How to Get Out of Fundamentalism: Build a Law School

In an incisive critique, Charles Habib Malik, philosopher and diplomat, laid bare the bankruptcy of the contemporary university: an institution once focused in Jesus Christ but which has now decisively "swerved" from that grounding. The great centers of learning in the Western world have generally abandoned the transcendent basis of their intellectual life. And in our own generation, their significance for the culture has become all-encompassing. The university is the centerpoint of the modern world, the crossroads of our troubled age.

So readers ofBOOKS &CULTURE will need no persuading that the survival of those modest postsecondary institutions that retain a conservative Protestant confessional heritage, the "Christian colleges and universities," is in fact something other than one of the many oddities of our collapsing culture. Their tenuous presence in the educational-cultural complex offers a haunting memory of all our yesterdays as well as a little, hand-sized cloud of promise for the future. As Thomas Cahill's seminal volume How the Irish Saved Civilization has lately reminded us, it is was in little, countercultural learning communities that the last great cultural collapse in Western history was mediated into the glories of the high Middle Ages.

Yet our schools face the most serious of questions as they seek the narrow passage between Scylla and Charybdis, with chapel-veneer secularism on the one hand and fundamentalism redivivus on the other. If our projects in higher education are finally to count for the kingdom in the third millennium, they must be wholly Christian, but they must be equally informed by a passion for cultural engagement. Mere islands of orthodox piety will simply embody the caricature of monastic withdrawal, which, as Cahill has reminded us, even the monks managed to transcend. Yet the answer, as well we know, lies not in the rhetoric of mission statements (we are all postfundamentalists now!), but in the character of our institution building.

And so the question of law. The avalanche of lawyer jokes well testifies to the conflicted status this once-esteemed group has attained, since the immense power that is exercised by those trained in the law lies in every seeming quarter of our society—in the White House and the Congress, quite apart from on the bench, all three branches of our government; and in the great corporations; aside altogether from the trial lawyers who oil the wheels of every engagement of persons one with another. While the corporate leaders and legislators who are also JDs may have left legal practice far behind, it was law schools that trained them how to think, how to argue, how to win. The fabric of our public culture is being decisively shaped by this pre-eminent grouping, and—pace the jokes—while these women and men are good and bad and wise and foolish like the rest of us, they hold in common an uncommon skill in using ideas and arguments, and in their hands are keys to the future of the culture.

So where are we? The Christian Legal Society offers a focus for believing judges and attorneys, and its Law Student Ministries networks Christian students nationwide. We have public-interest law firms that defend religious liberty and human life. And where are our Christian law schools? There are, of course, distinguished Roman Catholic institutions, and it is a thousand pities that conservative Protestants have not managed to preserve their equivalent of the major intellectual centers that are still Catholic in name, and in varying degrees in nature; and they include some leading law schools.

To be fair, it is not as if evangelicals had none. There are schools that are, if we may so say, "historically" evangelical; but like many Catholic institutions, they are distinctive but no longer pervasively so—one would not mistake them, that is to say, for a Wheaton or a Biola. Regent University's nationally accredited law school, with its earlier incarnation in Oral Roberts University, is a confessional evangelical institution that stands as the sole exception to this general rule: in our building of colleges and universities, evangelicals have eschewed legal education in a tacit though very striking acknowledgment that fundamentalism is not dead. Geneva College has tried more than once to garner support for such a project, and may yet succeed, but support—especially in dollars, which is a tragic comment on the depth of our problem in this land awash with evangelical resourcing—has been vanishingly difficult to obtain. Simon Greenleaf School of Law, brilliantly founded in 1980 by lawyer-apologist John Warwick Montgomery in Southern California, started well but limped along for nearly two decades as an unaccredited bright idea before its recent inclusion in Trinity International University, which has credible plans for major growth and national status.

The question is really this one, and it is defiantly simple: Is our cultural rhetoric just that? As America's most vibrant religious community, are we truly unable to sustain five, ten, twelve law schools of national stature in which we can build a new generation of Christian lawyers and at the same time challenge the reigning intellectual assumptions of the twenty-first century? Of course, at this point the small-arms fire begins to crackle. Don't we need Christian law students at Harvard? (Yes!) What do we mean by a Christian law school? (Not a Bible school, have no fear; law taught within the Judeo-Christian world-view, the way it used to be, in the context of a Christian community.)

But isn't law school simply law school? (Wait a minute: let's make jurisprudence central to the curriculum, so our lawyers know what the law is and what it is not; let's teach the history of law as something other than an elective, so we can dig a tunnel back into Western civilization; let's focus on ADR—alternative dispute resolution—so our Christian lawyers are experts at avoiding litigation; let's recapture human-rights issues for the Christians who know why humans have rights, in the image of God.)

Law school is not simply law school, any more than college is college. And while it is of central importance that we penetrate the bastions of secular ideology as students and professors, it is hard to see how we shall do this to any effect as we move into the post-Christian century unless we first establish our countercultural centers and demonstrate that there is another way, and what it is, and that we can do it well.

Cahill's lesson needs to be learned, and learned fast: the countercultural communities of the Irish monks, scattered across the face of Europe, offered salt and light in a dark and putrefying age. And today? Well, as Carl F. H. Henry has kept warning, the barbarians are indeed coming. If we are to be strategically serious in our kingdom response, we shall do more than build Christian law schools. But we shall do nothing less.

Nigel M. de S. Cameron is senior vice president for university affairs and distinguished professor of theology and culture at Trinity International University. On Trinity's behalf, he oversaw the inclusion into the university as Trinity Law School the former Simon Greenleaf School of Law. This essay is based on his address to the 1998 conference of the Christian Legal Society.

Copyright © 1999 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.