All about as controversial as Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, right? Guess again.

As The Wall Street Journal reported (“Fear of God in Harvard Yard,” Jan. 29, 1999), trouble began when a woman on the Undergraduate Council Election Commission asked some friends to pray for all the candidates, “but especially for Team King-Driskell,” whose message about community she believed was “vital for Harvard’s undergraduate population.”

For his part, King hadn’t sought her remarks — he didn’t even find out about them until the next day. The woman who made them resigned from the Commission. But it was too late: King was now suspected of Christianity.

Soon every freshman’s door was covered with a poster warning that King wanted Global Youth Connect — one of the community-building groups King had consulted — “to come and organize student life at Harvard.” But Global Youth Connect is a secular group, and as the Journal noted, “for [King’s] detractors that apparently didn’t sound scary enough.” So the poster added a quote from a totally unrelated group named Connect: “Our youth ministry exists to bring non-believers to Christ.”

Things went downhill from there. The Harvard Crimson newspaper jumped on the bandwagon, warning against the King campaign’s “ties to religious groups.” In the end, King — who, by the way, really is a Christian but never made a public issue of it — lost the election by 100 votes.

I don’t tell this story primarily to provoke outrage at lies or anti-Christian bigotry, though the story certainly has many outrageous aspects. I tell it because it reveals a lot about the type of hostility Christians can expect to contend with.

You often hear complaints that Christians have a “right-wing agenda,” that they plan to “force their religion on us,” that they’re “confrontational” or “divisive,” and so on. Yet whatever you think of such claims, it’s clear that none of them even remotely applied at Harvard. King’s campaign was by all measures gentle, respectful and devoid of controversial issues. If anything, King might fit the Journal’s description — “a good liberal communitarian.”

So what was the real problem? The perception that King and company might actually be Christians, and thus desire “to bring non-believers to Christ.”

It’s worth asking precisely what students feared this would mean. Did they seriously expect Team King to initiate mandatory church attendance or corner students on the quad for evangelism sessions? That’s hardly likely. At most, they probably thought King and others might speak about their Christian faith at some undefined time in the future.

But that prospect, I suspect, was bad enough. The reason is that Christianity is radically incompatible with the reigning postmodern etiquette.

If I play by today’s rules, I not only get to make up my own “truth” (“everyone has their own truth,” “whatever I choose to believe is true for me,” etc.); I also get to cry foul if anyone else has the temerity to contradict me by suggesting there’s such a thing as objective truth. After all, if such truth exists, then the beliefs I find convenient to adopt could be, well, wrong. And no one may dare tell me that; why, it’s an assault on my self-esteem — my inalienable right to feel good about myself at all times!

To people with that attitude, the very existence of Christianity is an affront, or even a threat. They know that Christianity claims to be true, and vitally important, to the point where the fate of our eternal souls rests on it. For all their fabled “tolerance,” they can’t tolerate that. The only Christianity they can bear is one that repudiates all those views — in short, that ceases to be Christian in anything but name.

These folk go well beyond disagreeing with Christianity. They loathe it, so much so that even the label of Christian on a Chris King — the antithesis of evangelical pushiness — is sufficient to set off alarm bells. No matter how nonthreatening he seems, there’s always the chance he might say something they don’t want to hear.

Christians facing this attitude may well be shaken by it, especially if (like many Christian college students) they’re running into it with an intensity they’ve never experienced before. Most people naturally want to be liked, and will try to hide or play down anything that seems likely to make them a target.

Yet Christ knew His followers would be unpopular in many circles, and called them to press on nevertheless. “If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first,” He told his disciples. “If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you” (John 15:18-19).