The Best Guide to Christian Colleges

A new college selection tool, elite misalignment, Amish economic development and more in this week's digest.

I want to lead off this week’s roundup by highlighting an incredible new Christian College Guide tool from the Center for Academic Faithfulness and Flourishing (CAFF) at American Reformer.

CAFF is run by P. Jesse Rine, who has a Ph.D. in higher education administration from the University of Virginia and is a leading scholar of Christian higher education. He’s actually the editor of a peer reviewed journal on the subject.

He and CAFF have created simply the most comprehensive online guide to Protestant Christian colleges I’ve ever seen. The Christian College Guide is not a ranking. Instead, it contains numerous pieces of data that allows families to find the schools that best meet their own commitments and preferences. This includes everything from theological tradition to test scores to the demographic makeup of the student body to statements of faith/requirements to extracurricular activities to financial info and much more. Over 2,000 hours of research went into this.

Here’s a sample screen shot from the profile of Cedarville University in Ohio

This guide is free to use after registering and filling out a brief survey. So check it out.

Note: The guide does not contain Catholic colleges at this time.

Elite Misalignment

My latest piece is now online over at American Compass. It’s about the misalignment between the personal incentives of our elite and the fortunes of the country as a whole.

During his confirmation hearings to be President Eisenhower’s Secretary of Defense, General Motors President Charles Wilson famously told Congress, in response to questions about conflicts of interest between GM and America: “For years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa. The difference did not exist. Our company is too big. It goes with the welfare of the country.”

At the time, what he said was basically true. The interests of the American elite, such as corporate CEOs, were essentially aligned with that of America as a whole. If GM wanted to sell cars, it needed citizens who could afford to buy them, making American prosperity paramount. At the same time, GM’s workforce was almost entirely North American……..

In an era of financialization, outsourcing, and globalization, this is no longer true. Companies and their shareholders can reap enormous gains without broad-based American prosperity. They can grow while reducing the number of well-paid workers in the U.S. and instead shipping manufacturing to China, IT to India, and customer service to the Philippines. With the threat of this type of offshoring hanging over their heads, workers have much more limited leverage to obtain a better distribution of profits for themselves.

Click over to read the whole thing.

Amish Economic Development

The Wall Street Journal had an interesting feature article on economic prosperity in Holmes County, Ohio created by the Amish.

At age 32, Ryan Hershberger has achieved success far beyond his modest roots. He launched a furniture business with two cousins a decade ago and now owns a company that distributes its solid-wood tables and chairs nationwide…It helps that Ryan Hershberger lives and works in Holmes County, Ohio, America’s standout for economic mobility by one measure. Millennials there are doing better than the generation ahead of them.

…

Between 2005 and 2019, average household income in Holmes County rose 24% for 27-year-olds raised in lower-income homes—from roughly $36,000 to $45,000 in inflation-adjusted 2023 dollars. That puts millennials who are now in their early 30s far ahead of their Gen X counterparts when they were that age. 

Holmes County had the biggest relative jump for any U.S. county where such 27-year-olds in 2005 already earned at least the median household income, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of data released this year by a team of Harvard University economists.

There appears to be a sort of Amish “mafia” that makes this go. Note the tight networks, similar to those which fuel upward mobility in some immigrant communities.

What’s going on? Economists and local business leaders believe much of the progress stems from entrepreneurial growth fueled by cooperation and innovation, all buttressed by tight family and community ties. Mark Partridge, an Ohio State University economist who has studied Holmes County, points to an “extreme networking effect,” where companies—and cousins—routinely help each other out.

While other counties can’t necessarily replicate this cocktail, they can draw on key ingredients, Partridge said. “There’s no real strong reason you have to be Amish,” he said. “You can have a tight social network with effective social organizations, chambers of commerce, business organizations, other kind of nonprofits.”

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“If we’ve got plenty of jobs, I just go to my competitor and I give him a couple jobs,” said Miller, who is Amish.

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He said some of his biggest competitors are his friends: “I go back to community, helping each other and being able to lean on each other to start a business and get into the market.”

“Some of his biggest competitors are his friends” sounds almost Silicon Valley like in terms of how networks function.

While the Anabaptists are about as far as you can get from Calvinism and still be Protestant, the article also hints that historic Protestant values and culture are key to Amish success there. Namely sobriety, thrift, a work ethic, civic mindedness (of a sort), and a sense of accountability to God in stewarding what they’ve been given.

“I’m here so my employees can make a good, honest living…. I’m not here to collect all the wealth I can absolutely collect.” 

…

To him, it is all about hard work, guided by his values and religion. “We believe that God has given us everything that we have, and we are going to make the most of every opportunity,” he added.

…

Crystal Bontrager, 30, opened the homey cafe in 2022, and has expanded to 3,000 square feet and a staff of 17. “Work ethic has been very much taught and kind of drilled into us at a young age,” Bontrager said. One of her childhood chores: washing clothes with a hand-wringer. 

Note that the civic mindedness seems to mostly apply within their own community. This is similar to what the sociologist E. Digby Baltzell noted about the Pennsylvania Quakers. Whereas the Calvinist Puritans built up genuinely public institutions in Massachusetts, the Quakers built largely sectarian ones.

Examples like Holmes County, Ohio or Sioux County, Iowa show that the Protestant ethic still produces great results even today. The fall of Protestantism in America, and the resulting loss of WASP values and culture, thus has profound economic and social as well as religious consequences.

The Amish have basically been given a free pass from many of the rules imposed on the rest of the society. They don’t have to pay self-employment taxes, for example.

I suspect the clock is ticking on this. They are becoming too numerous, are perceived as taking over in various areas, and are starting to make real money. The first rule of being a tolerated minority that lives differently is not to get too big or too visible. The Amish have broken it, and I suspect that means there will be a much more skeptical gaze turned their direction in the future.

Best of the Web

WSJ: Behind Many Powerful Women on Wall Street: A Doting ‘Househusband’ - My observation is that this is a real phenomenon among very high level women who make serious money. But it’s still a niche phenomenon.

Nathan Pinkoski made a similar argument about postmodernism to what I made about critical theory.

"Woke right" is a silly polemical term, but those who use it have an unintended insight. Postmodernism often provides better and more accurate assessments of our present predicament than bromides to the Enlightenment do. The capacity to use postmodern resources well sets those who are searching deeply to understand our problems apart from those who can only speak in the clichés that reinforce the status quo.

Pinkoski has an article in the new First Things about actually existing post-liberalism.

Acton Institute: Discordia: A Lutheran Seminary Wrecked and Reborn - This is a very interesting article about the infamous Concordia-Seminex Affair in the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, which is one of the rare times conservatives won a battle over an institution and ended up running off the liberals. If you missed it, I also recorded a great podcast with Eric LeFevre on this topic.

NYT: Millions of Movers Reveal American Polarization in Action - The big sort is real. People are moving to where there are others who share their political values.

New Content and Media Mentions

I was mentioned by Alastair Roberts, who wrote a response to my piece about choosing the right ladders to climb, Marvin Olasky, and American Reformer. I was also a guest on the King and Culture podcast.

I want to especially highlight my appearance on the American Reformer podcast talking about the old WASP establishment in America.

New this week:

• What Happens to Churches When Population Falls - How megachurches are like Tokyo

• What Happened When a Berkeley Feminist Had Three Sons - Sheluyang Peng reviews Ruth Whippman’s book BoyMom.

• My podcast this week was with Delano Squires of the Heritage Foundation with his take on the problems facing today’s men.

Subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Youtube, or Spotify.