Elite Campuses Could Use More Evangelical Christians

It might dial back the anti-Americanism

As grim as the anti-Israel protest scenes are from the college campuses, there are a few encouraging images starting to emerge.

At the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, members of the Pi Kappa Phi fraternity stepped in to protect an American flag. Guillermo Estrada told the story in a thread on X.

“It upset me that my country's flag was disrespected,” he wrote. As anti-Israel protesters sought to tear down the American flag and replace it with a Palestinian one, “My fraternity brother and others ran over to hold it up, in order for it not to touch the ground. People began throwing water bottles at us, rocks, sticks, calling us profane names. We stood for an hour defending the flag so many fight to protect.”

“My parents started a new life in the United States, a country that has helped them flourish and raise two kids. I grew up in a military community and saw first hand the sacrifices they make,” Estrada wrote.

Meanwhile, at Columbia University, two Christian students, Rory Wilson and Charles Beck, made a valiant attempt to protect Hamilton Hall from the anti-Israel mob that eventually broke windows and took over the building. They were guests just before me on Laura Ingraham’s show on Fox News last night. The Daily Wire’s Megan Basham called them “Brave lads showing what faithful Christian presence actually looks like.”

And at Harvard, the Salient, a conservative student publication, reports on a letter by a group of Christian alumni and academics. The letter is headlined “Christians Urge Harvard to Protect Jews, Truth and Freedom.” It says, “we do want Harvard to root out the discrimination in hiring that prevents the University from having anything remotely approaching the measure of viewpoint diversity in  matters of religion and politics that a great university in a pluralistic democratic society should have.”

Pew polling shows clear and stark differences among religious denominations in support for Israel versus Hamas in the war, with white evangelical Protestants (I’m not sure why Pew added a racial dimension to confound the religious one) looking much like Jews in their support for Israel and rejection of Hamas.

All the universities purport to be fully committed to the values of diversity and inclusion. Why not then be fully inclusive and diverse and make a real push to include evangelical protestants, which Pew says are roughly 25 percent of the U.S. population?

The Crimson freshman survey says all Protestants—not just evangelicals, but evangelicals and mainline Protestants together—are a mere 6 percent of the Harvard class of 2027, while agnostics and atheists are a combined 46 percent. That’s a steep decline from even the Harvard class of 2017, when Protestants were 20 percent. To some extent, all the many campus task forces on antisemitism and Islamophobia are a distraction: what really matters are the Protestants, where the bottom has dropped out.

The combination of “very religious” and “extremely religious” students at Harvard has dropped to 14.5 percent in the class of 2027 from 24 percent in the class of 2017, according to the Crimson data. To some extent that may mirror trends in the overall American population. But it also represents choices to admit more international students from Communist China and Europe, which are more secular.

The trends are probably even more pronounced for Harvard graduate students, where the international student numbers are even higher (Harvard Business School’s MBA class is 39 percent international and Harvard Kennedy School students are 56 percent non-U.S. nationals).

As the Israel-Hamas Gaza war polling numbers and the recent activity around the protests show, there are Israel- and Jewish-related reasons to pay attention to this. That has been underscored by the House hearings on antisemitism, where Christian members of Congress cited the Bible’s message in Genesis 12, and where the Jewish connection to the land of Israel is taken as basic biblical context. No close reader of the Bible can consider Zionism a purely European colonial project.

But sophisticated university leaders see a much broader and more widely applicable point, too, about the tone on the campus, with Evangelical Christians and others from tight-knit religious communities bringing a sense of humility and gratitude, joy, grace, mercy, kindness, and practice with close relationships. Brown University’s president, Christian Paxson, told Bloomberg in a 2022 interview, “I want students who grew up on army bases. I want students who are from tight-knit Christian communities.”

It’s not a cure-all. No one says Ivy League colleges or liberal arts colleges in the Northeast or research universities nationwide need to go overnight to 25 percent Evangelical Christian faculties or student bodies. Yet a critical mass could make a real difference. Imagine if admissions offices paid as much attention to these matters as they do to, say, recruited varsity athletes, or gender balance, or the standardized test scores that flow through onto U.S. News rankings. Faculties take a long time to turn over, but students cycle in and out quickly, and as Estrada, Wilson, and Beck show, they can have a large and immediate impact on a campus.

When you mention this idea to people involved in admissions, you sometimes are met with skepticism that Evangelical Christian students would even be interested in applying. Yet that’s what they used to say about Blacks and Hispanics and students from blue-collar or first generation college backgrounds.

Anyway, of all the possible ideas in the mix for improving the campus climate, this is one worth considering high on the list.

Recent work: “Who Is Bending the Truth—Trump or the New York Times?” is the headline over my latest column for the New York Sun. It points out that many of the claims in Trump statements that the Times’s Angelo Fichera describes as “falsehoods and half-truths” can be found in the Times itself. If you’re interested in that sort of thing, please check out the full column over at the New York Sun.

John James sums it up: Senator Tim Scott has been participating in a regular series of conversations with four Black Republican members of Congress.

My favorite moment in the most recent episode comes when Rep. John James of Michigan reels off, rapid-fire, what he describes as conservative principles: “individual freedom, limited government, rule of law, peace through strength, fiscal responsibility, free markets, and human dignity.”

As a 17-word platform, not bad, right? What’s missing?

Seinfeld on legacy: The editor of the New Yorker, David Remnick, has an interview with comedian Jerry Seinfeld:

What does working mean for you? You published a book of all kinds of attempts at jokes. It was almost like a master’s notebook.

It was. In case I depart early—just, if anyone cares, here’s what I did. I’ve been reading a lot of Marcus Aurelius’s “Meditations” book, which I’m sure you probably read when you were fourteen.

Four.

And the funny thing about that book is he talks a lot about the fallacy of even thinking of leaving a legacy—thinking your life is important, thinking anything’s important. The ego and fallacy of it, the vanity of it. And his book, of course, disproves all of it, because he wrote this thing for himself, and it lived on centuries beyond his life, affecting other people. So he defeats his own argument in the quality of this book….

It’s possible that you’ve made a dollar or two from “Seinfeld,” and yet you still work hard. Why?

Because the only thing in life that’s really worth having is good skill. Good skill is the greatest possession. The things that money buys are fine. They’re good. I like them. But having a skill—I learned this from reading Esquire magazine in the sixties. They did an issue on mastery. …It was a very Zen Buddhist concept: Pursue mastery. That will fulfill your life. You will feel good.

Silliest paragraph in today’s New York Times: From a front-page article from Katherine Rosman about the anti-Israel protests:

Signs in and around the Columbia encampment include inspirational quotes, including “The world belongs to the people, and the future belongs to us,” attributed to Jiang Qing, a Chinese communist revolutionary. But there are also celebrations of violence, like “Whoever is in solidarity with our corpses but not our rockets is a hypocrite and not one of us.”

What was the Chinese Communist revolution if not violent?

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