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In the estimate of Alan Wolfe, the Boston University sociologist writing in the October 2000 Atlantic Monthly, "Of all America's religious traditions, evangelical Protestantism, at least in its 20th-century conservative forms, ranks dead last in intellectual stature." For reasons detailed in George Marsden's The Soul of the American University, the late 19th and early 20th centuries relegated Christianity to the fringe of university life; and evangelicals have been ambivalent about wanting back in. Christian colleges and Bible schools were built not so much to compete with mainstream universities as to provide an alternative—and, often, a refuge. Meanwhile, universities became richer, bigger, more dominant in American intellectual life, all without much Christian input.

Thirty years ago, the late Timothy Smith was one of the very few "name" historians—perhaps the only one—who unabashedly showed his evangelical colors. Smith managed the improbable combination of teaching history at Johns Hopkins while pastoring a sizable Nazarene church in Boston. No Christian tradition can be more out of synchrony with academia than Nazarene holiness, and few subjects less appealing to university scholars than revivalism, but Smith's 1957 book, Revivalism and Social Reform, became a standard work. For many of today's evangelical historians, Smith was the first role model. He showed that it was possible to succeed without losing your Christian identity or enthusiasm.

Smith was one of a kind, however, a sometimes cranky individualist. Marsden has a different temperament—patient, understated—that enabled him, more than any other single individual, to nurture a new generation of scholars. Marsden grew up in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, went to seminary at Westminster in Philadelphia, and became fascinated by the question of how his family's kind of faith had become so out of sorts with the American mainstream. He took it as his Christian vocation to answer that, and in so doing to help the church understand itself better.

The quest took him to Yale for graduate school. Though Yale was (and is) one of the preeminent places to study American church history, Marsden didn't find anyone interested in the offbeat questions he was asking. He pursued them doggedly nonetheless as he moved to Calvin College in 1965 to teach. Fifteen years later he published his seminal work, Fundamentalism and American Culture.

His choice of Calvin would turn out to be important, for Calvin was not typical of evangelical church-related schools in the Midwest. Sponsored by the ethnically Dutch Christian Reformed denomination, Calvin revered the memory of Abraham Kuyper, a Dutch neo-Calvinist theologian and statesman who led the government of Holland in the first years of the 20th century. Kuyper advocated distinctively Christian leadership in every realm, including politics. Following him, Calvin College nurtured an aggressive confidence vis-à-vis the world, and a strong interest in the life of the mind. While Marsden was there, the college managed to nurture a remarkable constellation of scholars, including Nicholas Wolterstorff and Alvin Plantinga in philosophy, and Harry Stout and Dale Van Kley in history.

Meanwhile, Jimmy Carter was elected President, and the Moral Majority emerged as a political force. Suddenly the American mainstream, which had been no more interested in fundamentalism than in snake-handling, became very interested in understanding conservative American Christianity. It would fall to Marsden to explain fundamentalism as an internally consistent tradition with deep roots in the American experience. Without particularly intending it, he found a voice in the larger world.

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April 2 2001, Vol. 45, No. 5