To My Fellow Enemies

And our administrators

More than a year ago, when talking with my university’s president one day, I asked him if he and the Board were making any preparations should Donald Trump retake the White House. He looked at me, puzzled but curious: “Tell me more.”

I listed off a few things he could expect: Targeting all things “woke,” which would presumably include our decades-long commitment to diversity and racial justice. Attacking history, demanding that we whitewash our curriculum and present only a “positive,” “patriotic” view of the past that erased the truth of racism and prejudice. Scientific research, too, would likely be constrained, particularly around issues like climate change. Our students of color and international students would likely be facing new challenges as well.

He immediately understood, and said he’d get to work on that. (I don’t know if he did, as his tenure at Calvin ended soon after, for unrelated reasons.) But this conversation came back to me this week. In the midst of all the fast-breaking news, a clip was circulating from a speech J.D. Vance gave at the National Conservatism Conference back in 2021 in which he agreed with President Richard Nixon that “The professors are the enemy.” Here’s more from that speech:

The LA Times’s Benjamin Hett noted then that this was a common theme for Vance:

This hatred of professors and their universities seems to be a big deal for Vance. On his campaign website, under the heading “Protect Conservative Values,” he complains that “hundreds of billions of American tax dollars” get sent to universities that “teach that America is an evil, racist nation.” These universities “then train teachers who bring that indoctrination into our elementary and high schools.” He doesn’t want any tax dollars going to institutions that teach “critical race theory or radical gender ideology.” Instead, he wants them to deliver “an honest, patriotic account of American history.” Other sections of the website extol the glories of the 2nd Amendment, while ranting about immigrants and COVID-19 regulations.

Hett also noted that such rhetoric was familiar:

The fascist movements of the 20th century were notoriously anti-intellectual and anti-professor. In a relatively unscripted moment in a 1938 speech, Adolf Hitler said he regretted that his regime still had some need for its “intellectual classes,” otherwise, “one day we could, I don’t know, exterminate them or something.”

When I saw the clip, I remembered that conversation with my president, and also what I told him at the time: “You know, Christian colleges and universities may be in a position to take the lead here.” Less tethered to state control and protected by religious liberty, Christian colleges may have more freedom to pursue their mission—even when that mission includes things now labeled “unpatriotic” or “woke.”

Of course, Christian colleges don’t have a great track record here. There has been a spate of faculty firings at Christian institutions, often driven by a small group of constitutents or outside actors pressuring administrators to purge the faculty of anyone who could be labeled woke, liberal, or the like. I know this well. There have been outside attempts to get me fired, and I’ve had a talk canceled at another Christian college after agitators claimed I was a “CRT activist.” The president of the college called me himself to tell me he knew that was a lie, but he buckled under pressure in an effort to try to protect the institution from the agitators. It didn’t work.

Things are tough out there, and they’re going to get tougher.

But if Christian colleges are as mission-driven as they have always claimed to be, now is the time to stand firm.

My university’s mission has always been clear: equipping students “to think deeply, to act justly, and to live wholeheartedly as Christ’s agents of renewal in the world.” Decades before “woke” was a thing, members of my university committed to welcoming diversity and working towards greater inclusion, united around our common faith commitment. We have pursued that imperfectly, to be sure, but it has remained at the very heart of our mission. Not because it was popular with every donor (although many have supported this) or with any political party, but because it was central to our faith.

Which is why I think that Christian colleges have a critical role to play in this moment. If we see crackdowns on what is allowed to be taught in college classrooms, if we’re told we need to replace histories like Jesse Curtis’s The Myth of Colorblind Christians, Rusty Hawkins’ The Bible Told Them So: How Southern Evangelicals Fought to Preserve White Supremacy, or George Marsden’s, Mark Noll’s, and Nathan Hatch’s The Search for Christian America with the pseudo histories of David Barton and PraegerU, if we’re told we can’t talk about the history of racial inequality or the systemic effects of human sin, if we’re told to pretend mercy is heresy and empathy is sin, if we’re told we need to stifle any prophetic critique and turn into cheerleaders for the new regime, we can just politely decline to do so. We can just carry on carrying on.

And what if the laws change?

Fortunately, Christian colleges have a strong history of standing up for religious liberty even when—especially when—the laws change. The Council for Christian Colleges and Universities has long lobbied for religious liberty protections, and in 2017, the CCCU cheered President Trump’s statement “vowing the foundational principle of religious freedom in the United States.”

Their stance was unambiguous: “The CCCU believes that religious freedom is a God-given right that affirms the human dignity of every person and is essential to a flourishing society and vibrant democracy.”

Back then, the issue on the table was the right of religious employers “to offer health care plans that are consistent with their religious beliefs.” This time around, the issues will be different. But they will arguably cut closer to the core mission of universities: what happens inside classrooms.

And in this case, fighting to defend religious liberty might come at great cost. We will soon see if the powerful conservative voices who led the charge on religious liberty for decades really meant religious liberty, or the liberty to impose their own belief system on others. All current signs point to the latter. But this is a fight religious institutions must be willing to take on if they have any hope of continuing to have the freedom to pursue their faith-based missions.

The same, of course, can be said for churches and faith-based institutions working to aid refugees and immigrants in keeping with their understanding of the biblical command to welcome the stranger and show love to the least of these.

For a long time now, I’ve been arguing that the primary targets of Christian nationalists are likely to be fellow Christians who do not toe the Christian nationalist line.

To institutions who have fought for decades to preserve your liberty to live out your faith according to your deeply held convictions, you know what to do now, and how to do it.