Westmont College, a “feeder school” to the upper ranks of the Christian conservative movement.

[Recursion]

http://killingthebuddha.com/mag/dogma/ditto-boys/

Westmont’s motto is “Christus Primatum Tenens,” or, “Holding Christ Preeminent.” Some call it the Wheaton of the West, after Wheaton College in Illinois, which likes to consider itself “the Harvard of evangelicalism.” Its liberal arts faculty is distinguished and its students generally affluent, many of them drawn from the wealthier suburbs of Southern California. Not Ben. He’d been raised, he said, “behind the redwood curtain” of rural Northern California. His parents were Jesus freaks, hippies for Christ. In 1986 he went to Westmont to become a preacher, but he understood the job as something more like that of a druid, deciphering God’s works in nature, than that of a megachurch CEO.

Ben chose Westmont because his older brother had done a year there, and his divorced father lived in Santa Barbara. But his brother dropped out, his father found the college’s mix of aggressive conservatism and Christianity unsettling, and Ben found himself adrift in a campus culture that revolved around beach parties. Not long after he got there, a group of older students “sock and dimed” him: they scooped him up, drove him to the beach, stripped him naked, and left him with a sock to cover his crotch and a dime to make a phone call. Ben had no one to call. He found a couple making out on the beach—Westmont students, it turned out, in violation of campus policies forbidding sexual activity before marriage—and they drove him back to campus.

Ben’s father called the dean of students, but as Ben recalls the conversation, the dean had no sympathy for the 18-year-old. He told Ben’s father there were no rules against hazing. (There are now.) Ben’s father was shocked. “You don’t allow dancing,” he said, “but hazing’s ok?” The dean’s answer, Ben’s father said, was a chuckle and a “Yep.”

Ben didn’t go to the beach much after that. Instead, he went hiking. He could walk off the campus and right into the Santa Ynez Mountains. When he got to Westmont, they were brown and crackling, ready to ignite, a condition Californians refer to as “golden.” As the semester progressed, green crept up the hill from the well-irrigated campus. It reminded Ben of fertile Humboldt County. He’d finish classes and set off by himself and walk for hours, thinking about the usual things, girls, and grades, and being lonely, and also Christian things, theology and God and the pressing problem of creation. He’d wanted at one point to be a physicist, but geology was more his speed. He loved the stories of mountains rising and falling and shifting and colliding, the quiet grandiosity of the earth in motion. But the stories made him uneasy, too. They nudged him toward questions he’d never had to ask and to which he had no answers. If the fossil record chronicled life emerging from a primordial soup, what did that mean for the truth of Adam and Eve?

[JayhawkSD]

1. My wife is a Westmont College graduate.

She goes to a Unitarian church, works as a human resources counselor and conducts a part-time personal therapy practice. She is without question the least selfish or territorial person I have known, and she spends the entire year getting "just the right" Christmas present for everybody she knows, including co-workers. She takes more delight in giving presents than the average ten tear old takes in receiving them.

She not only voted for Obama twice, she campaigned for him in both elections and is still contributing to his political fund.

Just sayin'.