Calvin College, ey?

From the daily White House Briefing Blog by Dan Froomkin.

"The Calvin College Rebellion"

I wrote in Friday's column that Bush will be giving a commencement address next month at Calvin College, a small Christian institution in Western Michigan, highly regarded for its contributions to evangelical intellectual thought.

I'm betting that most of you readers out there, like me, suspected that Calvin was picked at least in part to assure Bush a supportive audience -- as opposed to, say, what he might find at your typical Ivy League university. (The other commencement address he'll be giving will be at the U.S. Naval Academy.)

But we -- and possibly the White House -- may have been wrong.

On closer inspection, it turns out that Calvin College is not the bastion of the Christian Right it appeared to be. In fact, judging from my e-mail, it's a veritable hotbed of those other Christian values -- the ones that oppose war, work for social justice, and don't think much of the president at all.

Professor Kenneth Pomykala, chair of Calvin College's Department of Religion (and a regular White House Briefing reader!) wrote to me that some members of the community "are unhappy with Bush's visit because we believe that Christian values require public policies that seek social justice, compassion for the disenfranchised, human rights, a commitment to peace, care and preservation of the environment, and honesty, say, from political leaders -- in short, policies opposed to the Bush agenda."