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The Biggest Intellectual Struggle Christians Face at College Isn’t What You Think
The Majority Isn’t Always Right
One of the most common questions I get from college students and from people thinking about what college students struggle with is about the most difficult objection to the faith they’re going to face. When you think about the average nineteen- or twenty-year-old college student, what’s the thing they struggle with the most? Many things could be obvious. It could be the problem of evil, the existence of God, or evolution. Those are all key issues. But actually, I don’t think that’s the most common question they face, and I don’t think that’s the thing that bothers people the most.
So what is it that people struggle with the most? The average believer on the college campus looks around and realizes that virtually every single person he knows, including the vast majority of the professors that he studies under, thinks that he’s crazy. In other words, let’s imagine that 10 percent of the college campus is evangelical (and that’d probably be generous on some college campuses); that means 90 percent of a person’s classmates think Christianity is nuts and that it doesn’t make any sense at all.
Surviving Religion 101
Michael J. Kruger
Writing in the form of a letter to his college-age daughter, Michael Kruger’s Surviving Religion 101 takes a topical approach to examining some of the toughest questions Christian students encounter at secular universities.
More than that, the smartest people on the campus with PhDs think Christianity is really crazy, and maybe even only 1 percent of those folks believe. So think about the average nineteen- or twenty-year-old on a college campus. They’re looking around and asking, Why does it seem like the smartest people on the planet are precisely the ones who don’t believe? To put the question in a different way that’s maybe even more troubling, they’re going to ask themselves, What is the chance that I’m right and everybody else is wrong?
That’s a pretty troubling question. If not answered, it’s going to be like a little sliver in the mind that doesn’t go away. They’re going to think, Okay, so I’m going to sit around on my college campus and say that 90 percent of my friends are wrong and 99 percent of my professors are wrong and I’m the one that’s right? Really? That’s the way this is going to go?
You may wonder why so many people abandon their faith in college. I’m convinced that’s one of the reasons. They don’t have an answer to that question. But you may not realize that lurking behind that objection is an assumption that people have that they don’t even realize they have. And that assumption is that if something is true, they assume that most people will believe it.
And the converse then operates in their head: If most people believe something, then it must be true. And so they look around and think, Well, all I have to do is simple mathematics here. Ninety percent of people believe X, so it must be true. If most people believe, it must be true.
If only knowledge worked like that. But I think we all know that’s not how people form their beliefs. They don’t form their beliefs, surely, on facts, as if they put on a white lab coat and go do the math and the science and then reach conclusions. Knowledge doesn’t work that way.
Whether or not mass amounts of people reject the faith and whether the majority of people reject the faith has no bearing on whether it’s true.
A very famous book was published in the twentieth century by a philosopher named Thomas Kuhn. Thomas Kuhn was not a believer, but he wrote a book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. That book was famous for one reason in that it said that even science doesn’t work neutrally. Even science doesn’t work purely on the basis of fact alone. Rather, science works through a predetermined grid or a paradigm—what we might call a worldview—where people collect data and information in light of what they already believe when they start the search.
And what Kuhn points out, therefore, is that what you already believe when you start searching for information actually colors the way you accept or reject information.
So here’s the big point: When you talk to a college student who’s struggling with why they’re alone, they have to remember that people don’t form their beliefs neutrally. People aren’t a blank slate. People come with all kinds of preconceptions and ideas. And even more than that, the Bible teaches that people start with a fallen, broken heart that’s already predisposed to not believe the things of God. Once you realize that people are not neutral and are actually hardwired, by virtue of the fall, to reject the things of God, it’s not a surprise anymore why many people reject the faith.
And here’s the big takeaway: Whether or not mass amounts of people reject the faith and whether the majority of people reject the faith has no bearing on whether it’s true. It can still be true even if most people reject it. And in fact, the Bible predicts exactly that: Narrow is the path to life, and few will find it. And wide is the path that many will take, and many will enter down it. (Matt. 7:13–14) We will not expect to be in the majority when we realize the world is set up exactly that way.
Michael J. Kruger is the author of Surviving Religion 101: Letters to a Christian Student on Keeping the Faith in College.
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