This study investigated the claim that some of the academically best evangelical colleges are in the process of secularizing. An instrument was developed which differentiated between evangelical and more liberal positions on religious, social, and political issues. Faculty attitudes were measured as representative of a particular college's position.;In Phase I, the DISCRIMINANT Program of the SPSS produced a predictor equation based on those questionnaire items which best discriminated between a stratified, random sample of faculty at known evangelical colleges and a similar sample at known secularized, church-related institutions. Validity of the instrument was shown as 94.59% of the evangelical professors were correctly pre-classified, as were 93.94% of their counterparts.;In Phase II, the predictor equation was applied to the responses of faculty at each of 15 colleges qualifying as the best evangelical institutions. Accordingly, 9 of these colleges were declared to be consistent with their evangelical claim and 5 were classified as secularized. One college was eliminated from the study due to a low response rate. A comparison for significant difference at the .05 level from the national evangelical mean of Phase I was made on those colleges declared by the predictor equation to be evangelical. Each of the 9 passed this test. Thus, since 35.71% of those colleges claiming to be evangelical were shown to be more alike the attitudes held by faculty at secularized, church-related institutions, it was concluded that the claim of secularization among the academically best evangelical colleges had empirical support. The variable of one's attitude toward the Bible proved to be a watershed issue in this analysis of secularization.;It was recommended that the evangelical community hold their colleges accountable, lest the trend eventually impact the larger evangelical movement. In addition, policy-makers at evangelical colleges were encouraged to continue hiring the best qualified evangelical faculty candidate, and to place greater emphasis upon the faculty members' continued spiritual growth. In short, the claim of evangelical colleges to center on God and the integration of faith and learning needs to be more actively pursued.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:wm.edu/oai:scholarworks.wm.edu:etd-1664 |
| Date | 01 January 1985 |
| Creators | Wilson, William Arthur |
| Publisher | W&M ScholarWorks |
| Source Sets | William and Mary |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects |
| Rights | © The Author |
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