The “indoctrination” of faith

Conservative critics have decried the liberal culture on college campuses for years, but the current campaign has sharpened this attack to include a charge of “indoctrination” by Rick Santorum.  Sociologist Neil Gross shows, however, that the evidence doesn’t support the idea that students become less religious or more liberal during college, any more so than they would have otherwise as a function of their age.  The general attack is motivated by a political strategy, with academia–I would argue one of the strongest remaining reason-based cultural fields–serving as a necessary bogeyman:

The main reason for this development is that attacking liberal professors as elitists serves a vital purpose. It helps position the conservative movement as a populist enterprise by identifying a predatory elite to which conservatism stands opposed — an otherwise difficult task for a movement strongly backed by holders of economic power. 

Among cultural conservatives like Santorum there’s another reason.  College at it’s best encourages people to think for themselves, representing a threat to the parallel subculture of fundamentalist belief that has provided a form of indoctrination in many families until college.  Ironically, an anti-science emphasis within that culture, among other features, may be largely responsible for young people disconnecting from the church.  A 2011 Barna national survey of young adults attributes that disconnect to churches being overprotective, shallow, anti-science, simplistic in their teaching about sexuality, exclusionary, and intolerant of doubt (the opposite of an ideal university experience).  I’ve posted earlier about the notorious Ken Hamm and his “Creation Museum” in Kentucky;  he advocates a rehearsed repudiating response to any teacher of science-based claims of evolution and creation:  “Were you there?”  This all-purpose come-back may be effective for many pre-college youngsters, but the Barna results suggest such thinking apparently loses them later.  The ultimate irony, of course, is that same come-back can be used to undermine the very faith culture that’s teaching it (to a claim based on Biblical literalism:  “Where you there?”). Fundamentalists like Ham are planting an anti-intellectual time-bomb that blows up when young people leave the home.  The larger mystery of faith has never been well served by indoctrination of any kind and is not threatened by academia.