Pensacola Christian College

At the time I attended, I beleived all the fundamentalist doctrines, but now that I am older and wiser I no longer want to be religious at all. I wish I had known then what I know now.

This is not bitterness. It is a reaction to PCC's violation of the most important principles on which societies stand: disagreement. Freedom of speech, travel and association are made out to be not really important to the God of the Bible. Good colleges do not have the intellectual "inbreeding" that is enforced at Christian colleges. The key distinction between education and indoctrination is hearing from all sides of a controversial issue, not just an edited, spin-doctored representation of the other sides as you would hear from PCC.

PCC has no real system for redress of grievances against the authorities, which is another violation of basic human dignity. The college has been built as a way to insulate the administration from accountability by censoring legitimate challenge and criticism. Those who criticize them are accused of criticizing God. Supposedly they are accountable to "God." I am ashamed that I fell for something so transparently self-serving.

The rules are for the purpose of advertising. The college promotes a make-believe image that will appeal to backwards church-going parents of potential students: the kind of parents who would send their children to four years of a gestapo police state. My years there were full of anxiety from constantly struggling to remember and follow the labyrinth of written and unwritten rules.

Since PCC is a surveillance society of phone-tapping, mail-opening, secret search and seizure, and reporting on each other, showing authentic individuality is risky. Everyone must conform to the facade of "spiritual victory" or else they are suspected of not being "fully supportive of our policies or standards," in the words of one expulsion letter.

As people grow, we become responsible for developing virtue. With that responsibility comes the right to differences of conscience in as many matters as society can sustain. But PCC takes away both the right and the responsibility, because they believe that if a student says, does, or is something that they don't agree with, then they are somehow complicit.Perhaps Biblical values are inconsistent with the values that I am defending here. If so, then so much the worse for the Bible. That is the most valuable thing I learned from my experience at PCC.