[Vision2020] Moscow's Calvinist College Makes the NYTimes

[Ted Moffett]

Nick et. al.

Today I read this article (Onward Christian Soldiers) in the NY Times
magazine at the Silo coffee shop on Styner... They happened to have the
magazine in the racks.  It's also available from the NYT online for free.
For those who want a quick read, I pasted in what they offered gratis at the
bottom.

There were numerous issues that were not explored that I thought deserved in
depth discussion, such as, unless I missed the mention, the implications of
"Southern Slavery As It Was," and the related protests during the NSA/Christ
Church "History Conference" that were held in Moscow, and the film "Our
Town."   Also, though Rose Huskey and her research into Christ Church and
associated entities was mentioned, there was no exploration of Huskey's
findings, again, unless I missed it. This I found disappointing.

The anti-science leanings of NSA, that I find just as troubling as other
often mentioned controversies, were revealed in this comment:

Darwin, for his part, remains only "a curious event in the history of modern
secularism," Matthew McCabe says.
-----
What I found laughable (literally... at the coffee shop I laughed
uproariously) was the mention of Wilson's "liberal critics" several times.
I expect that a magazine of the caliber of the New York Times would not
label the critics of Wilson et. al. with the oversimplified convenient
stereotypes of the so called "culture wars."  Many libertarian conservatives
are appalled at Wilson's theology and aims for society.  Wilson et. al.
unites "liberals" and "conservatives" of intellectual integrity in
opposition together!

Another outburst of uproarious laughter was inspired when I read this choice
comment:
-----
As Matthew McCabe, an alumnus, puts it, "We want to be medieval
Protestants."
-----
I pictured various barbaric practices common, and the primitive state of
science, in the medieval world.

I also thought the author rather uncritically presented the eye brow raising
claim we have heard over and over, that Wilson et. al. do not have a
political agenda:

New St. Andrews is turning away from the Moral Majority's legacy of
political involvement, but it has not turned its back on the culture war.
-----
As if those associated with Christ Church/NSA are not going to vote, or not
influence by other means political decisions by local government that impact
their future?  Perhaps the author intended us to "wink" with her at the
inside joke that this claim is bogus.

I was surprised to see discussion of the stealthy agenda to take over Moscow
highlighted, a claim many of the Christ Church defenders think "paranoid."
-----
"The object was to take over the town with the Gospel of Jesus Christ, but
to do it in an underground fashion," says Wilson's father, now nearly 80 and
still running his ministry. "One of the principles of war is surprise. You
don't tell people what you're going to do. Doug told them, and he gave them
someone to shoot at."
-----
And also the mention of the enlightened view of homosexuals and adulterers
that Wilson has expressed.  "Flexible" indeed!  The author with tongue in
cheek again?
----
Wilson emphasizes his flexibility when it comes to Old Testament law. "You
can't apply Scripture woodenly," he says; instead of executing them, "you
might exile some homosexuals, depending on the circumstances and the age of
the victim." He adds: "There are circumstances in which I'd be in favor of
execution for adultery. . . . I'm not proposing legislation. We're saying,
Let's set up the Christian worldview, and our descendants 500 years from now
can work out the knotty problems."
----
Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett
----
 September 30, 2007
Matriculation
Onward Christian Scholars By MOLLY WORTHEN

*EVERY FRIDAY AFTERNOON* in Moscow,
Idaho<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/national/usstatesterritoriesandpossessions/idaho/index.html?inline=nyt-geo>,
a strange commotion overruns Main Street. A stream of young men and women
parade down the sidewalk, wearing black academic gowns that billow and flap
as they walk. Some pore over Latin textbooks or thumb flashcards of ancient
Greek vocabulary, nearly tripping at the curb. They are students at New St.
Andrews College on their way to *disputatio*, a weekly assembly held in a
movie theater downtown. The college itself has no room large enough to
accommodate all 150 students at once: it occupies a single unassuming brick
building a few blocks away, one that a stranger might mistake for the
refurbished husk of an old savings and loan. Passers-by on their way to the
Pita Pit or Hodgins Drug barely give the students a second glance. Not a few
residents, however, have fought hard to keep them out of downtown. Founded
in 1994 by the elders of a fast-growing and radically conservative church,
New St. Andrews represents a new philosophy of evangelical education — one
that has inspired a national movement and makes local liberals nervous.

The students and teachers call what they are doing "classical Christian
education." They believe it's much more than memorizing Latin declensions
and Aristotle's principles of rhetoric, though they do plenty of that. Doug
Wilson, 54, the pastor who spearheaded New St. Andrews' founding, puts the
college's purpose simply: "We are trying to save civilization." He's not
alone in his mission. The C.C.E. movement began in the early 1980s among
Protestant evangelical private schools and home-schoolers who scorned most
conservative Christian colleges, which were long on classes in business
management and Bible prophecy but short on history, literature and ideas.
Now the movement boasts a host of home-schooling associations and curriculum
companies, more than 200 private schools and college programs around the
country. Evangelicals at New St. Andrews are using dead languages and
ancient history to reinvent conservative Protestant education. As Matthew
McCabe, an alumnus, puts it, "We want to be medieval Protestants."

When you ask teachers and students what sort of school New St. Andrews is,
they often cite one school they are not: Patrick Henry College, the
evangelical college in Purcellville, Va., with a reputation for training
home-schooled Christian students to wrest the reins of power from "secular
humanists" in Washington. "We believe in a much longer view," says Joshua
Appel, a professor at New St. Andrews. The curriculum is modeled on the
vision of "New England's First Fruits," a 1643 Massachusetts Bay Colony
pamphlet describing the college lately founded in Cambridge. Besides
required coursework in Latin and Greek, students at N.S.A. study natural
philosophy (mostly taxonomy and creationist science), the Western literary
canon, Euclidean geometry and theology; they also practice public speaking
at a weekly declamation. Students drag themselves out of bed for classes
that meet at 7:30 am, only half an hour later than classes once did at
Puritan Harvard<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/h/harvard_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org>.


This curriculum is a "reformation in higher education," says Roy Atwood, the
college president. "The last thing we wanted to be was a Liberty University
or a Patrick Henry. We are not interested in political takeover." Patrick
Henry — which requires classical core classes and offers a major in
classical liberal arts as well as more political fields — hemorrhaged
faculty and students a year ago as a debate over academic freedom and the
role of the liberal arts in Christian education divided the campus. "I
wonder if the N.S.A. people are right," says G. T. Smith, a philosophy
professor who left Patrick Henry after the turmoil.

New St. Andrews is turning away from the Moral Majority's legacy of
political involvement, but it has not turned its back on the culture war.
The Latin motto on water bottles and Frisbees for sale in the college
bookstore makes the point plain: *Numquam Bella Piis, Numquam Certanima
Desunt* — "For the faithful, wars shall never cease."

*IN CERTAIN WAYS*, Moscow is an unlikely home for New St. Andrews. The town
is "a little blue dot in an ocean of red," says Doug Wilson, who looks more
like a lumberjack than a pastor, even when he wears a suit. The presence of
the publicly financed University of Idaho has long made it a typical college
town. On Main Street, multicolored fliers flutter in the doorway of the
Golden Blue Lotus Tara Tibetan Buddhist Meditation Center.

A handful of people gather for regular antiwar demonstrations on Friendship
Square, adjacent to New St. Andrews. The well-combed and collared students
inside seem too busy reading Plato to pay attention.

In the student directory, a note on the first page explains the absence of
street addresses of the homes where students board (the college opposes
dorms on principle). "It seems there are people in the community who make a
hobby of causing trouble for local Christian families who extend hospitality
to N.S.A. students," reads the disclaimer. "So as a courtesy to these
families, and as a hedge against whatever else the 'Intoleristas' have up
their sleeve, we're making it a tad bit harder for them." "Intolerista" is
Wilson's nickname for his liberal critics. Some have filed zoning complaints
against N.S.A. host families for supposedly running illegal boarding houses.
Rival coffee shops have sprung up. The Christians drink their lattes at
Bucer's, which is outfitted like an English pub and is named after the
Reformation theologian Martin Bucer. The Starbucks-like One World Cafe is
the reputed liberal hangout. "There are a bunch of people who hate N.S.A.,"
says Laura Blakey, a 25-year-old alumna. "I think our Christianity offends
them."

Doug Wilson proudly declares himself more right-wing than most Idaho
conservatives. "They voted for Bush; I'd vote for Jefferson Davis," he
chuckles. Over the past two decades, he has founded a successful classical
Christian K-12 school, and his congregation, Christ Church, has expanded to
about 1,000 members. "It's Wilson Inc.," says Rose Huskey, a longtime Moscow
resident who met with me for two hours to detail Wilson's crimes and offer
boxes of documentation she has filed away at home. Wilson's critics view him
as a right-wing Pied Piper luring like-minded Christians to overrun the
town: families from as far away as France have moved to Moscow to enroll
their children in New St. Andrews or to join Christ Church.

New St. Andrews students are used to the challenge that their college is a
narrow-minded place. Brad Littlejohn, 19, often argues with his grandfather,
a Jewish agnostic. "My grandfather says, you're afraid of having your
beliefs challenged," Brad says. "That's a psychological claim, and there's
no way to refute that. I wanted a Christian-worldview education not because
I felt that if I got a secular-worldview education it would weaken my faith,
but it wouldn't nourish me in the same way." The students are bright. The
average SAT score is a respectable 1,214 out of 1,600, nearly on par with
schools like George Washington
University<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/g/george_washington_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org>(though
about 110 points behind Patrick Henry's average). The 88 percent
admission rate is deceptive, given the college's low public profile and
self-selecting applicant pool: students at N.S.A. have thought carefully
about why they are here.

Students' postcollege goals are fairly ordinary, ranging from academia and
law to construction and choral conducting, but they approach graduation with
a sense of mission sharpened by N.S.A.'s distinctive culture.

The school has adopted trappings of Oxford and Cambridge: professors are
called "fellows," and students dress in academic gowns for thesis defenses
and public final exams. Proudly Anglophile, faculty members lead a summer
tour of English castles and abbeys. C. S. Lewis and G. K. Chesterton are
ubiquitous on class reading lists — revered for their godly wit and their
fondness for fine drink. N.S.A.'s campus is proudly wet, in deliberate
contrast to the average fundamentalist Bible college.

The Oxbridge traditions; the college's nine-point Latin grading scale (from
*Summa Cum Laude* down to a failing *Minime*); the nameplates (in honor of
Augustine, Calvin and the Presbyterian theologian J. Gresham Machen) that
take the place of room numbers outside its three modest classrooms; these
constantly remind students that they attend a Christian college with class.
Donna Foucachon, an American who moved to Idaho from Lyon, France, with her
French husband after their sons chose to attend New St. Andrews, said that
the N.S.A. education impressed her French brother-in-law, who "is an
extremely cultured, educated man who worked in government and ate with the
shah. He's not of the same [religious] persuasion as us, but he looks at
what they're studying, and he says, This is true education." N.S.A. aims to
turn on its head the historian Richard Hofstadter's old stereotype of the
resentful evangelical bumpkin who equates intellectual life and high culture
with privilege and social status he doesn't have.

These flourishes are also intended as proof of intellectual seriousness.
"I'm critical of evangelical anti-intellectualism — the attitude that it's
not important to learn because we'll all be raptured soon," says Matthew
McCabe, the N.S.A. alumnus, who is now pursuing a Ph.D. in medieval English
literature at the University of Toronto. "I'm also critical of the view of
pragmatists, who are receptive to education but only to pragmatic ends."
Fundamentally, the college tries to reunite faith and reason: to devise a
medieval antidote to the post-Enlightenment confinement of religion to
Sunday morning. In a community this tightly knit, where weekends bring more
bonding at church, marathon Sunday brunches and endless "psalm sings" (if
you come to N.S.A. without having mastered four-part fugal harmony, you'd
better learn quick), the pomp and ritual further bond students from 31
states and five foreign countries into a band of cultured missionaries.

Students at New St. Andrews grin and complain that their teachers assign
more than 1,000 pages of reading each week. Seniors write theses that run to
more than 80 pages. Yet intellectual merit badges cannot guarantee an
education in critical thinking. Evan Wilson, 52, has been estranged from his
older brother's church and college ever since a theological quarrel in the
late 1980s that he dubs "the Great Unpleasantness." We sat in his library, a
forest green room appointed with leather club chairs and pictures of the
Battle of Waterloo. Lighting his briar pipe, Evan called himself "the local
Pelagian" and explained his very un-Calvinist view that God cannot
predestine our future because the future does not exist; it is only an
abstract concept, shaped by our free will. He runs his own church — one of
three Wilson ministries in town, including that of his father, Jim, who
brought the family to Moscow in the early 1970s to found a chain of
Christian bookstores.

Evan sees a lack of critical thinking among N.S.A. students, an inability to
systematically question their own assumptions. "When I meet these young men
who are trying to smoke pipes and talk about Chesterton, and they haven't
put Chesterton through the wringer, all I'll say is, 'Look, guys, his good
turn of phrase in "Orthodoxy" does not make him a good thinker,' " he said.
"When I went through college, some of my greatest moments of advancement
were with a professor who hated my guts and didn't agree with any of my
premises. . . . Our thoughts exist in broader company."

The faculty at New St. Andrews is hardly diverse. Several are N.S.A.
graduates who went on to do master's degrees elsewhere and came back to
teach. Only 4 of 17 faculty members have Ph.D.'s (those few are always
addressed as "Doctor" — proof that N.S.A. has not entirely escaped the
intellectual insecurity typical of evangelical colleges). Doug Wilson's son,
son-in-law and youngest brother teach at the college. "Someone's going to
say, 'Isn't that a little cozy?' " Wilson admits. "Part of modernity's
negative legacy is the pretense of objectivity. All institutions thrive on
interconnectedness, affection and loyalty." N.S.A.'s philosophy is that
cultural change begins with right worship and community rather than with
political activism. College life revolves around Christ Church and Trinity
Reformed Church — both members of the Confederation of Reformed Evangelical
Churches, a denomination based on "historic Protestant orthodoxy" that
Wilson co-founded in 1998. The college handbook forbids students to embrace
or promote "doctrinal errors" from the 4th through the 21st centuries, "such
as Arianism, Socinianism, Pelagianism, Skepticism, Feminism." If drawn to
such ideas, they must "inform the administration immediately and honestly in
a letter offering to withdraw from the College." Cultural revolution cannot
tolerate heretics.

*JOSHUA APPEL, A MODEL* N.S.A. professor, graduated from New St. Andrews in
2001. He did a master's degree at Reformed Theological Seminary in Florida
before returning to his alma mater to teach and raise a family. (His wife is
also an N.S.A. alumna — the school is a capable matchmaker, and during May
and June student weddings occupy nearly every weekend.) At 2 p.m. one
Friday, a group of students gathered for a seminar in Appel's living room.
One boy, perched on the piano bench, offered some armchair psychology on the
week's reading: the letters of Abelard and Heloise. Two girls balanced mugs
of tea on their knees and wondered how Heloise could disregard God's command
against fornication. Appel seemed frustrated. He wanted them to find
connections between this text and previous readings, not offer casual
opinions. As at any college, on some days discussion is better than others —
and sometimes students clam up in the presence of an observer. But perhaps
strict theological conformity has its drawbacks. The college "could have
been a more vibrant place for debate," recalls Matthew McCabe.

Like the majority of his classmates, Eric Mabry, a 21-year-old from Texas
who hopes to pursue a Ph.D. in philosophy, was home-schooled. Before he got
his driver's license he was studying Latin and reading Thomas Aquinas. At
N.S.A., he is known for occasionally wearing a monk's habit. When he told
professors at his local community college that he was going to attend New
St. Andrews, "it created a small firestorm," Eric says. N.S.A. was not even
accredited back then. But the teachers close to him respected his choice
because "they knew me and they knew my presuppositions," he says. "People in
a secular school are just as constrained. The only difference is, I'm aware
of my worldview." Eric smiles. "Some call it a straitjacket — I prefer to
think of it as a nicely fitted suit."

The phrases that N.S.A. students are trained to use — like "Christian
worldview" and "presuppositions" — are the tag lines of the theological
tradition that partly inspired their college. In the early 20th century, a
Dutch theologian named Cornelius Van Til introduced a kind of theology
called presuppositionalism. He argued that no assumptions are neutral and
that the human mind can comprehend reality only if proceeding from the truth
of biblical revelation. In other words, it is impossible for Christians to
reason with non-Christians. presuppositionalism is a strangely postmodern
theory that denies the possibility of objectivity — though it does not deny
the existence of truth, which belongs to Christians alone.

According to critics, this school of thought equips young Christians to read
and discuss non-Christian ideas without ever taking them seriously. "The
trouble is that once you've figured out someone's presuppositions, you can
write them off as right or wrong without having to deal with their
arguments. . . . It becomes anti-intellectual," says Darryl Hart, a
historian who has taught at Westminster Theological Seminary in
Philadelphia, the birthplace of presuppositionalism. Token "anti-Christians"
like Margaret Sanger, Karl Marx and Charles Darwin appear on N.S.A.
syllabuses, but students say these rarely generate serious debate. Darwin,
for his part, remains only "a curious event in the history of modern
secularism," Matthew McCabe says.

Students at New St. Andrews rarely read Van Til's dense theological
treatises. They absorb his ideas from their teachers. A few faculty members
at New St. Andrews also had links with a largely defunct offshoot of Van
Til's thought called Christian Reconstructionism. The movement's founder,
Rousas John Rushdoony, wrote that Christians should gradually take control
of society and reinstate Old Testament law — including the execution of
adulterers and homosexuals. Most N.S.A. faculty members are quick to
distance themselves from the movement, but not Doug Wilson.

Wilson emphasizes his flexibility when it comes to Old Testament law. "You
can't apply Scripture woodenly," he says; instead of executing them, "you
might exile some homosexuals, depending on the circumstances and the age of
the victim." He adds: "There are circumstances in which I'd be in favor of
execution for adultery. . . . I'm not proposing legislation. We're saying,
Let's set up the Christian worldview, and our descendants 500 years from now
can work out the knotty problems." Gene Veith, who is provost of Patrick
Henry College and active in classical Christian education, fears Wilson's
views are a handicap for the movement. "One of the frustrating things for me
is that people sometimes associate the classical Christian education
movement with Doug Wilson, so some people are sort of afraid of it," he
says.

Wilson and others at New St. Andrews say they are laying the groundwork for
the long-term reinvigoration of evangelical intellectual life — and for
Christian cultural ascendancy. Time and again, they assert that they are not
trying to influence politics and that the antagonism they face is
persecution. "The Gospels make it clear that as we're faithful, we can
expect opposition," says Peter Leithart, who teaches theology. It's hard to
deny, however, that Wilson goes out of his way to provoke. "The object was
to take over the town with the Gospel of Jesus Christ, but to do it in an
underground fashion," says Wilson's father, now nearly 80 and still running
his ministry. "One of the principles of war is surprise. You don't tell
people what you're going to do. Doug told them, and he gave them someone to
shoot at."

Evan Wilson, who disagrees with his brother on most things, does credit the
leaders of New St. Andrews with remaining true to their vision. Rather than
seeking change "by force of vote," he says, they look to "a natural
percolation of this culture they're offering." Yet, to quote the iconic
conservative author Richard Weaver, "ideas have consequences." New St.
Andrews's chronic spats with liberals in town belie the claim that one can
wholly separate the noble liberal arts from the crass business of politics.
"For years, evangelicals have been fighting abortion and evolution with
rubber-band guns, but there's all this great stuff from thousands of years
ago, when they were wrestling with similar questions," says Joanna Gray, a
24-year-old alumna. "It's there to be found — you just have to study and
find it."

Molly Worthen is writing a book about evangelical intellectual life.
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