ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 starts out with a basic history of Christian colleges. We situate it in the religious justification for early institutions of higher education and then discuss the reaction of Christian colleges and universities to secularization. This places those institutions in a unique position of promoting academic values while attempting to integrate science into their biblical understandings. We then explore a typology of Christian colleges: Orthodox, Critical-mass, Intentionally Pluralist, and Accidentally Pluralist. It is the first types that focus on maintaining a distinction from the larger society and those are the types that best describe modern conservative Protestant institutions of higher education. We will then introduce the concept of right-wing authoritarianism (Altemeyer, 1988) which predicts that religiosity is negatively related to openness to new ideas and thus conservative Protestant schools should be less politically tolerant than other schools. However, given their minority position in the larger educational framework it is also possible that such schools have more political openness than other schools.
