by William Trollinger 

Screenshot of Ken Ham’s attack on Biola University’s William Craig Lane, via AnswersInGenesis.org.

As I noted in my last blog post, Ken Ham has launched a full-scale attack on evangelical colleges, claiming that “biblical compromise” has infected the majority of these schools, including (as he specifically lists) Abilene Christian, Baylor, Biola, Covenant Seminary, Messiah, Westmont, and Wheaton. He exhorts parents who want their child to attend a “safe Christian school” to be very careful, as many of these supposed Bible-believing institutions have professors who brainwash students with “ideas that undermine God’s Word.”

Ham clearly understands himself to be on a roll. Six days after he posted his video, “This is Truly Awful: Seriously?!: This is What ‘Christian’ Schools are Teaching,” he put up a video specifically attacking Biola’s William Lane Craig: “Are You Kidding Me: I’m in Disbelief over What This ‘Christian Apologist’ Just Said.” (Note how in both instances Ham uses scare quotes to suggest that evangelical colleges and William Lane Craig aren’t really Christian). In this video Ham rips Craig for holding to an old Earth and rejecting the Genesis account of creation, thus compromising the idea that the Bible is God’s Word.

In response to my blog post I received the following note from a friend who has spent their entire career serving as a professor and administrator at evangelical schools. Here is the gist:

Ham’s instincts are absolutely right in raising questions about the handful of those still existing, once called “progressive evangelical,” institutions of higher education. The heyday of these schools (remember all those InterVarsity Press books) has been well over for a long time, and such institutions will continue to watch their waterhole of students shrinking into oblivion as “progressive evangelicalism” itself shrinks into oblivion. 

These schools continue to use language that suggests that their students will learn what they never knew, and that this education will be transformative. But as fundamentalism of various hues has overtaken the evangelical world, these institutions have been increasingly hard pressed to balance a branding message of “safe for your kids” with “intellectually rigorous and growth-inducing.” And of course, the marketing offices of these schools are as terrified of relying on their own faculty to explain this creative tension as they are with fundamentalists raining on their parade. With the likes of Ham naming names and showing receipts, the fundamentalist “wing” of these schools’ constituency base will continue to collapse right at the time when these institutions need them in order to stay open. All in all, I don’t see a rosy solution for these schools.

To be theologically “safe” in the land of evangelical colleges begins with an unwavering commitment to biblical inerrancy.  And for young Earth creationists, to hold firmly to biblical inerrancy necessitates a belief in a literal reading of Genesis 1, a young Earth (actually, a young universe), and a global Flood (Noah’s Flood). Given the spread of young Earth creationism in conservative Protestantism over the past six decades, one of the easiest ways for an evangelical school to establish its theological bonafides as a “safe school” is to affirm – or, at very least, to discourage public challenges to – young Earth creationism. And not to do so is risky — maybe not for a place like Baylor, given its size, but for many or most evangelical schools. 

Ken Ham knows all this. And he clearly smells blood in the water.