Thinking about God: to find a free and able mind, look for a believer, not a relativist skeptic.

To find a free and able mind, look for a believer, not a relativist skeptic.

IN 1989 I was interviewed for a job teaching Catholic studies at a state university in the South. Some members of the committee were concerned that I would proselytize the students. A Baptist turned Catholic, perhaps justifiably, raised certain suspicions. I assured them I would not, but added that the Catholic culture I would teach tended to make converts of its own. Evidently, my confidence in the power of great Catholic writers -- Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, Maritain, O'Connor, Percy -- raised yet more suspicions about my "objectivity." More questions followed. What would I do if a student wanted to know why I had become a Catholic? "If it were a serious question, I'd answer it," I replied. Needless to say, I didn't get the job. A member of the hiring committee instructed me that the separation of church and state required that professors on the state payroll should never testify to their faith. After all, I was told, this was a religious-studies department, not a theology department in a seminary.

The abuse of the Establishment clause of the Constitution has led to what has been called "establishment disbelief," as state-sponsored institutions have removed all vestiges of religion from their premises. Education, it has been said, begins with wonder. No more. There is no room for wonder where there is no talk about God. This artificial limit placed around the reason and imagination of students and faculty has been a central factor in the decline of liberal-arts education.

The modern secular university was created in the name of objectivity and freedom from superstition. In the attempt to cut the university off from its roots in Christian Europe, a vacuum was created in which all knowledge was made subject to the demands of politics and business. Christian humanism was replaced as the guiding light of education. Vocationalism swallowed up most of the curriculum; what was left of the humanities fell into the hands of the political Left. The Left, however, is no longer merely liberal. The Left has turned skepticism and relativism into tools of institutional politicization. The same faculty who once demanded that religion be excluded from the curriculum now teach that objectivity is just another Western myth. All knowledge, they claim, is a social construct, dependent on class, gender, and ethnicity.

The post-modern turn of events over the past twenty years has reinforced the importance of St. Anselm's notion that we believe in order to understand. The light of faith is good for the mind; faith stimulates the mind to look behind the appearances. That we believe in order to understand is not merely good for the individual believer, but good for the culture. The reasons are many, but central among them is that questions of faith lead directly to the big questions: Does God exist? Is the soul immortal? Is the world eternal? Training in these questions leads to free and able minds, minds not bound by today's superstitions of political correctness.

The results from the alliance of religious conviction and true liberal education speak for themselves. It is no accident that small institutions like Calvin College and St. Thomas Aquinas College have produced a disproportionate crop of talented young scholars. Many of our nation's best philosophers have come out of the evangelical heartland -- Protestant and Catholic -- of this country. As students they were encouraged from their freshman year to think speculatively about everything in the universe and outside it. Nothing was declared off limits at the outset. Few exercises of the mind can prepare a student to handle abstractions like reflecting on the nature of divine substance and its Trinitarian processions.

One of my own former students, who now teaches philosophy at Notre Dame, was a hotel accountant in Atlanta when she decided to finish her BA at night. In my Introduction to Religion class, I made some comments on "why it is good to think about God." She told me much later that this had been a turning point. I was able to give that lecture without any fear of complaint, because I was then teaching at a church-related university. Not only was I able to talk freely about God, but religion was part of the curriculum for all the students. Students at that college, whether they liked it or not, were challenged to think about matters of faith and the claims to truth that they imply.

THE advantage of church-related colleges can still be seen in their commitment to a liberal-arts education. The reluctance of Catholic institutions, in particular, to water down their general-education requirement, to give up their emphasis on philosophy, theology, and languages, has been documented.

By the Sixties and Seventies many Catholic institutions, with notable exceptions, had closed the gap. At present, however, the trend is reversing: those institutions serious about being church-related are becoming more and more distinct from their secular counterparts -- the catalogues, for example, of Baylor University (Southern Baptist) and the University of Dallas (Catholic) make the menus of the Ivy League look rather skimpy.

Many of our most prestigious schools -- Harvard, Yale, Princeton -- specify only broad distribution requirements in general areas. They have no core curriculum to speak of. Although these were all Christian institutions at their founding, they gave up long ago on shaping a liberal education according to the demands of human nature. Merely utter the word "nature" on these campuses nowadays and you are suspected of being in league with some sort of will-to-power over vulnerable minds.

These young minds are vulnerable, but in a way that the academy does not seem to grasp. Too many faculty still teach incoming students as if they were products of the Fifties. They assume freshmen have deeply ingrained conservative prejudices that must be destroyed. Today's students, however, have grown up breathing the pop-Nietzschean air of the Eighties and Nineties. They arrive on campus deeply suspicious of claims to truth -- they don't need to be taught the ways of the skeptic. What many faculty have been trying to accomplish for years -- subverting traditional wisdom --is now being done by the culture itself.

Students want their minds back. They are frustrated with the emotional dialectics of the talk show. They need to regain confidence in the power of rational inference. To accomplish this, they need more than bare logic; they need to rejoin the conversation of the West, so magnificently represented for us in the opening books of Aristotle's Metaphysics. It was a thirteenth-century Christian who recognized the importance of Aristotle, and it is religiously minded scholars like Alasdair McIntyre who keep him alive today.

The church-related university, illumined by the light of faith, confident in its curriculum, rooted in history, concerned for the student as a whole person, is our best bet for the recovery of the intellect and its freedom. A genuine liberal-arts curriculum reflects its conviction that the person, not the worker or even the voter, should be the center of education. This focus ensures that knowledge will not be reduced to job training, measured by its practical usefulness, or marinated in the politics du jour. The primary concern will be, as in those original American colleges of the 1600s and 1700s, the development of character, the discernment of true values, and preparation for heaven. Nothing frees the mind from the grind of practicality like a healthy concern for the next world.