Higher Learning

One of the many deceptions forwarded by modern Christian opponents is that Christianity equals anti-intellectualism. I am not here suggesting that without Christianity, Western civilization would not be as advanced as it is. Attempts to define alterations to history in the absence of another historical reality are always speculative. So the best-known facts remain the best means of determining cause and effect. The reality of the development of education throughout Europe and then across the Atlantic to the Americas is that Christians prized and valued education. Many of the most prestigious institutions of higher learning today owe their existence to the zeal of Christian colonists to establish centers of education.

John Eliot, a Puritan and one of the early advocates for the founding of Harvard College in Massachusetts, wrote, "After God had carried us safe to New England and we had builded our houses, provided necessaries for our liveli-hood, rear'd convenient places for God's worship, and settled the Civil Government: One of the next things we longed for and looked after was to advance Learning and perpetuate it to posterity; dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches, when our present Ministers shall lie in the Dust." (New England's First Fruits, 1643)