YEC at OBU and Elsewhere

Today, I'd like to weave together a few disparate items into a coherent thought about a coming war between science and religion at OBU.

First, I am of course alarmed that OBU recently hired a young-earth creationist to teach in the religion department.  More on that later.

Second, I'm concerned that I previously overstated the degree to which certain of OBU's peers are actually legitimate, intellectually honest and respectable institutions.  In my distress about the new enforcement of ideological rigidity and conformity at OBU, I assumed too quickly and without evidence that other evangelical schools were somehow better off in this regard.  For instance, I was impressed that Biola University received a $3 million grant from the Templeton Foundation for its new Center for Christian Thought.  But Biola's "Genesis Colloquium" this week, along with its published materials, seem to indicate an understanding that, while not required, young-earth creationism is a legitimate explanation for the origins of the universe.  Young-earth creationism is, unsurprisingly, still a force in many institutions affiliated with the Council for Conservative Christian Colleges and Universities, which is sponsoring the Biola colloquium.  I used to assume OBU was above all that, but OBU has changed.

Third, I recently had an enlightening conversation with a Christian philosopher friend who took a look at our recent series on the Baptist Messenger's "Christian worldview" essays.  My friend, who is imminently qualified to teach at OBU and could have easily gotten hired there pre-Norman but wouldn't stand a chance today.  He points out that the stage is set for a large-scale kerfuffle over this issue as faculty have to reconcile their personal commitments and integrity with the newfound acceptance (and eventually requirement?) of YEC at OBU.

Given the dramatic shift of OBU's religion department in the past 2-3 years, we will now see much more tension between science and religion at OBU.  I grew up going to church every Sunday, but I don't remember being taught that it was important to believe in creationism.  In fact, I don't recall any of my professors at OBU suggesting that young-earth creationism was true or required for Christians to believe.  Even Mike Keas, a former OBU biology professor and "intelligent design" proponent who now teaches at Southwestern Seminary's undergraduate program, seemed (to me) to think that young-earth was preposterous given the fossil record.

I, like many people, have been amazed by the resilience of Americans' professed belief in creationism, though I'm somewhat heartened that it's highly correlated with educational attainment.  But it wasn't until I became involved in Save OBU and started learning about the insular world of fundamentalist "higher education" that I even encountered the acronym YEC.

But just because I never really encountered YEC doesn't mean it's not out there.  It is.  It's a real force, as it turns out.  Of course, virtually no one outside of fundamentalist Protestantism takes YEC seriously (except maybe a few fundamentalist Muslims).  And to the extent that YEC becomes a hallmark of OBU's religion/apologetics department, OBU will be increasingly relegated to that ever narrower circle of fundamentalist institutions that like to speak (and occasionally fight) with one another, but are completely incapable of engaging the broader world.

Is YEC now a litmus test for employment in the Herschel H. Hobbs College of Theology and Ministry?    The theological implications are huge.  We are now to a point where fundamentalists will say they believe in things that are demonstrably false in order to preserve their belief in a literal Bible.  This is so different than the OBU I knew a mere 10 years ago.  At least one OBU trustees claims the gospel depends on a belief in a literal Adam and Eve.  For better or worse, this particular trustee could conceivably chair the board next year.

Also, just to clarify, I've tried hard not to put OBU professors (individually or collectively) in a more precarious position or put them on the spot in any way.  But you're not really going out on a limb to say that the sky is blue, not green.  So, I'll just say it: No professors at OBU (besides one or two of the recent religion hires) believe in young-earth creationism?  Right?

Right?!?

OBU's Peers: Nondenominational Colleges?

OBU's Peers Series:
Intro: Who's In the Same Boat?
OBU's Peers: Nondenominational Colleges?
OBU's Peers: Nearby Baptist Colleges (Ouachita and Southwest Baptist)?
OBU's Peers: Texas Baptist Colleges?
OBU's Peers: Union University?

This week, we're looking for OBU's sister schools that have had to negotiate the balance between "doctrinal accountability" and academic freedom.  Yesterday, we pointed out that neither the Furman/Stetson model nor the Brewton-Parker/Truett-McConnell model fits OBU's situation very well.  The former are no longer intentionally Baptist/evangelical and the latter are so fundamentalist that if we ever became like them, we would not be a legitimate liberal arts university so none of this would even matter.

Today, we look outside Baptist life for signs of flourishing (or trouble) among non-denominational Christian universities.  Forbes Magazine, in whose rankings OBU has plummeted in the past two years, gives us a starting place by listing the Top Ten Christian colleges in the U.S.  For the moment, we'll overlook the highly problematic fact that Forbes equates "Christian" with membership in the Council for Conservative Christian Colleges and Universities.  (According to the CCCU's accounting and blatant right-wing bias, only 116 of the hundreds of Christian colleges are actually Christian.)

Let's take a quick look at the top 10:

#59. Wheaton College (Wheaton, IL) - Nondenominational

#81. Westmont college (Santa Barbara, CA) - Nondenominational

#134. George Fox University (Newberg, OR) - Quaker

#142. Pepperdine University (Malibu, CA) - Churches of Christ

#160. Gordon College (Wenham, MA) - Nondenominational

#179. Covenant College (Lookout Mountain, GA) - Presbyterian (PCA)

#209. Whitworth University (Spokane, WA) - Presbyterian (PCUSA)

#213. Houghton College (Houghton, NY) - Wesleyan Church

**#233. Oklahoma Baptist University (Shawnee, OK) - Southern Baptist

#235. College of the Ozarks (Point Lookout, MO) - Nondenominational

**In 2009, we were #109 on this list, literally just a few places behind Duke, Cornell, and Georgetown.

The astute observer will quickly note that none of these schools is Catholic and only one is from a mainline Protestant tradition (PCUSA, one of the denominations whose members Dr. Norman would like to exclude from consideration for faculty positions at OBU).  But again, putting the CCCU's blatant and ignorant biases aside, let's assume for the sake of discussion that this is a representative (though not exhaustive) list of some of the better evangelical Christian colleges in the U.S.

Opponents of BGCO separation have said that without the convention to "hold OBU accountable," that the university would inevitably drift off into secularism.  That's ridiculous!  Four of these ten colleges have managed to retain their "intentionally Christ-centered" ethos without a denomination to keep the secularists out.  Never mind the fact that 30 years ago, many of the top Christian colleges in the U.S. were Baptist and today hardly any of them are.  If anything, affiliation with a Baptist state convention since the early 1990s degrades the academic quality of an institution over time.

While Baptists schools have left their conventions or regressed into fundamentalism, evangelical schools from other denominations (and those without a denomination) have flourished, a point we highlighted in our recent discussion of the "Evangelical Renaissance" in academe.

Does anyone really think the trustees or faculty at Wheaton, Gordon, or Biola -- even though no one is obsessing about their church affiliation or doctrinal purity -- are about to let those schools' religious character erode?  The mere suggestion is completely stupid.  These colleges may not have a dedicated funding stream from a denomination, but it hasn't stopped them from being excellent.  If anything, their options for hiring, recruiting students, and soliciting donors are greatly expanded without the burden of the denominational attachment.  Given that that OBU gets less than 5% of its annual operating budget from the BGCO (down from 25% 30 years ago), it's reasonable to at least ask the question of whether we would be better off without the affiliation.

Sure, administrators at Wheaton and Gordon are giving up a measure of control by welcoming trustees from a variety of Protestant denominational families.  The BGCO thinks it is doing OBU a favor and somehow protecting it from corruption by selecting its trustees, who in turn elect the president and sign off on many of his(/her -- ha!) decisions.  But the truth is, even though we have some great trustees, we are hurting OBU in the long run by excluding men and women whose gifts and expertise would be a great asset to OBU governance, even if they are not clergy and laity in BGCO congregations.  These excellent nondenominational schools assemble their boards from across the country, because they want to have a national reach.  It's an idea OBU should consider.

One of the reasons nondenominational colleges are eclipsing Baptist ones in Christian higher education is that the Wheatons and Gordons of the world are not distracted by and obsessed with appeasing fundamentalists.  Unfortunately, we are hindered in many ways by our unhelpful attachment to the BGCO.  I'm certainly grateful to the men and women who have supported OBU over the years.  And given how awful the situation is in other state conventions, I'm happy that the problems we've had seem to originate in the provost's office (which is an easy fix) rather than the BGCO Nominating Committee (which would be a sign of major, perhaps intractable, problems).

But looking at Southern Baptist life broadly, its degradation of educational institutions over the past 20-25 years does not bode well for the future of OBU as long as it is in the BGCO's hands.  Because while other, dare I say better, Christian colleges are forging ahead, secure in the knowledge that they have Christian faculty and governing bodies committed to a Christian ethos, that is not enough at OBU.  Our hires now have to hold the right social views (or be the right gender).  And the narrow circle of people of people the BGCO deems fit to be OBU trustees and the narrowing circle of people Provost Norman deems fit to teach at OBU will eventually limit our pool of prospective students and donors, as well.  I wonder how many OBU trustees would be opposed to having a few non-Baptists or non-Oklahomans who love OBU and are passionate about Christian higher education on the Board.  I bet not many, but they don't get to make that choice, unfortunately.

As much as some people might like to believe otherwise, these fine nondenominational colleges are not really our peers in any meaningful ways.  Though OBU and Wheaton are comparably selective in admissions, OBU's 75th percentile SAT score is about the same as Wheaton's 25th percentile.  Aside from the doctrinal rigidity and appeasement the BGCO expects from OBU (in return for a proportionally dwindling annual subsidy), the relationship imposes a set of constraints on the university that limits our reach and our profile.  Without such constraints, nondenominational colleges and seminaries have left Baptist ones in the dust.  Even so, we welcome their support in our efforts to rejoin the top echelon of Christian colleges in America.

Save OBU Outreach: Good Non-denominational Colleges

This week, we've made efforts to reach out to people other than our core constituency of students, parents, faculty, and alumni.  We brought attention to how OBU's devolution into a fundamentalist Bible academy would hurt the Shawnee community.  And we looked beyond OBU to the tragic story of how the Fundamentalist Takeover of the SBC so dramatically degraded the quality and rigor of Baptist higher education.  Though every school's story is a little different, other Baptist colleges are going through different versions of the same problems that we've seen at our beloved OBU.

Seminaries

Today we want to speak to another group: non-denominational Christian colleges.  in a very real sense, these institutions have benefitted from the decline of Baptist higher education.  Take the seminaries, for example.  There was a time not to long ago when some of the SBC seminaries were recognized throughout American Protestantism as quite good.  Today, the SBC seminaries have been purged of what few liberals ever existed there, as well as all moderates.  Some of them are led by loud-mouthed fundamentalist culture warriors.  As mainline Protestant seminaries have continued to occupy the moderate-to-liberal end of the spectrum, the decline of SBC seminaries has left a huge gap in evangelical theological education.  Seminaries like Fuller, Gordon-Conwell, and Asbury have stepped into that gap and picked up where Southern Baptists abandoned ideologically diverse, intellectually rigorous graduate theological education.

Colleges

At the undergraduate level, the decline has been just as spectacular.  As I looked at the SBC's list of affiliated colleges yesterday, it occurred to me just how dramatically the Southern Baptists have fallen when it comes to colleges an universities.  Barely over 20 years ago, that list would have included many of the finest private universities in the South.  Today, it's actually pretty embarrassing.    Thankfully, OBU is one of the best Baptist schools by any objective measure.  But perhaps the most tragic consequence of the Fundamentalist Takeover has been the absolute degradation of Baptist academia.

As with the SBC seminaries' decline, independent colleges have stepped in to fill the massive vacuum in Baptist higher education left by the exodus of Furman, Wake Forest, Mercer, Stetson, etc. and the fundamentalists' attack on on the remaining educational institutions.  Schools like Wheaton, Biola, Whitworth, and Gordon have emerged as the standard bearers in evangelical higher education as more and more Baptist colleges have descended into outright fundamentalism.

A few weeks ago, we talked about a recent op-ed piece by two Gordon College professors about a "renaissance" in evangelical higher education.  Though they do not take up this distinction in their essay, the comparison between non-denominational colleges' renaissance and Baptist colleges' decline is stark.

Why has one subset of conservative Protestant schools flourished while another has floundered?  The answer is complicated.  But it's undeniable that the Fundamentalist Takeover of the SBC in the 1980s and the state conventions in the 1990s is a big part of the story.  The SBC seminaries fell quickly, and many of the better SBC colleges left their state conventions.  Those that remained, like OBU, endured varying degrees of Baptist battles in the 1990s and 2000s.  Fortunately, OBU Presidents Agee and Brister generally protected OBU from fundamentalism.  The current administration seems much more accommodating.

While Baptist universities have had to deal with fundamentalist convention-elected trustees (particularly in the seminaries) and appease fundamentalist convention leaders, the non-denominational colleges have been able to pursue excellence in Christian higher education without such distractions.

We applaud our brothers and sisters at these schools for the very fine work they've done.  Admittedly they have outpaced us, given the retrenchment toward fundamentalism in many Baptist colleges.  We envy their freedom and independence.  We hope they realize that our students, faculty, and alumni long for academic freedom and fearless inquiry.

Denominationalism is dying in American Christianity.  While some media and scholarly commentators believe this dynamic is limited to Mainline Protestantism, we see it in evangelicalism as well.  Southern Baptist leaders are well aware that their "brand" has become irrevocably associated with fundamentalist theology, partisan politics, and anti-intellectualism.  At the same time, evangelical institutions without denominational shackles have flourished, from local churches all the way to universities.

Rather than trying to shed its Baptist identity, we want OBU to embrace it -- but in a classical sense, not in the narrow way today's fundamentalist SBC and BGCO leaders have defined it.  But given the past 20-30 years in Baptist life, we can't help but envy evangelical institutions' progress in evangelical theological education and look forward to joining that top tier as soon as we are free from our burdensome imprisonment to the Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma.

Progress Report on Save OBU Updates and Changes

So much has been happening at Save OBU, it's hard to keep track of it all.  About two weeks ago, I announced some changes to the blog designed to give voice to a new generation of OBU alumni.  Today I'll briefly report on some new initiatives and lay out a sketch of our vision going forward into the spring.

New Contributing Editor

After researching and writing 72 blog posts and generating more than 12,000 pageviews on the website, I invited Veronica Pistone ('11) to join me as a Contributing Editor.  Already, Veronica has impressed our readers with her knowledge, insight, and clarity.  She has not shied away from difficult topics, and her commitment to Baptist freedom and her love of OBU shines through in every post.

Veronica receiving an award for outstanding academic

achievement from SCS Dean Mark McClellan in 2011

Guest Bloggers

On Sunday, we ran our first in a series of occasional guest blog posts.  Caitlin Dacus ('11) shared an informative and passionately written essay on early Baptist hero John Leland.  Her connections to OBU's current situation show how far our alma mater has fallen.  Tomorrow and Friday, I am pleased to welcome Clayton Mauritzen ('06) as he shares his OBU story.  Look for more guest posts in the weeks and months to come.  If you have a perspective or story and would like to be considered for publication here, be sure to email us at SaveOBU@gmail.com.  Remember, our focus is on protecting academic freedom at OBU and advocating for independence from the BGCO.

Spotlight on Recent OBU Disasters

In giving voice to a younger generation of OBU alumni, we are hearing from people who had a front row seat for the Norman-Whitlock administration's authoritarianism, new fundamentalist-inspired direction, and assaults on Baptist freedom.  If you missed it last week, take a look at our three part series on administration at OBU.

A Broad View of Evangelical Academia

Initially, I invested a lot of time in learning about other Southern Baptist colleges that parted company with their state conventions.  As inspiring as those stories are, OBU's situation is unique in that the convention literally owns the university.  The BGCO has OBU in a legal straitjacket from which we cannot easily escape.  That's why they are able to advocate for a fundamentalist agenda with such impunity -- we really have no recourse (which is why our protests must be loud, passionate, and unyielding).  For now, we just have to hope and pray that current leaders will not do any more damage to OBU and its reputation than they already have.

But it occurs to me that while many Baptist schools were fighting battles from which Joe Ingram, Bill Tanner, and Bob Agee wisely and deftly shielded OBU during the Fundamentalist Takeover era, OBU quietly established itself as one of the premier evangelical colleges in the U.S.  Sadly, we are losing ground to other fine colleges like Wheaton, Gordon, Biola, and Whitworth -- institutions that do not have to kowtow to fundamentalists like OBU unfortunately does.  Some are suggesting that we are witnessing an "evangelical renaissance" in academia.  Not only is OBU not taking part, we are actually regressing.  In fact, we just received word that Wheaton hired an outstanding young New Testament professor that OBU passed over for a job in 2009 in spite of her being unanimously recommended by the search committee.

Next Steps

Now that I have help with the daily blogging duties, I am going to start assembling an advisory board for Save OBU.  I'm looking for a handful of people with ties to SBC churches (both BGCO and CBFO) in Oklahoma.

Then, we'll work on compiling a dossier of issues that we can submit to OBU trustees later this spring.

One idea that seems fun and might be effective is to hold a Save OBU rally in Shawnee sometime this year or next.

And we'll begin investigating the politics and processes involved in trustee selection.  With luck and extensive planning, we'll be able to influence trustee election at the BGCO meeting in November.  Given all the student, faculty, alumni, and retired faculty protests, Anthony Jordan is not going to let any non-fundamentalists on the Board from now on.  We need to make sure OBU continues to have good trustees who understand Baptist freedom, academic freedom, and the importance of not ruining an institution's hard-earned and well-deserved reputation for excellence just to satisfy a few Baptist power brokers in OKC and Nashville.

A Word of Thanks
We have received invaluable support and encouragement from Bill Jones ('73) of Texas Baptists Committed.  Bill featured Save OBU on the TBC blog yesterday and we really appreciate all he's done.

And, of course, thank to all of you for your kind words and assistance in spreading the word.

God bless OBU!

An Evangelical Renaissance in Academe?

Several of our readers pointed us to an essay that appeared last week on the Inside Higher Ed blog.  The essay pointed out the need for evangelical scholars to reclaim Christian thought from fundamentalism.  I commend the entire piece for your consideration, but want to comment on some of the relevant points in light of OBU's history and present problems.


The context of this essay is the opening of a new Center for Christian Thought at Biola University in California.  The authors, Gordon College Professors Thomas Albert Howard and Karl W. Giberson, explore some of the reasons why serious Christian engagement with philosophy and culture at a conservative evangelical institution might be problematic (or at least difficult) in light of the fundamentalist resurgence of the past 30 years.


Howard and Giberson tell a story that is familiar to those of us who have studied, lived, and worked in the 20th century's Christian war between modernists and fundamentalists.  But today's OBU students may not realize that there is a noble Christian academic tradition outside of fundamentalism.

Stung by ridicule after the Scopes trial, Fundamentalists retreated to the sidelines of American culture.  There they nurtured a parallel universe of publishing houses, magazines, journals, radio stations, and, not least, colleges and universities to combat the threat of secularism from without and the threat of theological modernism from within. 

Fundamentalists carried into exile many core tenets of Christian orthodoxy -- the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Atonement -- shared by Catholic and Orthodox Christians as well.  But they also carried dubious novelties, such as newfangled teachings on biblical inerrancy and speculations about the End Times.  What is more, they became pointedly hostile toward American culture and disengaged from serious intellectual pursuits, convinced that Christianity was almost exclusively about “the world to come,” with only negligible concern for the here-and-now.

For OBU, at least, we can see the fault lines forming.  Will we continue to be a locus for serious, honest, and searching Christian engagement with the scientific, economic, political, philosophical, artistic, and ethical concerns of the modern world?  Or are we we retreating into the "parallel universe" of fundamentalism to "combat the threat of secularism without and the threat of theological modernism from within?"


The administration's moves over the past two years seem to be a headlong descent into that parallel universe: turning our bookstore into a purveyor of fundamentalist pulp, firing conservative-to-moderate evangelicals who do not toe the party line, welcoming new faculty on the basis of doctrinal agreement rather than academic merit, and cozying up to the fundamentalists who run the BGCO and the SBC.  In the religion department alone, this fundamentalist "parallel universe" exists in the apologetics/"worldview" curriculum and the professional societies new faculty belong to.


This parallel universe attempts to imitate academic rigor and respectability, but the fundamentalist attachments are so bizarre and anti-intellectual as to make the whole enterprise suspect.  Back to the new Biola center:

But beyond the problem of Mr. Worldly Wiseman is the problem of Biola itself.  The problem of Biola, however, is not the problem of Biola alone; it is shared by a number of the more than 115 evangelical schools in the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU), the largest umbrella network of evangelical institutions of higher learning.  The problem is, quite simply, lingering attachment to some of the more dubious certainties and habits derived from Fundamentalism and hardened by the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversies of the 20th century. 

I'm glad Howard and Giberson pointed out the CCCU (Council for Conservative Christian College and Universities), of which OBU is a member.  As badly as the D.C.-based CCCU wants to seem like a uniquely faithful coalition of colleges, the evidence seems to suggest it is just another part of the parallel universe.  It's not a total joke/sham like the Association for Biblical Higher Education (ABHE), which "accredits" fundamentalist Bible academies that could never attain accreditation through an actual accrediting body.  But the CCCU just isn't as special as it thinks it is.  And frankly, I'm not sure why OBU (or any college) is a member.  The CCCU does provide one service you'll be pleased to learn about: Supposedly whenever Dr. Norman actually has to undergo a performance evaluation that includes input from faculty, Dr. Whitlock has proposed to use an instrument developed by the CCCU.  Isn't that reassuring?


We've entered a new world at OBU -- one in which you can't even find the classics of the Christian faith (or any decent new research, either) in the college bookstore, but you can find reassurance in apologetics and "worldview" classes.  While plenty of other conservative Christian colleges are also facing hostile takeovers, some are not.  Some are continuing ahead on the path of enlightened Christian liberal arts education -- the path we would still be on if not for the fact that our leaders have to appease the BGCO.  As schools like Gordon, Wheaton, Biola, Whitworth, and others forge on, OBU and other Southern Baptist schools have to fight against our fundamentalist overlords.  (True fact: Wheaton just hired an amazing professor OBU rejected in order to hire someone from Liberty University.  I'm sorry, but whoever made that decision has absolutely no business in Christian higher education.)

What is more, many old-guard defenders of the status quo, convinced that the residue of fundamentalism is simply “what the Bible plainly teaches,” are not in short supply among donors, board members and vocal alumni.  They would likely perceive some changes such as admitting Catholic faculty, constructively engaging evolution, or modifying statements of faith away from simplistic biblicism as greasing the slippery slope toward perdition.

As fundamentalism faded from view in the middle of the last century, OBU built a proud reputation for an academically rigorous, unapologetically Christian, and unashamedly Baptist brand of higher education.  Yet today, resurgent fundamentalists seem intent on destroying everything we built.  And unless we stand up and fight, they will win.