Setting the Course

Mon, 01 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Dangerous Christians

There are different ways to respond to a crisis. The first is to bellyache about it. We can document what’s wrong with our institutions, expose the bad guys, complain and write letters, maybe even go to rallies. That’s the first way: to seek improvement by calling for improvement. The second way is to tackle the problem at the surface level. If we think Washington is dysfunctional, we can work to elect a congressman who seems different from the rest. If we think academia is too liberal, we can push for a conservative speaker who will offer an alternative point of view. That’s the second way: to make improvements on the margin. It’s needed, but it’s not enough.

At The King’s College we offer a third way. We don’t just want to document the problem; we want to be part of the solution. We aren’t satisfied with improvements on the margin; we want to help transform the core institutions of society. In short, we are here to make a difference. That’s why we’re in New York City, the capital of the world. One has to be in the capital of the world to understand the world, and only when one understands the world can one change it. That’s what we’re about at King’s: changing the world.

How can we do that? Each year we seek to send several hundred students out into the mainstream institutions of society. These students will go to Wall Street, to Silicon Valley, and to leading corporations. They will go to Capitol Hill and the White House, to Fox News, and to ABC. They will go to Hollywood, to graduate school at Duke and Columbia, and to such entrepreneurial hot spots as Hong Kong and Shanghai and Bangalore. Imagine the impact on America and on the world if King’s were to dispatch five hundred or a thousand students a year into key positions.

Many Christian institutions seek to shelter their students from society. Even if they succeed, they marginalize those students because, in shutting them out from mainstream institutions, they leave them with no access to those institutions. Right now, if someone were to ask me, “What is the Christian capital of America?” I’d have to say Orlando, Florida, or Colorado Springs, Colorado, or Tupelo, Mississippi. The problem, of course, is that the major political and economic and cultural decisions in America are made in New York, Washington, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. These are the secular capitals of America. If we want to make a real difference, we have to go where the action is.

At King’s, if I may borrow a phrase from Matthew Arnold, we expose students to the best that is being thought and said. Our core curriculum is built around the ideas that shape nations: politics, philosophy, and economics. Some people may wonder, what’s the point of learning about all that? Well, politics is about who is in charge and for what purposes. Economics is about how we eat and survive and prosper, about what’s to be done with wealth and poverty. Philosophy is about what and why: what is truth, what is justice, why is there a universe, what is happiness, what is the purpose of life. All these words are in the Bible, hundreds of times in various forms. And these are practical questions. By figuring them out, we are better prepared not only to have successful careers but also to be good citizens and to live full and happy lives.

Our goal is knowledge, but knowledge applied to the world in which we live. Our mission is academic excellence, but not excellence for its own sake or effort and achievement for their own sake. Rather, our goal is effort and achievement for the sake of America, for the sake of society, and for the building of God’s kingdom. We are a Christian college. We are not embarrassed by that; we are motivated by that. We are, one might say, unapologetically Christian.

We intend to become a leading center for the new apologetics in America—an apologetics that is needed to counter the new atheism. We welcome the challenge of atheism and radical secularism, and we intend to engage it with its own weapons. We are not intimidated by radical Islam; we have an effective response. But we aren’t going to win these arguments solely by citing passages from the Bible. We have to recognize that we live in a society that is religiously diverse and secular in the terms of public debate. Citing Scripture on a given question—that of creation, say, or gay marriage—is not likely to work when one is addressing someone who rejects the authority of the Bible to adjudicate that question. As Christians we must be able to speak two languages: one language in church and another when we address people who don’t share our Christian beliefs. This is what I call Christian bilingualism.

We are Christians who believe that reason is not opposed to revelation; that reason is a valuable tool with which to discover and affirm the truths of God and creation. We believe that the Bible isn’t merely about the next world; it has important things to say about economics, about war and peace, about ethics, and about human nature. At King’s we aren’t afraid to say what we stand for; we stand for the truth and for political, economic, and spiritual freedom. We don’t hesitate to say that a free society is better than a totalitarian society, or that free markets are a better way to generate prosperity than socialism. We don’t hold these truths dogmatically; we hold them empirically. We affirm them because they are congruent with the facts. At the same time, we are all about open debate. We don’t avoid tough issues; we plunge into them. Freedom and truth aren’t opposites; they go together. Freedom of inquiry and open debate are the mechanisms by which we arrive at the truth.

If we do our job, and our students do their job, they will graduate from King’s as dangerous Christians. Dangerous because they are spiritually equipped and intellectually equipped. They have lived in the big city and encountered the slings and arrows of atheism and radicalism and secularism. They aren’t intimidated by such challenges; their attitude is “bring it on.” That’s what makes them a force to be reckoned with .

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The Real Reason for Religious Freedom

Sat, 01 Mar 1997 00:00:00 -0500

Why do we protect freedom of religion? The commonsense answer, which I think hits close to the truth, is that we protect it because religion is important. That simple answer creates serious problems for liberal theory, however, so it is seldom discussed or defended by legal writers.

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Setting the Course

The Real Reason for Religious Freedom