The Liberal Arts: Truth U, Social Justice U, Or Jesus U?

Christianity Today Op-Ed: The Christian Liberal Arts Tradition Can Appeal to Christians and Non-Christians Alike, by Joseph Claire (Dean, College of Humanities, George Fox University) (adapted from his chapter in The Liberating Arts: Why We Need Liberal Arts Education (2023)):

College and university professors in the liberal arts (humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences) are almost entirely left-leaning, liberal, or progressive, and this is especially true among faculty in the humanities and social sciences. The trend is even more pronounced in certain selective schools.

Students who attend liberal arts colleges or universities often adopt more liberal or progressive points of view as a result of their education. ...

Is this phenomenon accidentally related to the demography of the professoriate or somehow intrinsically related to the craft and content of the liberal arts themselves and the culture and atmosphere of the campus? ­

The terms “liberal” and “progressive” represent different political traditions in the West, and, when applied to the liberal arts, represent different approaches to education.

“Liberal” liberal arts education represents a modern vision of an Enlightenment-style view of objective truth pursued by rational and empirical methods. The “progressive” model, on the other hand, is often associated with postmodern visions of education, ones suspicious of privileged categories such as knowledge, truth, and understanding. It aims at dismantling systems of illegitimate power, ensuring equal outcomes, and achieving other goals connected to the mission of social justice.

New York University social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that these visions of the liberal arts are ultimately incompatible and that universities should choose between the aims of objective truth and social justice. He calls the “liberal” approach “Truth U” and the progressive approach “Social Justice U.” He notes that most major liberal arts institutions in America today have become Social Justice Us by default, owing simply to the makeup of their faculties.

Haidt notes that some religious colleges present themselves as pursuing an entirely different telos, or guiding purpose. As an example, he points to the evangelical Wheaton College, whose mission statement mentions “serv[ing] Jesus Christ and advanc[ing] His Kingdom.” Haidt calls this exceptional case “Jesus U,” but he doesn’t seem to take it seriously, given his commitment to an Enlightenment-style vision of the liberal arts.

Both the liberal and progressive approaches to the liberal arts retain something essential from earlier traditions, but they also deviate significantly from the classical and Christian view of the human person that gave birth to the earliest universities and liberal arts colleges in Europe and America. ...

The telos of Jesus U is love. Here the love of learning is tethered to love for God, love for neighbor, and a healthy self-love. Here is a vision of education that eclipses any purely material view of human personality.

Th­e social-science caricature of the human person found in both Truth U and Social Justice U reduces human desire to either bare economic self-interest or raw social power. Neither get to the true depth of human personality. Each appeals to the language of psychology (whether as trauma or happiness) at key moments to get out of the flattened secular horizon and move into the realm of true meaning.

Although the social sciences are supposedly methodologically immune to value judgments, they slide into them through the quantitative language of material well-being. ­This leaves the student hostage to contested visions of selfhood and identity in the digital coliseum and marketplace.

In the Christian vision, self-love is not reducible to economic self-interest or social dominance but recognized as the divine impulse through which one meets the world not as one’s oyster but as one’s neighbor. Th­e ember of self-love fuels an outward-driving process of moral formation.

In the Christian university, then, liberal education is brought toward a transcendent horizon that exceeds any purely secular view of political society. Here, citizenship is twofold: One part is committed to the proximate justice and common interest of our earthly political communities, as framed by a Christian conception of human dignity. The other part of citizenship longs for a deeper, truer form of community found in that “eternal city” foreshadowed throughout Scripture.

Liberal arts education is inherently linked to the formation of new citizens, and thus, Christian education imbues citizens with a shrewd sensitivity to the limits of politics. Christians ought to be fiercely loyal to local forms of community and fiercely global in outlook given the history and mission of the church. Th­is produces a kind of spiritual restlessness that resists the temptations of nationalism and goes on pilgrimage. ...

We should be encouraged that educational endeavors in the Christian liberal arts tradition have emerged and succeeded in much less auspicious times than our own.

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