A Conservative's Guide to Seminary: What I Learned at Yale Divinity School

I chose to attend Yale Divinity School knowing exactly what I was walking into. I had read William Buckley’s indictment of the institution written seventy years earlier. I knew the place was progressive—intellectually, theologically, and politically. I applied anyway, not despite those facts but because of them. I wanted my faith tested. I wanted to know whether what I believed could survive sustained contact with the strongest arguments on the other side. This guide is for anyone considering the same path—or wondering whether such a path even makes sense in the first place.

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Is Yale Divinity School Conservative?

Let me begin with the most direct question first: No. Yale Divinity School is not a conservative institution. Not theologically, not politically, not institutionally.

The statistics alone tell part of the story. According to data from the Buckley Institute at Yale, Yale Divinity School faculty skew heavily progressive, with over 87 percent identifying as Democrats and essentially zero percent identifying as Republicans. The broader Yale faculty numbers are similar: 82.3 percent Democrat, with a faculty ratio of 36 Democrats for every Republican. In a school of roughly 100 students per entering class, I was likely the only—or among perhaps two or three—openly self-identified conservatives.

I have written elsewhere in detail about this data, but the point here is not to single out Yale for criticism. This is the reality of elite divinity schools across the country. What matters for prospective students is understanding the terrain you are entering and what that actually means for your education.

It means that the default frame in the classroom—the lens through which Scripture is read, theology is debated, and church history is analyzed—is progressive. It means that conservative theological interpretations, while perhaps discussed, are rarely presented by faculty who actually believe them. It means that if you hold orthodox Christian convictions on issues like sexuality, abortion, or the proper ordering of society, those convictions will be subjected to intense pressure. And it means you will need to be deliberate about finding resources and community to sustain your faith while you are there.

But here is what it does not mean: it does not mean you will be maliciously attacked for holding conservative views. It does not mean you cannot get a world-class theological education. And it does not mean that attending a progressive seminary as a conservative student is a mistake.

In fact, the opposite may be true.

What to Expect as a Conservative Seminary Student

Walking into a classroom at Yale Divinity School for the first time as a self-identified conservative is a peculiar experience. You are, from the standpoint of many of your peers and professors, something between an intellectual curiosity and a moral concern. People are not always unkind about it, but you are aware that you are being regarded through a particular lens.

In my first semester, I took a World Christianity class. The course began with a lecture on the history of mission work—a necessary subject and an important one. But the frame through which it was presented was entirely one of colonialism, oppression, and cultural displacement. Mission work was discussed almost exclusively as a vehicle of Western domination. That is not a false frame—Western missions did sometimes serve as the cultural arm of colonialism, and that history deserves to be examined critically. But the possibility that missionaries might have been motivated by genuine faith, that they might have conveyed something of real value along with their cultural baggage, that Christianity itself rather than its cultural packaging might have met real human needs—these possibilities were not seriously entertained.

This is what I have called elsewhere the “oppression obsession”—the tendency to filter every historical event, every theological question, every text through a single analytical lens: who has power and who is marginalized, and how can the structures of domination be dismantled. That lens is not without value. Oppression is real, it has shaped history, and Christian theology must account for it. But when it becomes the only question worth asking, when it crowds out other legitimate approaches to Scripture and tradition, something has been lost.

You should expect to encounter this regularly. You should also expect to find that much of what passes for “progressive” theology at places like Yale is, in fact, quite thin. It is fashionable. It is politically serviceable. But it often lacks the intellectual depth and rigor of serious theological work. You will read Augustine and Aquinas, the Church Fathers and the Reformers. You will encounter thinkers who took their theological work seriously enough to argue about it for decades, to change their minds when evidence demanded it, to hold complexity and mystery as virtues rather than problems to be solved. And you will notice that many of your progressive peers and some of your progressive professors have not done the same reading, have not developed the same intellectual discipline, and are operating at a fundamentally different level of theological sophistication.

This is not to say that progressive theology cannot be serious or intellectually rigorous. It can be, and some of it at Yale is. But the default posture is not one of serious inquiry—it is one of settled conviction.

You should prepare yourself for this. Read deeply. Come to class prepared to engage seriously with the material. Be willing to argue, but argue on the grounds of evidence and logic rather than assertion and emotion. And understand that your role, in some sense, is to be a living reminder that not everyone in the room accepts the ambient progressivism as obviously correct.

The Benefits of Attending a Progressive Seminary

This might sound strange given everything I have just said, but there are genuine advantages to being a conservative student at a liberal seminary. I chose Yale for exactly these reasons, and I would do so again.

First, you will be forced to think. You cannot coast at a place like Yale. You cannot simply repeat the orthodoxies of your upbringing and expect them to go unchallenged. Your professors will challenge you. Your peers will challenge you. The intellectual culture of the place demands that you know why you believe what you believe, that you can articulate it clearly, and that you can defend it against serious objections. This is exhausting. It is also invaluable.

I spent my undergraduate years at Ouachita Baptist University, a fine Christian college where evangelical faith was largely assumed. I spent law school at the University of Arkansas where such questions simply did not arise. But at Yale Divinity, I had to actually think through my faith. I had to read sources I disagreed with and take seriously what they had to say. I had to discover which of my inherited convictions could withstand scrutiny and which needed revision. Some of my beliefs have been strengthened by this process. Others have been genuinely reformed.

That is education, properly understood. It is not catechesis. It is not confirmation in your existing convictions. It is the difficult work of subjecting your thinking to rigorous examination and emerging either with refined understanding or with necessary correction.

Second, you will develop genuine friendships across profound intellectual divides. One of the remarkable things I discovered at Yale was that people with genuinely different theological and political convictions could nonetheless be kind to one another, could listen to one another, and could value one another as human beings. This is rarer than it should be. In a culture increasingly bifurcated into hostile camps, the experience of sitting across a table from someone who disagrees with you profoundly and finding that person to be thoughtful, good-hearted, and worth knowing—this is a gift.

I have written about this as one of the real advantages of finding yourself as a minority voice in an institution. It is much harder to hate someone when you know them personally. It is much harder to dismiss someone’s intellectual tradition when you have spent time in conversation with that person and found them to be intelligent and sincere.

Third, you will gain access to elite theological resources and instruction. Yale Divinity School draws some of the finest theological minds in the country. The library is extraordinary. The breadth of courses available is vast. You can study with scholars who have spent their careers on questions that matter—Church history, biblical exegesis, systematic theology, ethics, comparative theology. These opportunities are not available everywhere, and they are worth taking seriously.

The fact that some of these scholars are theologically progressive does not diminish the quality of their scholarship. They are still serious thinkers, still rigorous scholars, still worth learning from. And there is something valuable about learning from scholars you disagree with. You learn to see how intelligent people arrive at different conclusions. You learn the arguments they find most persuasive. You learn to distinguish between their real positions and the caricatures you might have heard in more conservative spaces. This is how you become a better thinker.

How to Thrive as a Conservative at a Liberal Seminary

If you decide to attend a progressive seminary as a conservative student, you cannot simply show up and hope for the best. You need a strategy. Here is what I learned:

First, find your community. This is essential. For me, this meant engaging with the Buckley Program at Yale, which provided a sustained community of conservative fellows, visiting lecturers, and intellectual resources. It meant attending theBuckley dinners, where I could discuss serious ideas with peers who shared my conviction that conservatism was worth taking seriously as an intellectual and moral position.

If your school does not have such a program, you need to create one or find one elsewhere. This might mean seeking out faculty who share your convictions (they exist—they are just often quiet). It might mean finding a vibrant evangelical campus ministry or conservative student group. It might mean building relationships with graduate students in other programs who can provide intellectual companionship. The key is that you need people around you who remind you that the progressive consensus is not inevitable, that conservatism has intellectual resources worth engaging, and that you are not crazy for believing what you believe.

Second, read widely and deeply. Do not rely on your seminary courses alone to shape your theological thinking. Read the great conservative theological traditions: Augustine and Aquinas, the Reformed tradition, the Anglican divines, contemporary conservative theologians. Read political philosophy: Hayek, Oakeshott, Michael Polanyi. Read the best defenses of Christian orthodoxy. Read the sources that your progressive professors dismiss as outdated or problematic. Form your own judgments about whether those dismissals are warranted.

This is not because your professors are wrong—some of them are quite right about specific issues. It is because intellectual independence requires that you do your own reading, that you form your own convictions, and that you are not simply shaped by the intellectual environment you happen to inhabit.

Third, engage seriously with the material even when you disagree. This cannot be emphasized enough. If you are going to be a credible conservative voice in your classroom, you have to do the work. You have to read carefully. You have to understand the scholarly arguments on all sides. You have to write papers that are rigorous, well-researched, and intellectually serious. You cannot simply assert your positions. You have to defend them.

This is partly pragmatic—sloppy thinking will be quickly exposed in a rigorous academic environment. But it is partly principled too. If you genuinely believe what you believe, then it deserves rigorous defense. And if you cannot mount a rigorous defense of your position, then perhaps that is a signal that you need to think about it more carefully.

Fourth, remain open to genuine intellectual growth. Do not simply circle the wagons and protect your existing convictions. Some of what you believe may need correction. Some of your assumptions may be provincial or uninformed. You came to a seminary like Yale partly to be challenged, so be willing to be challenged. This does not mean abandoning your convictions. But it does mean being willing to refine them, to acknowledge where you have been wrong, and to integrate insights from traditions different from your own.

I came to Yale as an evangelical, a Republican, and relatively confident about my basic theological positions. I leave with my evangelicalism significantly reformed, my political convictions refined and complicated, and with a much deeper appreciation for traditions—particularly Catholic and Orthodox theology—that I had previously dismissed or misunderstood.

Yale Divinity School Political Diversity: The Data and What It Means

One of the most surprising things I discovered during my time at Yale was that data existed documenting the political composition of the faculty. The Buckley Institute has conducted surveys showing the dramatic skew in faculty composition across major American universities. Yale’s divinity faculty, as noted above, is overwhelmingly progressive.

But numbers can obscure as much as they illuminate. What matters more than the raw statistics is what this composition means for how theology is done. It means that certain questions are assumed to be settled. It means that progressive theological methodology is treated as the obvious approach to Scripture and tradition. It means that students never encounter faculty who think like Robert Gagnon, or R.R. Reno, or Alasdair MacIntyre actually believe in these things. They might read them—critically—but they will not sit under a professor who takes their work seriously as more than a historically interesting but ultimately superseded position.

This has consequences. It means that students who arrive at seminary with conservative convictions will find few mentors to help them develop those convictions more deeply. It means that conservative intellectual traditions are treated as outsiders to the ongoing conversation. And it means that the institution fails at one crucial aspect of its educational mission: the cultivation of intellectual diversity as a good in itself.

But this should not scare you away from attending if that is what you discern. It should simply prepare you for the terrain.

The Buckley Program and Finding Community

During my time at Yale, the most formative intellectual experiences happened not in the classroom but in the context of the Buckley Program. Through the Buckley Fellowship, I met other conservative students across Yale’s schools. I attended dinners with visiting speakers. I heard and met intellectuals like Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, whose presence and conversation reminded me that the conservative intellectual tradition was alive and serious.

If your school has a similar program, engage with it. If it does not, it is worth asking why not—and whether the institution’s commitment to diversity is as genuine as it claims to be.

The Buckley Program is not a safe space where conservatives can hide from disagreement. It is the opposite. It is a deliberate effort to bring serious conservative thought into dialogue with the broader campus. But it is also a lifeline—a space where you can develop your thinking without having to justify your fundamental premises every time you open your mouth.

Would I Recommend It?

This is the question I am most often asked. Would I recommend that a conservative student attend a liberal seminary like Yale?

The answer is: it depends.

If you are firmly grounded in your faith, intellectually curious, willing to work hard, and able to handle being a minority voice in your community—then yes, I would recommend it. You will get a superb education. You will be challenged and refined. You will develop relationships across genuine intellectual divides. You will leave knowing not just what you believe but why you believe it, and you will have thought seriously about whether those beliefs can withstand scrutiny.

But I would not recommend it if you are fragile in your faith, if you lack intellectual conviction, if you are primarily seeking spiritual formation rather than rigorous theological study, or if you need your beliefs simply affirmed rather than examined. There are excellent Christian seminaries that will serve those needs better. And there is no shame in choosing them.

The key is to be honest about what you are seeking and what kind of environment will best serve those goals. Yale Divinity School is excellent at what it does. It is not for everyone. But for those for whom it is a good fit, it is an extraordinary place to study, to think, and to have your faith both tested and strengthened by sustained encounter with first-rate theological minds and a tradition of serious Christian scholarship.

I came to Yale as a conservative because I wanted to know whether my faith was real or merely inherited. I leave having discovered that it is both—inherited from a tradition rich with wisdom and truth, but also genuinely my own because I have had to think through it carefully and choose to hold it deliberately rather than simply by habit.

That, finally, is what a good seminary education offers: not comfort but clarity, not certainty but the kind of reasoned confidence that comes from having your deepest convictions tested and found, on balance, to be true.

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Related Reading:

• Conservatives at Yale Divinity School — My first-semester reflections on being a minority voice at YDS
• Viewpoint Diversity at Yale Divinity School — How political homogeneity shapes the intellectual environment
• The Buckley Program at Yale: Intellectual Diversity on a Progressive Campus — The community that sustained my intellectual development
• Yale Divinity School Political Diversity: The Data — Buckley Institute data on faculty composition
• Cancel Culture at Yale Divinity School — Why institutional consensus can become corrosive
• God and Man at Yale Divinity School — How I applied and what I found