Patrick Henry College, Paradigm of the Evangelical Liberal Arts?

I recently listened to a podcast of a booktalk by Hanna Rosin giving a talk (about a year ago) on her book, God's Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save America.The book is about the school that seems to be a veritable breeding ground for White House interns, Patrick Henry College. In her talk, Rosin marvels at the juxtaposition of a student body which is intellectually sophisticated, culturally, well ... at least aware, and yet made up of students who maintain their rigorous fundamentalist faith.

Her main goal seems to be to understand this seeming juxtaposition and drive home just how unique a position Patrick Henry College occupies in the intellectual landscape. I would agree that the school seems to be quite an outlier in terms of many of its specific ends and means. I would not agree with what seems like the implicit assumption in much of Rosin's story: that the fundamental issues Patrick Henry College was specifically set up to address are all that different from other Christian colleges.

First of all Rosin sets up her story describing her view of the tension between the sacred and the secular in the lives of the student body. Rosin describes how she "could sense a real tension between the school's dual missions of leading a faithful Christian life and impacting the culture. The school really wanted the students to study Plato and Nietzsche or the modern novels or the enlightenment thinkers but they were worried that they might be corrupted by their ideas."

The way she characterizes the problem makes it seem like 21st century fundamentalists who are also busy competing for jobs in the White House are somehow the first set of Christians to feel a tension in how to live out their Christianity in public. But this is not a new problem at all. Christians have been wrestling with this at least since Saint Augustine penned his book City of God struggling with the right view of the Church after the fall of Rome. But of course it has really been an issue for followers of Christ from day one. Christians tend to adopt the language of 'two kingdoms' to deal with these issues. We sense two basic tensions: on the one hand there is the eschatological tension between the ‘already’ and the ‘not yet’ of the kingdom, on the other hand there is the incarnational tension in how we are called to be ‘in but not of’ the world. And we Christians call these things ‘tensions’ with good reason. Answers in this arena are never merely plain on their face. I think anyone who takes their Christianity seriously and lives in a secular society, with secular neighbors or with a secular vocation - which is to say: everyone - struggles with striking the right balance in regard to these tensions at some time or another.

The next problem is that having missed how universal the felt tensions described above really are, Rosin depicts politically hyper-active Patrick Henry College as having somehow stumbled upon the idea of engaging in politics and the broader culture at the same time as maintaining a firm orthodoxy. She then backtracks and uncritically adopts Patrick Henry's characterization of other Christian insitutions of higher learning. Patrick Henry College sees itself as paradigmatic for any theologically robust evangelical liberal arts institution and views other schools either as lacking in true intellectual sophistication and thus not worthy of being called liberal arts institutions (Bible Colleges), or as accomodating too much to the secular University and compromising their orthodoxy (mainstream evangelical schools). Rosin apparently buys their story.

But Patrick Henry College is merely one recent, perhaps unique in some regards, example of a Christian institution of higher learning seeking to have some impact on the wider culture. Rosin is certainly aware not only that there are many other kinds of Christian colleges - liberal Protestant, Catholic, etc. - but even that Patrick Henry is exceptional among evangelical institutions; she mentions in response to a question, both Wheaton and my own alma mater, Calvin College, saying they are places that would almost certainly not hire a six-day, young-earth Creationist. So they seem to fit Patrick Henry's conception of an accomodationist school. But if she knew anything about these institutions, she would know not only that they maintain what most American Christians would see as a conservative core theology, but also that a central part of their missions is to have an impact broader than on their students private spiritual lives. Finally, if she did any more than scratch the surface she would also have know that, on the whole, places like Calvin College have very different ideas on how to go about this cultural and political engagement.

For example, in another place she mentions Farris [the school founder]'s model of reading atheist philosophers as one of doing 'opposition research.' As if one has to read this stuff just to be versed in enemy strategy. But I can't imagine an understanding of liberal arts education more divergent from this than the one in which my reading of atheist, secular or just plain old pagan books took place at Calvin. (Even on this front there is an internal discrepancy in that she admits that not all PH professors agree with Farris's views.)

The problem I think is that Rosin has appropriated wholesale Patrick Henry’s very wooden view of Christianity's two-kingdom mindset. From her viewpoint, a bright young student listening to secular music and reading secular philosophers on the one hand and then going to congress to lobby about teaching itelligent design, is seen as someone completely stepping in and out of their identity as Christians. They might listen to good music because it's entertaining and read secularists because it's useful, but they lobby congress because they're Christians; they do the former just because they're modern young people and only the latter specifically as Christians.

At another point she relates how the students "try and follow Farris's model of living in two worlds at once. Of keeping a running conversation with Jesus in your head at all times while still making it in the real world." ... "Michael Farris is not interested in adapters who bend to the will of the mainstream. He wants shapeshifters who can move in between two worlds with their essential natures in tact." As I've said, I think all Christians try to strike a balance here but Rosin does not see how the line could be tread in any other way than Farris's. Nowhere does she seem to contemplate the possibility of an orthodox Christianity that actually encourages an appreciation for art, even secular art, because it's beautiful and recognizes that all beauty comes from God, or a politics that seeks engage in the public sphere as Christians in order to contribute to the common good without merely seizing power and imposing as much theocracy as possible.

And this is where Rosin's lack of the ability to theologically critique Patrick Henry's understanding of Christian vocation matters. While I have asserted that all Christians feel tensions in how to live out their callings in life, the orthodox view is not that we navigate between purely sacred and secular spheres of life where we could alternately put on and shed our identities as Christians. This strict dichotomous view is not more orthodox or conservative but essentially an instance of the Christian heresy of gnosticism. Against this, Christians must recognize how, in Abraham Kuyper's words, "there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: 'mine!'" But while this means that we are called to engage specifically as Christians in all spheres of life, this engagement need not, and almost certainly should not, look like that of the stereotypical culture warrior.

Perhaps Rosin's portrayal of what Patrick Henry teaches its students to think is correct. I am not in a position to say. Even if it is, it is a serious error on her part to accept the school's own take on the theological landscape of cultural engagement and to uncritically employ its own self-assessment and characterization of the options available in Christian higher learning.

But this is probably exactly why she wrote the book. Patrick Henry's students and their mission are headline grabbing. They are more than likely unique, but not because of their intellectualism and not because of their desire to engage the culture, but merely in what they think constitute the right weapons for the Christian to take up and for which battles. If she had started out with a little background discussion of the historical significance of Christian conversations surrounding eschatological and incarnational tensions she could have given us a much more interesting account of exactly how Patrick Henry is, and is not, unique.

So Ms. Rosin and journalists everywhere, please take note, if you meet someone trying to act like a Christian out there in your 'public' sphere, know that we're not all from Patrick Henry.

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