For the past couple of years, historian Chris Gehrz has been working on a book project: a college guide for Christians. As parents, Dan and I have been very excitedly looking forward to it! Chris has decided to serialize publication at his substack, and you can read chapter 1 TODAY! So, this marks the official book launch, and we’re grateful to celebrate with this interview.
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You first wrote here at The Arena about this project in June 2023: You have been working on a guide to college for Christians. At that time, you introduced this project and your aims as follows:
“Our kids are still in middle school, so we’ve got a few years to go before we need to help them make the two of the biggest decisions they’ll make: where to go to college and what to do when they get there. But as I’ve started to think ahead to a process that many of my friends and colleagues are already going through, I’ve wondered if I might be able to help families like ours and theirs navigate the transition from high school to college. After all, I not only have twenty years of experience as a college professor myself, but higher education is one of the primary topics that I study and write about.“
This fall, you have decided to publish this book in serialized format at your Substack. And so, this seemed a fitting time to ask you more questions–and I’m grateful for your willingness to take the time to answer them. My first question for you is one that you had discussed originally, but I want to check back at this stage: Who are your target audiences for this project? Is this guide for both Christian parents and their kids, or are you focusing more on one or the other of these groups?
Apart from one chapter where I’ll speak directly to fellow parents’ fears about sending kids off to college, I’m still trying to reach both audiences at once. My ideal would be that students and parents (or other adult advisers to them) read the book at the same time, then discuss each chapter together.
Now, I’m not convinced that I’ve pulled that off! It’s hard to write for two distinct audiences at once, knowing that teenagers and their parents have different assumptions, expectations, vocabularies, and attention spans.
So I’ve tried to write with the same voice I’ve used for over twenty years in teaching first-year courses, where teenagers are learning to make the transition from high school to college — at the same time that being on their own for the first time means that they’re starting to look at the world more like adults do. I don’t hesitate to introduce new vocabulary, but I always pause to explain it. I often lean on personal experience and popular culture to make academics more relatable. I regularly review what we’ve already covered. Above all, my goal in this book — like a first-year lecture — is not simply to dispense information, but to help readers ask and answer questions themselves.
Many average people in the pews know fairly little about Christian colleges. What do you wish everyone (whether they have kids or not) knew about Christian colleges in 2024?
First, that there’s no single type of “Christian college.” My wife attended an ELCA Lutheran college, several of my cousins went to a diocesan Catholic university, and I work at an evangelical university coming out of the Baptist and Pietist traditions. Each approaches higher education differently; each approach is shaped by Christianity. All three would say that their religious roots sustain the work of intellectual and moral formation, and that they’re trying to help students discern their calling and live lives of purpose. All three offer opportunities for Christian worship and spiritual formation. And I daresay that all three sometimes make people in the pews nervous, since the mission of a Christian college or university is not identical to that of a Christian church!
But my university, unlike the other two institutions, seeks to pursue its mission within a Christ-centered community where every professor and (traditional undergraduate) student is a Christian, every class — whether Bible or Biology, Mathematics or Music — seeks to integrate learning with Christian faith, and you’d find everyone from campus pastors to athletic coaches and career counselors talking about their work as a form of Christian ministry. I know that our approach is genuinely transformative for students who may have grown up attending church, but learn at college both to “make their faith their own” and to live it out in ways consistent with their callings.
All that said… this is also a prime example of a recurring theme from my book: your choice of college may be less important than the choices you make at college. A student could decide to go to Bethel, then decide not to take seriously the questions we ask about faith, truth, purpose, and justice. While a student attending a different kind of Christian college — or maybe going to a public university and getting to know its InterVarsity chapter or Christian study center — might choose to dedicate those years to learning to love their neighbors in a more diverse community.
Wherever you go, I think the key is that you commit to relating your faith to your studies — finding mentors and friends along the way who can help you do that hard work.
You’ve been thinking a lot about the changing landscape of Christian higher education and also the decline in the study of the humanities. True, historians study the past rather than the future, but what predictions would you make for the next 10-20 years in American higher education–and especially Christian higher education?
I wouldn’t trust anyone who claims to see the future of higher education with any degree of clarity. Ten years from now, the parents reading my college guide will be Millennials who are struggling to make sense of Gen Alpha kids who have lived through two more presidential elections and who knows how many generations of AI. To a significant extent, higher ed is shaped by what’s happening in the economy, but Americans can’t even agree on whether our economy is doing well right now, let alone how it will function ten years from now.
As a historian, all I can say is that what people choose to study in college has been a cyclical phenomenon. Majors like history, philosophy, and English have been in decline since the Great Recession, but we’ve seen that happen before (after World War II, when there was a push for “applied studies,” and in the Eighties, when business majors took off), only for the humanities to recover (especially in the Sixties and Seventies, to a lesser extent after the end of the Cold War and in response to 9/11). In that sense, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a modest renewal of student interest in the same fields that some colleges have been too quick to cut; our department, after all, just had its largest graduating class since 2010.
As to Christian higher ed… it’s subject to the same pressures as the rest of the sector, including declining enrollment overall, weakening public confidence in the value of a college degree, the challenge of keeping costs under control without reducing the quality of education, the effects of political polarization, and a continuing crisis in student mental health. But in addition to other demographic changes, Christian colleges — especially those that only admit Christian students — have to reckon with the shrinking number of self-identified Christians in this country.
I do worry that these pressures will cause some Christ-centered colleges to lose sight of themselves — e.g., to make themselves training grounds for culture war politics, to emphasize the values of the market over those of a Christian liberal arts education, or to water down their Christian identity altogether. But I’m hopeful that most institutions like mine will come through the present crisis looking more like the “fearless Christian university” described in John Hawthorne’s forthcoming book by that title, committed “to center student questions and experiences, to pursue research that meets real needs in the church and society, and to participate boldly in their cultural contexts” not in spite of their Christian commitments, but because of them.