“If you tell young men that entry into the ministry is based on passing written exams in institutions of higher education, they will spend most of their time and effort mastering the techniques necessary for passing the exams. The churches must select candidates from a limited supply of survivors. Problem: there is no evidence showing that passing written exams prepares men to pastor churches. There is considerable evidence based on actual Church growth rates that these skills are inversely related: the greater the skill in passing formal exams, the less the skill in pastoring. Additionally, there is a positive correlation between the ability to pass written exams and political liberalism. As Ladd and Ferree concluded in 1982, based on a detailed survey of the opinions of 1,112 members of American seminary faculties, “Those who teach in schools of religion and theology resemble fairly closely a larger community of academic humanists of which they are a part.” Of those responding, 50 percent or more described themselves as politically liberal. The Episcopalians were the highest: 78 percent. Then came Methodists (69 percent) and Presbyterians (63 percent). The only faculties below 50 percent were Southern Baptists (32 percent), other Baptists (17 percent), and Pentecostals (7 percent). Those students who seek access to a seminary education must first prove themselves skilled at passing collegiate exams designed and imposed by politically correct liberals, atheists, feminists, and New Age mystics on the college campus…. The Church’s preliminary screening process is placed in the hands of the Church’s mortal enemies. This has been going on for eight centuries. You get what you pay for, and hierarchical churches pay ministerial candidates for passing academic exams. The operational rule is: “Those who baptize infants have been academically certified by liberals.” … The weak point in churches that baptize infants is their intellectual pride.”
Gary North
Crossed Fingers — pp. 766-767
A few more observations,
1.) Besides the observations offered by Dr. North above we have to contend that Educational programming is liberal by its very dynamic. What higher education is really a model of is bureaucracy and bureaucracy is inherently liberal since it is committed to top town authority and working within the system. When that system is functioning as Humanist then the bureaucracy’s job is in support of the beast. In bureaucratic systems students learn never to challenge the system, never to question authority, and never to work outside the bureaucratically assigned boundaries. That which educational bureaucracies overwhelmingly produce is men and women who look like the liberal bureaucracy where they attended. Bureaucracy always reproduces itself.
2.) Even thinking about the whole “college experience” we conclude that it is Liberal. We take children out of the context of that which is familiar (Family life) and place them in the context of that which is strange and unnatural away from family. Why do we do that? Is it because we want to get the children away from non liberal influences so that they can be properly propagandized with the Liberal Humanist agenda? Further, in the big University settings we pack and stack them in co-ed Bacchanalian centers called dormitories so that those young adults who are coming from more conservative homes can be compromised with is licentiate humanist ethic and morality.
3.) Of course the implication of all this is that at a very fundamental level the guy you’re listening to on Sunday Morning is likely Liberal. Oh, naturally, most ministers are not going to lead with their chin on the matter, and it may only come up in putatively conservative churches in very subtle ways. But if Dr. North is correct in the above quote then your minister is likely Humanist and the reason you don’t see that is because you are also.
This also applies to the Seminary teacher as well. The reason our ministers are humanist / liberal, whether of the R2K type, the FV type or the Cultural Marxist, or the Statist type is because they learned it from their Seminary professors.
Naturally, like all things, exceptions exist. But they are far more rare then most people believe. A few students happen upon a College or Master’s program where some key Professor managed to slip through the Humanist net himself and so is able to mentor and teach a young student in a Biblical direction. Alternately, God still awakens men and women to see through the parlor game that Humanist Higher Education is.
The Christian Church member needs to realize that higher education is not their friend and that because ministers are produced by the humanist educational system that most Churches are not their friends either.
Could this be one reason why we were told to “not conform to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind?”