Religion does not do well in the hands of academics, whether they are sympathetic to it or not." So argues Darryl Hart of Westminster Theological Seminary in his provocative book on religious studies in the university. As a matter of fact, he claims, the field has "failed to produce first-rate scholarship." It has "limped along behind other academic disciplines."

More important, according to Hart, it has been conflicted from the start. Its practitioners have pursued the study of supernaturalist faith communities in a largely secular, indeed naturalistic, way. And they have labored in the service of both the academy and the churches, creating confusion in the general public regarding the nature of their craft, and schizophrenia among one another in the guild.

In The University Gets Religion, Hart jumps right into the recent fray over the secularization of the academy, paying special attention to developments in religious studies.1 His focus is on the arguments used to justify this discipline, its scholarly methods, and its place in the modern American university. Ignoring the intellectual giants whose work gave rise to the secular study of religion (e.g., Hume, Durkheim, Freud, and Weber, Europeans all), Hart suggests that a host of home-grown, largely forgotten, liberal churchmen proved most important in building up the American profession of religious studies, and in defending its legitimacy as a university discipline.

Hart traces the history of this defense through three major phases. In phase one (c. 1870-1925), he avers, leading white Protestant churchmen responded to the rise of new American universities by baptizing their scholarly methods and moral values. They accommodated older orthodoxies to recent scientific findings, and promoted university-based religious scholarship under the aegis of mainline Protestant campus ministries.

In phase two (c. 1925-1965), modernist Protestants emerged victorious from their row with fundamentalists, their leadership in the field now uncontested. But chastened by world war and its technological devastation, they proved more pessimistic about the promises of science. They began in earnest to found departments of religious studies in universities. But they often did so in an effort to shore up the nobler traditions of Western civilization, promoting a "neo-orthodox" theological resistance to historical presentism and cultural arrogance.

In phase three (c. 1964 to the present), religion departments sustained the social upheavals of the 1960s, a decade when earlier Protestant rationales for religious studies began to implode. Consequently, the discipline "reinvented itself as an academic field of critical inquiry," symbolizing this transition with the founding of the American Academy of Religion (AAR, formerly the National Association of Biblical Instructors). This "new academic appearance," however, "never hid completely the older ministerial one." And, more than ever, scholars of religion "suffered from the strain of being pulled in two directions simultaneously, one churchly, the other academic."2

We are left today, according to Hart, with an academic discipline still in search of a solid identity. Having been "stripped of the pious and social grounds for studying religion," recent scholars have failed to "produce a set of compelling intellectual reasons for its place in the university." Further, Hart contends that this failure is endemic to the very enterprise of establishing the discipline on a completely secular/scientific footing. "As much as religious studies strives to sever ties to communities of faith," he writes, "it cannot do so without self-immolation. The academic study of religion has not only been dependent historically upon churches, synagogues, and mosques, but it has no object of inquiry without particular religious traditions. As such, religious studies needs communities of faith, and such dependence will always be out of place in the modern university."

The good news, he concludes, is that the removal of religion from the university would prove a blessing to all concerned. It would enhance academic freedom within the halls of academe, allowing scholarship to proceed more freely there along purely secular lines. (Hart believes that the concept of academic freedom was designed "to protect the university from external restraints" such as those of politics and religion, enabling the establishment of "its own professional standards.") And it would enhance both the study and the practice of religion, freeing them from the shackles of modern naturalism. "Because the university is incapable of evaluating dogmatic claims and supernaturally inspired texts," he explains, "the religion it tolerates tends to be … thin …. To exclude those religions that assert their own exclusive claims to truth, then, is to do them a favor. Academic inquiry, if the history of religious studies is any indication, waters religion down to the point where faith makes no actual difference."

In The Sacred & the Secular University, Jon H. Roberts and James Turner offer little in the way of a normative response to secularization—certainly nothing as drastic as Hart's call for a divorce between religious studies and modern science. Its much more modest, 100-page body began life as a presentation at a conference on higher education held at Princeton University's 250th anniversary celebration (in March of 1996). But, as befits their more breezy survey of academic secularization in general, Roberts and Turner offer a breadth of perspective that helps to contextualize Hart's study, and to moderate his arguments as well.

Whereas Hart has imbued his narrative with irony and tinged it with hints of conspiracy, suggesting that the usually liberal Protestant captains of modern religious studies have nearly sunk their own ship by overloading it with foreign cargo, Roberts and Turner attribute secularization within the modern American university, not to any one class of people, but to subtle and systemic scholarly forces. Indeed, as Princeton's John F. Wilson summarizes their interpretation in his introduction to the volume, "these developments certainly took place without the benefit of any overall design or prescription of a system. Changes that summed to an emerging new era in American higher education occurred without clear central direction."

Put all too briefly, the argument of Roberts and Turner is that academic specialization in the emergent American universities yielded methodological naturalism, which in turn helped to produce a kind of secularization. Before the late 19th century, American college professors did not offer specialized courses, and students did not declare academic majors. All pursued the study of a general liberal arts curriculum. They did so doxologically, and in preparation for public service. Their study was capped accordingly with a course on (mainly Christian) moral philosophy taught by none other than the college presidents. And most scholars approached their studies with religious direction and moral purpose, preparing for work that would promote the glory of God.

But with the rise of research universities human knowledge became fragmented, as scholar-teachers began to study and teach less broadly and much more deeply. Not many of these new specialists ever intended to undermine belief in God. "In fact, modern academic specialization in the United States initially developed mostly within explicitly Christian institutions." As a matter of course, though, religion became compartmentalized like every other form of knowledge, and no longer played a central role in integrating the curriculum.

Once this happened, explain Roberts and Turner, it was only natural that the disciplines would develop their own methodological canons, their own epistemological criteria, without much recourse to religion. And in an era whose intellectual culture was dominated by Darwinian theory and biblical criticism (trends that often seemed to justify this restructuring of higher education), the consequences of this marginalization of religious discourse would be profound. "Religious concerns became essentially extrinsic to the culture of science. Nonbelief (though not unbelief) became science's reigning methodological principle."

In the humanities, a concern remained to promote moral and spiritual ideals, and these ideals continued to cast a secular kind of coherence on the curriculum. But grounded as they usually were in philological historicism, the humanities could not fill the place of moral philosophy and religion. More often than not, they only eased people's concerns about specialization. "They certainly did not save the unity of knowledge when moral philosophy decayed but, by disguising the collapse, only made it easier to accept."

Ultimately, write Roberts and Turner,

As higher education increasingly became identified with expanding the boundaries of verifiable knowledge, such knowledge became valorized in classrooms, seminar rooms, laboratories, and academic discourse. Truth claims based on alternative epistemologies—tradition, divine inspiration, and subjective forms of religious experience—increasingly lost credibility within the academy. … During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, colleges and universities became identified as institutions imbued with the faith that the only knowledge really worth having is obtainable through rational, 'scientific' inquiry. If this now seems obvious to us, it is a measure of how completely higher education and the culture to which it has ministered have been captivated by that faith.

The story told by Roberts and Turner does contain a certain measure of irony. For in their view (as in the view of Hart), antebellum moral philosophers themselves helped to set this train of events in motion. By devoting the bulk of their instruction to divinely ordained "laws" of human nature and society, laws that could be studied "scientifically," independent of revelation—most famously, by promoting Scottish Common Sense Realism—they unwittingly invited a trojan horse into American college classrooms that would later undermine the religious purposes of their work.

While all three historians under review exaggerate the extent to which such Christian humanism self-destructed, Roberts and Turner are not out to blame Christian scholars themselves for secularization. Rather, if their analysis provides Christians with any practical lessons for intellectual life, it suggests that the secularization of the academy, even the secularization of religious studies, has involved a far more complicated and elusive kind of historical evolution (pardon the pun) than most intellectuals have usually recognized.

Indeed, how easy it has been for well-intentioned Christian scholars—and not just liberal ones—to accommodate to imperceptibly harmful and misleading forms of naturalism. Such accommodation is often viewed as a fact of life in the modern university, as a requisite way of doing business within our disciplines. We can make it without denying our belief in God and divine providence, getting along well with non-Christians from whom our faith would serve to divide us. But at what price? And toward what end? As Hart suggests, these are questions that could haunt us for a very long time.

Let's face it: Christians, at least traditional ones, have always been supernaturalists. Though full of ignorance and sin, our perceptions and interpretations are shaped profoundly by supernatural revelation, supernatural grace, not to mention the work of the Holy Spirit within our souls.

We have good reasons to get along with those who don't share our religious beliefs—indeed, reasons beyond those of Christian witness and apologetics. Further, these beliefs do not always impinge very directly upon our work. We frequently see eye-to-eye on mundane matters with non-Christians, with whom partnership for secular purposes often proves mutually beneficial.

But we also have good reasons to call things completely as we see them, to speak theologically about the significance of our work—not holding back as compartmentalized Christians afraid of the scandal of the cross (or worse, afraid of transgressing sacred disciplinary boundaries), but reaching out in the bright hope of promoting divine justice, righteousness, and peace. Intellectual honesty and integrity demand no less.

If we are to do so, however, we must resist the temptation to take our faith and go home, letting the modern university go to hell, as it were. And here is where I must disagree with my friend Darryl Hart. To risk a cliché, our God is the Lord of both creation and redemption. And he has called most Christians to incarnate his love and grace primarily in the secular city. To be sure, we are called to "take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ"

(2 Cor. 10:5), opposing ideas and intellectual trends that are inimical to Christian faith. But we can and ought to do so, even in the field of religious studies, without succumbing to sectarianism and expending all our energies on behalf of our own communities.

Besides, as these two books make clear, the canons of the modern university have always been more fluid than they have seemed. The rules of the academic game are under continual negotiation. Christians, like everyone else, have a right to take part in these discussions. And we should do so, not to secure a place of honor in the university, but to minister to the intellectual needs of those around us.

Douglas A. Sweeney is associate professor of church history and the history of Christian thought and director of the Center for Theological Understanding at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He is the author of Nathaniel Taylor, New Haven Theology, and the Legacy of Jonathan Edwards (Oxford Univ. Press).

1. Among the many other recent books that discuss the secularization of the modern university, those best-known to professional historians include George M. Marsden and B. J. Longfield, eds., The Secularization of the Academy (Oxford Univ. Press, 1992), and George M. Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishments to Established Non-belief (Oxford Univ. Press, 1994), two books whose production Hart assisted as Marsen's postdoctoral research fellow at Duke University in 1988-89. Among recent works on the history of the study of religion in the university, Conrad Cherry's Hurrying Toward Zion: Universities, Divinity Schools, and American Protestantism (Indiana Univ. Press, 1995) is perhaps best-known.

2. For a much stronger argument regarding the failure of the aar (and related institutions) to secure a sufficiently scientific approach to religious studies in North America, see the recent collection of essays by Donald Wiebe, The Politics of Religious Studies: The Continuing Conflict with Theology in the Academy (St. Martin's Press, 1999).

Copyright © 2003 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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