But even if the universities make it difficult, there must be other ways for students to hear the Gospel?“We are facing a crisis of religious freedom on campus in this country,” says David French, Senior Counsel with the Alliance Defense Fund and director of the ADF Center for Academic Freedom.
“Sixty-nine percent of our tax-funded universities have speech codes which either restrict or prohibit Constitutionally- protected speech,” he says. In other words, on at least 230 public universities across the country, doors are effectively barred to the Gospel.
In fact, the cumulative effect of this aggressive oppression is shaping not only the next generation of Christian leaders, but the eternal destiny of millions of young people. One out of six Americans – 13.6 million young people – are now enrolled in America’s public colleges and universities, and studies show that while 52 percent of them, on entering college, are attending or actively involved in a local church … that number drops to 29 percent by the time they graduate. (Source: Spirituality In Higher Education:A National Study of College Students’ Search for Meaning and Purpose (2000-2003))What forms does this persecution take?
Aren’t universities supposed to be “the marketplace of ideas?”“The Emily Brooker case (see A Time to Stand) is the leading edge of a new and disturbing trend in higher education,” French says. “Censorship of Christian students really began with the speech code – with the notion that there are some ideas and viewpoints too abhorrent, too offensive to be heard.
“The universities then moved on to not just silencing Christians but excluding groups of Christians from campus, saying it is ‘discriminatory,’ for example, to have a group with Christian leadership.
“The next step is to say, ‘Not only are we going to silence you, not only are we going to exclude your groups from campus, but we are going to make you publicly vocalize support for radically Leftist positions before we give you a degree.’
Theoretically, but in truth, universities are “increasingly the Church of the Left – the place that is enforcing an ideological mono-culture,” French says. “The Center for Academic Freedom was created to address that situation … to give Christian students, professors, and campus ministries an opportunity to be heard.”
