Onward Christian Scholars
By MOLLY WORTHEN
September 30, 2007

EVERY FRIDAY AFTERNOON in Moscow, Idaho, a strange commotion overruns Main Street. A stream of young men and women parade down the sidewalk, wearing black academic gowns that billow and flap as they walk. Some pore over Latin textbooks or thumb flashcards of ancient Greek vocabulary, nearly tripping at the curb. They are students at New St. Andrews College on their way to disputatio, a weekly assembly held in a movie theater downtown. The college itself has no room large enough to accommodate all 150 students at once: it occupies a single unassuming brick building a few blocks away, one that a stranger might mistake for the refurbished husk of an old savings and loan. Passers-by on their way to the Pita Pit or Hodgins Drug barely give the students a second glance. Not a few residents, however, have fought hard to keep them out of downtown. Founded in 1994 by the elders of a fast-growing and radically conservative church, New St. Andrews represents a new philosophy of evangelical education — one that has inspired a national movement and makes local liberals nervous.

The students and teachers call what they are doing “classical Christian education.” They believe it’s much more than memorizing Latin declensions and Aristotle’s principles of rhetoric, though they do plenty of that. Doug Wilson, 54, the pastor who spearheaded New St. Andrews’ founding, puts the college’s purpose simply: “We are trying to save civilization.” He’s not alone in his mission. The C.C.E. movement began in the early 1980s among Protestant evangelical private schools and home-schoolers who scorned most conservative Christian colleges, which were long on classes in business management and Bible prophecy but short on history, literature and ideas. Now the movement boasts a host of home-schooling associations and curriculum companies, more than 200 private schools and college programs around the country. Evangelicals at New St. Andrews are using dead languages and ancient history to reinvent conservative Protestant education. As Matthew McCabe, an alumnus, puts it, “We want to be medieval Protestants.” the rest