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Joining them at the bottom of the slope were the mainline Protestant colleges. In the 1950s and 1960s, these schools were caught in the same current that secularized Catholic colleges. Study after study showed that the mainline colleges were Christian in name only. By the 1980s scholars quit studying the phenomenon because the colleges had become so secular.

Or so it seemed. Under the scholarly radar, a number of individuals at mainline colleges began to suspect that secularization might not be such a great idea. Rhodes College in Tennessee has ties to the Presbyterian Church (usa) that reach back a century and a half. However, like most denominational colleges, it gradually secularized after the Second World War. By 1991, many of the faculty were not Christians, and those who were kept their work and religion separate. Hardly anyone thought of Rhodes as a Christian school. Imagine the faculty's awkward embarrassment, then, when newly hired Michael Nelson—a high-powered political scientist lured from Vanderbilt—told a faculty gathering, "I am happy to be at a Christian college finally, for my professional work is thoroughly informed by my faith."

Stephen Haynes remembers the event as if it were yesterday, for it changed his life. Just a year earlier he had been ordained a Presbyterian minister and joined the college's faculty to teach religion courses. Yet even he felt embarrassed. Why was this? As he pondered this question, a grant from the Lilly Endowment enabled him to complete a survey of church-related colleges. He learned that even colleges that claimed to have strong church ties often "had lost a sense of themselves as recognizably Christian."

Soon Haynes began to think the unthinkable. Might the trends that secularized so many colleges be reversed? Could a formerly Christian college once again become Christian? This led him into contact with other Lilly programs in religion and higher education. He also began to read histories of college secularization. In both places he discovered that educators from all four different traditions—evangelicalism, Catholicism, mainline Protestantism, and "denominational" Protestantism—were starting to converge around a common question: How might Christianity and higher education relate to each other now, and in the future?

In a development no one would have predicted, evangelicalism was in a position to help. Since the 1960s, evangelical educators (who were emerging from fundamentalism) had been talking to their Dutch Reformed cousins (who were emerging from ethnic parochialism) about how Christianity, scholarship, and higher education relate to each other. The Dutch Reformed folks contributed philosophical precision and the habit of respect for learning; the evangelicals contributed a sense of mission and a conviction that any important principles would apply to all Christian traditions.

Both groups believed to the marrow of their bones that allowing Christian colleges to become just like secular institutions was wrong-headed. A Christian college had to be more than just a good secular college. Christian learning, somehow, had to be different from secular learning. The Dutch get this from Abraham Kuyper ("two kinds of human beings—regenerated and unregenerated—hence two kinds of learning"). Evangelicals get this from the fundamentalist prime directive of separation ("come out from among them and be ye separate"). So much of the discussion turned on the question of just how Christian learning is, and is not, different.

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June 2005, Vol. 49, No. 6