This is a quote from Professor Richard Rorty, who has taught at Princeton and Stanford, describing his attitude toward Christian students and their parents:
While there are some really good college professors out there, there are plenty who share Rorty's views, and some will even be this openly hateful in class (Beth and I have both personally experienced this). If you are heading off to college this fall, you need to prepare yourself for some head-on attacks. If you aren't reading your Bible and praying regularly, START. Read some good Christian books on apologetics (defending your faith), load your iPod up with an audio Bible and some podcasts that will challenge, educate, and encourage you (I can recommend some if you're interested), and as soon as you get settled in on campus, find a Christian community to connect with.I, like most Americans who teach humanities or social science in colleges and universities... try to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic, religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own ... The fundamentalist parents of our fundamentalist students think that the entire ‘American liberal establishment’ is engaged in a conspiracy. The parents have a point. Their point is that we liberal teachers no more feel in a symmetrical communication situation when we talk with bigots than do kindergarten teachers talking with their students ... When we American college teachers encounter religious fundamentalists, we do not consider the possibility of reformulating our own practices of justification so as to give more weight to the authority of the Christian scriptures. Instead, we do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization. We assign first-person accounts of growing up homosexual to our homophobic students for the same reasons that German schoolteachers in the postwar period assigned The Diary of Anne Frank... You have to be educated in order to be ... a participant in our conversation ... So we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable. We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours ... I don’t see anything herrschaftsfrei [domination free] about my handling of my fundamentalist students. Rather, I think those students are lucky to find themselves under the benevolent Herrschaft [domination] of people like me, and to have escaped the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents ... I am just as provincial and contextualist as the Nazi teachers who made their students read Der Stürmer; the only difference is that I serve a better cause” (‘Universality and Truth,’ in Robert B. Brandom (ed.), Rorty and his Critics, 2000)
If you still have some time in high school, great! That means you have even more time to build a strong foundation of faith before heading off into the "real world". I hope you'll see this as an encouragement to start early.
If you're a parent or a fellow church member, please continue to pray for and mentor our students.
See you in church!
