Hiding in Plain Sight: the Potential of Christian Higher Education

In the last few years, public higher education has been shaken up by the emergence of new civics-related centers and schools. Examples include the Hamilton School at the University of Florida, the School of Civic Leadership at University of Texas Austin, and The Ohio State University’s Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society. Typically begun with politically conservative motives and money, these centers aim to foster viewpoint diversity and to increase scholarly research and teaching in American civic thought. 

These new centers and schools have so far been very well-funded and have attracted a great deal of positive and negative attention. In many cases, these programs have increased the number of faculty and courses related to traditional topics and the “Western civilization” beat. There is no real dispute that Americans could benefit from more and better civics education. However, many of these programs have had explicitly political foundings and they are well-funded while other disciplines and departments are being starved. In many cases, the newly hired faculty also duplicate the skills of existing faculty in other departments, creating internal competition for students and challenging the ability of new faculty in the schools and centers to integrate into the broader campus community. 

The future of this civic center movement has yet to unfold, but those involved have correctly assessed the role of education in the civic imagination. Funding faculty, courses, and programming on the American founding or diplomacy or the Great Books gives college students the opportunity to seize hold of these stories and ideas for themselves. Our country may indeed be a better place if young people are studying the Constitution and the Federalist Papers and reading the Great Books. Arguably, if these centers can overcome politicization, they can help inculcate civic virtue in the rising generation. 

Just as the American civic imagination is a significant part of our national heritage, so is the Christian imagination. As a 2026 fellow for the Center for Christianity & Public Life, I’ve spent the last nine months soaking in the wisdom of mentors, bonding with other fellows, practicing spiritual formation, and thinking about the viability of Christian resources for public life. And this has led me to an even firmer conviction about the untapped potential of Christian higher education. 

Scattered across our country are Christian colleges and universities of various shapes and sizes. Some are large and well-known, like Baylor and Notre Dame. More are smaller, some are denominationally specific, some are quite historic, and others are relatively young. In a sense, each of them is a small center for the Christian imagination. Each of them is an incubator for future Christian leaders, equipped both spiritually and academically. 

The Christian liberal arts tradition is especially valuable for civic life. Students who read Antigone, Socrates’ “Crito,” Augustine’s City of God, and Erasmus’s Education of a Christian Prince—as students in my university’s honors program (or history majors) typically will—are cultivating a Christian civic imagination the world desperately needs. The same is true at dozens of similarly mid-sized Council for Christian Colleges & Universities (CCCU) schools, who are likewise upholding the Christian liberal arts tradition. When I was an undergraduate at Messiah University (and not in honors), I read Plato’s Republic and Hobbes’s Leviathan in my first semester. I took classes on the Old Testament and wisdom literature despite not being a biblical studies or ministry major. At Calvin University, Rebecca DeYoung is teaching the Christian virtues, which can be transformative for civic engagement. Peruse the reading list of George Fox’s Great Books honors program. Consider the kind of graduate this type of education can produce. 

An ideal graduate of a Christian liberal arts university is a testament to the viability of Christian resources in public life. There are over 500,000 CCCU students, and many of the over 170 CCCU schools are liberal arts universities, where students are exposed to both Christian thought and the Western tradition. These are students who read Locke and Leviticus, Rousseau and Romans. Whether or not they study civic thought, they are being trained to engage well in the civic sphere.

Yet nearly all Christian liberal arts institutions are tuition-dependent and many of them are closing for lack of resources. Joshua Travis Brown’s Capitalizing on College (2025) explains the crisis facing Christian higher education the various survival strategies schools are adopting. The flame of Christian imagination is burning, but it is not especially well fed. We have not one endowed chair in history or in honors at my university. The same is true at many CCCU schools. 

While others are pushing to found centers to cultivate civic thought and virtue, we already have institutions designed to cultivate Christian thought and virtue. We do not need to found them. We need to fund them. 

When we think about showcasing the value of Christian resources in the public sphere, we should not only think about Christians and Christian programming in prominent institutions, but about making more Christian institutions prominent. Imagine the impact of endowed chairs in the liberal arts across CCCU schools. We can have more students who are familiar with Common Sense and Corinthians, who understand the difference between Sparta and Athens, and who can ponder the relationship between Athens and Jerusalem. 

Christian higher education is a great example of potential hiding in plain sight. While others seek to establish schools and centers for what they value, we have existing centers for Christian thought. We should support them as eagerly as today’s founders of centers for civic thought support theirs. After all, Christian resources are both timely and transcendent.