On, Concordia?

I'm from one of those families in which attendance at Synodical schools is genetic; I knew from grade school that I was destined to go to Concordia (Seward, in our case). But I have mixed feelings about carrying on the tradition, for the following reasons.

When I went through (I graduated in 2000), there were two main divisions of piety on campus. The first was Absolutely None, which was extremely upsetting to me when I first got there at the height of my late adolescent Pietist phase. The second was Evangelical Pietist, which revolved around the creation and disintegration of praise bands and organizing carpools to the "good churches" (ie those with sufficiently awesome contemporary worship) in Lincoln. Neither of these is what I want for my kids.

There was near total liberalism among the professors, corresponding to their respective fields. The science department barely pretended to tow the line on creationism. The humanities were overrun with feminist and socialist rhetoric. Since professors care so deeply about students, they were very willing to go out of their way to inculcate these values into students' personal lives, especially when the poor confused young souls came looking for advice outside of the classroom. (Although the intersection of piety and professors was kind of amusing: on the one hand they seemed to endorse the contemporary worship thing as the proper anti-establishment position, churchwise--but that put them in the same political corner as all those Huckabee-votin' gun-totin' fag-hatin' knuckle draggers! What to do?)

Anti-clericalism was through the roof in the so-called church work programs. Everyone's a minister, except those jerks who formally claim the title and don't think that 20 year old interns in skin-tight bra tops who maybe had time to do a little of their Doc II reading between their last hangover and the next party, and other problematic character types, should be teaching confirmation classes.

Add these things to the ridiculous cost of admission followed by untold years of low wages from the church (for those who go into "church work," as many of the pious think they should) leading to interminable loan repayments and I really can't see the point. I'd rather send my kids to a state school where I can tell them flat out, "Don't listen to anything your professors tell you," and they won't naively expect good behavior from their fellow students. I don't want to have to make excuses for people who would choose a Lutheran school (and even a Lutheran profession) but act just as debaucherous as your standard heathen, or for professors who have vowed to uphold the Lutheran confessions but are all too willing to loan out selections from their pro-women's ordination libraries.

I'd rather leave my kids in the spiritual care of a campus Higher Things chapter than whatever LCMS church is across the street or in vogue among other students. I'd rather have my kids meet a potential spouse through Higher Things than any LCMS-sanctioned entity or event.

I can only speak for the Concordia I attended, but in talking to other relatively recent alums (and it also came up in the comments on Mollie's blog), I've learned that I'm not the only one leaning away from wanting Synodical college for my kids.