Van Inwagen and the Secular Academy

So I found this passage from Peter Van Inwagen's spiritual autobiographical essay Quam Dilecta extremely interesting, and extremely truthful:

"In 1980 or thereabouts, I began to experience a sort of pressure to become a Christian: a vast discontent with not being a Christian, a pressure to do something. Presumably this pressure was of the same sort that had led me to pray for faith on that one occasion ten years earlier, but this was sustained. This went on and on. My mind at the time is not readily accessible to me in memory. I wish I had kept a journal. I know that sneers directed at God and the Church, which--I hope I am not giving away any secret here--are very common in the academy, were becoming intolerable to me. (What was especially intolerable was the implied invitation to join in, the absolutely unexamined assumption that, because I was a member of the academic community, I would, of course, regard sneering at God and the Church as meet, right, and even my bounden duty.) I perhaps did not have anything like a desire to turn to Christ as my Savior, or a desire to lead a godly, righteous, and sober life, but I did have a strong desire t o belong to a Christian community of discourse, a community in which it was open to people to talk to each other in words like the ones that Lewis addresses to his correspondent in Letters to an American Lady. I envied people who could talk to one another in those terms. I know that I was becoming more and more repelled by the "great secular consensus" that comprises the world-view of just about everyone connected with the universities, journalism, the literary and artistic intelligentsia, and the enterta inment industry. I knew that, confused as I might be about many things, I was quite clear about one thing: I could not bear the thought of being a part of that consensus. What made it so repulsive to me can be summed up in a schoolyard cri de coeur: "They think they're so smart!" I was simply revolted by the malevolent, self-satisfied stupidity of the attacks on Christianity that proceeded from the consensus."