Today’s post is from Dr. Perry Glanzer. He is professor of Educational Foundations at Baylor University and the editor-in-chief of Christian Scholar’s Review. Professor Glanzer is the author of books including the newly-released Christian Higher Education: An Empirical Guide.
A few years ago, I wrote a guest essay for this blog entitled “A Guide to Choosing a Christian College.” After its publication, I received dozens of e-mails from parents who wanted additional help choosing a Christian university. All of them mentioned a problem similar to what this parent articulated: “My daughter is in the process of selecting a Christian college and we recognize faith integration in the classroom and campus can vary widely. While many schools speak the language of integration, it seems difficult to assess from the ‘consumer’ side.”
These parents were particularly interested in the spreadsheet I used to evaluate how Christian institutions operationalize their Christian commitment. They wanted to know if I would be willing to share that information. After receiving those e-mails, I knew I needed to write a book for these parents to share this data publicly in an easy-to-understand format.
The result is my new co-authored book, Christian Higher Education: An Empirical Guide. The book is meant for parents, students, faculty, and staff, who want to understand how to evaluate the degree to which a university takes its Christian identity seriously at the level of administrative, faculty, and staff decision-making.
“Christian” versus “Church-Related”
One danger in undertaking such an evaluation is that the scholars doing the evaluation might use narrow ideological or theological criteria. That is why some scholars prefer using the term “church-related” to describe these institutions instead of “Christian.” They do not want to engage in arguments about how to define “Christian.”
But the term “church-related” is not clarifying either. One can be “related” to another person, institution, or idea to varying degrees. For example, a big difference exists between a sibling and a fourth cousin. Just as we have a wide variety of family relationships, Christian institutions have a wide variety of relationships with their Christian identity and sponsoring churches.
Furthermore, just as we sometimes do not mention certain relatives (my parents’ old pastor was related to Jack the Ripper), higher education institutions can be similarly reticent. Merrimon Cuninggim noted almost thirty years ago that whether institutions embrace “church-related” label or not depends on who’s asking. “If it is the denomination that is doing the asking, then the college’s answer is likely to be ‘Yes’ . . . if it is the general public, the Federal Government, or some secular agency that is doing the asking, then the college’s answer may well be negative.”
Despite acknowledging the slippery way “church-related” might be employed by an institution, Cuninggim did not like “Christian” any better. He thought that the term “Christian higher education” “is apt to be a battle cry, or seem so to the whitewashed inside or the unwashed outside.”
Cuninggim also failed to acknowledge that the use of “church-related” resulted in an inability to make simple distinctions between institutions that are seriously Christian but not officially church related, and those which have a vestigial church connections but little Christian commitment. The former category includes schools such as Biola University or Wheaton College, which are not denominational but use their Christian identity to guide administrative decision-making in multiple areas.
The latter includes Texas Christian University (which styles itself as “TCU”) or Southern Methodist University, which have no empirical markers of Christian identity but are sometimes still referred to as “church-related” and mistakenly described as Christian simply due to their names. Under Cuninggim’s approach, there may be no battle cry, but there is also no helpful language for distinguishing between institutions with obvious differences.
Most importantly, the term “church-related” confuses parents, faculty, and even the public. Thus, they end up turning to random internet rankings. For example, I found one such ranking on EdSmart. This site ranked Christian colleges based on their cost, graduation rate, retention rate, and median earnings of ten years after attending the school.
Although these metrics are helpful, it is interesting that one would rank the best Christian college based on two financial factors and two factors that—though identical to the metrics by which secular universities are measured—reveal nothing about the seriousness with which the institution takes its Christian mission, or if they even have a Christian mission.
Evaluating Christian Identity
Whenever a person or institution claims an identity, one would expect empirical self-descriptions or behavioral markers that indicate the influence of that identity. Someone claiming to be a baseball player cannot do so without actually demonstrating some effort to be knowledgeable about, and to love, practice, and play the game of baseball. The same is true with the Christian identity as it relates to higher education. We need to consider the evidence demonstrating actual commitment to the professed identity.
That is why my co-authors and I created the Operationalizing Christian Identity Guide (OCIG) to analyze higher education institutions. It uses twelve clear empirical markers related to an institution’s mission, rhetoric, membership requirements, curriculum, co-curriculum, and governance to determine the influence of an institution’s Christian identity. We then apply the resultant guide to evaluate institutions. By “operationalize” we mean that the specific markers we assess serve as evidence of how various Christian universities put their Christian identity into effect through concrete (i.e., observable) actions or policies.
We then assign a number value to the 28 different types of decisions institutions could make to operationalize their Christian identity, so an institution could score between 1 and 28. To give an example, we wanted to find out who can join and lead the community. Are the students, staff, faculty, president, and/or members of the governance board required to be Christian (e.g., Biola or Taylor University or Wheaton College)? Is it some kind of mixture (such as at Baylor University or the University of Notre Dame)? Or are there no religious requirements for anyone outside of divinity schools (e.g., Wake Forest University or TCU)?
Thus, we looked at student admissions pages or applications along with faculty/staff hiring pages to understand if the institutions require students, faculty, and staff to sign statements of faith or affirm a Christian identity.
We then used the following coding system:
• Christian Identity Requirements for Students (+1)
• Christian Identity or Belief Requirements for Faculty (+1 for all or 0.5 if part)
• Christian Identity or Belief for Staff (+1)
• Christian Identity or Membership Requirements for the President (+1)
• Christian/Church/Denominational/Order Requirements for Being on the Governance Board (+1 for all or 0.5 if part)
• No Identity Requirements in each area (0)
We made similar evaluations of the institution’s rhetoric, curriculum, and co-curricula (activities outside of the curriculum such as student groups, residence life and perhaps chapel). Overall, we believe the OCIG provides the clearest understanding of the diverse ways that institutions demonstrate their relationship to a Christian identity to date.
To be clear, the presence of these factors alone does not make an institution robustly Christian. Although the institutional standards our guide reveals help a Christian culture, requiring a president, faculty, or staff to affirm a particular Christian identity does not mean they are excellent at their job. Nor does it mean they view advancing the institution’s Christian mission as central to what they do. Nonetheless, the presence of these factors does provide an empirical baseline.
Using this guide, we identified 554 Christian colleges and universities in the United States (371 Protestant, 182 Catholic, and 1 Eastern Orthodox) and 16 institutions in Canada (5 Catholic and 11 Protestant). As a result, we discovered that Christian institutions vary considerably in the degree to which they operationalize a Christian identity.
In what follows I will offer a sample of what we found regarding the five major groups of American Christian institutions: Mainline Protestant universities, Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Catholic universities, Evangelical Partnership institutions (Council for Christian Colleges and Universities—CCCU; International Association for Christian Education—IACE), and Independent Protestant institutions.
There are two clear patterns of difference among Protestant institutions. Almost every (94 percent) Mainline Protestant and HBCU institution scored 12 or below, with only nine total exceptions. The CCCU/IACE and low-church Protestant institutions all scored 12.5 or above with twelve exceptions in the low-church Protestant category. Thus, if you are looking for Protestant institutions operationalizing their Christian mission in significant ways, you will typically find such institutions among the CCCU/IACE or low-church Protestant colleges and universities.
In addition, although one earlier scholar, James Burtchaell argued that nondenominational institutions are more likely to secularize, according to our empirical findings, there is no indication that nondenominational institutions are less likely to operationalize their Christian identity.
But stated simply, our findings reveal the Mainline Protestant and HBCU institutions score at the low end of the OCIG, the Catholic institutions score in the middle, and the CCCU, IACE, and low-church Protestant institutions score at the high end. For example, on the low end, the ELCA Lutheran university, St. Olaf College, scores a 6.5 and The African-Methodist Episcopal HBCU, Wilberforce University scores a 2. In the middle, the Catholic Marquette University scores a 12. The CCCU/IACE-affiliated Biola University scores a 26 and the independent Mid-America Christian University scores a 19.
The media often depicts Christian college in America as a monolithic experience, but that could not be further from the truth. Differences in institutions’ rhetoric, membership qualifications, curriculum, and co-curricular expectations can lead to entirely different experiences for students at Christian schools. Thus, it behooves us to make clear distinctions between different types of schools. We trust that knowing how much faith actually makes a difference at various Christian colleges will be of service to prospective students and their families.
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