 Upon his return to the United States, Matthews enrolled in Drew University, a private United Methodist–affiliated institution in New Jersey, where he studied languages at the graduate level, including Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, Sanskrit, and Persian.During this interval, Matthews was influenced by the social gospel movement in American Christianity, which emphasized the application of Christian ethics towards the solution contemporary social problems.It was through this searching for answers to the social issues of the day, such as militarism, poverty, and racism, that Matthews was exposed to the ideas of political radicalism for the first time.