c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) When Bob Jones III steps down next month as president of the university his grandfather founded, he will leave behind a difficult legacy.

Despite the lifting of the interracial dating ban a few years back, the reputation of Bob Jones University will probably be tarnished for some years to come. But the problems of the school have spread beyond its gates in Greenville, S.C. Indeed, there is a tacit assumption now that most Christian colleges, particularly evangelical ones, also have a streak of racism running through them.

But are evangelical schools really the bastions of racial prejudice that people believe? If they are, it is certainly cause for concern, since religious colleges in this country are growing at a breakneck pace.

In fact, enrollment at the more than 100 member institutions of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (four-year liberal arts colleges committed to teaching Christian doctrine, hiring only professors who share the faith, and providing a Christian atmosphere outside the classroom) jumped a remarkable 60 percent between 1990 and 2002, while the number of students at public and private schools barely fluctuated.

In fact, though, evangelical schools seem to be courting racial minorities just as much as secular schools today.

When I ask Abby Diepenbrock, a senior at the evangelical Westmont College in Santa Barbara, Calif., whether her school needs more diversity, she answers, “Yes! Yes! Yes! And you can tell anybody I said that.”

Abby cites the apostle Paul’s speech in the third chapter of Galatians: “In Christ, there is neither Jew nor Greek nor slave nor free nor man nor woman,” meaning, she explains, that once people accept Christ as their savior and get into heaven, there are no distinctions among them. Abby concludes that to have a Christian school that is predominantly one ethnicity gives people “the idea that it’s the white man’s God or the white man’s religion. That’s completely not true.”

At some level, of course, religious colleges want diversity for the same reasons secular schools do. Michael Beaty, the vice provost for faculty at Baylor University in Texas, tells me: “(The school) didn’t admit its first black student until 1965, after the University of Texas had. I’m ashamed of that. It’s an indication of institutional sin.”

In addition to making up for past wrongs, many Christian college students and faculty believe they have a duty to represent accurately not only the population of the United States, as many secular schools do, but also the kingdom of God.

Leslie Clark, an African-American senior at Wheaton College, explains, “As a Christian community, we should look forward to how it will be in heaven, where there will be no biases or racism.”

There is one final reason that many students offer for the drive of Christian colleges to pursue racially diverse campuses. As Abby explains, “It’s crucial for Westmont to be open, to be supporting financially and spiritually people of different ethnicities so that we are influencing them.”

Even Bob Jones University, whose graduates have found some success setting up churches in inner-city areas, is now recruiting minority students who will be able to go back to those communities and lead them from the inside.

However offensive outsiders may find the idea, religious colleges are hoping to use minority students to spread the faith to other ethnic communities. If the mission of the college ultimately is to spread the gospel, then, the thinking goes, it needs representatives in each community who can help to do that.

This might be a compelling reason to bring racial minorities to campus, but it seems to create problems once they arrive. Christian schools, as it turns out, are just as susceptible to racial self-segregation _ what sociologists call “the lunch table problem” _ as secular schools.

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Despite the shared religious tradition, minority students on religious campuses often see themselves as there to fill a particular gap, not just to receive an education.

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And the schools seem to encourage this. Calvin College in Michigan offers financial incentives to its minority students who live in a “Mosaic dorm” with only other minorities. A Gordon College administrator recently tried to start a minority-only choir. And some students report that Wheaton College seems to bring in minority speakers only when the topic is related to race.

Indeed, the schools’ own acknowledgment that members of a particular ethnic group are best suited to bring its other members into the fold supports secular society’s tacit message that only people of the same race can truly understand each other and can therefore communicate best with each other.

There are still some factors that prevent Christian colleges from sinking as far into the identity politics that dominate so many secular campuses. The strong core curricula found at religious schools, including rigorous theology requirements, may help the students see more of the similarities than differences among them.

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Such curricula also tend away from the “multicultural” aspects of secular college educations. Baylor senior John Drake brings up this distinguishing feature of religious colleges _ by complaining about it.

At Baylor, he tells me, “I think they’re trying to create this common experience academically. There are a lot of classes that everyone has to take: the great text series; the religion requirement, which includes biblical heritage and Christian Scripture … The overall vision is to take away choice (from students), to say this is the experience everyone will have at Baylor.”

One can’t help, but wonder, though, whether that common experience is such a bad thing.

(Naomi Schaefer Riley is the author of “God on the Quad: How Religious Colleges and the Missionary Generation Are Changing America,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)

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