by Josh Gibbs

In the last several years, I have written quite a lot about sending your kids off to college. Nearly everything I have written has been quite negative. Let’s call it a hazard of the job. In the same way doctors warn patients against cigarettes, I warn people against American universities. The CDC says that somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of all smokers eventually develop lung cancer—but that eventually means that many smokers will need three or four decades to work their way up to a diagnosis. On the other hand, I would wager that somewhere between one-third and one-half of the students I’ve taught who have attended big secular universities have quit going to church within twelve months of showing up on campus. I don’t know any classical Christian teacher who is excited to see graduates head off to colleges like James Madison University or Virginia Tech.  

If you’re familiar with my work, you’ve read this sort of thing before. I’ve developed a reputation for complaining about parents that blithely send their kids off to Babylon U while claiming, “My son has a strong faith in God.” Did you send your son off with a carton of Camels, too, because “his health is strong”?

Parents are so attached to the idea of “a good college,” though, that I often meet people (who have read my thoughts on college) who incredulously ask me, “So, are you sending your daughters to college after they graduate?” as though they want to hear a real live adult actually answer, “No,” to this question—perhaps for the first time. And so I tell them, “No,” and they shake their heads bewilderedly and say, “What are they going to do?” It’s almost like we’re standing on the deck of a ship, watching my daughters drown in open water just twenty feet away, and I’ve just said that I’m theologically opposed to life preservers.   

In the last year or so, though, I’ve come to an odd realization about the prospect of sending my daughters to college. It might sound like back-peddling at first, but I would contend it’s simply a more accurate way of expressing my concerns. I would be happy to help my daughters go to the biggest, dumbest, most prestigious apostasy factory in the country on two conditions: they were 28 and married.

For years, I primarily attributed the high rate at which Christian kids give up the faith in college to the constant onslaught of attacks on Christianity (and sanity) which have become commonplace on college campuses, both in the classroom and on the quad. While this onslaught cannot be ignored, I’ve lately begun to think apostasy rates have more to do with the age at which young Christians are being made to bear the attacks on their faith. Simply put, the problem is the eighteen-ness of it all.

Obviously, people quit the faith in their late 20s and 30s, as well, but they do so for very different reasons than Christian kids who have just arrived at college. Apostasy in later life often emerges in the wake of some significant sin, especially adultery. For mature Christians, adultery and apostasy are often connected. Adultery is a big decision, though. It entails crossing an unambiguous line and requires a brazen willingness to turn one’s back on a well-established life, even if that life is also incredibly vexing and unsatisfying. Adultery feels momentous, final, portentous, even uncanny.

Quitting the faith at eighteen or nineteen doesn’t feel quite the same. It’s far, far easier. It takes far less.

To be eighteen, far from home, and surrounded by people willing to mock you mercilessly for your beliefs—there’s no better set up for quitting the faith than this. It’s so perfect it seems nearly scientifically engineered for apostasy, almost like the devil had been setting it up for a thousand years. When the University of Bologna was founded in 1088, we might imagine a coterie of demons worriedly surrounding Old Scratch and pointing at it worriedly, saying, “Now the Christians will become wiser than ever,” and Lucifer responding with a yawn, “Eh, give it time.”

At eighteen or nineteen, the young Christian has no spouse, no children, no career, and no money to lose. When that young Christian is far from home, he also has no church home, no reputation, no friends, and no oversight. It’s the triple convergence of being young and far from home and beset by mockery that makes young Christians so inclined to apostasy. There’s nothing more apt to make a husband and father-of-five forget his obligations than to get him by himself a long way from home. Ask any faithful Christian man you know if he’s at his best while on a business trip and he’ll laugh. Being away from home is a constant temptation—and what’s true for an established Christian is all the more true for an unestablished one.

That last point is critical because many parents who send their children to classical Christian schools assume those schools are preparing their children for the temptations of a secular college. They assume the temptations will primarily be intellectual, a fair and dignified argument between two opposing sides with different beliefs. “Provided my son can follow an argument, he’ll be fine in college, and his sophomore logic classes have taught him quite a bit about that!” Wrong. When a Christian tech salesman at a trade conference in Vegas ends up drunk in a strip club, the problem isn’t that he failed a quiz on the modus ponens argument. If he confesses everything to his wife when he gets back home, she’s not going to give him a logic textbook, she’s going to tell him no more tradeshows in Vegas. We’re given to pray, “Lead us not into temptation,” not, “Lead us into effective strategies for combating temptation so we can safely plunge ourselves in headlong.”

By the time my daughters are in their late twenties and married, though, I simply don’t think the temptations of a secular college are really going to be temptations. I imagine my daughter Camilla telling her husband over dinner, “I learned some interesting things about color theory today. And there was a big dumb protest against the patriarchy outside the library in the afternoon.” I cannot imagine her saying, “You know, dear, I’m starting to think those blue-haired vegan queers might really have things figured out. Maybe we should skip church this Sunday.” In other words, it’s quite hard for me to imagine the blue-haired vegan queers having all that much to offer a married Christian woman in her late twenties. When she’s eighteen and far from home, however, that’s not the case. At eighteen, they can offer her a powerful identity, an ethos, the peace which comes from knowing you’re on the winning side, and the social leverage which comes from a fashionable reason to be angry.

All this said, what I’ve offered here really isn’t an argument against sending graduates off to college. Rather, it’s an argument against sending teenagers far from home and into alienating, disorienting deluges of temptation and lies. Christian parents who prioritize fidelity to God over money and prestige will have to make sacrifices when choosing a college for their children. Only after that has been understood, I recommend the following.

First, keep your children close to home when they attend college. If they can live at home, great. Otherwise, they should have roommates you know, preferably from your church, and you should drop by their apartment on a regular but unpredictable basis.

Second, if your children are leaving town, they should go to a small Christian college where everybody knows everybody, and you should try to get them installed in the spare room, attic, or basement of a family home.

Third, if they’re going to a large Christian college, you should insist they keep attending a church within your denomination or tradition (OPC, WELS, SSPX), you should be in regular personal contact with the pastor or priest at this church, and whatever financial assistance you give your child should be irrevocably staked on attendance at church every Sunday. At a large Christian college, the temptation to intellectually reject the faith won’t be nearly as strong as it will be a secular college, and yet many attendees of Christian colleges who nonetheless get involved in sex, drugs, and rock n roll quit going to church because it makes them feel guilty—and quitting church is the fastest path there is to renouncing the faith.

Finally, as a parent contemplating your child’s future, the worst thing you can do is what most parents do: send your child off to a secular college where they don’t know anybody, assume the fact they’ve read Plutarch and Milton and written a “great” senior thesis means they’re genuinely wise, and pretend like “making some good Christian friends in college” is a strong strategy for staying faithful to God. That’s the sort of plan that is emptying American churches.  

A version of this article was originally published on the CiRCE Institute blog.