The Resilience of Religion in American Higher Education

John Schmalzbauer, Kathleen A. Mahoney

• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781481308731
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Institutions & Organizations

A well-worn, often-told tale of woe. American higher education has been secularized.Religion on campus has declined, died, ordisappeared. Deemed irrelevant, there is no room for the sacred in American colleges and universities.While the idea thatreligionis unwelcome in higher education is often discussed, and uncritically affirmed, John Schmalzbauer andKathleenMahoney directly challenge thisdominantnarrative.

The Resilience of Religion in American Higher Education documents a surprising openness to religion in collegiate communities. Schmalzbauer andMahoneydevelop this claim in three areas: academic scholarship, church-related higher education, and student life. They highlight growing interest in the study of religion across the disciplines, as well as a willingness to acknowledge the intellectual relevance of religious commitments. The Resilience of Religion in American Higher Education also reveals how church-related colleges are taking their founding traditions more seriously, even as they embrace religious pluralism. Finally, the volume chronicles the diversification of student religious life, revealing the longevity of campus spirituality.

Far from irrelevant, religion matters in higher education. As Schmalzbauer and Mahoney show, religious initiatives lead institutions to engage with cultural diversity and connect spirituality with academic and student life, heightening attention to the sacredon both secular and church-related campuses.

1

The Comeback

As the twenty-first century opened, religion staged an unexpected comeback in American higher education. Its return contravened long-accepted theories that held society would become less religious as it became more modern. Portrayed as a carrier of secularization, higher education was its chief exemplar.1 Historical studies also supported the view that the academy had or was about to become thoroughly secular.2

There is much to commend in this interpretation, but recent developments suggest the secularization narrative seriously underestimates the resilience of religion in the American academy. A closer reading of history and contemporary sources demands an alternative assessment and a more complex explanation.

Despite the undeniable impact of secularization, the sacred did not disappear from higher education. Coexisting with the secular, religious frameworks and concepts continued to influence American intellectual life. Most visible in church-related colleges, divinity schools, and campus ministries, the teaching and the practice of religion persisted in a wide variety of institutions, waxing and waning over the course of the past century. Sometimes this presence was more overt. For example, in the years following World War II through the late 1960s, colleges and universities experienced a resurgence of piety that found expression in a Protestant theological renaissance on campus. By nurturing the nascent field of religious studies, it laid the foundation for future scholarship. Though the postwar revival ended, it showed that the academy need not follow a straight and inevitable path toward secularization.3

As in the postwar era, religion is making a comeback in American higher education. Unlike the postwar revival, it is not led by Protestant theologians. Reflecting the pluralistic character of the contemporary university, today’s resurgence is the work of diverse groups of faculty and students, including people of faith and the religiously unaffiliated, engaged practitioners and detached scholars. While some have treated religion as an object of study, others favor more confessional approaches. Still others have challenged the binary between the religious and the secular.

Over the past three decades, religious activity in higher education has increased rather remarkably. There is more interest in religion in the academy and more commitment to the project of religious higher education. There are growing campus ministries and unprecedented diversity in student religious life. Claims that higher education is wholly secular are no longer credible, if they ever were. Instead, the academy is better described as post-secular, a set of intellectual and social institutions where the sacred and secular coexist.4

In the post-secular academy, faculty blur the boundary between religion and knowledge. While some emphasize religiously grounded scholarship, others engage in the nonconfessional study of religion. Though definitions of religion vary widely, both theological and nontheological approaches are on the rise. So is attention to spirituality. Membership in religiously oriented scholarly societies has soared, specialization in religious topics has increased, and articles on religion have proliferated. Reflecting targeted investments by philanthropists, religiously oriented centers and institutes can be found at America’s leading universities, part of a surge in the interdisciplinary study of religion.5

At the institutional level, churches and denominational colleges have reassessed their often less than robust relationships and fostered closer ties. Through several foundation-supported initiatives, hundreds of representatives from religious colleges have gathered at conferences, seminars, and consultations to talk about the religious identities of their institutions. On individual campuses, dozens of religion-oriented centers and institutes, faculty mentoring programs, and new mission statements have signaled a renewed commitment to the cause of church-related higher education.6

Finally, voluntary religious expression is thriving and increasingly visible. Membership in evangelical parachurch groups has risen dramatically, while student religious life is now remarkably diverse. Reflecting the rise of a new religious pluralism, Hindu Students Councils and Muslim Students’ Associations continue to proliferate, while a campus interfaith movement brings many voices to the table. Experimenting with new forms of ministry and new development strategies, some Catholic and mainline Protestant ministries are showing signs of revitalization.7 Responding to the vitality of undergraduate religion, national leaders in the student affairs field have called for the integration of spirituality into campus life.8

In the late 1990s, commentators began to notice religion on campus, describing its presence as a resurgence, a rediscovery, a revival, or a revitalization. In the year 2000, George Marsden, whose The Soul of the American University chronicled the secularization of higher education, acknowledged the potential for reversal. As he told the Chronicle of Higher Education, “The general consensus is that there’s no reason to have to continue along the slippery slope toward secularism.” The very next year, an ethnographic study reported that the teaching and the practice of religion was “alive and well in the institutions of higher education.” A decade later, another study concluded that religion was “no longer invisible.”9

Going beyond previous accounts, this book comprehensively documents the return of religion in American colleges and universities at the turn of the twenty-first century. It takes up the history of religion in higher education where the historians left off: in the early seventies, when religion’s presence was less conspicuous. Chronicling multiple movements, it examines how the sacred moved back toward the mainstream of academic life intellectually, institutionally, and socially over the past three decades. It documents growing interest in the study of religion, as well as greater willingness on the part of some scholars to recognize the intellectual relevance of religious convictions. It recounts how church-related colleges are taking their religious identities more seriously. And finally, it describes the vitality of student religious life in all its diversity.

Over the course of four centuries, the history of higher education and the history of American religion have frequently intersected. The United States remains among the most religious of the industrialized nations. While episodes of disestablishment have loosened the authoritative claims of religion over government, they have set the stage for religious mobilization in civil society.10 Disestablishment found formal political expression in the First Amendment of the Constitution as early citizens rejected European patterns of church-state relations: no religion would enjoy the legal privilege of state sanction, nor would the state interfere with the free exercise of religion by its citizens. Remarkable for its mixture of deists and Christians, Catholics and Protestants, Europeans and Africans, newcomers and natives, colonial America was far from religiously monolithic. Amidst this diversity, religion remained vital.11 And though legislation prohibited the government from establishing a national church, it did not deter some early nineteenth-century Americans from proclaiming Protestantism the national religion. They unambiguously claimed America for the Protestant faith and invented a national mythology, bestowing upon their new country a pivotal role in salvation history as a light to the nations. The press, voluntary associations, schools, and colleges stood with the churches as essential agents in the cause of a Protestant America.12

Cast as the national religion in the nineteenth century, and once at the very center of American life, Protestantism saw its cultural hold weakened in time, culminating in a second disestablishment during the 1920s. Its influence diminished as scientific discoveries, technological advances, and the emergence of strong nonecclesial forces such as unions, corporations, organized sports, and popular entertainment successfully vied for men’s and women’s attention. Under the weight of demographic shifts, Catholic and Jewish immigration, and intellectual advances, Protestantism’s identity as the “soul of the nation” waned, and with it much of its capacity to shape society and culture through the press, schools, and other agencies.13

Religion’s increasingly marginal role in higher education constituted one of the clearest signs of the cultural disestablishment of Protestantism. Once taken for granted as a part of academic life, Christianity lost its central place in the academy toward the end of the nineteenth century. This marked nothing less than a sea change.14 From the earliest days of colonial history, Protestantism exerted considerable influence by educating men of standing in denominationally sponsored colleges. Its sway grew in the antebellum years as the evangelical fervor of the Second Great Awakening led to the creation of hundreds of denominationally affiliated colleges.15

The era of the denominational college closed rather quickly at the end of the nineteenth century as an academic revolution fueled by the forces of modernity swept through higher education. Reform, innovation, and significant structural change remade the academy. The signal event in this revolution was the emergence of the modern, nonsectarian university in the second half of the nineteenth century. It quickly came of age, and by the early twentieth century the nonsectarian university, rather than the denominational college, stood at the head of the new academic order.16

The revolution that produced the modern university and a new academic order at the end of the nineteenth century helped disestablish Protestant Christianity in higher education. This process of de-Christianization led to three boundaries constraining the religious, separating religion and knowledge, churches and colleges, and spirituality and student life. Though never airtight, these boundaries often segregated religious and educational activities.

One boundary differentiated faith and knowledge, separating what was known through religious sources from what was known through reason and empirical study. The growing divide between faith and knowledge undermined earlier assumptions about the nature of truth. At one time, all truth, whether religious, moral, or scientific, was considered part of one greater, seamless whole. But this conception of truth fragmented with the vast expansion of science in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and concomitant development of specialized inquiry. An unintended consequence of professionalization, the rise of specialized disciplines rendered theological and religious questions less germane to academic research. Knowledge derived through focused investigation gained primacy over the knowledge obtained from the Bible, revelation, creeds, and pronouncements of the clergy.17

The disestablishment of religion also created an institutional boundary between the churches and the colleges. From the earliest years of the colonial period, the churches had exercised a central role in the field of higher education; hundreds of colleges were established under the auspices of particular denominations or, in the case of Catholic colleges, under the sponsorship of dioceses or religious orders. But the traditional sponsorship pattern changed significantly during the second half of the nineteenth century as the state matured and entered the arena of higher education. Though established as nonsectarian institutions, nineteenth-century state universities were still considered Christian institutions and partners with the churches in the cause of a Protestant America. But over time, the logic of nonsectarian education in a pluralistic nation undermined even a loosely construed sense of religious identity.18

Of course, the state did not capture the complete field of higher education from the churches. Hundreds of colleges remained church affiliated, and many were established with religious sponsorship. Yet more than a few, such as Duke and Princeton, severed their church ties. Even among those retaining their religious affiliation, distance grew between the churches and the colleges. The colleges abjured direct control by the churches, while the churches manifested growing disinterest in the colleges. On the part of the colleges, greater autonomy took the form of independent boards of trustees and the appointment of nonclerical presidents. On the part of the churches, growing disinterest in the colleges led to cutbacks in financial support.19

The academic disestablishment of religion found expression in a third boundary constraining the free exercise of religion on campus. Once at the center, functioning publicly and normatively, religion moved to the margins, where it became more private and voluntary. Through much of the nineteenth century, colleges and universities, even nonsectarian state universities, publicly witnessed to their Christian commitments. It was carved into the granite of academic buildings, found in the curriculum, and heard in prayers and hymns when faculty and students gathered for mandatory daily chapel exercises. But during the first half of the twentieth century, most institutions of higher education abandoned public commitments to Christianity. Colleges and universities did not become antireligious per se; they simply declared themselves religiously neutral. Colleges and universities allowed for and even encouraged the free exercise of religion among students, provided it was private and voluntary.20

During the twentieth century, religion’s presence on campus waxed and waned. And though Protestantism gradually relinquished control, it left its intellectual fingerprints on American higher education. From the post-Protestant thinkers of the Metaphysical Club to the Social Gospelers who became sociologists, early twentieth-century scholars confirmed Nietzsche’s observation that the “Protestant parson is the grandfather of German philosophy.” Increasingly devoid of religious substance, a cul...