No Hiding in the Ghetto
by Donald T. Williams
I used to ask my composition students to write an essay on “Why I came to Toccoa Falls College,” a Christian school with rather rigid lifestyle requirements. Over the years, the results were very consistent. The one answer I got more than all others combined was, “To escape the evil influence of the secular university.” This has always troubled me, not because the secular academy is not an evil influence, but because the answer is a negative, rather than a positive, one. The students came to Toccoa Falls College to hide. They wanted to be “not of the world,” and if that meant not being “in it” as a result, that was just fine with them.
Why didn’t anybody ever give the answer I was looking for: “Because Toccoa Falls College is the West Point for Christian soldiers!” The school had the potential to be that; I made sure my classes were. But most of the Evangelical youth culture was interested in something else.
I wanted my students to understand that coming to Toccoa Falls College to hide in the Christian ghetto was not the mentality of Conquerors for Christ but of people who are defeated already before they even enter the battle. Christians are not called to be afraid of the world or ignorant of it; they are called to be different from it while being engaged with it; they are called to be engaged with it while staying different from it. Isn’t that the way we all should be living?
Donald T. Williams is Professor Emeritus of Toccoa Falls College. He stays permanently camped out on the borders between serious scholarship and pastoral ministry, between theology and literature, and between Narnia and Middle-Earth. He is the author of fourteen books, including Answers from Aslan: The Enduring Apologetics of C. S. Lewis (DeWard, 2023). He is a contributing editor of Touchstone.
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