Ratio Christi

In one week, it starts all over again. Thousands of young people will enroll in classes in the sixteen-campus University of North Carolina system. Before the first day of class is over, the professors and administrators will begin the assault on students and their Judeo-Christian values. Parents will have spent their entire lives saving money that will ultimately be used to turn their children against them. Students will unlearn everything they were taught about the foundations of liberty, the basis of morality, and will even begin questioning the very existence of truth. Before long, many parents will realize they have risked bankruptcy funding a legacy of intellectual and moral impoverishment.

I realized the situation was bad when a military officer wrote me a few years ago. While he was off serving his country, his twin teenaged girls were enrolling at Rice University. During “O” week, Rice orientation week, their orientation leader told them it was time to “experiment with their sexual liberty” now that they were off at college and away from their parents. The military officer was outraged over the incident – as he should have been. More parents would be outraged if only they were paying attention.

Later that same semester, I sat through an excruciating graduation speech by a feminist sociologist. She smugly told the parents of graduating seniors that she hoped their children were leaving college with a “different perspective” than the one they brought with them. She said nothing about knowledge during her speech. She spoke only of “perspective” – smugly asserting that hers was better than the one held by the parents who were paying her salary.

If I sound a little edgy when I broach this topic there is good reason for that. I abandoned my faith as an 18 year old college freshman – a mere two months into my first semester of college. It is true that I carried some anger into my freshman year, which fueled that abandonment. But it is also true that I took my first psychology class from an atheist professor who used the classroom to evangelize students.

There may have been a legitimate reason for my psychology professor’s decision to discuss Sigmund Freud’s theory of how man created God, not vice versa. But when he talked about how B.F. Skinner’s theory of operant conditioning “explained away” religion it bordered on obsession. The psychology professor who feels compelled to rid students of their faith is no less perverted than the orientation leader who feels compelled to rid students of their chastity.

eventually made my way back. And reading apologetics played a huge role in my spiritual transformation. For years after that transformation, I wondered why there was no national organization dedicated to bringing resident apologists to campuses in order to establish Christian apologetics groups that would challenge campus atheists.

Then it finally happened. After hearing a speech I gave at Summit Ministries (www.Summit.org) in Colorado, Professor Lonnie Welch of Ohio University invited me to speak at the national conference of Ratio Christi (www.RatioChristi.org) in October of 2011. I did not even know that my friends John Stonestreet of Summit Ministries and ADF attorney Casey Mattox were on the Ratio Christi board.

Speaking at that conference was one of the greatest thrills of my year. During my speech, my friend Frank Turek came in with none other than Josh McDowell. William Dembski and Greg Koukl showed up later for our conference dinner. It was an evening to remember.

While I was there to speak, I was also there to learn. And what I learned was that Ratio Christi is the ideal campus Christian organization. There may be scores of Christian organizations already. But none prior to Ratio Christi were focusing on apologetics training. Such training is desperately needed to keep kids from falling away during college. How can students remain firm in their faith if they are not hearing both sides of the story? And how can they remain grounded if they were never grounded in the first place?

Ratio Christi is dedicated to doing the work that other Christian groups are ignoring. It is also laying the intellectual framework that the church has failed to provide for the last half-century. So it was easy to say “yes” when attorney Aaron Marshall asked me to be the faculty sponsor of the new UNCW Ratio Christi chapter. Aaron will be leaving his law practice in Charlotte and moving to Wilmington to become our new chapter advisor.

In addition to being a chapter sponsor, I am also a financial supporter for Ratio Christi. Throughout the year, I will be sending them 10% of the gross profits from every column I write and every speech I give. If you want to join me, send your donations to:

There is other good news on the anti-indoctrination front. At the end of the school year, Regnery will publish my next book, which is tentatively titled Letters to a Lost Progressive. The book is a collection of 33 letters written by me to a student who lost his way in college. Like our new Ratio Christi chapter, the book is meant to keep young people from following false ideas presented by false teachers. It assumes that ideas have consequences that should not be taken lightly.

I’ll have more to say about the book as the publication date arrives. In the meantime, take a good look at the Ratio Christi website (www.RatioChristi.org). They might make a believer of you. Or make it difficult to make a non-believer out of someone you love.

I clicked over to the Ratio Christi website, and it looks splendid and robustly Evangelical. I had kinda hoped there would be some Catholics in it, especially (I know I'm being simplistic here) because of the name "Ratio Christi" (loosely, "Reason of Christ" or "Christ-Reason".)

It would be a "natural" for a certain kind of Catholic: "Fides et Ratio," "Veritatis Splendor," "Ex Corde Ecclesiae"and all that,which is even beter in Enlish :oP

I hope The Cardinal Newman Society (Link) would take on something like this for the Catholics. God knows it's needed.

Parents should brace their children for this attack on their morals and Judgement long before they enter college.

Parents should be discipling their children in Bible doctrine and applying that doctrine in life circumstances. Just "bracing" your children will not do if the are not already sound in their beliefs, in their persistert, complete trust in The Lord Jesus Christ for every situation of life. Furthermore, why would faithful parents send their child to an unfaithful college? Why not send them to a school noted for its persevering faithfulness through Christian excellence in its graduates?

It is disgraceful that Socialists and hedonists have take over the administrations of colleges.

Come, now. They had taken over these colleges sixty or more years ago when I entered Syracuse University then. As an example, Syracuse was founded as a Methodist Church based Liberal Arts (emphasis on "liberal," I suppose) institute in 1871. By the time I got there, it was saturated with atheistic professors, drunken students, and left-leaning chaplains. (Norman Vincent Peale was one of such liberal chaplains.) Such schools released liberal-thinking graduates who entered seminaries of the same cast, who then finally became the guiding lights of major denominations.

You are now seeing the final product of this cycle in leaders such as Hillary Rodham Clinton (and her fixation on Alinsky) who was greatly influenced by both her leftist United Methodist pastor, and her Christian Education director, in her youth. That model of the swiping of children from their parents through influence in their own church youth groups and summer camps is my personal estimate of the state of religion in the late 40s, 50s, and 60s. You may say I am wrong in this, but I think not. In all of this nation, we lost our morals from the pulpits filled by liberal-trained pastors, in both Protestant and Romanist churches, IMHO. It is that vicious cycle from which it seems almost impossible to recover.

The problem is not just from heathen colleges. It starts in religionistic, but faithless, homes who send weak-willed unregenerated students into antichristian colleges; who, upon graduation become business, educational, and political leaders with their heathen pragmatic philosophies to guide a dumbed-down populace.

Til He comes, that is.

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