The Challenge of Student ‘Idealists’

“But do the students stand for anything?” As a university professor, I was participating in a panel discussion of the issues involved in the student strike of May, 1970, when a member of the audience asked the question. The setting for this discussion was significant: university professors, students, and interested non-students were gathered in the fellowship hall of a large evangelical church after the Sunday evening service. The discussion engendered some moments of animated exchange, particularly when members of the audience spoke of the “negative” aspects of student protest, especially at public colleges and universities supported by tax funds: the destruction of property, the repudiation of government policy, the rejection of nationalist pride, and the nonconformist modes of conduct.

Several in the audience had come to the forum, not to listen, but to react because they felt that their values, derived from their social background, education, and religious belief, were threatened. Others, sharing these same values, had come to ask questions and to listen because they were genuinely puzzled about why students were acting as they were. In general, the impression of the campus protesters held by the audience was that students were sure of what they were against but had nothing positive to offer society, that “if the Viet Nam war were over tomorrow,” students would find some other issue about which to demonstrate.

My reply that evening to the question was inadequate, for I merely emphasized that today’s students, like the young people of any era, are idealists and that the ideals dominant on the campuses of the 1970s require special insight from society in general. To speak, however, of a single, monolithic student population with a single set of goals is misleading. Rather, the student body on the larger campuses of the nation has the heterogeneity of any urban community in America. Special interest groups often have specific aims that may not be shared by the rest of the student body: black separatists are such a group, as are other disadvantaged students, Marxist revolutionaries, and the few anarchists. A large percentage of the student body echoes the pragmatism of middle-class America; these students may be politically concerned, but they are inactive with regard to most social questions. Their code of conduct is largely governed by what society expects of them, and they plan to achieve security by following their parents’ life style, despite the generation gap on such issues as sex, marijuana, ecology, and war. As a result, these students are content to “get an education,” find a job, marry, and buy a home. And if a student who is motivated toward achieving material and social security is not already a member of the middle class, he may well be the son or daughter of a blue-collar worker, aspiring to the life pattern of those above him socially.

Another significant number of students are engaged in actively rejecting this same middle-class life style. Usually raised in an atmosphere of material security, these students have worked out a set of ideals so different from that of their parents and of those holding power in society that they feel alienated—and unable to communicate with anyone outside their peer group. These are the “idealists” of the student body in the sense that they reject the materialism of capitalistic society. They are also secular in their approach to life, for they have no religious training and operate as though God were irrelevant to their personal needs. “Pascal should not try to convince us that his God exists because for us it doesn’t,” wrote one of my students concerning the Pensées. In essence these secular idealists are cultural relativists; they would not dream of imposing their personal life styles and codes of conduct on anyone else, though they often try to persuade society that it has humanitarian obligations. Such students pose a unique challenge to the evangelical community, for they espouse many of the ideals of Christ but reject the institution of the church and the life style and world view of most church members.

Perhaps the slogans and slang of the secular idealists provide a key to their attitudes. (Many of these idioms have passed easily into the national vocabulary and have already been replaced by others within the closed social group of the young.) They always use the phrase “up tight” in a pejorative sense to describe anyone who is nervous and tense about small—or important—matters. Certainly the expression denotes one kind of reaction to the neurotic world of the suburbs: the stresses of business competition, the cocktail circuit, and the accumulation of status symbols. But it is also the phrase of a generation profoundly aware that they are the children of an “age of anxiety” and that anxiety cannot be a way of life without destroying the individual. Another negative expression describes the evasion of reality, responsibility, or truth—“copping out.” Anyone can cop out, but parents and the “establishment” are particularly guilty. They have hypocritically mouthed ideals and willfully refused to acknowledge their failure to follow these ideals, creating a world of hatred, suffering, and injustice. A third phrase has a positive force, representing the desire of college youth to liberate themselves from restrictive inhibitions and to decide what they think is best for themselves. To “do one’s own thing” is to declare one’s independence and define one’s own personality—to do what one feels comfortable doing without worrying about what other people think. Key slogans that indicate other positive values of the idealists might be “make love, not war,” or simply “peace.” If there is one aspect of the religionless life style of such college youth that should challenge the religionists of our era, it is certainly their belief that love, selflessness, and sharing are important goals in life. While the situation ethic of the young may occasionally seem shockingly immoral or impulsive to those who are orthodox, few Christians could deny that love, selflessness, and sharing are laudable concepts.

So a generation of youth has opted for honesty, self-expression, freedom from inhibitions, spontaneity, sharing, love—and has rejected authority as hypocritical and the middle class as materialistic. The choices these idealists are making are fraught with dangers, however, for they are frighteningly on their own. Let me cite as an example part of an essay written by a sophomore who was expressing the relevance of Voltaire’s Candide to his personal life.

Candide and I are both lost. We are both traveling through different areas to seek some sort of purpose and meaning for living. Candide moves through the physical world, while I move through the different regions of thought, world travel being not as easy to accomplish. Both of us have left the surroundings which nurtured us. Candide was thrown out of the castle … in Westphalia. I myself have mentally left the middle class values by which I was reared. Together we travel through lands filled with hostility. Candide comes into contact with Bulgarians who try to regiment him into their way of thinking. I myself every day am bombarded by those who would wish to make me conform to a loyalty to which I have no heart felt allegiance, as Candide had none for the King of the Bulgarians. Candide witnesses senseless feuding between groups such as the Bulgarians and the Abares. I, too, feel caught in the middle between different groups fighting one another, but who both neglect the dignity and rights of people that Voltaire was trying to stress in his day. Extreme radicals and extreme reactionaries with their demagoguery are both trying to control the thoughts of the people of this land, while each rejects the life of the individual if he interferes with his plan. I find myself in the same situation as Candide, just trying to find a place where I can live my life in a style suitable to my own desires.

Man rarely can “make it” on his own, and students are human enough to make mistakes, to be caught up in fads, to experiment. Their unusual attempts to find a workable life style often get the public’s attention. They seem to replace faith with hedonism, occultism, mysticism, drugs, rock music, communal life, political activism, and social work. These contradictory choices all represent the reactions of withdrawal from or involvement in society of a generation dissatisfied with a world it did not make, but the reactions of both withdrawal and involvement are explicable in terms of the “new” ideals of the secular student who either tries to reform society or leaves it.

What, then, is the responsibility of the evangelical church member to these students to whom the biblical notion of personal sin is alien and the institutionalized church, anathema? Looking at rebellious youth from the vantage point of maturity, hard work, and a strict upbringing, established Christians may feel a condemnatory spirit of judgment. Are not these students rebellious, self-centered, lazy, coddled, and undisciplined? In certain cases and from certain vantage points, this is true. Perhaps we should begin with an open mind, however, and ask whether we may indeed be unconsciously materialistic and hypocritical. Is it possible that the evangelical Christian equates certain political, social, and economic values with the claims of Christ and biblical truth, when indeed these values are the product of his place in history and society? It is possible, and the students demand of the Christian that he live daily the life of Christ while constantly holding up for examination his everyday values. For instance, does the call of Christ that impels me to work in Sunday school or youth groups also require me, if I am white, not to sell my home when blacks or Puerto Ricans move into my neighborhood and I fear property values may decline? Or does the call of Christ that asks the church to minister to all people also challenge the middle-class congregation not to forsake the inner city for the suburbs? Or does the call of Christ that asks the follower to be a “good soldier” also require that he think carefully about the power of the military in America and the nature of the wars the nation fights?

The students thus challenge all evangelicals not to be stumbling blocks to those seeking truth by either personal or institutional hypocrisies. When students see living examples of Christ, they are open to the Gospel, and dialogue becomes possible. Dialogue is not possible, however, when either side is intolerant of the superficial life style of the other. During the student strike, for instance, many students, still hoping to “rap” with non-students, cut their hair and dressed “straight” so that they could go out into the community and not be rebuffed; often they were rebuffed anyway.

Chances for direct confrontations with nonconformist students may be rare, but church members also have a responsibility to pray for and support Christian students, faculty, and organizations that present the gospel, directly and indirectly on secular campuses. Sooner or later, many secular idealists have an experience that shows them they are inadequate in their own strength. And in such situations, they are often eager to let Christ transform their lives.

Patricia A. Ward is assistant professor in the Department of Comparative and World Literature, State University of NewYork at Albany. She has the B.A. degree from Eastern Nazarene College and the M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin.

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