Ignoring Religion Fails To Prepare Students
Anne Kerhoulas
While it may not be surprising to hear that Christianity is declining in America, religion as a whole is actually growing throughout the world. China is on track to have more Christians than America in the next decade in spite of being an openly atheistic country. In the Middle East, the Islamic revival is producing more pilgrimages to Mecca than ever before. In Latin America, a once predominately Roman Catholic region, pentecostalism is booming. Even in America, though Christianity is waning, new-age spirituality is increasingly popular, and more and more people are religiously unaffiliated but interested and open to spirituality.
Though secular culture touts the rise of atheism as the logical belief system of the modern age, religion, it seems, isn’t going anywhere.
In this episode of The Veritas Forum podcast, Ross Douthat argues that universities are neglecting to prepare their students for a world that is deeply religious. By leaning more into the sciences and failing to employ professors of different religious beliefs, universities are communicating that religion is unimportant and shouldn’t be taken seriously. But graduates move into a world to discover that religion and theology shape everything from economics to politics, and they are struggling to understand how theology directly impacts everyday life.
Douthat further argues that beyond simply teaching the facts of religion and theology in the university setting, schools ought to actually employ individuals who take their religious faith seriously in order to provide students with the knowledge of religion as a world shaper with real-life consequences. Douthat says, “If we are going to take faith seriously as an intellectual system of thought as opposed to a nebulous feeling about the universe, it doesn’t just impact what the university should teach about faith, but also who should teach. You can tell how seriously an idea is taken by a university by how many professors subscribe to it.”
Christian Union works with students at influential universities, most of which were founded as Christian schools. For the past 20 years, Christian Union has challenged the intellectual and cultural belief that Christianity isn’t a worthwhile or viable belief system while equipping students with biblical and theological knowledge to know the truth and walk in it.
Listen to the full podcast here.
