Michaela Swedberg

Dr. Ken Myers is a studied individual, having taught at numerous institutions over the course of his career. He is currently head of the History Department and Chair for the Division of Humanities at Southern Wesleyan University. Dr. Myers plans yearly trips abroad for SWU students (the picture above comes from a previous excursion), and his 2018 trip will take SWU students to France.

ME: Firstly, what sparked your interest in history?

MYERS: Well… [looks away in thought] I was interested in it when I was younger and didn’t know I was.  As a child growing up and on through high school I read a lot.  I read every book in the library in my small school.  And I was interested in two areas.  Science, and I didn’t realize it, but I was interested in history as well.  So that was sort of the undetected current that was there. Then when I was in college I became a Christian in my freshman year and it really changed my life, changed my thinking, changed – well, I say changed my interests, but probably just brought forth interests that I didn’t realize were there. So as an undergraduate I majored in English because I couldn’t think of what else I wanted to do and I liked writing and reading and so on.

And then I felt the Lord calling me to Seminary so I went to Seminary after college. [I] wasn’t sure if I was going to be called into the pastoral ministry or anything of that sort, but I just knew I wanted to study theology and learn more about the faith and all that.  So I did.  And while I was at Seminary it was kind of interesting.  Some of the courses I was the most interested in were my church history classes.

Then I graduated from Seminary, got married, we moved half way across the country, and started jobs and all that.  And I found myself on my lunch breaks reading a lot of newspapers, magazines, articles, and so forth.  I was very interested in politics and very interested in the roots of how things got the way they were.  And so eventually I realized that my real passion was the intersection of politics, religion, and history, and how one’s worldview affects the political position one takes. Of course, all of that starts with one’s faith and how you answer the question: Who is God? Everything flows downstream from that. And I eventually realized that what I was really called to do was to teach history at the college level. I had taught high school English for a time and loved teaching but I didn’t care as much about teaching at the high school or middle school level. So I went back to graduate school, studied history, and the rest is history!

ME: How did you become a professor of history?  What prerequisites did you acquire?

MYERS: The minimum requirement teach history at the college level is a Master’s Degree.  But, because it is competitive, you would do better to earn a doctorate. There are some schools that state right out that they want someone with a PhD. So I said: If I’m going to do this, then I’m going to go all the way; and by that time I had a wife and child, and my wife was a real trooper for packing up and moving back into an apartment and supporting me while I went through Grad school. So that was a wonderful thing. I went all the way through and did the doctorate and started teaching.

ME: When did your faith first start to impact your teaching?

MYERS: As far as teaching history? Right from the start. As I was going through graduate school (I went to two big, secular state universities), and as I was learning and absorbing what was being offered there, I was also evaluating, analyzing, and seeing how it fit with the Christian faith and looking where the Christian worldview either accommodates this or is in opposition to it. So the whole time I was in graduate school I was evaluating and kind of putting the pieces together to see how these different ideas or schools of thought fit or didn’t fit within a Christian worldview.

ME: Describe your teaching style; specifically, how you incorporate Christianity into your lessons.

MYERS: Well, my teaching style: I used rutted methods, but my natural method is sort of a modified lecture, sort of a lecture dialogue where I’ll present to the class for a while and then present questions and invite the students to react to those questions and to dialogue about different ideas and different events and causes and effects over time. So that’s my preferred style, but I also use group discussions, debate format, have student presentations. So I use a variety of different things.

You also asked how I incorporate my faith into my teaching? Well, I try to say to myself and to the students in every class is: How would God think about this? How should we, as Christians, think about this?

So how does God see what we’re talking about here? And if He is truly sovereign, if he is truly overall and interested in all then you really can’t say that God’s not interested in World War I or that God’s not interested in the Great Depression or whatever. There is God’s view of that. So what we want to try to see is to see those things as He would see them and interact with them as He would. That’s my approach.

ME: Have you ever felt that it was necessary to modify your methods in the classroom in regards to a student’s beliefs that conflicted with yours?

MYERS: Well I have always tried to be accommodating to a variety of different perspectives, opinions, and so forth. I had been, particularly in graduate school, in situations where to be a Christian or to come from a traditional viewpoint or traditional perspective was different from my professor and a lot of the students, as a matter of fact. I’ve been in those classes where traditional ideas were not tolerated, were silenced, and it was made clear that they weren’t welcome. I resolved then that I was never going to create that kind of situation in my classroom. But also, stepping back into the broader view of things, its not really education if you’re not inviting questions and different points of view.  [Education] is entertaining ideas, evaluating them, and seeing which one is true. If all you’re getting is one perspective then that’s not a real education. That’s programming and propaganda. So from the start, I’ve tried to make it clear that I do have [my] perspective on things, but I always present the different schools of thought about different issues and topics. That’s the true essence of an education, and I hope that’s what the students are getting in my classroom.

ME: You said you’d been a student in an environment where religion could not be discussed in the classroom. Have you ever been a teacher in that environment? How did it affect your teaching and your faith?

MYERS: The first school I taught at was a secular school.  Now, it was a secular school in the south so the surrounding community was more accepting of the Judeo-Christian perspective, but it was still a state secular school. I didn’t start class with prayer like I do here, I didn’t overtly seek to tie whatever we were talking about into a Christian perspective, but also I didn’t run away from those ideas when they were a natural part of what we were studying. That gave me an opportunity to explore those aspects as much as I explored anything else and I think that’s the difference. We might not start class with prayer at a secular school, and I’m not going to openly witness to my faith in a secular class, but neither am I going to shy from it. The approach is to consider and approach religion and faith with as much attention and emphasis as you do economics, as you do politics, as you sociological factors, or whatever else because it is a legitimate part of history. Too many secular historians downplay it, leave it out, and ignore it. You are not being fair and honest with history when you do that.

ME: Do you think religion should be discussed more often in public schools? Should religious language between students and teachers be more or less censored?

MYERS: Oh, I don’t think it should be censored at all. Neither do we want to indoctrinate. Public schools should not be a place for indoctrination or propaganda or anything of that sort of thing for any cause. But going back to what I consider to be the very essence of education, it should be the free offering and examination of all kinds of different ideas. If we can’t do that, then we’re not really seeking truth. What we’re doing then is promoting one particular perspective, and that perspective may have flaws, may not be true, and, in fact, if it’s leaving things out then it isn’t true.

So, I don’t think there should be censoring of religious speech between teachers and students, between students and students, or any of that. I think teachers should be taught to allow students to present any legitimate idea or any idea within reason and to consider it. That includes religious ideas. Not that they’re propagating anyone or promoting religious propagation but if you’re truly a seeker of truth then you’re going to consider all ideas and evaluate them.

ME: Were there any specific professors, authors, or other significant figures in your life that encouraged you to pursue your career?

MYERS: When I first became a Christian in the spring of my freshman year I ran into and became friends with an older man who was in college. He was married and had a family, but they were living in the married housing while was getting his college degree. He was an older Christian, probably eight to ten years older than me. I came to know him and his wife and he really became the Paul to my Timothy. One of the things I learned from him was to see all of life through the lens of your Christian faith, in other words your Christian worldview. Now, that was something that had not been openly taught to me before. My mother was a Christian and she had a big influence on me, but she had not taught me that, precisely. I think he focused on that a lot more, and as I moved forward I kept that with me. Later, when I realized that history was what I was really called to, I took that same approach. How is it that God would see this? How do we put on that lens and see the world through those eyes? I feel that we should see history the same way.

ME: Excluding instances involving Christianity, what do you think was your greatest accomplishment as a history professor?

MYERS: I can think of two things I am proud of in my career. One was at the previous school I was at, Southeastern University in Florida. When I got there they had just a bare whisper of a history program. I would say it was a joke but it was too sad to be a joke. They had cobbled it together with courses from other programs. They had the history of math in there and the history of psychology—it really wasn’t a history degree. I went there as the only history professor in a school that was rapidly growing. I had to wrestle with, not my department chair, but the provost of the university to get him to agree to let me restructure this program and set it up for growth. So we did that and we brought in some additional faculty, and when I left that university the history program was much better, much bigger, was growing by leaps and bounds, and it was something you could be proud of. So I was pleased with that.

The second thing was when I came here. This history program was in better shape, but there were some things that needed to be changed to update it and to really bring it to where it needed to be.

So, I guess in my career, those are the two things that I’ve been proudest of. Some historians are great book writers, some are very active in professional organizations, some are called to do different things, but the Lord has called me to build, apparently.  I’m a builder. I’ve built two programs and that’s what I’m proud of.

ME: What about any disappointments you have encountered as a history professor?

MYERS: Disappointments… I’ve not experienced any big disappointments. Maybe there are things that I’ve not been able to do yet that I would like to do. There has been some good growth in our program here and I would like to see more. Not just in terms of numbers of students but also in terms of course offerings, and I would like to see more of our history majors go on to grad school. So those are some of the ‘not yet accomplished’ things that I’d like to see done. As far as disappointments, there aren’t many. Part of it’s being pleased with what we’ve been able to do, but part of it, too, is seeing it not as disappointments but just as things we haven’t been able to do yet.  I think we will do them, though.

ME: As a Christian professor, what was your greatest accomplishment?

MYERS: Well, I think I would name two things just right off the top of my head. One is developing an approach that genuinely helps students—and I’ve seen evidence of this—that genuinely helps students to see history from a Christian perspective and not to just see it as something divorced from any kind of perspective. It’s not just a pile of data that doesn’t mean anything. So that’s one accomplishment, truly getting students to see things from a Christian perspective.

Another—I’ll name three even though I only said there were two—another is having students who say, “You know, I never really liked history before but after taking your class I’ve changed my mind.” You can close the door and go home after that; you’ve done something!

Then the third thing is that I’ve had a few students along the way, even at my secular school where I taught, who, because of what we talked about in class and the witness that I had who had come to faith in Christ and they would come and tell me, “We talked about this in class and I just had this sense that God was calling me.” It was a tremendous thing!

ME: As a Christian professor, what were your biggest disappointments?

MYERS: I think—and again the last chapter hasn’t been written on this and its an ongoing situation—but that in recent years, the last ten years or so, I have seen in Christian schools, in general, an acceptance of worldly ideas and secular ideas that Christians formerly would not have accepted and would not have embraced. It’s also worrisome to me because it seems to me that we are watering down our faith when we do that. We are letting the world shape us rather than having the opposite impact, which is what we’re supposed to do and that is to transform our culture through Christ. So that has been something that has worried me and disappointed me, but like I said, I don’t think the end of that story has been written yet. It’s not something that is over and done but it does worry me and I’d like to see us reverse that trend.

ME: How do you plan to continue incorporating your faith into your teaching?

MYERS: I’m a big ideas kind of guy. I’m a big picture kind of person, and I like to step back and say, “Alright, what are the big organizing principles here? What are the big approaches?” and then let those principles guide what I do. That’s where I came up with my particular idea about incorporating my faith, and that is to ask the question: how would God think about this? How would God see this situation?

I’ve used that this point and I think it works pretty well. I’m going to continue using it in the future. I have not seen yet where that approach doesn’t work, and I’ve not seen a situation that tells me it has to be changed. To one degree or another, it’s been effective, so I guess the answer is that I’m going with that and continue doing it that way.