Righting America

by William Trollinger

Ken Ham has launched a full-scale, no holds barred attack on evangelical colleges.

In his video, “This is Truly Awful: Seriously?!: This is What ‘Christian’ Schools are Teaching,” the Answers in Genesis (AiG) CEO repeatedly and dramatically proclaims that “Compromise is Rife in ‘Christian’ Colleges.” And while the video begins with 15 seconds on “drag” classes and pride celebrations at Texas Christian University, the bulk of Ham’s diatribe is aimed at evangelical professors who instruct their students that the Earth is much older than 6,000 years, who claim that there is very little evidence that the Flood was global, and who suggest that one can incorporate evolution into a Christian worldview. Incorporating an image of Bibles being burned, he asserts that “biblical compromise” is widespread throughout evangelical higher education (actually, at a majority of so-called Christian colleges). To make his point, he specifically calls out Abilene Christian, Baylor, Biola, Covenant Seminary, Messiah, Westmont, and Wheaton.

Ham asserts that what these schools are teaching is leading these young people to leave the church. (For evidence that supports a very different explanation as to the rise of religious “nones,” see my chapter on this topic.) So he exhorts parents to investigate evangelical colleges before sending their children there.  But as Ham sees it, the challenge for parents is that these schools are often quite deceptive in how they present themselves:

You have to be very careful about how you ask questions concerning what the colleges are going to be teaching, because a lot of times you will ask these questions in a particular way, and [you will] think that they’re going to teach my children to stand on God’s Word and to be bold about God’s Word. And then you are shocked to find out that those kids end up getting brainwashed with ideas that undermine God’s Word. 

To counter this, at AiG’s annual Creation College Expo parents and their children are introduced to Christian Colleges that “won’t plant seeds of doubt in your child or teach them to compromise.” These very “safe” schools include Appalachian Bible College, Bob Jones University, Cedarville University, Emmaus University, and Maranatha Baptist University.  

As Adam Laats makes clear in his excellent Fundamentalist U, both fundamentalist colleges (see the Creation Colleges listed above) and evangelical colleges (see the colleges attacked by Ken Ham) have over the years sold themselves – to donors and to parents – as “safe” schools for their students, safe intellectually, culturally, and of course religiously. And when an evangelical or fundamentalist school’s “safe” label has been challenged, the result has often been a purging of “unsafe” faculty members. 

So now Ken Ham has labeled the majority of evangelical colleges – with certain schools specifically mentioned — as unsafe places for Christian parents to send their children. How will these schools respond? Will they simply ignore Ham? Will they reason that they are not competing with Bob Jones and Cedarville and Maranatha Baptist, and so they don’t have to worry about what the young Earth creationist gatekeeper (Ken Ham) has to say? Or, on the other hand, will they see a threat to their enrollment and donations? Given that so many of their students come from fundamentalist backgrounds (having taught at one of the schools Ham attacked, I know whereof I speak), will they now work overtime to re-establish their credentials as “safe” schools, in the process removing “unsafe” faculty members? 

I don’t know. What I can say is that how evangelical colleges respond to this attack will be a very telling indicator of the reach of Ken Ham, Answers in Genesis, and young Earth creationism in mainstream evangelicalism. Stay tuned.