On Teaching Dangerous Texts

Why it is essential to learn from secular, unorthodox, and just plain wrong books and scholars

Photo by Tom Hermans on Unsplash

I hate to have to write this, but it seems to me that the cultural winds have shifted over the past few years so that there is increasingly less and less toleration in evangelical institutions of higher education for the teaching of texts and ideas outside the orthodox Christian tradition. Let me start off by saying, I have never, not even once, been asked not to teach something at my school. I have only received support and encouragement from my administration, and I have always sought to teach texts that challenge my students while guiding them with a Christian interpretive framework; so this article is not about me or my school. Instead, I’m reacting to a wider cultural trend of reading publically available or clandestinely taken syllabi, hunting for the names of scholars and works that are verboten—whether that be postmodernists, critical theorists, radical racial scholars, progressive theologians, or a host of other voices—and then condemning the school as culturally and theologically adrift.

Schools do drift. This is a very real and very concerning dynamic. After all, Princeton, Harvard, and Yale all began as explicitly Christian schools and today no one thinks of them in those terms. The same fate could face any Christian institution of higher learning. Probably the best defence against mission drift, in my opinion, is staying attached and accountable to a specific denomination and set of doctrinal creeds and statements. Schools can drift because they are seduced by the times, because they are status-seeking among secular “peers,” because they want to stay financially afloat by any means necessary, because they fail to ensure that their faculty and staff are onboard with the mission, and a host of other reasons. I don’t want to minimize this danger. It is a legitimate danger that every institution needs to take precautions to guard against. But my concern is that with all this fear of mission drift, we’re failing acknowledge the value of reading “dangerous” texts with proper instructional guidance.