The Fundamentalists War On Thinking Christians

Just as the evangelicals in the Republican Party base are increasingly insistent that GOP candidates meet religious extremist imposed ideological purity standards, so too are thinking Christians being driven out of fundamentalist affiliated colleges.   Any signs of accepting modern knowledge and science or any recognition of objective reality is nothing short of heresy.  Through "statements of Faith" and increasingly by outright firing, professors that do not fully embrace ignorance are on the witch hunt hit list.  The latest target is Professor Tom Oord of Northwest Nazarene University (NNU).  An obvious issue needs to be reviewing the accreditation of such institutions and whether or not scholarship funds should be available for backward, discriminatory institutions (in my view, the answer is no).  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at the growing witch hunts at such colleges and, in my view, misnamed universities.  Here are highlights:

Evangelicals have just voted another intellectual off their island.  On the eve of April Fools’ Day, while on vacation in Hawaii with his wife, Professor Tom Oord got an email from the president of Northwest Nazarene University (NNU) notifying him that he was being terminated. NNU is one of eight schools sponsored by the evangelical denomination Church of the Nazarene.

Oord was a tenured full professor—the highest rank in academia—who had been on the NNU faculty for 13 years, after several years as my colleague at Eastern Nazarene College (ENC).  Oord was the university’s leading scholar, with 20 books on his CV; by most measures he was also the denomination’s leading scholar and one of a tiny number of Nazarene theologians whose reputations reached beyond evangelicalism. Oord had won multiple teaching awards and was wildly popular with students and respected by his colleagues. He had brought over a million dollars of grant money to the University—a remarkable accomplishment for a professor at a small unsung liberal arts college.

Oord, however, was controversial.  He strongly supported evolution and had long been a target of creationists in the denomination. He embraced “open theism,” the view that God does not know the future but responds in love—rather than coercive control—to events as they occur, rather than foreordaining everything. Fundamentalist critics called him a heretic and had been vying for his termination for years.

Getting rid of tenured faculty requires administrative creativity. In Oord’s case a small downturn in graduate enrollment cracked open a legal door that allowed the president to declare a financial problem. Curiously this financial problem required the termination of only one faculty member. Even more curious, this financial problem came in a year of record overall enrollment when NNU was celebrating its great financial health in press releases.

Alexander and Oord, however, have been at odds for years. As recently as last year Alexander informed Oord that he would not be returning because a theological review board was investigating him and was about, in so many words, to declare him a heretic.

The controversy at NNU is, tragically, just one of many related incidents that has plagued the Church of the Nazarene. In 2007 biologist Richard Colling was forced out of another Nazarene University for his book arguing that evolution was true and should be understood as God’s way of creating. In 2010 I left Eastern Nazarene College (ENC) after years of being attacked by fundamentalists as a heretic for my views on science.

An entire college could be staffed with the victims of fundamentalist witch-hunts in the Church of the Nazarene. And, if we add the victims of witch-hunts in other evangelical traditions, we could staff a major research university.

The controversy at NNU is one battle in the long war that is being waged—and slowly won— against thinking evangelical Christians. Battles at the various institutions are eerily similar and unfold along the following lines: Progressive, educated scholars push their traditions to make peace with new ideas, to be open to reconsidering historical positions on human origins, the nature of God, the morality of homosexuality, the meaning of Bible stories, the status of other religions.

American evangelicalism’s failure to make peace with the progressive scholars within its ranks—or even keep the conversation going—has alienated it from a broad range of scholarship. In The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age, historian Randall Stephens and I lament that most evangelicals now get their science from young earth creationist Ken Ham, their history from the discredited revisionist David Barton, their social science from the homophobic James Dobson.  

Noll coined the term “Scandal of the Evangelical Mind” to describe the intellectual crisis of his religious tradition—a crisis created by that tradition’s inability to break free of the fundamentalism out of which it arose.

One has to wonder why anyone hires a graduate of such institutions.  They certainly are not well educated.  Of course, the same holds true of Liberty University here in Virginia.  I would never hire a Liberty graduate since they obviously have been educated in a world of fairy tales and delusion.