Some years ago I was a teaching assistant for a course on St. Augustine’s Confessions, one of my favorite books. It turned out to be one of the most discouraging experiences of my life. The fault was not Augustine’s, and in some way not even the students’, but the horrible sham of an education that the students had acquired somewhere in their past.

What masqueraded as “critical thinking” was in fact the cheapest and dumbest form of deconstructionism imaginable. Its underlying principle seemed to be: “Whatever sincerely-held, deeply thought-out ideals you may have, I can pierce and deflate in an instant with my nasty-minded reductions, pieced together from a shallow acquaintance with Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, without anything like adequate evidence, because suspicion always trumps fact.”

Here are some gems from that class. After reading the story of the pear tree, wherein Augustine exposes the terrible human love of transgression for its own sake, a bright-and-shiny, sure-to-be-moderator-of-the-General-Assembly-someday young man flung out his hands in perplexity at the whole thing. “But they weren’t even good pears,” he said. Since the proper owners couldn’t benefit from them, there was no real harm done in the theft. That was the sum total of his reflection on the account. I imagine Calvin was rolling in his grave at this paragon of his theological progeny. Other students judged that Augustine exaggerated the story sheerly to enhance his own present standing as a bishop, showing off his prodigious conscience in his early years. The notion that age might confer greater wisdom and insight into one’s own past, or that conversion to the gospel might make grave what a pagan can take lightly, was never suggested.

Then we got to the death of Augustine’s beloved friend. I invited comments, and the first one was: “I can only infer that Augustine was gay.” This view was generally adopted by the class. The agonized confession of Augustine’s uncontrollable promiscuity with females was deemed insufficient to override this view, until, after entirely too long a discussion in this vein, one woman suddenly said: “You know, none of us think it’s possible for two men to be good friends without it being sexual. I have a lot of dear female friends, but I don’t know any men with dear male friends.” It was the first time in the course—a number of weeks into it—that it ever occurred to anyone to let Augustine judge the present instead of the other way around. It was also perhaps the only time this actually happened. (Incidentally, please note my grievance at this episode was not the supposed tarnishing of Augustine’s halo with the suggestion that he was homosexual, but the flat inability to read a text for what it means to say, preferring instead a shallow interpretation projected onto it.)

It would be tedious to recount all the other tone-deaf misreadings that ensued over the course of the semester—and, I should add, by otherwise smart and well-meaning students. On the final day, I invited the students to share what they had gained from reading the Confessions. (Surely an act of evangelical hope if ever there was one.) One student dismissed him with this sentence: “I can’t trust Augustine because he was in bed with the state.” Again, that was it; one of the great Latin fathers, for that matter one of the cornerstones of Western civilization, got tossed out in service of some inane and inarticulate notion of political purity.

Poor students. Somewhere along the line they were massively betrayed by the elders who saw fit to bestow this educational system upon them. I would like to think that, if they were pursuing careers in the church at all, they did, deep down, desire something better than this half-baked parody of critical thought. But without something like an intellectual conversion—and heaven only knows if any opportunity for that will present itself in the rest of their lives—they’ll have little choice but to betray, in turn, the noble tradition of well-educated, well-read, thoughtful clergy whose task was to be curators of the vast accumulated wisdom of the church. With reasoning skills this poor, such students will certainly not be ideal representatives of modern progress (when it really is progress) either. It is hard to imagine how, in such circumstances, the pulpit can ever be anything but a soapbox for the pastor’s pet causes, for ultimately the inability to read will demote the word of God to just another one of the competing voices in the marketplace.