Are evangelical colleges going “woke”?

Christian journalists and social media have been abuzz with the question of whether prominent evangelical colleges and universities are going woke. Although the term “woke” is often sensational and imprecise, it seems clear that some Christian schools that enjoy reputations for being orthodox and evangelical Protestant institutions are nonetheless increasingly uncomfortable with a vocal commitment to conserving the divinely appointed natural order and in maintaining historic theological orthodoxy and orthopraxy.

Although it might seem like there is a cabal of liberals purposefully trying to infiltrate the last few conservative Christian colleges remaining in the United States, the reason for liberal drift in evangelical schools is far less sensational but perhaps far more worrisome because it is so unintentional. The root of progressive drift in Christian higher education lies in the fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of education.

In the aftermath of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy in the early 20th century, conservative Protestants—calling themselves at the time fundamentalists—retreated into quietist biblicism. Their institutions of higher education, newly chartered Bible colleges, and a smattering of older institutions, saw strict biblicism as the chief way of preserving themselves from the growing heterodoxy of the mainline. By the 1950s, some conservative Christians who might have formerly identified with fundamentalists rejected quietism and began arguing for more Christian engagement in civic, educational, and political life. They preferred to be called evangelicals and distanced themselves from their fundamentalist predecessors. They retained, however, a conservative biblicist intellectual framework and the same socio-moral commitments, even as they intended to engage the culture.

Evangelical colleges engaged the world with gusto, but they did so handicapped by their incomplete understanding of education and the liberal arts. Historic Protestant education in the United States claimed the entirety of the Western intellectual tradition as its foundation and understood its mission as being a continuation of that of the medieval scholastics, the early modern humanists, and the Protestant Reformers. All of those groups understood the mission of education to be the mission of making students fully formed humans and to know beauty, goodness, and truth in human society and the natural world.

Modern evangelical colleges often claim as their mission teaching students to think deeply, act justly, and live wholeheartedly as Christ’s agents of renewal in the world, equipping students to pursue their unique callings, educating the whole person to build the church and benefit society, and a whole host of other noble-minded and noble-sounding declarations.

But none of those things can be accomplished in their fullest sense without a knowledge of what is truly human. And historically Protestants—from backcountry Baptists to the high church Anglicans and everything in between—understood that knowing humanity meant knowing unchanging divine truths revealed in Scripture and natural law. Their foundational belief was that truth could be known, and the traditional aims of academic pursuit could be trusted.

In 1882, James McCosh, president of Princeton University, confronted his own era’s liberalization. This age, he said, “may be characterized as one of unsettled opinion. Our ambitious youth are not satisfied with the past, its opinions and practices. Authority is not worshipped by them; they have no partiality for creeds and confessions.” Youth in McCosh’s era did “not accept, without first doubting, the truths supposed to be long-established. In searching into the foundation of the old temples, they have raised a cloud of dust and left lying a heap of rubbish.” McCosh was not hopeless. The age, he argued, that might produce good and evil, “either or both … according as it is guided.” He entertained “fears, for it is dancing on the edge of a precipice down which it may fall,” but he also cherished hope, “for it is an inquiring age.”

Our own moment is equally fraught with danger for Christian higher education, but like McCosh, we can have hope in the spirit of inquiry exhibited by convictional Christian intellectuals, professors, and students. Inquiry and the development of knowledge, alongside an unswerving commitment to orthodox faith, are the pattern for how evangelical institutions will flourish. That inquiry among conservative evangelicals in the 21st century has led to a reclamation of the historic Protestant tradition and a more substantial approach to evangelical intellectual life.

Important groups and institutions are creating an intellectual ecosystem committed to Scriptural truth and the enduring Protestant natural law tradition. Concerns over wokeness at evangelical colleges are understandable and sometimes justified. If these concerns remain unattended, more colleges and universities may indeed slide toward theological liberalism and eventual heterodoxy.

But the rising generation of scholars working to reclaim a transcendent understanding of humanity revealed in the Bible and the Western intellectual tradition is a very real cause for hope for Christian higher education.