Matthew Pate is a former law enforcement executive who holds a doctorate in criminal justice and who has advised police agencies around the country.
By MATTHEW PATE
Stephens Media
I am the virulent monster Rick Santorum warned you about. I confess. I am Nosferatu in the guise of a New York educated, liberal elite. I am here to suck the religion out of your babies using my leftist, Ivory Tower, demagogic fangs.
At least that’s what the senator would have you think. As he told a recently assembled throng in Michigan, the desire for an educated populace is tantamount to snobbery; and more importantly, he asserted that college turns religious people into non-believers through liberal indoctrination.
In their misguided effort to foment a culturally homogeneous Volksgemeinschaft, people like Santorum have to manufacture demons. After all, what’s a righteous crusade without a villain? If those folks had their way, Pope Innocent III’s 1207, Cum ex officii nostri would come back to life as governmental dictum. Heresy against the state religion would be criminalized and treated as treason. We could bring back the stake.
The not so tacit implication of his rhetoric is that college strips students of their inherent imago dei. Whatever is in you that is godly, a college education will wring it out like grandma’s washer on a tea towel.
This perspective might have merit if it were still the 16th century. As the theologian, John Calvin, once wrote, “When his (God’s) glory is to be asserted, humanity must be almost obliterated from our memories.”
I just don’t understand the anti-intellectual means-test for being a modern Conservative. Surely, William F. Buckley and Milton Friedman are rolling in their graves. Academic training no more exiles piety than does a welding class at the local vo-tech. Moreover, it can be argued that a well-educated Conservative would be better equipped to fend off the “faulty” reasoning from godless Liberals.
To that point, higher education has been semantically transformed to equate with atheism. This change betrays the fact that for most of human history, if you wanted an education, you had to get it in a church-run school.
Even I was fortunate enough to attend a Methodist affiliated school, Hendrix College. While there, I took a number of religion courses. Of course some of them focused on non-Christian religious traditions. So, they may not “count.”
If we have to drill down further, my first school experience was a Methodist kindergarten. Somehow I managed to get out of there without drawing a hammer and sickle on my Easter pageant costume. Then again, Mrs. B. did have a bust of Trotsky on her desk … hmmm. Yes, I’m glibly mocking the senator’s reductio ad absurdum, but it’s … well … absurd.
Santorum’s anti-intellectual rant is contradicted by the Social Science Research Council’s 2007 study on higher education and religious practice. SSRC found that while 64 percent of students enrolled in a four year college “curbed” their church attendance habits, 76 percent of those who never enrolled in college reported a decline in religious service attendance. Moreover, SSRC found that 20 percent of people who did not pursue college degrees renounced “any and all religious affiliation,” whereas only 13 percent of four year college students did. Facts being what they are, Santorum is diametrically incorrect.
According to the SSRC’s rigorously scientific poll, if anything, college seems to promote church attendance. Lest we fall prey to the same post hoc fallacy, it may be that college attendance is only spuriously related to church attendance.
Then there’s another small matter. If a person’s religious faith were so weak that a crank in elbow patches and tweed can undermine it with a few lectures, then it must not have been all that strong in the first place. As the Bard wrote, “The fault, Dear Brutus…”
If anything, learning more about the world, culture, history and science should heighten one’s appreciation for a bigger plan, shouldn’t it? The educated person understands that the universe is far greater than humanity can comprehend. If that doesn’t inspire a search for spiritual truth, what would?
Matthew Pate is a former law enforcement executive who holds a doctorate in criminal justice and who has advised police agencies around the country.