Irreligious studies

Higher education | The church has not prepared young Christians for the liberal religion programs at most universities | John Dawson

AUSTIN, Texas — With just one semester of coursework at the University of Texas completed, Blake Helm stepped unwittingly into a religious minefield. Coming from a theologically conservative background, Mr. Helm had signed up for Professor L. Michael White's "Rise of Christianity" course, only to find out in the first class that the subject matter was the fall of Christianity. "He started out with, ‘Why aren't they [the Gospels] in chronological order?' and went on from attack to attack," Mr. Helm said.

Mr. Helm dropped the class after one day, but others stay on: Some, Mr. Helm says, "won't think about questioning what [Professor White] says because he's got a Ph.D." Greg Grooms, director of The Probe Center—a Christian resource library and campus hangout—says, "I'm consistently finding fundamentalists who have blundered into his classroom and get burned. It's not Sunday school. I ask them why they wanted to take his class in the first place."