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"The Soul Of The American University: From Protestant Establishment To Established Nonbelief," by George M. Marsden (Oxford, 462 pp.; $35, hardcover). Reviewed by Roger Lundin, the author of "Culture of Interpretation" (Eerdmans).

Seventy years ago a plaque was placed in the center of a college campus. The simple inscription on it states that the aims of that college "are to assert a faith in the eternal union of knowledge and religion set forth in the teachings and character of Jesus Christ, the Son of God." What is this college? The Moody Bible Institute? Wheaton College? Liberty University? No, the mission statement is that of Duke University, a school known today more for its dominant basketball team and radical English department than for any sort of theological rigor or evangelistic zeal. When Duke revised its mission statement in 1988, the Christian faith was relegated to a virtual footnote: "Duke cherishes its historic ties with the United Methodist Church and the religious faith of its founders, while remaining nonsectarian."

University of Notre Dame historian George Marsden tells this intriguing story, and many others, in "The Soul of the American University." One virtue of his book is that it refuses to treat changes at Duke and other schools over the past century as simple matters of apostasy and decline. In the case of Duke, for instance, Marsden points out that the 1924 statement on the plaque and the new, 1988 mission statement "are more closely connected than they might seem." The 1924 statement is "a classic example of the liberal Protestant vision of a unified culture under Christ," while the recent revisions promote many of the same ideals as the founding bylaws did decades before. "The only difference," Marsden says, "is that the references to the ethics of Jesus and to the church have become superfluous."

In Marsden's account, instead of being the rebellious child of orthodox parents, the modern university is more like the natural heir who is working out the full logic of parental belief. "Liberal Protestant theology had already located salvation primarily in social advance and so had removed any basis of maintaining a distinction between church and society," Marsden explains. "The rest of the twentieth century worked out the inevitable implication of that fusion."

ESTABLISHED NONBELIEF

Marsden's subtitle, "From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief," alludes to the historical irony that weaves its way through his entire narrative and is evidenced in the history of Duke and scores of other modern universities and colleges. The irony is that although "the American university system was built on a foundation of evangelical Protestant colleges," modern universities soon became "conspicuously inhospitable to the letter of such evangelicalism," even as they carried "forward the spirit of their evangelical forebears." The forces that liberal Protestantism had unleashed against evangelical orthodoxy "were eventually turned against the liberal Protestant establishment itself" and helped create the "established nonbelief" of the contemporary university.

Marsden argues that we have reached a point where "it is the spirit of liberal Protestantism that arguably survives," but "normative religious teaching of any sort has been nearly eliminated from standard university education." One can imagine the Protestant builders of modern universities looking at their institutions a century later and saying, "This is not what we had in mind."

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August 15 1994, Vol. 38, No. 9