The Christian Purposes of the Liberal Arts

Education for citizenship and witness

Tomorrow evening we’ll graduate another class of students, an event that always prompts me to step back from end-of-term grading and reflect on what I hope that those young adults got out of a Bethel education.

Actually, I’ve been pondering that question for a couple weeks now, since I had the honor of delivering the final lecture of the semester in Bethel’s first-year general education course, Christianity and Western Culture. Most of those students won’t graduate until 2026 or 2027. But because that seventy-minute class on the world wars and Holocaust was the last time some of them would study history, I wanted to close with some kind of argument for the value of Christians studying the liberal arts.

In a gen ed course that did had more research or writing assignments, I might have reminded the business, education, engineering, nursing, and social work students in the room that the liberal arts help develop soft skills that are valuable in any profession. I might even have suggested that they consider adding a major or minor in a field like mine, since I’ve spent the semester watching our department’s seniors demonstrate the ability not only to conduct research and write well, but to think critically, to listen and to speak, to collaborate, to solve problems, and, maybe above all, to learn independently.

At the other end of the spectrum from my first-year gen ed students… Bethel history, philosophy, and political science students celebrating the completion of their capstone seminar this past Monday - photo courtesy of Amy Poppinga

CWC students do start to cultivate the skill of writing concisely about complicated ideas, but instead I thought about emphasizing how the liberal arts can prepare students for citizenship in a democratic society.

“Education is the foundation of democratic liberties,” wrote the Truman Commission in the early days of the Cold War. “Without an educated citizenry alert to preserve and extend freedom, it would not long endure.” Specifically, those educators argued that American colleges should have general education curricula because more specialized training by itself would mean that the student has “competence in some particular occupation, yet falls short of that human wholeness and civic conscience which the cooperative activities of citizenship require.” It was the broad study of the arts, humanities, and sciences that would “give to the student the values, attitudes, knowledge, and skills that will equip him to live rightly and well in a free society.”

Specifically, a lecture on modern warfare could help young little-d democrats think critically about the demands a state may attempt to make on its citizens, the ways that nationalism can both foster mutual trust within a nation and hatred of those outside of it, and how warfare can both endanger individual freedoms and act as an engine of social change.

Then as we turned to the Holocaust in the last act of that lecture, I hoped that I was helping prepare citizens who are thoughtful, empathetic, and committed to engaging in political practices and institutions that restrain the worst collective impulses of humanity.