Fundamentalist Education, Beyond Doctrine

Many newcomers to the inner workings of fundamentalist Christian colleges are surprised to learn that the institutions consider themselves not just righteous but also thoroughly “modern,” says Adam Laats, a professor of education and history at Binghamton University.

In Fundamentalist U: Keeping the Faith in American Higher Education (Oxford University Press), he says that officials, alumni, and most students of the conservative, interdenominational institutions are proudest of two accomplishments, as they see them.

First, their institutions teach what it is to be a citizen of a “properly Christian America” of biblical revelation.

Second, they safeguard their founders’ legacies by being “dissenting modern schools, not restorations of an earlier standard.” Fundamentalist founders, writes Laats, “insisted that their dissenting forms of science and knowledge represented better science, truer knowledge, and more modern inquiry.”

They still believe that of themselves. Liberty University, for example, has been a leader in online-course delivery, and has generated huge income from it, which it has invested in campus buildings and recreational facilities.

In a phone interview, Laats explains: “My book would be about three pages long if in the 1910s and ’20s, conservative evangelical and fundamentalist academics had said, ‘We don’t want to be modern. We want to be early-19th-century church colleges.’ " Such a choice back then, he believes, would have left just “one or two quirky remaining schools” today. Instead the sector is relatively secure and clearly politically influential, even though some smaller institutions “are under intense pressure just to keep the lights on.”

For founders and modern-day officials alike, he says, “secure” means, more than anything, that “we want our institutions to be safe and trustworthy.” The concept of being doctrinally and thus culturally sound echoes through the history and current life of the institutions, he says.

So when other colleges eased up on their expectations of students’ conduct starting in the mid-20th century, fundamentalist institutions barely did. “They tried to figure out what changes they liked and which went against their rules,” Laats says. And that was often hard to say, because they all read Scripture differently. “They had no pope to go to,” as he puts it.

Early on, and still today, watchful parents have readily volunteered their judgments about “safe and trustworthy,” he says. For example, they “wanted their sons and daughters to be courting fellow Christians, but certainly not to be having sex.”

Leaders of fundamentalist and evangelical colleges and churches have always been quick to condemn anything they consider the apostasy of others. In a sort of continuing “family feud,” says Laats, whenever two institutions bicker — over, say, varying stances toward issues of sexual identity — “both will say they do what they do within a staunchly evangelical Christian context.”

Laats spent the 2014-15 academic year poring over institutional archives at Biola University, Bob Jones University, Gordon College, Liberty University, Moody Bible Institute, and Wheaton College, in Illinois, in an attempt to understand what has motivated leaders as they have energetically imposed doctrinal and behavioral strictures on students and faculty members. He concluded that fundamentalist institutions have frequently been run almost as cults of personality, quick to quash any signs of dissent.

Like elite secular institutions, Laats says, fundamentalist ones seek to thrive by “developing a niche that they can exploit,” selling themselves as “experiences” that transform young people. They describe themselves as hubs of academic endeavor, with prospectuses little different from those of their nonreligious peers. Leaders also promote their institutions’ distinguishing features, like size, location, and sports programs, aware that evangelical families want to provide their children with more than doctrinal guidance during their college years.