators? Less so. Trustees? Even less. Donors? Even less.

One of the things I talk about in the book is my concern that too few Christian college presidents — and almost no Christian college trustees — come out of an academic experience. So, they’re not well versed in how a broad mission or direction of the Christian university actually operates on the ground, where the task of seeing those students in that transformational journey takes place. They’re too much abstracted from that view.

My solution for Christian universities is to put that student transformational journey at the center of everything the university does.

The reason you talk about DEI at Grove City College is because there are students of color and white students who need to hear Jemar Tisby at chapel, because it’s part of their ongoing transformational development.

If you have the students at the center, you have the means for addressing those external critiques. Whereas, if all you’re worried about is maintaining the position of the university, then the accusation you’ve “gone woke” is one that you look over your shoulder and worry about.

Even outside of the context of colleges, I wonder how to care more for a faith journey than a destination. What would that look like for a Christian university, considering that students may be at different places in their journeys?

First of all, you’re right, there are a number of students who come with relatively underdeveloped faith perspectives. They may have some casual church involvement and came [to the university] to play soccer. Or they may have grown up in a very rigid church setting. A student who’s 18years old, she may have only had a couple of pastors at the local church, and that’s Christianity to them.

There’s a process of, on the one hand, learning the language and learning what the values are for those students who don’t have a faith background. And then for others, it’s a matter of opening up a world and finding out that there’s a great deal of diversity.

At my first institution, there was incredible regional variation for the denomination. Chicago and Eastern Michigan were very different than Southern Indiana. Students came to college saying, “I’ve got it together. I know what it means to be a Christian. I know what it means to be a Nazarene.” And they meet these people who also say they’re Nazarene and Christian who have very different views than them — that’s good! It’s important for them to be able to manage that.

My observation: When students go to the required chapel — assuming they don’t have assigned seats — freshmen run to the front. They’re very active and they’re the ones with their hands up and they’re the ones jumping up and down with the worship music. By the time they’re juniors, they’re halfway back in the auditorium. By the time they’re seniors, they’re another five rows back in the auditorium. Why? Because they don’t need that in the same way. Their faith is less dependent upon the experiential dynamic that I would associate with church camp.

A second indicator of that transformational faith journey is that one might come with a sheltered view of what we read and what we study. They might believe, “These are bad books, and these are bad people,” and then you’re taking a sociological theory class, and you’re reading Marx. And you say, “Okay, I don’t need to embrace Marx’s kind of antipathy to faith to understand that the economic argument has some value, and I can take something away from it.” That’s a sign of maturity.

If Christian colleges and universities implemented your vision, how would tomorrow’s students be different?

One of the sad things about too much of Christian higher education is that good Christian students come, they study, and they’re feel boxed in by the infrastructure that says, “This is what we can talk about. We can’t talk about those things.” And so, within a couple of years of graduation, they’re not sure what they believe anymore. They’re not measurably different than their peers who went to state schools.

I want to see [these schools] have depth, carry on, and have this kind of holistic sense of the way in which we claim we’re creating leaders for the future. That’s exactly what we ought to be doing.

If people’s ethics get soft, their faith gets weaker, their Christian involvement drops off, that’s an indictment of the current practice.

My hope is that, if people followed my path, we’d see it in a changed impact among the graduates. Which, in my idealized world, would even change perceptions of what it means to be evangelical, be Christian, or be faithful in a pluralistic society.