What’s the concerned Christian teen — who seeks a college that’s unwoke, religious, classical, and affordable — to do? Aren’t small colleges, even those with religious roots and names, disappearing? And isn’t the cost of an undergrad degree equivalent to a McMansion mortgage?

Despair being a sin — a tenet often recited by this magazine’s founder, the author of God and Man at Yale — consider this welcome news for the matriculant of faith: There are indeed colleges, very good colleges, that check your boxes and are worthy of your consideration.

Here is a quartet, subjectively chosen (by a Catholic!) as examples of attention-deserving Protestant colleges — accredited, decidedly non-nominal, anchored in unembarrassed faith, and determined to offer education that is excellent and affordable when compared with the all-in cost of private schools, which can top $100,000 annually.

The best known of the four may be Patrick Henry College (PHC), based in Purcellville, Va., and brandishing the motto “For Christ and Liberty.” Founded in 2000 by homeschooling champion Michael Farris, the nondenominational institution is “dedicated to bringing honor and glory to the Lord Jesus Christ in all of its activities” by preparing “Christian men and women who will lead our nation and shape our culture with timeless biblical values and fidelity to the spirit of the American founding.”

PHC doesn’t mince words regarding its bedrock: All students, faculty (highly regarded), and staff must sign a statement of faith holding that there is a triune God, that Jesus, “born of a virgin, is God come in the flesh,” and that the Bible is “inerrant” and “the only infallible and sufficient authority for faith and Christian living.” As for Satan, he “exists as a personal, malevolent being who acts as tempter and accuser, for whom Hell, the place of eternal punishment, was prepared, where all who die outside of Christ shall be confined in conscious torment for eternity.”

Education is as serious as faith: PHC boasts a rigorous program — a classical liberal-arts education trivium with “emphasis on knowledge (grammar), understanding (logic), and application (rhetoric),” all taught from an “unwavering Christian worldview” — that it says is competitive with curricula at the Ivies and ensures that graduates will “possess a profound appreciation for our country and the liberty it provides.”

All this in 2024–25 for just $37,800. That’s little more than Virginia’s public universities. And while private-school tuition has risen on average nearly 36 percent since 2015, PHC has kept its rate of increase to a mere 1.7 percent.

One final boast for this school that takes no federal funds: PHC students regularly triumph at the National Moot Court Competition, and four graduates to date have become Supreme Court clerks.

Heading west: Another school worth contemplating is New College Franklin (NCF), based outside of Nashville. Founded in 2006, it emerged from brainstorming by a handful of concerned Christian scholars, led by Gregory Wilbur, who “wrestled through the particulars of what a revival of the seven classical liberal arts could look like in an intentionally relational and mentoring environment.” The resulting institution describes itself as dedicated to “liberal arts under Christ” and blends a discussion- and tutor-model classroom setting (where “fellows” serve as “experienced guides to knowledge”), a great books curriculum, British-influenced “house” communities, and a focus on the trivium (mentioned above), the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy), and God — all so that students “will emerge with a stronger mind and soul that can know and enjoy God and His creation.”

Here, as the school’s website proclaims, faith motivates and is the purpose of schooling:

New College Franklin disciples students through the Liberal Arts for wisdom, virtue, and service. We believe that all knowledge is grounded and unified in the Lord God because He is the Creator and Source of all being. Our unique educational experience emphasizes this unity so that we may know God’s truth, cherish His goodness, and enjoy His beauty, drawing us toward man’s highest aim: the worship of God.

As colleges go, this one is small: NCF will have 60 students for the 2024–25 academic year, but a freshman class of 25. “It’s on pace to soon double the student body to 120,” says board member Brian Driskell. “And we expect realistic additional growth through this decade.”

That will be in spite of the school’s eschewing the return-on-investment (ROI) mind-set that has strong-armed pricey higher-ed schools (i.e., just about all colleges) into focusing on career training and graduate salaries. NCF castigates ROI genuflection as the “predominant mode of education in modernity” because the focus on utilitarian and “vocational-technical” ends leaves no room for contemplating traditional and essential questions such as “What is Truth?” and “Who is God?”

NCF encourages that contemplation. And it can stand fast by its old-school mind-set because of its extremely low cost of tuition: Only $13,800 for the coming academic year. That model will surely palliate angst over student-loan debt — at least in this happy little place in Tennessee.

Midwest-bound, mere blocks from the Minneapolis locus of the 2020 George Floyd riots, one finds another higher-ed jewel, Bethlehem College and Seminary (BCS), which promises “an education in serious joy.” With over 150 years of city roots and institutional precursors, BCS emerged in 2009 from the Bethlehem Institute. The Reformed Baptist institution — suited for conservative Evangelicals and, more so, those with “a reformed, Calvinistic theological perspective” — proclaims that it “exists to spread a passion for the supremacy of God in all things for the joy of all peoples through Jesus Christ by equipping men and women to treasure Christ above all things, to grow in wisdom and knowledge over a lifetime, and to glorify God in every sphere of life.”

It’s not your typical university’s mission, and if what BCS expresses sounds unusual, well, the school’s driving force, well-known theologian John Piper, agrees. Indeed, he calls BCS’s goal — where, in each student, four years of classical education will turn the soul and mind into a “supernova of worship, study, love, and service” — “very unusual.”

And it is unusual. Anchored in a close-knit house system, BCS has crafted a purposeful, classical “omnia” (Latin for “everything”) curriculum — the study of “Great Books in light of the Greatest Book for the sake of the Great Commission” — that extends the traditional college-core program of two years into three and “aims to recover the best of the Christian and classical liberal-arts traditions, examining the diversity of human knowledge under the unifying discipline of theology.”

The intimacy, the spirit, the courses, this self-acclaimed “extraordinary college environment”: Their blending and interplay, says Piper, mark BCS as “a golden opportunity” for the prospective college student.

Speaking of gold, sorta: BCS students can count on some of the lowest college costs in America. The school’s leadership is especially dedicated to raising funds so that those who enter into “life and ministry” can do so “without a burden of student-loan debt.” The remarkable Serious Joy Scholarship program reduces every student’s annual $18,000 tuition to only $8,000.

Even after factoring in the cost of housing and books, the estimated annual price of a classical Christian education at BCS is $14,000.

You read that right.

This journey concludes in Moscow, Idaho, a hep town — the University of Idaho is based there — that is home to a thriving Calvinist intellectual community that includes the Association of Classical Christian Schools and New Saint Andrews College (NSAC). Just 30 years young, NSAC is growing: Three hundred and nine undergrads are expected this fall term, with a record 103 incoming freshmen; a total of 400 concurrent students are expected within the next two years. Maybe that has to do with the school’s unvarnished mission “to graduate leaders who shape culture living faithfully under the Lordship of Jesus Christ.”

President Benjamin Merkle says that the school is pledged to offering “the highest quality undergraduate and graduate education in liberal arts and culture from a distinctively Christian and Reformed perspective” and says the endgame is “to create free, robust, leading men and women.” NSAC strives to accomplish that in part by offering the “most unique undergraduate language study in the world,” as its website puts it. Students are taught “to speak and compose in classical languages” — Hebrew, Greek, and Latin — at NSAC and receive a rigorous education in all the classical subjects. There is also a focus on music literacy. (“Because we understand what music is in light of who God is, we want to nurture a love of music that emulates truth, beauty, and goodness in our community, our nation, and our world.”)

That’s a great tune. Great, too, is the price tag for what NSAC hails as “a premium product.” Averse to “the bloat in higher education, where inflated costs that rely on federal grants and loans often exist alongside coursework of little substance,” NSAC’s leadership keeps tuition at $16,800, a figure “very close to that of the ten least expensive private colleges in the nation.” Recognizing that “our students and families are hard-working,” NSAC forgoes “excess amenities” that Merkle mocks as “Big Ed”: “lazy rivers, hot tubs, gym memberships, and stadiums.” None, he says, are “really necessary for a true education that focuses on students’ studying great books with mature mentors.”

Far more schools than these four Christian colleges offer classical educations and the vigorous formation of faith at prices that seem to be from generations past. God and man may not be buddies at Yale, but they’re BFFs elsewhere. Seek, and ye shall find.