You hear the stories.
So do we.
Your friend’s (or your own!) child, raised in the Christian faith, went off to college and jettisoned all that he grew up believing.
As one young woman told her sad parents, “Christianity is just something that makes people feel better at funerals. I don’t believe it anymore.”
Why do universities seem to be so antithetical to faith?
Because they are controlled by an elite, secular culture that is global in scope, Boston University sociologist Peter Berger explains in The Desecularization of the World.
“There exists an international subculture composed of people with Western-type higher education, especially in the humanities and social sciences, that is indeed secularized,” he writes.
“While its members are relatively thin on the ground, they are very influential, as they control the institutions that provide the ‘official’ definitions of reality, notably the educational system, the media of mass communication, and the higher reaches of the legal system. They are remarkably similar all over the world today, as they have been for a long time.”
This group includes influential professors, some of whom make it their mission to talk their students out of faith in God. Yet Dr. Berger predicts that they will not succeed.
“The world today is massively religious,” he notes. Evangelical Christianity in particular is undergoing a worldwide upsurge that he calls “breathtaking in scope.”
Dr. Berger mentions a fascinating possibility. What if the global secular elite themselves were to turn to God?
“No one can predict the appearance of charismatic figures who will launch powerful religious movements in unexpected places,” he maintains. “Who knows—perhaps the next religious upsurge in America will occur among disenchanted post-modernist academics!”
What if their professors pointed students toward God rather than away from Him? This is our prayer, and the goal for which we strive. Thanks for your partnership with us in this most strategic effort.
