Finally, we have a comprehensive history of some of the most significant—and significantly understudied—“dissenting” types of higher educational institutions: fundamentalist and evangelical colleges and universities. And Adam Laats is exactly the right person to have written it. As a sympathetic outsider to the institutions he studies, Laats pairs depth of research and analysis with a commitment to rigorous fairness to his subjects. In Fundamentalist U, Laats does not merely explain the internal logic of an interesting, but isolated, group of colleges and universities; he also raises critical questions about the nature of broader American higher education and culture in the twentieth century. As Laats notes, “Our culture wars are not between educated people on one side and uneducated people on the other. … Rather, our culture wars are usually fiercest between two groups of people who have been educated in very different ways” (p. 4).
Laats is an engaging writer, and the book's chapters are filled with fascinating stories cleverly told. Fundamentalist U combines chronological and topical organization. As it progresses through the twentieth century, the book addresses issues from race and gender relations to the unique dynamics of governance at fundamentalist colleges. The book analyzes “a network of interdenominational conservative evangelical colleges and universities,” including particularly deep archival work at six institutions: Wheaton College in Illinois, Bob Jones University in South Carolina, Biola University in California, Gordon College in Massachusetts, Liberty University in Virginia, and Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. As Laats notes, these schools “are often as far apart from one another culturally as they are geographically, but all of them—and many others like them—represent a recognizable family of institutions” (p. 2).
Although titled Fundamentalist U, the book actually analyzes both fundamentalist and evangelical colleges. The distinction may sound hairsplitting to the uninitiated, but a key part of Laats's argument is that contesting the shifting line between these two distinct, but overlapping, types of institutions—some of which shifted from one to the other over time—has driven much of their development. Institutions on the fundamentalist side were more separatist, while those on the evangelical side were more willing to engage with the outside world. Both were founded by conservative Protestants who believed secular colleges and universities had grown godless in their epistemological assumptions and mores, especially by questioning the veracity of the Bible and embracing Darwinism. But these Christian institutions nevertheless embraced and sought to redeem the form and concept of higher education. They understood secular institutions as apostate and themselves as carrying on the true collegiate legacy.
One of the takeaways of Laats's book is that Christian colleges are not so very “other” as they might first appear. By and large, they were simply colleges. Like other colleges, they needed money to survive. These particular institutions constantly had to convince donors and tuition-paying students that they were simultaneously religiously “orthodox”—however that was defined at the time—and “real” colleges—however that was defined at the time. Their problem was exacerbated by the fact that these colleges did not affiliate with any one denomination and therefore had no formal hierarchy to which to appeal on questions of belief or practice. They were subject instead to the ever-changing court of fundamentalist opinion. Thus, their stories illuminate both the changing norms of American higher education and how those norms intersected with the nation's changing religious and moral norms.
One of Laats's great strengths is parsing the ways in which fundamentalist and evangelical colleges were both similar to and different from more mainstream institutions. A good example is gender. Although conservative Protestant institutions gave even greater attention to gender roles than the surrounding culture, they hired female faculty at approximately the same rate as secular institutions. What professors taught mattered more than who was doing the teaching. Likewise, before the cultural upheavals of the 1960s, most colleges placed restrictions on male and female students’ interactions, and most colleges were harsher on women. Conservative Protestant colleges were the same—but more so. Similarly, before the 1960s, state universities and Christian colleges both expelled students accused of homosexual behavior, but Christian colleges used even harsher language in denunciation. At the end of the day, parents sent their children to these institutions for a “safe” education, in every way, not only theologically but also culturally.
Laats notes that conservative theology often intertwined with conservative mores and conservative politics more by instinct than by principle. One of the most famous fundamentalists (although he contested the term) was J. Gresham Machen, founder of Westminster Theological Seminary, who came under fire from co-religionists for permitting drinking. Machen could find no good biblical evidence forbidding it, but most other fundamentalists continued the nineteenth-century assumption that all good conservative Protestants were dry. Both fundamentalist and evangelical college administrations have been reliably politically conservative throughout the twentieth century, but evangelical students and faculty have consistently covered a much broader political spectrum. And despite their greater separatism, fundamentalist rather than evangelical institutions are the ones that have nurtured a particularly close relationship with political conservatism. Nevertheless, the student and faculty outlook at both types of conservative Christian colleges leaned further right politically than at secular institutions.
Laats's treatment of race is particularly strong. In some ways, conservative Protestant institutions were considerably worse than mainstream institutions at race relations. Notably, the founder of Bob Jones University, Bob Jones Sr., imbibed the racism of his southern white culture. Then, in keeping with the fundamentalist tendency toward cultural conservatism, he eventually elevated segregation to a point of fundamentalist orthodoxy—despite disagreement from other fundamentalists. But at other times, fundamentalist and evangelical colleges actually performed better than their mainstream peers. For many years, Wheaton College, founded by radical abolitionist Jonathan Blanchard, was at the leading edge of racial integration in American higher education. Sadly, Wheaton, along with other similar conservative Protestant institutions, later backed away from this stance in order to appear respectable. During the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, their antiracist faculty and students could make even stronger arguments than some of their secular peers by pointing to their institutions’ radical pasts. Nevertheless, while these evangelical institutions eventually became fully integrated again, they did so at too slow a pace to lead the wider evangelical world at that time.
Fundamentalist U does such a strong job of tracing the development of fundamentalist and evangelical colleges and universities that I wish Laats had turned his analytical eye more directly to the question of how these institutions affected the larger world of American higher education. He clearly demonstrates how trends at secular institutions affected Christian colleges; it would help to state more clearly how these dissenting institutions fed back to shape American higher education as a whole. At the very least, they offered collegiate education to students who may otherwise not have attended—and nurtured distinct bodies of scholarship, perhaps most clearly in the sciences, but also in the humanities. Elaborating on these effects would enhance Laats's argument for the wide significance of these institutions. Regardless, Fundamentalist U reshapes our mental landscape of twentieth-century American higher educational institutions and is essential reading for understanding both their history and their present.
