Reflecting on his nearly four decades in Christian higher education, sociologist John W. Hawthorne worries Christian universities make too many decisions out of fear.

“Christian universities, much like the evangelical subculture that spawned them, are characterized by fear: fear of societal decline, fear of secular authorities, fear of apostasy, fear of not being ‘real’ schools. In short, fear of losing their way,” Hawthorne writes in his new book, The Fearless Christian University (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company).

The book asserts that those fears are limiting, even debilitating, for institutions roiled by culture wars, teetering on the brink of a demographic cliff and drawing from an increasingly limited pool of Gen Z evangelicals. Hawthorne takes a hard look at these institutions from the vantage point of his roles within them, as both faculty member and academic administrator, and offers up what he describes as a new, “fearless” model of Christian higher education.

Inside Higher Ed spoke with Hawthorne about the ways Christian universities are changing and his hopes for their future. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: When you say you want Christian universities to be fearless, what do you mean by that? What are they most afraid of?

A: Everything.

Here’s a very fresh example. If you followed what’s been going on at Wheaton College [in Illinois] since they put out their social media post congratulating Russell Vought for being confirmed as Office of Management and Budget director, they just said, “Congratulations. Good for you and good for us—an alum.”

And a group on their left flank exploded and said, “How could you do this, because Russell Vought has these ideas, and Project 2025 is everything that we as Christians oppose?” And then there was blowback on the other side after Wheaton took the post down. They said, “How could we do this and give up to the woke mob?” And then there were two letters that happened: One was an alumni letter decrying the celebration of Russell Vought and the other was a letter that said Wheaton has lost its way in all these different directions and we’re calling for Wheaton to return to the fold.

That’s a nice illustration … Christian colleges, because they have embraced not just culture wars but this kind of sense that they’re embattled—they’re at threat, somebody’s going to come and get them—they’re always worried about this mission drift question. And so, when they try to respond to a part of the constituency that says, “We don’t think you’re living up to the values,” there’s another part of the constituency that says, “How could you even raise that question?” And they are forever, in my experience, bouncing back and forth between those sentiments and are constantly looking over their shoulder to make sure that they haven’t done something that will upset donors or trustees or major churches in the area that have been feeders or alumni blocs that are influential.

So, that’s kind of been their dynamic. Part of what I argue is that stance, which tends to dominate among administrators, trustees, donors and denominations, is completely inconsistent with the kinds of questions and struggles that their current students have. And that tension between issues that are real to the lives of the students and the institutional brand pull in very different directions.

What fearlessness looks like is to center those real student concerns and experiences at the heart of the institution and organize everything else around it. And that gives [universities] strength to be able to lean into their mission, to celebrate their accomplishments and to actually push back, not just on their critics but to be able to articulate their purpose to the broader higher education landscape.

Q: In the book, you also talk about who students at Christian universities were in the past and who they are now. How are student bodies at Christian universities changing? And from your perspective, what changes does that necessitate on the part of the institutions?

A: In the middle of my career, I was a senior administrator, a chief academic officer, of Christian colleges, and I began seeing in the first decade of the 21st century, students were asking different questions, or they were approaching the administration in different ways … They were articulating different concerns and with more passion. At one of my institutions, the student government decided they wanted to have an open forum on homosexuality at a campus that doesn’t support homosexuality, and the administration said, “Well, you know, that’s an interesting topic. Tell you what, we’re going to form a study group that will involve four members of the cabinet and a religion professor and a couple other random people.” And they said, “No, that’s not what we want.” And so they actually were able to lobby until they had a somewhat circumscribed event. But I [noticed] this is different. This is changing.

I have a passage in the book … recognizing that a student who might be starting at a Christian college next fall was born in 2007. She has no [recollection] of Sept. 11. She doesn’t know about Bush v. Gore. She barely remembers the Obama administration. Police killings from Trayvon Martin to George Floyd happened during her formative years. She saw sexual harassment explode in the Me Too and Church Too movements when she was in her early teens. All of this has transpired on the iPhone that she’s had, which was invented the year she was born.

And so these students, they’re aware. They know about DEI issues. They know about climate change. They’re worried about school shooters … And they’re frustrated. These issues are important to them, because they’ve always grown up with them. DEI is a perfect example. At the very time that you have administrators and trustees who really don’t want to deal with issues of systemic racism, you’ve got a cohort of students who know all about systemic racism because this is the most diverse generation we’ve ever had, and they have friends, some of them are biracial and some of them are gay. These are not issues that are abstract. These are real, lived experience issues. And that’s the gap. That’s the challenge.

Q: In your book, you encourage Christian colleges to stay out of the culture wars and to focus on “culture creation” instead. What does “culture creation” mean to you?

A: Culture wars often wind up positioning the Christian university … on the wrong side of the issues that students care about. They might kind of have support of that older bloc—the donors, the trustees and the denominations—but in a social media age, their culture warring will be put in the worst possible light, and they will be seen as anachronistic.

And they don’t win them. I open that chapter with the story about the College of the Ozarks suing the Biden administration and the Housing and Urban Development Department over the new HUD policy [which prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity under the Fair Housing Act], which had nothing to do with Christian colleges. It had nothing to do with universities at all, but they sued the government because they said this was an infringement on their religious freedom. It wasn’t, and their positioning didn’t change anything. I don’t think it helped them … They may have been thinking that it’s going to draw students by showing how tough they are. But I don’t think that’s what students are looking for.

My initial attempt at articulating “culture creation” instead was to argue that we could take those contemporary issues that are of concern—LGBTQ affirmation, race politics, climate change—and rather than positioning the college in antipathy toward those topics, it would be possible for the fearless university to decide that they were going to engage those topics in collaboration with other scholars. And they would try to write about how we try to deal with LGBTQ affirmation questions … Working to better understand the problems brings the Christian university into dialogue with other segments outside the university [and] has the potential of helping churches understand how to address those issues, helping their denominations to deal with contemporary change.

Q: I’ve heard the narrative from some Christian university presidents that doubling down on what they see as their Christ-centeredness or Christian identity is what’s going to keep enrollments up. So, it’s interesting that you’re saying grappling with these issues, which some see as outside of that mission, potentially helps enrollments.

A: Simply declaring “Christ-centered” as the mission works to distinguish the Christian university from the historically religious institution or the state school, but it doesn’t really articulate the mission of the Christian university from a pedagogical or curricular or student development [standpoint]. I feel bad saying this because I just spent my career at Christian universities, but I feel like it winds up being a necessary but insufficient component of self-identity. They really need better language, more robust language that allows them to speak to the current moment.

Q: Speaking of the current moment, how do you think a second Trump administration will affect Christian universities? And how do you think the fearless Christian university model that you’re laying out here would approach the next four years?

A: Well, the easy answer is, who knows? If these five weeks are any indication of what the term looks like, I just— My head spins. I have no clue.

That being said, we’re in an interesting moment, where the Trump administration has made very clear that they’re going to bring God back, they’re going to protect Christians. Their approach to issues of religious discrimination or religious freedom or religious expression is going to be friendly to conservative Christians. And the Supreme Court has similarly made clear … [they’re] going to side on behalf of conservative Christian expression.

And so, for Christian institutions … the belief that the government is out to get you and that we’re standing where we’re standing because we’re standing for what’s true and they’re not going to make us do these other things, at least theoretically, that fear of the government coming in to encroach should be gone. And this should be a time where, if an institution wanted to move to fearlessness of their own volition, to deal with DEI issues or to deal with the LGBTQ questions, they could do so with their own strength and not because the federal government will make them do it or they’ll lose their Title IV money. That’s an opportunity that will exist in this environment in ways that it would not have happened in the Biden administration or the Obama administration.

Q: You talk in your book about how making change at these institutions involves coordination between faculty, presidents and trustees. And we know that higher ed institutions of every type wrestle with tensions between these groups. What are some of the unique ways that those dynamics play out in a Christian university context?

A: What I’d love to see is better ongoing linkages between trustees and faculty and trustees and students … How do we work with these faculty members we have come to know, to treat them as not full partners, but engage partners in decisions that have to be made? … A big lesson I learned way too late in my administrative career was that you have to share the scope of a problem with faculty members early, even when it’s underdeveloped, even when you don’t know exactly what you’re going to do. Say, “We’re looking into how we’re going to resolve this issue,” because then faculty members and staff members can lean into that and say, “Well, what if we did this” or “What if we did that?” … What tends to happen is the cabinet wrestles with a question until it comes up with a resolution that is the least bad of the options, and then presents it and expects people to respond.

In Chapter 5, which is the chapter on trustees, faculty and administrators being on the same page, I talk about the multiple analogies that are used [to refer to these relationships at Christian universities]. And I specifically talk about one which I come back to at the end of the book: the college as church.

I heard this said at one of my institutions, that really, in a Christian university, the president is like the pastor and the trustees are like the church board and the faculty, staff are like the members and the students just pass through on short-term visits. And there’s just so much wrong with that … but there is that dynamic in Christian universities.

Christian college presidents, based on my analysis in that chapter, came [to the presidency] out of either advancement, ministry or academics. If they came out of the first two, that model of leadership is very different than if they came out of the academic range.

It runs completely counter to what I just said about engaged partnership.

Q: You make some bold, potentially controversial, suggestions in your book: that colleges get rid of faith statements, adopt a more open posture toward LGBTQ+ students and acknowledge students may grapple with and adapt their faith in and after college. Have you gotten any pushback?

A: Not yet. So far, what I’ve seen is [the] faculty response … They love the book. They love the bold suggestions. They like the fearlessness. I have not heard from any trustees or presidents who have read the book, but I’m intrigued to do that, because if all I get is cheerleading from the faculty, that’s insufficient to get where I think we need to go.

If just a handful of Christian colleges said, “This is a different direction from where we’ve tried to go in the past, and we at least ought to try to see how to move that direction,” I’d be happy, because I think all I’m looking for at this point is proof of concept. I know in my bones that the everybody-get-more-conservative-than-everybody-else [approach] won’t work for a variety of reasons. So, that’s my hope, that … it is possible to carve out this new territory without losing the faith commitment of the university or its historical orientation or its denominational relationship, if it has one, that that’s all possible. I just need a few of them to decide to do it.