Otherness

Throughout the previous three chapters, I have introduced (i) the set of questions A I am asking in this book, (2) four members of the IVCF, and (3) the ways these believers communicate among themselves and with non-Christians. By now it should be clear that IVCF students often feel separated from their non-Christian peers and professors. Moreover, as I have explained, many IVCF students feel that McMaster privileges the beliefs, values, and worldviews associated with liberalism, pluralism, materialism, and permissivism. According to Reginald Bibby, this evangelical perception is largely correct: . . . Education stands out as an institution that not only has been strongly influenced by individualism and relativism but also has done much to legitimize the two themes. Indeed, the mark of a well-educated Canadian is that he or she places supreme importance on the individual while recognizing that truth is relative. To decry individual fulfilment or to claim to have found the truth would be a dead giveaway that one has not graced the halls of higher learning. (1990:71) . . . This situation marginalizes, alienates, or (to make a verb of an adjective) others evangelical students who generally do not embrace these traditions (or many core elements of these traditions). However, although it might appear that IVCF students would suffer unrelenting and agonizing psychological difficulties during their years at McMaster, the majority of IVCF members do not seem to share such an experience. On the contrary, most IVCF participants I met struck me as no less sane, healthy, contented, and well adjusted than the non-Christian students I have met during the many years I have spent in Canadian universities. In fact, I have found that, with a few exceptions, evangelicals at McMaster seem slightly “happier” than non-Christian students. This obviously unscientific impression is consistent with Frankel and Hewitt’s (1994) findings that involvement in religious groups during one’s university years is positively correlated with higher levels of physical and psychological “well-being.” This observation raises an obvious question: how do evangelicals retain these relatively high levels of psychological well-being in an institution that not only ignores their values and beliefs but also, according to IVCF students, often promotes “anti-Christian” principles? The main insiders’ (or “emic”) answer to this question is simply that well-being is a natural by-product of a personal relationship with God (Little 1988:38).