The Moderates Dive for Cover, Part I

Is it typical for people to beat up on their own church-related colleges and universities? I don't know about other communities of faith. But I can tell you that in my eighteen years of working in Christian higher education in my tradition, I have seen and felt the bruises. People can inflict such wounds upon their educational institutions when they believe that those institutions are not doing things the way they would like them to.

The more conservative one's stance, I have seen, the more vicious the attack. It's as if they believe that we really are an ivory tower on an impregnable castle, and their flaming arrows are unlikely to damage the enterprise. So they shoot them more frequently and with much more force.

I have heard some people inside the organization, when they are feeling frustrated and hurt by the critics, harrumph and write these people off as whackos and crazies. But they are not (for the most part). They are dear, sincere people who for the most part agonize over the things they see going wrong with "their schools." They feel that the issues they cite are signs of their own "family" falling away from God, and of their young people not being ready for the second coming. I hear the fear in their voices and understand that they care. They care a great deal, or they would not be so ready to rip and tear, fight to the death, and pass on their concerns in viral emails and blog posts.

My current employing university has been under fire for several years because the biology teachers have been accused of being "evolutionists." * Websites against the school have sprung up, the authors of the posts railing against the insidious evil apparently taking place in the biology classrooms, citing rumors and second-hand stories as truth, expressing opinions that the university is fake and insincere in every action it takes to respond to or address the issues, painting the university president as devious and intent on separating the university from the church, and calling on the church leadership to take disciplinary action. Without getting into the whole long story, I will say that there has been much heat and little light, and it's not over yet.

[to be continued]

*In this case, that term would mean teaching evolutionary theory as historical reality, while dismissing a literal creation as simply a myth. I tend to be a conservative in this area, but these posts are not to discuss our differences on origins. They are to discuss the voices we hear speaking up on these matters.