Finding a (Real) Christian College

Or, why people worry about the wrong kinds of "mission drift"

I was going to mention it in my links wrap last Saturday, but the more I thought about Jeff Bilbro’s recent piece for Christianity Today, the more I wanted to say about it.

Most of all, let me say this: read the original. An English professor at Grove City College, Bilbro is always an interesting writer who offers the reader new ways of answering old questions.¹ In this case, he covers ground that should be familiar to readers of this Substack: how Christians understand and evaluate “Christian colleges.”

The question many Christians have for me is which colleges are “safe” or “real” Christian schools, which usually means those that have a truly conservative theological ethos. For those who aren’t familiar with the world of Christian higher ed, it can be difficult to identify these schools from outside the campus community, and parents often (reasonably) conclude an institution’s stance on human sexuality is the simplest indicator of a college’s commitment to Christian orthodoxy.

Before I summarize (and overwhelmingly affirm) Bilbro’s response to this common question, let me complicate it just a bit.

If only because I’ve married into a family educated by Lutheran “colleges of the church,” I want to discourage the people asking this question from assuming that a school has to “have a truly conservative theological ethos” to be a “real” Christian college. While I teach at that latter type of school and don’t want to work anywhere else, our ELCA peers are absolutely doing “real” Christian work in the field of education. They have more religious diversity — on their faculties, not just in their student bodies — and often a more progressive “theological ethos” than a university like mine or Bilbro’s. But the fact that their religious values are often more implicit than explicit doesn’t make them any less authentically Christian. At the best of those colleges, those very values still undergird a model of education more in keeping with what Bilbro goes on to recommend than what you sometimes find at more conservative institutions.

Now, those mainline schools’ positions on sexuality may still be a dealbreaker for the people that Bilbro is talking to. But consider what he says next:

LGBTQ questions are indeed important, and they can serve as a proxy for an institution’s broader theology. But by itself, this isn’t a reliable formula for finding a good Christian college. A school may stake out a bold position on sexuality and yet capitulate to what I’d suggest is the most overlooked and therefore most insidious threat to Christian education in America right now.

It’s not progressive theology. It’s a pervasive consumerist anthropology.

In addition to thinking about college options in terms of theological alignment, Bilbro urges Christians to ask another question: does the college see students more “as consumers who need to get a marketable degree leading to a high-paying job” or “as people bearing a tarnished imago Dei that, by the grace of Christ, can be burnished through disciplined, focused effort.” In other words, is its approach to Christian higher education rooted in a consumerist or a “formational” anthropology?

“Clearly,” he acknowledges, “no Christian college brands itself as offering degrees in the service of consumerism. They make the decisions they think they must to keep their doors open. Yet the result is that far too many institutions give lip service to Christian moral formation while organizing themselves around a consumerist vision of education.”

Of course, many parents worry that the college is just paying “lip service” to its theological affirmations. But at this point in the 21st century, the most common “mission drift” in my sector of higher ed has nothing to do with professors allegedly betraying core doctrines and everything to do with the erosion of our core mission as educators.