My first official pastoral job was doing college ministry. During seminary in Florida I worked with students at the University of Florida and the University of Central Florida. After graduation we moved to Memphis, TN and I worked with students at Rhodes College and the University of Memphis. I truly enjoyed my time with the teachers and students - many of whom I got to know well and keep in touch with up to this day.

The university campus is a very interesting place - one that is not really understood by some today. 40 years ago college was a place of specialization that was necessary in order to enter certain professional fields. Today most people look at college as a post-high school experience - a place to really figure out what our kids want to do with their lives. But the college and university experience of today is much different than it was 40 years ago, mainly because the liberal students who protested just about everything on the campuses during that era have become today’s professors and administrators.

During my ministry I knew many professors well, and by no means were all of them radicals. But it was certainly the case that at some of these schools there was a great deal of hostility towards traditional beliefs, especially the Christian faith. In the early to mid 1990s, while a minister of college students, I was blocked by the administration of one school from using a meeting room on campus, had students repeatedly come to me shaken up that their professor was ridiculing Christians, and had professors tell me that I was guilty of undermining their attempt to educate students (apparently my defending the Christian faith impeded their ability to secularize the students). And my experience was not unique. I know many other campus ministers who tell similar stories.

That is why I read with some interest a recent editorial in USA Today by Tom Krattenmaker. He believes that while there are still incidents of hostility towards Christians, conservatives are making hasty generalizations as to how widespread and intense the current animosity is. In fact, he writes, the conservative conventional wisdom “is not quite right.” According to Krattenmaker Christianity, and not just generic “religion”, is making a comeback among both students and faculty in the modern campus environment. Given my own experience this was strange to me until I reread the op-ed and saw what he was driving at. Essentially what is happening, ironically, is a rebirth of campus Christianity similar to that which was popular on the campus in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

In the late 60s not all hippies were druggies and New Age flower children. Many during that period converted to the Christian faith, and several became part of what is known as “The Jesus Movement.”

To be sure students and faculty who were Christians at that time were a little unconventional from the norm in their beliefs and practice. They tended to be charismatic in expression and socially active in applying their faith. Like the students Krattenmaker has in view they tended “to emphasize different public concerns than the old-guard Christian right.” It seems that if it was a concern for civil rights in the 1960s, it is concern for the environment among these college faithful today.

In the early 70s, The Doobie Brothers covered a song by The Byrds called, “Jesus is just alright with me.” This song really captured the prevailing attitude about Jesus Christ during the late 60s and early 70s. There was also a lot of heretical nonsense like the rock-opera Jesus Christ Superstar. But the gut-level belief of the flower-power generation during that period was that Jesus was just alright, and Christianity had great answers for both life and eternal life. It seems that the conversation is resuming today.

So let’s be clear: this renewal is not a form of gutted, generic religion. These are genuine believers who have real concerns about life - as did the Jesus movement before them. Like the Jesus Movement they do seem to be guided more by passion than principle as self-conscious reflection on doctrinal matters is a low priority. It is perhaps this doctrinal indifference and ignorance that is the greatest weakness of the campus Christian renaissance. Hopefully this will change. An informed and educated Christian is not antithetical to a passionate, heart-felt faith. Israel wasn’t destroyed by the Assyrians because they lacked passion: they fell because they lacked knowledge (Hosea 4:6). Willful ignorance of truth is a certain path to destruction.

No doubt there is still much cultural hostility toward Christianity. Such will always be the case. But let’s not miss the forest for the trees.

Marty Fields is pastor of Westminster Presbyterian Church. Reach him at pastor@westminsterepc.com.