Christians surviving University

Christian researchers publish grim statistics every year about the university exodus of church-fleeing teens, but raising the alarm never seems to stem the tide. Churches and parents grasp at their graduating high schoolers, warning them about the temptations and ideologies waiting to consume them on-campus. Student ministries focus on apologetics, answering worldview questions, and defending the truths of Scripture. Campus ministries canvas the quad to draw struggling Christians into cheerful religious communities with pizza and froff. And yet the great collegiate apostasy continues. So, what’s wrong?

When I walked away from Christ in college, I wasn’t won to the world by “lofty sounding arguments.” I just wanted friends. My experience since then confirms that I wasn’t alone. Though many students succumb to gnawing intellectual doubts about the trustworthiness of the Bible while in college, many others wander away from Christ in search of relational and emotional fulfillment. 

Apparently, Christian students heading off to college need more than just another Case for Christ; they need to guard both their heads and their hearts.

That’s why every Christian college student and graduating high school senior should read Michael Kruger’s new book, Surviving Religion 101: Letters to a Christian Student on Keeping the Faith in College.

You may know Michael Kruger from his work defending the canonicity and veracity of Scripture, but in this book, he puts on a different hat. Kruger writes as a dad who wants his daughter to keep loving Jesus. Each chapter takes the form of a letter to his daughter, Emma, who is just beginning her studies at UNC Chapel Hill. So, while Kruger casts his letters as “intellectual preparation” (p 24) from a seminary prof (which they certainly are), he can’t help being a dad, too. 

He knows that his precious little girl will face more than atheist arguments on her college campus, so he also writes to help her survive relationally, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually. The product is fifteen winsome, thoughtful, wholistic answers to some of the toughest questions that Christian college students face on their campuses today.

Let me give an example. 

In the opening chapter, Kruger speaks directly to the fear of falling away in college and does so with tenderness and candor. While acknowledging the real dangers that await Christian college students in their classrooms and dorm rooms, he also is careful to note that “your non-Christian professors are not Darth Vader, and your fellow students are not part of the Inquisition looking for evangelical Protestants to string up” (p 29). That balance alone is refreshing to read. Then Kruger goes on to remind his 18-year-old daughter that she is, in fact, just 18 years old. 

She shouldn’t expect to have all the answers and shouldn’t get frustrated by arguments she’s never encountered. He writes, “Your beliefs can be absolutely correct, even if you cannot explain or defend them” (p 31). 

What a relief that should be to Christian college students everywhere! Kruger will, of course, go on to provide several robust answers to serious quandaries with Christianity, but he grounds his advice in the theological and practical reality of regeneration. Christians are Christians even if they can’t fully explain Christianity. Praise the Lord!

Here’s another example. After dealing with some of the big religious questions (Which religion is right? How would we know? What about Christian morals?), Kruger turns in chapter 5 to the question, “Are we sure that homosexuality is really wrong?” Put another way, “But my gay friends are really great people, so homosexuality can’t be all that bad, right?” 

This is precisely the right question to ask, because we’re all tempted to shape and reshape our convictions based on the people we like, especially in the friendship-dominated atmosphere of a college campus. Kruger’s parental and pastoral insight into this issue is profound. He notes that such a question, “assumes that the morality of an act is somehow connected to the character (and likability) of those who perform it” (p 79). 

Then Kruger goes on to show how biblical anthropology helps us see that people are necessarily a “mix of virtue and vice,” and that to correlate evil behavior with the ugliness of personality actually can reflect an embarrassing assumption – that gay people must necessarily be awful people (p 79). 

Kruger shows how Christians can instead approach all people with biblical nuance and understanding, and thereby avoid the emotionalist trap of peer pressure. He addresses the head and the heart of the question and so marks a nuanced, biblical path through treacherous relational waters.

Those are just two examples, but the list goes on. Kruger tackles the following big questions with care and wisdom in this book (these are actually just some of the chapter titles):

• The Concept of Hell Seems Barbaric and Cruel – Wouldn’t a Loving God Save Everyone?
• Science Seems Like It Can Explain Everything in the Universe – Do We Really Need to Believe in God?
• Everything I Believe Seems to Hinge on the Truth of the Bible – How Do We Know It’s Really from God?
• Some Parts of the Bible Seem Morally Troubling – How Can a Book Be from God If It Advocates Oppression or Genocide?
• Sometimes It Feels Like My Faith Is Slipping Away – How Do I Handle Doubts about What I Believe?

You can tell just from this sample that this book doesn’t hide from the hard questions. Instead, Kruger faces them head-on, but with gentleness, sincerity, clarity, and a wealth of knowledge on early church history. And he regularly summarizes big, complex ideas by saying, “The point is this…” putting the cookies on the bottom shelf for his readers. 

Kruger writes like a dad who loves his kid, but who also teaches church history for a living. It’s a potent combination and powerful for addressing these big topics with college-aged readers.

If you’re a student of apologetics, you’ll likely recognize some of Kruger’s arguments as familiar, but it’s also likely that you’ll be helped by some of his fresh insights. 

For example, in the chapter on Christianity as the one correct religion, Kruger dispatches with common objections by pointing out the logical contradictions of relativistic worldviews. But he takes it a step further. Kruger writes, “Put bluntly, relativism is pride masquerading as humility.” (p 59). That’s an evangelistically useful insight. 

Also, in his chapter on the Gospel accounts, Kruger shows how several external and internal pieces of evidence demonstrate the legitimacy of the authorship of the Gospels. However, he goes on to add that “we don’t have even a single example of one of the four Gospels circulating without a title or with a different title from the current ones” (p 167). Those kinds of nuggets show Kruger’s expertise in this field and make this a valuable volume even for apologetics aficionados.

Now, to be clear, I’ve met a college student before, and I realize that a 241-page book on Christianity won’t naturally rise above Call of Duty on the to-do list. 

However, I still think this book is worth giving to a college student for two reasons: 

1) It can serve as reference material for whenever the student actually encounters one of the fifteen questions, and the chapters don’t take more than 15-20 minutes to read. 

2) A proactive parent or other 'discipler' could work through this book a chapter at a time with a college student, opening up opportunities for more questions and discussion. That being said, I wouldn’t expect most students to read this work front-to-back, despite its accessibility.

The questions Kruger addresses in Surviving Religion 101 are exactly the issues I’m asked about every week by the college students at our church. More than that, Kruger gets at the subsurface concerns, the subtle temptations that lead well-meaning Christian students step-by-step down the dark road of apostasy, and in this book he acts as a sure guide back to the narrow path.

I highly commend Kruger’s inviting, in-depth letters as a great help to any nervous graduates or struggling collegians as they persevere through the unique challenges of the university years. May God use this book in your life or the life of someone you know to keep them Christian in college.