FA L L 2 0 1 3
that you can see Narnia, when they find out and let you go, you’ve given them deniability. They can say “it wasn’t his evangelical faith, but the quality of his work” or something like that. If you’re clearly an evangelical and there’s a hit job on you in the department, that possibility will be clear to those who are watching the situation. Now, I don’t think you should be unnecessarily scrappy. But I do think it’s important for Christians to be clear, and if God wants them to be promoted then they will, like Daniel in Babylon. Did you take away anything from this experience about the way you teach or what you’re teaching at the college? Reflecting on it, what it makes me think is that we have to equip our kids better, because the world outside the church really is becoming pagan. Even when kids in my generation dealt with nonbelievers, there still was a lot of vestigial Christianity in the culture, but there’s a lot less now. So what that means is that we have to do more and more equipping. Do experiences like this make you think afresh about postmillennial convictions, or have they held fast? That’s a great question. My convictions have held fast and not only have they done so but this sort of thing strengthens it. One phrase comes to mind: that is not the future. How could it be the future? They don’t have any civilization-building or civilizationsustaining skills. They can devour, they can burn up, they can waste, but they cannot not build up or maintain. One of the reasons I’m a postmillennialist is because in the long run, stupidity never works. There was a comment from a student in the Q&A to the effect that “hate isn’t always wrong.” What are your thoughts on that? It’s refreshingly honest, because they generally like to pretend that they’re too nice to hate. Idaho’s Too Great to Hate was a referendum in Idaho. I was in an event where I was ready to call the cops, almost as hot as IU, and at the end of the evening a guy stood up in the audience. He had a “No Hate Here” sign on that he flipped 35