Schools that aim for prestige and “excellence” as the current American regime defines it are most likely to accommodate our culture’s presuppositions. Fewer “prestige” schools embrace a conservative Protestant social teaching that emphasizes marriage, recommends different roles for men and women, and shuns same-sex sex and same-sex marriage. Students interested in becoming doctors or lawyers might choose Baylor, SMU, or Wheaton. On the other hand, schools without signs of American decadence are less descript, their chief virtue being that they fail to promote vice.

The decline of Protestant higher education is manifest. At the time of their founding, most Protestant colleges and universities had a strong sense of mission, connected to preparing Christians for ministry, missions, and trades.
As James Tunstead Burtchaell documents in his meticulous Dying of the Light: The Disengagement of Colleges and Universities from their Christian Churches, school after school, in tradition after tradition, chose American respectability over fidelity to a distinctly Christian mission. This tome details how Congregationalists lost Dartmouth and Beloit; how the Presbyterians lost Lafayette and Davidson; how Baptists lost Wake Forest and Linfield; how Lutherans lost Gettysburg, St. Olaf, and Concordia; how Catholics lost Boston College and Saint Mary’s College of California; and how Evangelicals lost Azusa Pacific.
What emerges is a science of higher education apostasy. Schools worry about being perceived as “sectarian,” as it is defined at different times. University programs multiply, necessitating departmental hiring. Faculty become beholden to professional standards over school missions. The administration wants prestigious faculty and progressively sheds faithfulness and piety from job descriptions. Faculty statements of faith “devolve from active membership in the sponsoring church or denomination to nominal membership, to acceptance of the college’s own faith statement, to silent toleration of the ill-specified purposes of the institution.” Chapels, vestiges of old missions, become the only “sectarian” event on campus—and then they fade, becoming optional or inclusively non-sectarian. Once controversies swirl about chapel, their light is already dying out.
Soon Christian colleges begin speaking the language of intellectual freedom and diversity of opinion while they water down and then drop distinctively Christian mission statements. New monies from alumni and government replace old denominational money. Governance moves from the denomination to the alumni or to those who know the college president. Eventually, Protestant schools, as Burtchaell writes, end up “judging the church by the academy and the gospel by the culture.”
As American culture shifts, so do Christian colleges. While it was possible, earlier, to entertain the idea that American culture was not anti-Christian, that is no longer the case with the ideology of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), which is presently conquering Christian universities. Universities are now “welcoming” but not faithful to the truth; they embrace “diversity” but not the Savior of the nations. Christian schools commonly defile themselves in conforming to transgender ideology, same-sex marriage, queer theory, and perpetual singleness.
Burtchaell’s Dying tells much the same story as George Marsden’s The Soul of the American University and as does James F. Keating’s “Who Killed the Catholic University?” Every school’s decline is different in the specifics, but every such story is also broadly the same. The mechanisms of prestige and government money absorb Christian universities into Americanism. Maintaining Christian distinctives requires a deep, abiding commitment to tradition and a jealous guarding of mission against imperial Americanism. Protestant higher education hardly specializes in these traits, and neither do Catholic schools.
A list of apostate universities is much longer than any list of holdouts. David Goodwin, President of the K-12 Association of Classical Christian Schools, which now boasts more than 500 schools, tells me that “the number one question he hears is ‘where should I send my graduate to college?’” Are there universities that Christian parents can still trust?
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Sometimes, when we ruminate on things in our own mind, we make them much bigger than they are in reality. Often, what is needed is to stop dwelling on things. Instead, we need to get out of our heads and focus on something else altogether. Go and visit someone, read something, watch TV, go out, whatever. But stop dwelling on things for a bit, focus on something altogether different, and see if there isn’t some fresh perspective to have in the morning.

Discouragement is a strange beast, isn’t it? It can strike when there is really nothing to be discouraged about at all. Things might be going really well but, one thing, and discouragement sets in. Sometimes it is that one things catches us off guard. We might cope quite well with a series of difficulties, but a discouragement coming out of the blue when things are going pretty well can really hit us. As I say, it’s a strange old beast.
So what do you do when you get discouraged? Certainly, there are things we shouldn’t do. It’s all too easy to turn to things that won’t really help.
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Do not the vows taken by elders regarding the constitution of the PCA and submission to brethren require that we (all of us) follow and abide by the polity of our church (in letter and spirit) until such time as that polity is changed through orderly constitutional process rather than by the drip-drip normalization-by-tolerated-violation approach of ecclesial antinomians—no matter how winsome and missional they be?

The fact that a significant number (likely hundreds) of Presbyterian Church in America congregations “have” female deacons or deaconesses or present females as holding the office of deacon or the imaginary office of deaconess is indisputable.* Also beyond question is the fact that a number of PCA churches do not ordain male deacons (presumably to create a unisex, egalitarian board of deaconing persons) is also beyond dispute.
Questions for PCA officers:
1. Has anyone considered the incremental-but-inevitable effect of allowing quasi-/non-ordained “officers” in a denomination?
2. How many members of PCA churches with female “deacons” or deaconesses (a term with no set meaning in our polity) know that the female deaconing persons are not actually officers? If members are confused it may be because some churches use the same nomination, training, and election processes for females who are called deacons or deaconesses as they do for men who are part of the diaconate.
3. What is the long-term effect of allowing churches to forego the ordination of one of the two offices our polity requires?
4. Have the de facto three-office/three-office-attracted pastors considered the effect that their position may have on our supposed firewall against ordaining female elders (of one kind or another)? In other words, will we move from “women can never be elders” to “women can never be preaching (or senior) pastors.”
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