Protest? But Why?

Protest? But Why?
The divide between religious and secular college deepens.

BY NAOMI SCHAEFER
Friday, October 26, 2001 12:01 a.m. EDT

"We can't kill innocent children in Afghanistan to say we've responded to terrorism." So said Jessica Hiemenz, a junior at Virginia Tech, to a Baltimore Sun reporter during an antiwar demonstration in Washington late last month. "We need to look at what we've done wrong in the world--if we don't, then more of our buildings will keep blowing up in our face."

When asked what he thinks about U.S. retaliation for the terrorist attacks, Christopher McGowan replies: "Tom Paine was pretty much on the money: 'Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.' " Mr. McGowan, a student at Ave Maria School of Law in Ann Arbor, Mich., speaks with some experience. Before coming to the Catholic school, he served five years in the National Guard.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the divide between religious and secular colleges has become ever more evident. Harvard still bans ROTC from its campus; Wesleyan students have held teach-ins on "Cultures of Masculinity and Militarism in the U.S."; and some Berkeley students formed a "Stop the War" coalition.

Meanwhile, at evangelical Christian Bob Jones University three students have left to join the military; several students at Southern Virginia University, a new Mormon college, are seriously considering enlisting; and ROTC students at Brigham Young University are wearing their uniforms even when not training.

Why the divide? According to Damon Linker, a former professor at Brigham Young, the students there have "tremendous respect" for legitimate authority. When asked about any clashes between the school's student government and administration, Andria Uale, Brigham Young's student vice president, answers that there aren't any. As for taking stands on national political issues, she explains: "The religious aspect of the school makes you channel your energies differently. Instead of starting a protest, you work to raise awareness of issues."

But it is not just blind obedience that encourages patriotism at religious colleges. At Ave Maria, says Mr. McGowan, "we talk about how this nation's history is rooted in a respect for religious freedom. You cannot separate the two." Mr. Linker agrees. "A lot of students want to serve in the armed forces to defend the political structure that lets them be who they are." In fact, he says, "Mormons believe the U.S. exists so that the Church can have a safe haven in the world."

Another reason for the reaction at religious colleges may be a sense of a purposefulness built on faith. Gary Weier, a professor of communications at Bob Jones, believes that the young people at secular-college protests, by contrast, are still "searching for something in life." This idea gains plausibility when one reads what one Berkeley student recently told reporters: "I feel like I'm floating in the middle. I'm not pro-war, but I'm not for doing nothing."

At Bob Jones, Southern Virginia, Brigham Young and Ave Maria, almost all students attended prayer services to honor those killed in the attacks and to ask for God's guidance for America's leaders. The schools' unified religious cultures provide spiritual solace, but they also let administrators draw a line between acceptable and unacceptable behavior. When a Muslim student was observed "glorying in the attacks," BYU president Merrill Bateman says, "we just took him aside and said, 'That is not us.' "

It is unlikely that any nonreligious university would give a student a talking to for such "glorying." In fact, many faculty members at the country's prestigious colleges have remarked, in essence: "At last the U.S. is getting what it deserves!" At secular schools, an earlier consensus on our moral and civic foundations has been replaced by a relativism that disparages the "parochialism" of patriotic sentiment.

Maybe curriculum matters. At schools like Ave Maria and Southern Virginia, the study of philosophers like Aristotle and theologians like St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas gives students a ground for moral and political reflection considerably deeper than the cafeteria-style offerings of most secular schools. Students at religious schools thus seem more likely to react to current events not by indulging in anti-establishment feelings but by considering the "just war" doctrine developed by theologians and jurisprudential thinkers over a millennium--or by citing Tom Paine.

Ms. Schaefer, a Phillips Foundation Journalism Fellow, is working on a book about religious colleges.