Promotional poster for “A Matter of Faith,” via their website (http://bit.ly/1o7fD3p)

A student goes away to college only to have her faith challenged by a popular professor, an avowed atheist whose persuasive lectures about evolution threaten to turn this devout Christian student into…well, that’s not clear exactly. A believer in evolution? A non-Christian? We’ll have to wait until September 26th to find out, because that’s when A Matter of Faith is released. No, it’s not a reboot of God’s Not Dead, the surprising box office hit about a college student who goes toe-to-toe with a philosophy professor about the existence of God. One does wonder if Christian filmmakers have a place to talk about their next projects or if, sensing a threat from higher education, they decided that “The Year of the Bible” in film needed a good dose of straw men.

In his book Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults (2009), Notre Dame sociologist of religion Christian Smith observed a shift in the way young adults were experiencing their college years:

One recent study, for instance, using some of the best longitudinal data available, has shown that it is not those who attend college but in fact those who do not attend college who are the most likely to experience declines in religious service attendance, self-reported importance of religion, and religious affiliation. Another showed that among recently surveyed college students, 2.7 times more report that their religious beliefs have strengthened during their college experience than say their beliefs weakened.

So why the insistence on this narrative that higher education is adversarial to belief? Anecdotally, some college students certainly walk away from the faith of the childhood. Others, met by campus groups like InterVarsity and Cru, become Christians during those four years. There is no incident on record of a professor requiring his students to sign waivers stating that God is dead, but God’s Not Dead went ahead with that outrageous plot. “In the real world it is Christian universities that alone in America require of students and faculty that they sign faith statements to attend or teach,” wrote philosophy professor Daniel Fincke on his blog (emphasis his).

In the real world, we also have examples of schools like Cedarville University, which over the last year and a half has seen a steady hemorrhage of some of its brightest faculty and staff due to their increasingly conservative stances. Bible classes taught by women are now only offered to female students, and an independent student newspaper has been shut down.

Christian anti-intellectualism isn’t new. Various sects within Christianity (Full Gospel/Pentecostalism chief among them) have held education and formal training in low regard, positing that nothing more than the Bible is needed for a person to live a faithful life. As Rick Nanez wrote in his book Full Gospel, Fractured Minds?, there is a history within Pentecostalism of believing that education is associated with “worldly” knowledge, and that as Christians who are to be in the world an not of it, we must avoid anything so tainted by society.

Is it fear that motivates these filmmakers to repeat the same lie about higher education? Is it the motivation to write a dramatic story? I don’t know that, but I do know one thing: The Christian filmmaking establishment is already an embarrassment to art. Let’s not let it also become an embarrassment to the truth. Or is it too late?