“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.”
According to “The Soul of the American University,” the “fatal weakness in conceiving of the university as a broadly Christian institution was its commitments to scientific and professional ideals and to the demands for a unified public life.” As long as the Protestant establishment dominated public life and the assumptions of the scientific method could be reconciled to the Christian faith, American universities could continue as quasi-Christian endeavors.
The more closely the Protestant establishment equated Christianity with the advancement of knowledge and the promotion of American values, however, the more superfluous specifically Christian thought appeared to be. For example, Marsden cites Daniel Coit Gilman, the first president of Johns Hopkins University: “The methods [the universities] employ are particularly directed to the ascertainment of truth and the detection of error. Moreover, the end in view—the ultimate end of all education and scientific effort, as well as of all legislation and statesmanship—is identical with that at which Christianity aims … ‘Peace on earth, good will to men.’ “
A Christ whose gospel intends nothing more than what education, science, and legislation intend is an irrelevant Christ. He brings nothing distinctive to the educational endeavor, nor does he present any alternatives to accepted ways of thought and action. Such a Christ is at best a curious antiquity and at worst a troubling nuisance.
In his concluding chapter, Marsden offers a modest proposal to counter indifference and hostility toward Christianity in the contemporary academy. He observes that because of the “widespread current critiques of scientific objectivity,” it is no longer tenable for universities to exclude religious perspectives because they are allegedly “unscientific and socially disruptive.” With their naove understanding of scientific objectivity thoroughly discredited, contemporary universities have had to open their intellectual debates to many voices formerly silenced. Marsden argues that as the academy has opened itself to gay, ethnic, and feminist viewpoints, so too should it afford evangelical Christians a chance to work in its midst.
“The reasons for discrimination against religious outlooks in academia are greatly reduced,” observes Marsden. “Religiously committed scholars” already in universities should overcome their inhibitions about clearly articulating their faith, while “other faculty members … should be receptive to the ideas of individual scholars whose religious perspectives may frankly influence aspects of their work.”
Marsden’s accounts of the erosion of Christian profession in the modern university should give pause to those who believe that the return of Christians to scholarly endeavor is a simple and unalloyed good. This book implicitly points to the need for further study of the social, psychological, and theological dynamics in the Christian engagement with contemporary intellectual life.
At the same time, Marsden’s book should encourage all Christians who care deeply about the life of the mind. It should hearten them because it lays out clearly and convincingly the past follies and present opportunities of Christian activity in the academy. Furthermore, “The Soul of the American University” should encourage Christian scholars because it embodies the qualities of intelligence, clarity, and commitment that Christians need to bring to bear in their engagements with contemporary culture.
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