God in my classroom?

Washington Post reports that Evangelical Christians often feel that their beliefs are not respected or validated in academia, and that this constitutes discrimination. Evidence of discrimination is largely anecdotal, but there has been a survey of professors' attitudes towards adherents of various religions:

[The] survey, by the San Francisco-based Institute for Jewish and Community Research... found what the institute's director and chief pollster, Gary A. Tobin, called an "explosive" statistic: 53 percent of its sample of 1,200 college and university faculty members said they have "unfavorable" feelings toward evangelical Christians.

Tobin asked professors at all kinds of colleges -- public and private, secular and religious, two-year and four-year -- to rate their feelings toward various religious groups, from very warm or favorable to very cool or unfavorable. He said he designed the question primarily to gauge anti-Semitism but found that professors expressed positive feelings toward Jews, Buddhists, Roman Catholics and most other religious groups.

The only groups that elicited highly negative responses were evangelical Christians and Mormons.

I can't say that this surprises me, but I certainly don't see it as evidence of discrimination. Rather, I think it is evidence of a wariness among professors toward religious groups who are perceived to be militantly anti-intellectual and whose standard of fairness often demands that their religious beliefs be accorded a privileged status as unquestionable truth claims. Academia is about the critical and rigorous evaluation of all truth claims - this is the single unifying commitment of the academic community across all fields and schools. For Evangelicals to expect their religiously-based truth claims to be accepted at face value is, in effect, to demand special treatment for those claims.

You may believe anything you like in your spiritual life, but if you bring it in to the classroom and offer it as a truth claim which has consequences for the rest of us, there is no reason to expect a special dispensation for those claims because you believe them to be divinely sanctioned. The instructor is not obligated to accept a student's religiously-based claims as true or valid simply because a student makes them out of a sense of religious commitment. Singling out students for ridicule on the basis of their religious beliefs is unethical and unacceptable, but that does not mean that professors cannot critically evaluate religiously based claims. Indeed it is their duty to their profession and their students that they do so.

At a time when three of the ten Republican candidates for President of the United States can assert along with many Evangelicals that they do not believe in evolution -- let's remind ourselves that we are talking about an enormously powerful and robust scientific theory which has withstood over a century and a half of critical intellectual scrutiny -- there is legitmate concern for a religiously-based anti-intellectualism abroad in the land. Converting our colleges and universities from centers of critical intellectual discourse into madrassas run according to the standards of the Christian Taliban would be a social and cultural catastrophe.