The founder of New College Franklin (Tennessee), (PCA Minister George) Grant, has been accused in the past of advocating for Christian domination of government based on Biblical law, a movement known as Reconstructionism.

At New Saint Andrews College, students toss around Latin terms and sometimes don black robes. Academic terms have proper names: Jerusalem, Nicea, Chalcedon and Westminster. The curriculum, mostly primary source readings, is based on Harvard University’s — from the 17th century.

The details are meant to create an atmosphere of reverential tradition, but New Saint Andrews, founded in 1994, is as new as its name suggests. The college and its founders see themselves as drawing inspiration from a purer time in higher education, before specialized majors, large lecture halls, prime-time football games and much of the rest of the popular image of the American university. They are also in the vanguard of a new movement with the ambitious goal of reshaping Christian higher education.

That movement calls itself “classical Christian” education, and it combines a Great Books curriculum — featuring primary source documents from the Western tradition, but few or no specialized majors — with a theologically conservative, Protestant Christian perspective.

Since its beginnings in elementary and secondary schools, the idea has caught on at the college level: in the 17 years since New Saint Andrews opened in Moscow, Idaho, at least six other such colleges have sprung up across the country, including New College Franklin in Tennessee, Patrick Henry College in Virginia and Imago Dei College in California.

Other colleges, including Biola University, have started classical programs within the institution, and another stand-alone college, San Elijo, also in California, plans to enroll students as early as 2012. As many as 20 more new colleges may be under consideration, said Doug Wilson, one of the founders of New Saint Andrews and a proponent of the movement.

To the devout faculty and students at classical Christian colleges, the institutions represent a rebirth in American higher education, turning away from public universities some disparage as “government schools” and from the more established Christian colleges they see as too secularized or insufficiently academic. But these colleges aren’t without controversy.

Two educators involved with the founding of two of them — New Saint Andrews and New College Franklin — have drawn criticism for statements and publications that are seen as intolerant, theocratic or neo-Confederate, though the criticism has been limited to the founders themselves and not the colleges they created.

The institutions themselves differ in some important ways, including how much specialization they offer (Patrick Henry offers majors in government, journalism, history and literature, as well as a classical curriculum) and their faith requirements for students (most require some sort of written faith statement, though Gutenberg College does not).

But they have much in common, including a staunch opposition to much of modern higher education — in some cases, even the concept of a residential campus.

They try to disprove a common stereotype of conservative Christians, and their schools, as anti-intellectual, presenting a proudly esoteric face to the world and boasting of a rigorous curriculum.

“One of our concerns is that Christianity in America has kind of decided that they should withdraw from the intellectual sphere,” says David Crabtree, president of Gutenberg College, which does not describe itself with the phrase “classical Christian” but combines a Great Books curriculum with a Christian perspective. “We need to establish that Christianity is indeed intellectually defensible.”

Christianity at the center

The most obvious analogue to the classical Christian colleges is St. John’s College, whose campuses in Annapolis and Santa Fe also focus on reading classic texts. But describing an institution like New Saint Andrews as a “Christian St. John’s” misses how central faith is to the classical Christian experience, college presidents and observers say.

In emphasizing the importance of learning the classics over career-oriented specialization, the leaders often sound like their counterparts at secular colleges. “We’ve made the mistake in the contemporary university setting of reducing education to simply downloading information,” says Roy Atwood, the president of New Saint Andrews, who was previously a professor of journalism and director of the School of Communication at the University of Idaho. “It’s not about the formation of the individual as much as acquiring data.”

The colleges emphasize their professors’ Christian faith alongside or above their academic credentials. New Saint Andrews, where many of the faculty belong to Christ Church Moscow, part of the Confederation of Reformed Evangelical Churches, boasts that more than half of its teachers serve as ministers or pastors: “They have strong academic credentials and teaching experience in their respective disciplines, of course, but more importantly, as Christian spouses and parents themselves, they cherish the responsibility and privilege of nurturing the next generation,” the college’s website reads. At New College Franklin, faculty are encouraged to research and to publish, says Matthew Vest, the college’s dean. But living alongside students is their most important priority.

“There is no doubt that they are deeply religious institutions — I’d be tempted to say in every way, all of the time,” says Samuel Schuman, who wrote about New Saint Andrews in his 2009 book on religious colleges, Seeing the Light (Johns Hopkins University Press). “What they read, they read from the perspective of their religious outlook. What they pick to read, they pick because of the light it shows on their religious outlook.”

The distinctions are perhaps most evident in matters of science: statements of faith at the classical Christian colleges contain assertions that would be heresy (so to speak) at most secular institutions, most notably a belief that the world was created in six 24-hour days and a disavowal of Darwinian evolution.

Editor’s Note: While this article was written and originally appeared in Inside Higher Education, a journal whose readers are essential professionals in the world of Higher Education, it was picked up and reprinted in the Education Seciton of USA Today giving this story a much broader audience.

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