Job listings are starting to trickle out, a few of which require statements of faith. My reading of Mendelssohn earlier this summer makes me very skeptical of the whole concept, particularly as the statements get longer and longer (I’ve seen statements of faith so detailed that not even the most hardened fundamentalist could necessarily agree to literally all of it). I understand that a faith-based institution wants to have everyone on the same page, given that one of the major appeals of a faith-based school is that the students presumably will not “lose their faith,” and I understand how making everyone sign onto a statement of faith might seem like a good filtering mechanism.
The problem, though, especially when the statements start to include more and more things that seem incidental or questionable, is that you’re basically filtering for people who are willing to compromise their convictions (i.e., “officially” deny something they either affirm or are open to) for the sake of their teaching calling or else lie about believing something that, at the gut level, they either don’t believe or don’t actually care about.
To me, the more efficient model would be to just prohibit instructors from contradicting certain key beliefs. You don’t want me to tell the students that there probably wasn’t a historical Adam and Eve? Fine, I can do that — I can’t imagine how it would even come up. You want me to always teach a certain book in the gen-ed theology course? Awesome — that way the students will easily be able to find used copies. It could reach a point where it becomes too constraining, but that point is probably further along than most people would assume.
Why this concern, though, for whether your faculty actually believes in the constraints? Why do we need to go that extra step from obedience to one’s employer (authoritatianism) to being made to affirm that we like obeying (totalitarianism)? Something similar is at work with the widespread trend toward discussing behavioral standards in terms of a “lifestyle covenant” or “community covenant” — as though the rules you have to follow to play a role in a given institution are some kind of holy ordinance established by God. For instance, I know people who teach at Nazarene schools who have no personal objection to drinking, but who follow the rules because that’s part of what being a faculty member at a Nazarene school entails. The language of “covenant” (as opposed to “rules”) seems to imply that being willing to obey an arbitrary rule isn’t good enough — you have to like it, too.
Every institution has goals it wants to achieve, and they should be able to require that faculty members contribute to those goals. Setting up standards and rules is totally acceptable, and saying “you can’t contradict the following beliefs in your teaching and you can’t violate these rules as part of your contract” would provide clear expectations and allow for clear standards as to whether everyone was complying. But going the next step and making people affirm that they’re agreeing to all this spontaneously, out of personal conviction — that’s just inviting people to lie. What kind of foundation is that for any kind of community?