Email Of The Day

A reader writes:

Andrew, two things:

First, it is indeed true that Asians dominate Christian groups at elite US colleges. At Williams, my friends and I lived in a suite opposite six or seven Christian, Asian girls, very sweet and demure and renunciatory of things of This World: I know it bothered them living with four more or less Wild Men (like the figure of medieval popular mythology) who were constantly smoking pot, shouting, and carrying machetes (we used to play a game called Machete Ball, very wasteful and American; it's pretty much baseball except one uses fruit for the balls and a machete for the bat -- quite satisfying). Or rather, I do tend to think that along with the disapproval, there was a genuine amount of fear, which is not unreasonable.

So that statistic rings true.

Secondly, Harvard was not an evangelical institution in the 17th C., it was only in the 18th C., with the Great Awakening, that what we know as Evangelicals really came on the scene. The 17th Century types were much more grim and bloody-minded Calvinists, Cotton Mather style.

Sorry to be pedantic, but New England 17th and 18th C. History is my specialty.

That and machete ball.