What actually happened was that Stephen Colbert, a comedian, recently delivered a speech at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner (was it funny? imagine a junior higher having just learned about sarcasm, trying to insult someone).

Part of his speech contained these lines: “By the way, Senator McCain, it’s so wonderful to see you coming back into the Republican fold. I have a summer house in South Carolina; look me up when you go to speak at Bob Jones University.” Folks, Colbert was making jokes, not reporting the news.

Sadly, it’s no surprise so many people who read The Da Vinci Code think they’re learning theology.

The article alludes to a difference between Liberty’s debate program and Bob Jones University’s much smaller one—Liberty has debated at least one topic for which BJU decided it couldn’t argue both sides—but it doesn’t mention a fundamental difference. Bob Jones is a member of the National Educational Debate Association (NEDA), a small group that split from the Cross Examination Debate Association (CEDA) about ten years ago.

The Times reporter notices that

Quick speaking hardly captures the velocity of collegiate debate. . . . Only experienced judges — most of whom are coaches from neutral schools — can actually follow the argument. . . . Debaters gulp air like competitive swimmers.

That style of speaking is one of the principal reasons NEDA schools left CEDA. No doubt, being able to “argue” at air-gulping speeds involves skill and the development of certain abilities. However, it’s more of a game than anything resembling typical public discourse. And speed-talking debaters can easily adopt harmful habits, such as relying on jargon.

NEDA tournaments, on the other hand, require that half of their judges be laypeople. “Laypeople” doesn’t mean just anybody off the street; it often means college professors, lawyers, and other professionals. Convincing such an audience requires good reasoning—what Aristotle called logos in his Art of Rhetoric—but it also demands appropriately employed pathos and ethos. Those skills, valuable in professional and academic realms, are often not valued in auctioneer-style debate. No wonder Patrick Henry College, with its heavy student involvement in politics, is a member of NEDA. And it seems odd to me that head coach Brett O’Donnell, who has helped the Bush team prepare political debates, would train his debaters in a style far removed from that of public persuasion.

What interests me more is the public interest. For one thing, it’s as though someone passed out talking points to bloggers: “Look, when you blog about this, be sure to say that ‘Starbucks is too gay-friendly for right-wing Bob Jones University.’ We all need to stay on-message.” Bloggers here, here, and here all got that memo.

For another, it seems ironic that one of the times the school has gracefully handled its disagreements in the public eye, it still gets blasted for bigotry, intolerance, hatred, and the like. Here’s the official statement from the school as to why it has discontinued selling Starbucks coffee:

Dr. Stephen Jones [president of the school] announced that due to the social activism of Starbucks, we will no longer be selling their product at the University.

Here’s a selection from the Greenville News:

BJU spokesman Jonathan Pait said the school’s constituency began to object to Starbucks’ stance on gays several months ago. More objections came lately, he said.

“They were supportive of homosexual events and causes,” he said. “That would be a problem for our constituency.” The issue surfaced from quotes on a coffee cup Starbucks sells from a man who supports a gay lifestyle.

And here’s the description of an eyewitness to the announcement:

[Y]ou should have heard the announcement and the lengths to which [school President Stephen Jones] went to try to avoid doing this. . . . [He] had a pleasant chat with the regional representative from Starbucks, who gave him the impression that he was sympathetic and would get back with him. He never called back, and [Jones] left eight unanswered voice mail messages for the guy. They just strung [him] along to get another three months out of the franchise.

I see no calls for smiting hip-and-thigh there. Yet reading the comments under zacfoo’s story-breaking blog entry, you might think the school had called for lynchings. I think the point is that when it comes to Bob Jones University, many people already have the bigotry meme, and by George they’re going to stick to it.

After hearing an interesting NPR interview with Christine Rosen, author of My Fundamentalist Education: A Memoir of a Divine Girlhood, I thought her book would describe why she left “fundamentalism.” Other books do that: Leaving the Fold is a collection of testimonies of former “fundamentalists” who end up everywhere from milquetoast Christianity to bizarre spiritualistic cults. What Leaving the Fold lacks and what I hoped to find in My Fundamentalist Education is a tempered view of fundamentalism that recognizes good among the bad. In that regard Rosen’s book seemed promising: to NPR she said that fundamentalism had encouraged her interest in reading and her curiosity about the world.

But Rosen’s book was disappointing. Not because she presents a lop-sided attack against fundamentalism–the opposite is the case; her childhood experience seems mostly positive, if quirky–but because she has almost no analysis at all. At the close of the last chapter, her parents are about to transfer the twelve-year-old to another, non-fundamentalist Christian school, and then we learn in the epilogue that today she no longer considers herself religious. That’s quite a change from the little girl who once memorized numerous Bible verses and wanted to save the souls of all her friends and family. What happened? Rosen doesn’t tell us.

Instead, we get over two hundred pages about life at Keswick Christian School in St. Petersburg, mixed with stories about visits every other weekend to “Biomom,” her term for her divorced mother. As someone who’s had a fundamentalist education, I think her portrayal of school sounds about right, and she makes an important distinction among evangelicals in general and fundamentalists and charismatics in particular (though without elaborating on the distinctions). Some descriptions seem exaggerated, such as her exceptional reverence for Jews (though I agree one is not likely to find antisemitism among evangelicals) and her classmates’ nightmares about the End Times. I credit most of those exaggerations to the perspective of a pre-teen.

Part-way through the book, the descriptions start to get tedious. I kept thinking: Rosen, we get it. You studied the Bible–a lot–and everyone at Keswick was at least a little weird; now draw some conclusions. For example, in a chapter titled “Here Comes the Son,” Rosen talks about fundamentalist eschatology, the study of the End Times. Rosen is a historian by training, so one might expect her to compare the theology of movies like A Thief in the Night, shown to her school, to the similar, recent best-selling Left Behind series. Or she might say something about Christian eschatology throughout history. She doesn’t. Also, Rosen notes the tension between the creationism Keswick taught and the theory of evolution, which she first learned about in a secular science camp. Why did the latter win out in her mind? We’re left wondering.

From clues scattered throughout the book, readers can speculate about the forces that brought about her conversion away from fundamentalism. For one thing, her father, step-mother and grandparents, seemingly not religious themselves, did not support her fundamentalist views. So perhaps they influenced her thinking. Also, Rosen hints that fundamentalists just aren’t very smart: reading a story about a fundamentalist trying to evangelize a doctor, the young Rosen thinks the doctor comes off looking intelligent and his would-be proselytizer, boorish. At another point her school librarian is befuddled at the mention of evolution. Maybe Rosen wants us to see her change as a matter of steadily increasing enlightenment.

Wall Street Journal reviewer Alan Crawford has another idea: class pride.

Twelve years old then but in her early 30s today, Ms. Rosen is a vivid writer with an enviable memory for the revealing detail. But what she remembers about her Keswick years suggests that her biggest objection to fundamentalism and fundamentalists was less moral and theological than aesthetic.

Keswick mothers, she writes, “were women with home permanents, not salon coiffures, and they wore vinyl mock-croc pumps and polyester-blend dresses from Sears.” Teachers, both male and female, were also partial to polyester. The female musicians who performed at the school smelled of Aqua Net, and the missionaries who came to share their stories invariably had “out-of-date clothes” and “badly cut hair.”

The pews in the school chapel were “upholstered in an unfortunate pea-green color,” and the Good News Bible Club that she joined met “in a musty, decaying house painted in a disturbing lime green color.” The “old, disheveled lady” who hosted the club “served stale cookies and tepid Juicy Juice.” This woman also “had the sort of girlish crush on Jesus that only a disappointed spinster who’d spent too many years leading children’s Bible studies could nourish.” She read to the children with her Bible balanced on her knees and her “thick socks rolling down her legs.”

Sometimes these unattractive and unsophisticated people could also be downright embarrassing. The local Jehovah’s Witness missionary had a “strange smell,” for example, and one of Keswick’s Bible teachers was a legless Vietnam veteran “whose biblical knowledge was impeccable, but his nonscriptural musings were infected with malapropisms.” He said “reprehend” when he meant “comprehend.”

Such descriptions may well be accurate, and they also betray the extent to which social class can influence religious beliefs–one’s own and one’s attitudes toward those of others. Only on the penultimate page of “My Fundamentalist Education” does Ms. Rosen acknowledge that her Keswick experience “gave me a profound respect for my fellow human beings”–not evident from her descriptions of them–and afforded her serious academic benefits. The peculiar rigor of the school’s approach, for example, “taught me the value of reading, the usefulness of memorization, and the importance of speaking and writing clearly.”

These are, of course, precisely the qualities that many public schools are struggling to inculcate in their students, all too often with little success. Had Ms. Rosen explored how Keswick managed to accomplish this considerable feat, and what it felt like to be a child learning to love the written word in this eccentric environment, she might have made a greater contribution to the literature of American education. She might also have offered a way for people on one side of the so-called culture war to better understand those on the other. As it is, “My Fundamentalist Education may be regarded, because of its unkind tone, as another salvo in that struggle, which is probably not what the author intended.

I think Crawford is about right: Rosen seems interested more in the trappings of fundamentalism than in being one herself. When she describes her religious experiences, it usually strikes me that she’s missing the point. For example, when she “hustled [herself] to the front of the chapel to join the many other ‘just-in-case’ supplicants at the altar” (p. 126), it was because she imagined that otherwise she’d suffer the fate of Patty, the decapitated protagonist of A Thief in the Night. The adventurous life of missionaries allured her, and she wanted to save friends and family from Hell, but as far as I know nowhere does young Rosen claim to have had faith in Christ herself. Even her repeated bathtub “baptisms” seem to have everything to do with Biomom’s superstitions. Other remarks are uncharacteristic of fundamentalists. For instance, she writes that “the only inclination to vice I could identify in myself was a longing for my own at-home video-game arcade” (p. 124). Part of being a fundamentalist involves expecting Christ to save you from your sins; that’s tough to do if you don’t think you are a sinner.

By excluding her analysis and leaving us to guess why she left fundamentalism (or whether she actually was a fundamentalist), Rosen left out much of what could have been the most interesting part of the book.

When Dr. Jones Sr. wrote to Brokenshire, asking him whether as a Presbyterian he would be able to teach students of other denominations (particularly Methodists), the professor replied that “as to the Methodist brethren, I have worked with them for years and should not think of wounding their views of God’s grace and human free agency or of stirring up controversy with those who hold the fundamentals—as I hold them myself.”

Voice, Vol. 79 #3, Winter 2005

That was the 1940s. To someone familiar with the landscape of contemporary American Christianity, it might come as a surprise that there were Presbyterian or Methodist fundamentalists. Today, most “fundamentalists” are Baptists (or their kin, “Bible church” members), and their theology is likely to be closer to that of Tim LaHaye (also a Bob Jones graduate) than John Calvin or John Wesley. But back then being a “fundamentalist” meant holding to a set of core or “fundamental” orthodox, Protestant beliefs, as can been seen in Brokenshire’s letter. This quotation made me wonder what happened in the intervening years between the historic fundamentalism and now.

I’m sure there are many answers. However, it seems to me that the cultural shift began in the late 1950s, when fundamentalists such as Bob Jones split with “new evangelicals” such as Billy Graham. Graham had made ecumenical alliances based more on practical advantages than on shared theology, and fundamentalists were justifiably alarmed that he was too willing to bend theology in favor of evangelistic results. Fundamentalists’ consequent separation from new evangelicals became a defining part of the fundamentalist movement.

This theological “secondary separation”—ecclesiastical separation from someone (or an institution) not because he believes differently but because he associates with others who do—creates a potential pitfall: its proponents must act on the basis of who persons and institutions are and what they do, rather than what they believe. In other words, one answers the question, “should I separate from X?” not based on X’s beliefs but based on who X is or who X’s friends are.

Someone who takes theology seriously will occasionally have to practice secondary separation. What’s happened with the fundamentalist movement is that secondary separation has become its defining characteristic, its modus operandi. One result, it seems to me, has been that fundamentalism has sorted itself into a group based more on associations (where one is a church member, what Christian college or seminary one has attended) than on shared belief in the core doctrines of the faith.

Welcome to the latest front in America’s culture wars. The Association of Christian Schools International (ACSI), the Calvary Chapel Schools and six Calvary Chapel students are suing the university, whose campuses include that traditional bastion of liberal thought, Berkeley, as well as the huge UCLA campus, for what they call “viewpoint discrimination”. The Christian schools add that the university is violating the students’ constitutional right to freedom of speech and religion. The university naturally denies the charges, and this week a federal judge in Los Angeles began considering the preliminary arguments of a contest which could eventually reach the Supreme Court.

. . .

UC denies it practices secular intolerance and “viewpoint discrimination”. It notes that it has approved plenty of courses at Christian schools and in the past four years has accepted 24 of the 32 applicants from the Murrieta school. And it says that if the courses had used these textbooks “as supplementary, rather than primary, texts, it is likely they would have been approved.”

What is really being challenged, says the university, is its right to set its own academic standards and admission requirements. In which case the question is what that right implies. The Christian plaintiffs say they have no objection to science students, for example, being taught conventional wisdom, but “their constitutional rights are abridged or discriminated against when they are told that the current interpretation of scientific method must be taught dogmatically, and must be accepted by students, to be eligible for admission to University of California institutions.” In other words, what the case involves is not so much the now-familiar tussle over intelligent design, but a student’s freedom of speech and thought.

The Economist thinks that this conflict will escalate until evangelicals play a greater role in higher education.

Fifty years ago there were only a handful of “megachurches”, drawing more than 2,000 each Sunday; today, there are more than 1,200 such churches, three of them with congregations of over 20,000. Not only is the nation’s president a born-again Christian, but so (according to the Pew Research Centre) are 54% of America’s Protestants, who are 30% of the population.

Will America’s public universities take on a similar tinge? To the extent that educational establishments reflect cultural reality, it may be inevitable. After all, before the liberal era of the 1960s, there were no such things as courses in “Women’s Studies” or “African-American Studies”. Now, no prudent American university would be without them. It would be odd if conservative Christians did not leave similar footprints on the syllabus.

I think the Economist is right on both counts: this issue is much larger than Calvary Chapel’s perceived lack of standards, and this kind of conflict is not likely to disappear.

I know nothing about Calvary Chapel’s quality of education in particular, but having some familiarity with the Christian school movement, I’m fairly confident that UC’s claims are not really about standards. Often, many students educated in the Christian school movement are better-prepared than their secular counterparts in this sense: they learn both the secular dogmas as well as the religious ones. For example, I’ll wager that a good student at Calvary Chapel would be able to explain the theory of evolution as well as creationism, whereas we would expect her public high school counterpart to know only about evolution.

The same is true of conservative students in general. Because those with liberal political views dominate the American higher education system, conservatives are forced to learn both languages. The UC officials should appreciate how that tension–between politically liberal educators’ beliefs and conservatives’ beliefs–actually offers some pedagogical advantages. For one thing, a somewhat adversarial position and skeptical mind on the part of the student further critical thinking skills. For another, the different beliefs and cultural background of conservatives further universities’ vaunted “diversity.”

However, the cynic in me suspects that the UC officials are less interested in improved critical thinking and cultural or viewpoint diversity than in hegemony over California’s secondary schools.

The United States should start to gradually remove its troops from Iraq. We’ve been there long enough and done enough and spent enough.

UPDATED December 7, 2005: Now the Washington Post‘s taken notice:

Getting Dovish at Bob Jones

Speaking of going off-message, a notable college newspaper editorial last week carried this headline: “Congress must begin gradual withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.”

“The U.S. government must gradually remove troops from Iraq, being responsible about the war but giving control back to Iraq,” the editorial said. “We’ve been there long enough and done enough and spent enough.”

Words from the Antioch Record? No. Turns out it’s the Collegian, published by the students of Bob Jones University.

The editorial rejected “remaining indefinitely” in Iraq and sending in more troops. “But how can we do that when we’ve already been there just about 32 months? When will the end come?

“The United States can’t really expect to make things perfect before ending its Middle East visit,” the paper said. “The Iraqis won’t feel independent and capable of launching out on their own until we, the Americans, the foreigners, have left.”

But after this Murtha-like flirtation, the editorial rejected “immediate and complete withdrawal” — settling on a variant of a Pentagon drawdown proposal, so long as it includes “a relinquishing of oversight to the Iraqis.”

UPDATED (again) December 7, 2005: Daily Kos gives moderate approval:

There isn’t anything startling or new in the editorial in the Collegian, the student newspaper of Bob Jones University. It calls for a gradual withdrawal from Iraq, cautions against a quick pullout, etc.

But it is startling because of where it appears — in the student paper at arch-conservative Bob Jones University, the place where Bush spoke during the 2000 primary campaign, the place that used to forbid interracial dating (I think they lifted that ban).

The editorial takes a few shots at war protesers, but hey, just calling for withdrawal is an earth-shifting event for them.

The problem is that Mr. Vinciguerra is artfully ambiguous and doesn’t quite come clean with his readers. At first blush, any of three radically different possibilities might be in play:

1. Mr. Vinciguerra may conceivably be offering his readers a genuine choice: “Read the evidence, and then decide for yourself, folks, who’s right in this fascinating debate.”

2. Or he may have read the evidence himself, been pleasantly surprised at what the high-schoolers were studying, and is therefore asking his readers: “Can you believe that the snobs at the U. of California would really exclude kids for studying something that makes such good sense as these excerpts exhibit?”

3. Or he may be asking what I think (and fear) he really is saying: “Can you believe these Christians are coming to a court trial with such wacky ideas and actually hoping a 21st-century judge will uphold them?”

Author Thomas Vinciguerra pairs a brief comment with a quotation from a Bob Jones University Press textbook:

Slavery, which most historians look at politically or economically, is seen as “an excellent example of the far-reaching consequences of sin.”

The sin in this case was greed – greed on the part of African tribal leaders, on the part of slave traders and on the part of slave owners, all of whom allowed their love for profit to outweigh their love for their fellow man. The consequences of such greed and racism extended across society and far into the future. It resulted in untold suffering-most obviously for the black race but for the white race as well. … The Lord has never exaggerated in warning us of sin’s devastating consequences – for us and for our descendants (Exodus 34:7).

Shocking stuff, that. Imagine: thinking sin might play a role in human affairs, instead of just politics and economics. To the flames!

Even the abstract laws of energy and matter, the authors write, reflect the hand of God.

You are about to embark on an adventure. The study of physics reveals the wonderful orderliness of God’s creation – so orderly that it can be comprehended in terms of relatively simple principles (mathematical formulas). … Physics is important because through it mankind learns how creation actually works. It satisfies our God-given curiosity about nature. Seeing that God does “great things and unsearchable; marvelous things without number” (Job 5:9), men have dedicated their lives to unraveling the rich mysteries of creation.

Again, what horrors! The “study of physics reveals the wonderful orderliness of God’s creation”–where would Western Civilization be had, say, Isaac Newton thought such things? Someone please re-educate the poor dupes.

“We are Christians,” said the younger Joe Gatas, a marketing-management graduate of Bob Jones University, a South Carolina school whose Web site lists readings from the Bible.

And that’s the base of the GOP base — a county that routinely produces the biggest Republican vote margins in this red state and that is home to Bob Jones University, an evangelical institution that posts daily Bible readings on its Web page.

That’s right–I’m a graduate of Bob Jones University; you know, the school that posts Bible readings on its Web page.