D'Souza: Christians need to tackle secular culture from 'belly of Beast'

Author, apologist and former White House policy analyst Dinesh D'Souza has high hopes for The King's College in New York City.

The Catholic-raised evangelical, who was appointed Monday to serve as the school's president, wants to raise a generation of z.

Christian colleges today, he says, tend to "shelter students" from society's "toxic influence".

But as the president of The King's College, D'Souza wants to reverse that trend and "equip students" with "good reasons" for their faith, even while in "the middle of secular culture".

"I think I've shown an ability to navigate both worlds – the Christian world and the secular world," says D'Souza, a former policy analyst in the Reagan White House who has written best-selling novels, delivered addresses from prominent pulpits and lecture halls, and appeared in the media on numerous occasions.

"There are a number of Christian apologists, but some of them merely inhabit the Christian subculture," the India-born evangelical adds.

"[They] don't have any mainstream exposure at all. You'll never see them on CNN, you'll never read an article by them in USA Today, and I think the idea of The King's College is to do that – to prepare young Christians to be successful in the mainstream."

For years now, D'Souza has spoken out on a slew of topics including human nature, social policy and affirmative action, multiculturalism and the greatness of America, feminism, atheism, Islam, church-state separation, and same-sex marriage.

Author bestsellers such as Illiberal Education and What's So Great About America, D'Souza has been called one of the "top young public-policy makers in the country" by Investor's Business Daily, one of America's most influential conservative thinkers by the New York Times Magazine, and one of the country's most prominent Asian Americans by Newsweek.

On Monday, D'Souza was tapped as the fifth president of The King's College, which seeks to educate students to bring competitive Christian ideas to positions of leadership in the institutions of government, civil society, media, law, education, business, the arts, and the church.

The Campus Crusade for Christ-supported school is currently listed by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute as one of the top 50 colleges for conservatives. Last year, the school was included in the list of top conservative colleges by the Young America's Foundation.

"Our goal at The King's College is to prepare intellectually-gifted students to transform society by preparing them for careers in which they help to shape and eventually to lead strategic public and private institutions," remarked D'Souza after his appointment as president. "We love it when our graduates bring transformation to the key institutions of society-business, law, politics, academia and media."

As a model for the type of institution D'Souza envisions for The King's College, the apologist looks to Ivy League schools, most of which started as effective, influential, Christian schools but "sadly" lost their Christian traditions.

"Where Dartmouth left off, that supplies my model for King's," says D'Souza, using his alma mater as an example. "I don't see why we can't have a first rank academic institution in the middle of the secular city."

And it is D'Souza's hope that from The King's College will come men and women who will be the "salt and light" of today's culture and who do more to defend their faith than just "scoring points."

"I've seen Christians debating Christopher Hitchens bring 40 books and make the ontological argument, make the cosmological argument, but Hitchens just laughs it off, makes good jokes, and at the end of the evening, Christians think Hitchens is super cool and the Christian comes off as fuddy duddy," recalls D'Souza, referring to the popular atheist author whom he, himself, has debated ten times.