Bramadat, P. A. 2000. The Church on the World’s Turf: An Evangelical Christian Group at a Secular University. New York: Oxford University Press.
This book summarizes Bramadat’s findings based on his fieldwork with the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship chapter (IVCF) of McMaster University in Ontario, the largest such chapter in Canada. The IVCF has a membership of more than two hundred students on a campus of fourteen thousand. Bramadat argues that these evangelical students adopt different strategies for dealing with the “permeable membrane” between the evangelical world and the rest of McMaster campus, and the non-Christian world more generally. One strategy is a form of resistance. Using a “fortress strategy,” evangelicals seek to protect themselves from “threatening elements of the secular educational ethos, such as relativism, evolution, promiscuity, and alcohol consumption.” Another strategy is meant to link the evangelical and non-Christian worlds. Here, evangelicals might articulate their evangelical convictions and beliefs in a classroom discussion, though they often do so in a cautious manner. Ultimately, Bramadat finds that many of the evangelical students are “content to ‘live with the tension’ of being children of God in a godless institution.”
