I'm Not Even Hungry

And This!

I actually had to talk to Christians for this.

At the end of assembly, which my elementary school had at the beginning of every week, we all had to sing Father Abraham. Because of this, every Monday for five years, I joined in with an unruly mass of kids between the ages of six and 11 while we sang along to a song we kind-of-but-not-really knew. Afterwards, we ran around in angry circles until we got dizzy and fell down. Sometimes, teachers gave us ice cream.

We also had to attend Bible-study classes three times a week. Since most of the assignments involved drawing animals we would have brought with us onto Noah’s ark—I chose the butterfly, because nobody ever suspects the butterfly—we didn’t take them seriously

That was the extent of the religious training I received at my Methodist elementary school. But even if teachers didn’t make us memorize catechism, or whatever its Methodist equivalent is—see, bad school—religion insinuated itself into our lives. When I turned 10 and had my first pretentious existential crisis, I turned to the person I respected most in the world for help: my school’s principal, who was also its pastor.

Columbia reminds me of elementary school in many respects, but not this one. Although deeply religious students come here, they tend to isolate themselves from the broader community for understandable, and perhaps necessary, reasons. Moreover, the rest of student body, whose attitudes tend to range between apathy and slightly more apathy, don’t usually provide the most supportive atmosphere.

Some want to change this. A recent article in The New York Times detailed the efforts of a group of students supported by Christian activist groups across the country to, in their words, “reclaim the Ivy League for Christ.” They take their work seriously. As one explained in a grammatically mind-blowing sentence that, coming from an advocate of family values, still makes me giggle, religious students in the Ivy League today act as “a finger in the dike of keeping back the flood of immorality.” Must... not... laugh...

To add some fingers, they rely on the financial support of people like “Julian L. McPhillips Jr., a wealthy Princeton alumnus,” who believes he “cured an employee’s migraine headaches just by praying for him.” Apparently, they “joke in [his] office that we don’t need health insurance.” It’s a funny joke.

Others have given up on redeeming the Ivies altogether. Instead, they flock to established religious colleges. Most of these schools are Christian, for the simple reason that most Americans are as well. They include Bob Jones, for Fundamentalists; Brigham Young, for Mormons; and Thomas Aquinas, for Catholics.

It’s very easy, from our heavily guarded citadel deep in the heart of Blue America, to look askance at these schools, all of which describe themselves as “the Harvard of” whatever, even though they admit students who got a check for participation on their SATs. Okay, that is pretty funny, and not creepy “God told me you don’t need health insurance” funny.

But the stereotypes, as usual, conceal more than they reveal. Bob Jones, for instance, has an amazing gallery of religious art that comprises work from artists like Rubens and Botticelli. And for every slack-jawed Cletus in training, an admissions official can point to someone who got a 2400 on her boards back when they still went to only 1600 and turned down the Harvard of the Ivy League, Princeton.

More importantly, the students themselves seem happy. Compelled by God, who for some reason cares about this kind of thing, they approach learning with a purposefulness many of their Sparknotes-skimming counterparts in secular colleges lack. They have lower rates of drug use and depression. Despite their largely lily-white student body, minority students say they feel integrated into the university community.

One problem, though, afflicts students at both religious and secular colleges. When a reporter asked a professor at Thomas Aquinas, “If Nietzsche is taught with the same consideration as, say Thomas Aquinas, isn’t it likely that at least some of the students will come away doubting the existence of God,” the professor answered by “clench[ing] her hands around the edge of the table” and “rais[ing] her voice,” before becoming frustrated and leaving abruptly.

The professor had difficulty responding to the question because the answer was so obvious: of course some students will doubt. At its best, a liberal arts education challenges students’ most fundamental beliefs—even their belief in God. The people who get the most out of a college education are those willing to lose everything they ever had so they can get more. Luckily none of them have started their real lives yet, so they can afford to do so.

Except for people who take their beliefs and their education seriously. Knowledge can be more important for them, but it’s also more dangerous, because they have already found something they can’t afford to lose. Nietzsche, or any secular thinker, may be wrong. But unless students endanger their faith, they can’t seriously entertain the proposition that he may be right. Whether they do so at Bob Jones or at Brown, those who regard their religion as more than an excuse to get ice cream have to decide what they can sacrifice for their intellectual life. Unfortunately, so does everyone else.

posted by Tim @ 10:44 PM