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Acknowledgments
This volume, which is a revision and updating of The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (1994), has benefited from the work of many contributors, mostly from about three decades ago. The Pew Charitable Trusts funded a multi-year study of the topic. That helped provide research assistance from quite a number of graduate students and others listed in the acknowledgments to that volume. I’ll just mention again the three who contributed the most: Bradley Longfield, Darryl G. Hart, and Paul Kemeny. I also benefited from comments on the original text from ten distinguished reviewers, acknowledged in that volume.
For this revised and updated edition I am particularly indebted to Rick Ostrander, who read the entire text and provided many comments and suggestions, many of which I have followed. I am also grateful to Todd Ream, Bill Ringenberg, Benjamin Wetzel, and Tom Jones, who read and commented on the principal new parts of the volume, the introduction and two concluding chapters.
I also owe a debt once again to the editors and staff at Oxford University Press for their always excellent help. I especially want to thank my longtime editor, Cynthia Read, who suggested a revision such as this and has been an invaluable contributor to the project.
Introduction
American higher education has changed in some striking ways since the publication of The Soul of the University more than a quarter century ago. That is especially true if one is seeking to understand its “soul” in the sense of some sort of essence growing out of a common story that shapes its identity and purpose.1 In light of such changes, I am offering a new and more concise version of the history that brings the story up to date and also recasts its concluding interpretive theme.
One telling indicator of the differences between the prevailing outlooks toward religion and culture in the twenty-first century and those of the preceding era is the fact that today one of the widely accepted characterizations is to say that we are in a “postsecular”2 age. “Postsecular” does not mean that secularism is dead or dying or necessarily that religions, including traditional religions, are making a comeback. Rather, “postsecular” is a paradigm for understanding our era that contrasts with the old widely used twentiethcentury “secularization” paradigm that saw human history as inexorably heading toward a secular era. According to that old paradigm, as modern, industrialized, technological, scientific-minded societies advanced, traditional religions would have to give way much in the same ways as would traditional medicine or modes of agriculture. Such assumptions about secularization involved a variety of Western imperialistic thinking that assumed that the patterns of secular development in the West would become the template for the rest of the world. Marxism provided a strong version of such assumptions.
Even in mid–twentieth century America, when religions of all sorts were flourishing, many academics were dedicated to variations of the “secularization thesis” that projected inevitable decline, especially of old-fashioned, “prescientific” religious beliefs. Such ideas that related secularization to progress were among the reasons that many universities and colleges put their religious heritages aside in order to keep up with the forefront of American education. And for similar reasons many would-begatekeepers
in mainstream higher education characterized traditional religious perspectives as unscientific and “unprofessional.”
My subtitle for the original version, “From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief,” was designed to point out the irony involved if the mainstream academy would allow only essentially secular views. For centuries Protestantism had been virtually the established religion even in state-run American higher education, a monopoly that sometimes involved injustices to those with differing viewpoints. But by the later twentieth century it was advocates of purely naturalistic viewpoints who aspired to have their views established as the norm for truly professional higher education. In my “Concluding Unscientific Postscript” I argued that, instead of assuming that higher education should become increasingly secular, a more genuinely pluralistic alternative would be to encourage a diversity of religious as well as secular points of view.
By now, well into the twenty-first century, the situation has changed, and I have reframed the concluding narrative in light of such changes. For one thing, as was already apparent in the late twentieth century, purely naturalistic viewpoints (that is, those that would exclude traditional religious perspectives) were hopelessly divided against themselves. Broadly speaking, there are two major types of anti-religious naturalism. First, there is the oldfashioned mid–twentieth century positivistic naturalism, which seeks objective or universally valid truths based on scientific models. Second, becoming much more prominent since the 1960s, has been what can be called subjectivist naturalism. Such views reflect modern or postmodern celebrations of the sacred self and of the communities that shape the self’s identities. Such celebrations typically reject enlightenment attempts to find common philosophical ground for all. Instead, they involve liberationist narratives for individuals and groups that previously had been discriminated against. Claims to knowledge, accordingly, can be best understood as matters of power.3 Although such narratives may have a religious basis, as they do in some more liberal versions of Christianity, much more often in academia they have been exclusively naturalistic, rejecting most traditional religious beliefs as sources of oppression.
Aside from the question of how one might evaluate these viewpoints, one can recognize the historical phenomenon that subjectivist forms of naturalism have done much to undermine the authority of the old positivistic objectivist naturalism. Science itself is now often seen as shaped in part by the assumptions, values, and power interests of the communities that practice it.4
One reason why the American academy of the twenty-first century might be fairly called “postsecular” is that there is so much room for diversity of opinion that, while secular viewpoints continue to dominate, various religious outlooks can still find room for expression. Even though there are plenty of documented examples of prejudice against religiously based viewpoints,5 religiously based scholarship that meet the usual standards of academic merit is likely to find a place among the varieties of accepted perspectives. Even some quite traditional religious perspectives, though they may remain unpopular, have proved themselves to be intellectually viable. Thus, while a diversity of viewpoints that includes various religious viewpoints is not as often encouraged in mainstream academia as it might be, neither are religiously based academic outlooks entirely ruled out.
One side effect of my subtitle, “From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief,” was that it led some readers to view the history as essentially both a secularization story and a declension narrative. It is, of course, in part a story of secularization in the strict sense of the removal of an activity from church influence. And it concluded with what could be construed as a declension narrative in that I expressed my disapproval of the degree to which more traditional Christian perspectives had been largely marginalized from mainstream academia.6
Still, even if the story of American higher education inevitably involves a secularization narrative, it is important to recognize, as this history emphasizes, that secularization is a complex and often paradoxical process. Sociologist David Martin has shown through the study of comparative secularization that the process takes many forms, depending largely on the nature of the religious establishment, and that, by itself, the term carries little clear meaning.7 Such observations are especially relevant to the United States, where the religious establishment was almost wholly Protestant and still so bewilderingly diverse. Further, one prominent feature of secularization in the United States, where voluntary religion has been especially strong, has been that when a religious dimension is reduced or removed from one sort of activity, it will reappear in compensating ways in others. The clearest illustration of that phenomenon is that the population of the United States is in many respects more religious than was its antecedent counterpart in the colonial era, even though there is much less formally established religion today. So in my telling of this story, I have tried to take into account that what may seem like secularization often involves the shifting of the locus of religious activity rather than its disappearance.
Furthermore, one of the main lessons of this history is that religious establishments are inherently problematic. So disestablishment, whatever its downsides, brings benefits even to the principal religion involved. That is certainly the case in the history of Protestantism and American higher education. There was no golden age from which there was a simple decline. Rather, a leading theme that emerges from this narrative is the inevitably flawed character of trying to maintain a de facto national religious establishment. The most evident problem with religious establishments is that they are discriminatory. In the mid-nineteenth century, for example, even state universities typically had all Protestant faculties, had clergymen as presidents, and required Protestant chapel services. By the mid-twentieth century it was becoming evident that principles of equity demanded the ending of such Protestant privilege if leading institutions were to serve a diverse citizenry.
A less obvious consequence of the informal Protestant establishment, but a major motif that emerges in this history, is its negative impact on the quality of Protestant intellectual life. The assumption that Protestant Christianity should be, at least informally, the American established religion, meant that that most leading academics took for granted a broadly Christian cultural ethos. Rather than regard Christianity as a distinct point of view at the heart of the entire educational enterprise that ought to challenge the idols and ideologies of the age, they tended to treat it as supplemental to the more general and religiously neutral education that was suitable for gentlemen. At the time, they had understandable reasons for this approach. They were heirs to a long tradition, inherited from medieval Christendom, of reverence for the Greek and Roman classics, and so they viewed Christian teachings as largely supplemental to secular learning, which comprised the heart of higher education.
In the eighteenth century, in places where Protestantism was still the established religion, the new “enlightened” thought of the era could be regarded in much the same way: It could be appropriated as an updating of the best of human inquiry based on reason alone. Theology and biblical revelation might be necessary to understand the full picture, but “natural” revelation, or aspects of God’s creation that could be understood by objective reason and science, was fully reliable so far as it went. So Christian teachings continued to be seen as largely supplemental to the learning suitable for all educated persons.
To make a long story short, such assumptions regarding the harmony of Christianity and modern thinking remained strong through the
mid-nineteenth century but collapsed under the pressure of the second scientific revolution of the late nineteenth century, of which Darwinism became the symbol. In the context of a rapidly modernizing industrial society, “science” came to be equated with “natural science,” and leading thinkers insisted that true rationality demanded consideration of natural phenomena exclusively. In part, such exclusively naturalistic ideologies were used to undermine the authority of residual religious establishments. Darwinism was an especially effective weapon in the resulting warfare, since it seemed to provide for the first time a plausible explanation as to how a universe that included intelligent beings might arise without the agency of a higher intelligence. Furthermore, Darwinism, together with rising biblical criticism based on naturalistic assumptions, seemed to undermine the authority of the Bible.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, therefore, it was no longer feasible simply to add traditional Christianity to the best of modern learning. One prominent response was to conclude that Christianity had to be modified to meet the modern standards, as liberal Protestants did. At the other end of the spectrum were conservative Christians who declared war on much of modern thought and developed their own teachings and institutions, as did fundamentalists and traditionalist Roman Catholics. Though there were many more moderate shades of opinion, these extremes often seemed to define the conversation through the first half of the twentieth century.
In the past generation, however, a very different picture has emerged. As is described in the concluding chapter of this volume, learning that is based on explicitly Christian perspectives yet engaged with the intellectual mainstream has been prospering in its new outsider status. One of the benefits of disestablishment is that thoughtful Christians are forced to see their outlooks as distinctive minority points of view in a world where there is not going to be a majority consensus. Such flourishing could be illustrated in some of the varieties of outlooks among a wide range of Protestant and Catholic thinkers. But as a historical phenomenon, perhaps the most unexpected development has been the blossoming of explicitly Christian scholarship among more traditional Protestants. That is surprising because in the mid-twentieth century, their academic progenitors had been largely written off by the mainstream establishment as hopelessly obscurantist. In the twenty-first century, by contrast, traditionalist Protestant scholarship, both in America and around the world, has developed substantial and intellectually impressive interdisciplinary communities. The story of that development is hardly one of simple success. Serious scholars typically represent only a tiny minority in any
community, so often there are large gaps between outlooks of academics and their more populist church constituencies. Nonetheless, in recent decades traditional Protestants have developed a substantial community of accomplished scholars who can hold their own in mainstream academic settings and also provide alternatives to forms of anti-intellectualism that continue to persist in many of their own communities.
I have presented much of the principal history through the stories of elite institutions. That is because when doing cultural history there are advantages in looking at the most influential leaders and institutions in the cultural mainstream. Nonetheless, one must always bear in mind that, given America’s bewildering religious and ethnic diversity and opportunities for local initiatives, there are many alternative stories that are important in their own right.8
In telling the stories of America’s leading educators and their schools, I also tend to focus on the relationships of Christian teachings to intellectual and moral concerns. Higher education, like Western intellectual life generally, has long included searches for meaning. And young people of college age have often been engaged in personal quests for meaning. Until recent decades, that was commonly considered to be one of the major goals of undergraduate education, and it is still considered so by a minority.9 In a nation where many people have had some degree of religious training, religious questions have often been involved in such searches. So it is worthwhile to reflect, as this volume does, on the degree to which explicitly religious perspectives may have helped shape what was taught in the classrooms, what was published for the edification of the public, and how institutions were defined. Other scholars might choose to address the role of religion in universities by focusing on student life, chapels, revivals, and the many voluntary religious organizations on American campuses. Those are also important parts of the story that I try to keep in view. But my primary inquiries concern how Christian perspectives were related to the intellectual inquiries that were essential to the enterprise.
Though I write this history with a general audience in mind, it is important to recognize that I speak as one who has long been part of religiousintellectual communities that have built their educational institutions around the conviction that Christianity should offer distinct perspectives. If one truly believes, as Christians profess, that everything in the universe is part of God’s ongoing creation and that human history centers around God’s plan of salvation in Jesus Christ, such claims are so radical that they ought to
change the contextual framework for thinking about just about everything. Such perspectives, shaped by our loves (as St. Augustine suggests), should influence our commitments and priorities, including those surrounding education and scholarship. One’s approach to learning may be in practical ways much the same as that of people working from other perspectives, since Christians see themselves as part of a common humanity living in a universe that is ordered in the same way for everyone. Yet even in their most technical research and scientific learning, Christians seek to self-consciously view the purpose of what they are doing through the lens of their commitments to a loving God who mandates love to others and cherishing of creation.
Even though many Christian educators through the centuries have informally viewed their vocations in such ways, it has not been until relatively recently that such approaches have been widely articulated as the ideal for distinctly Christian higher education.10 This history helps us understand why such efforts to integrate faith and learning, now the stock in trade of many Christian thinkers and institutions, were not more fully developed earlier. The short answer, as suggested previously, is that so long as higher education was a privileged dimension of Christendom, it was difficult for educational leaders to see Christianity as a radically distinct point of view.
Finally, in this new edition I have edited and abbreviated the main historical narrative. Specifically, I have reduced the number of schools whose histories I recount in the formative transitional era of the emergence of modern universities in the late nineteenth century.11 I have also abbreviated some of the other accounts in that and other eras and reframed a few of the interpretive themes. Overall, the result is that, even with the new twenty-firstcentury materials, the volume is similar in length to the original. Most of the essential history, of course, remains the same. Nonetheless, with the view that historical interpretation is properly meant to illumine one’s own times, this study is updated for a twenty-first-century audience.
Prologue I
God and Buckley at Yale (1951)
“I was somewhat concerned,” wrote McGeorge Bundy (Yale ’40) in the Atlantic of November 1951, “lest my readers refuse to believe that so violent, unbalanced, and twisted a young man really existed.”
Bundy, a professor at Harvard but speaking on behalf of his alma mater, treated William F. Buckley Jr. as an upstart who had failed to know the rules at a gentlemen’s club. Buckley’s infraction was that he had been so ungrateful as to write a scathing attack on the school from which he had just graduated, alleging that it was a hotbed of atheism and collectivism. This ingratitude was compounded by Buckley’s failure to recognize that, as a Roman Catholic, he was something of a guest at Yale. “Most remarkable of all,” said Bundy near the beginning of his review of God and Man at Yale, was that Buckley, while not even mentioning that he was “an ardent Roman Catholic,” should attempt to define Yale’s religious tradition. “Yale has thousands of Catholic alumni and friends,” said Bundy, “who would not dream of such a course.”1
The Rev. Henry Sloane Coffin (Yale ’97), chairman of a blue-ribbon committee to report on the spiritual and political condition of Yale, wrote to one inquirer, “Mr. Buckley’s book is really a misrepresentation and distorted by his Roman Catholic point of view. Yale is a Puritan and Protestant institution by its heritage and he should have attended Fordham or some similar institution.”2
God and Man at Yale would have caused a sensation even without the religious issues. Senator Joseph McCarthy was on the loose, and at the height of his influence, the United States was in the midst of the Korean War, and at other universities professors had lost jobs over accusations of communism. Buckley did not allege that there were communists on the Yale faculty, but his accusations that traditionally conservative Yale was promoting “collectivism,” even if this amounted to little more than New Deal liberalism, threatened to test the loyalty of some of the Old Blue.
In retrospect, however, the religious dimensions of the controversy are the most remarkable, since they are the least remembered. Even a generation later it would seem almost inconceivable that there could have been a national controversy involving the question of whether a major university was sufficiently Christian. Yet not only the responses of Yale, but also those of the reviewers, make it clear that it would have been news to admit that Yale had drifted loose of its Christian moorings.
To be sure, the task of assessing the role of religion in the controversy is complicated by Buckley’s conflation of the economic and religious issues. At one point in the book, Buckley even affirmed, “I believe that the duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world. I further believe that the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level.” Years later Buckley remarked that the words “the same struggle reproduced on another level” were not originally his own but were suggested by one of his conservative mentors. Nonetheless, he let them stand because there was “a nice rhetorical resonance and an intrinsic, almost nonchalant suggestion of an exciting symbiosis.”3 Though Buckley, always the debater, thus acknowledged that his fondness for rhetoric overrode his concern for precision of argument, the explicit equation was implicit throughout the book.4
In any case, a substantial section of Buckley’s essay dealt solely with the state of Christianity at Yale, and this provides us with a revealing account of both the extent and limits of religious influences at the middle of the twentieth century. Buckley’s evidence, as well as Yale’s responses, offers clues as to how it was that many American universities of this era could still see themselves as Christian and yet simultaneously, especially from an outsider’s point of view, seem essentially subversive of Christianity.
One of the things Buckley was so impolite as to point out was a sizable gap between Yale’s rhetoric and reality. His lead quotation was from President Charles Seymour’s 1937 inaugural: “I call on all members of the faculty, as members of a thinking body, freely to recognize the tremendous validity and power of the teachings of Christ in our life-and-death struggle against the forces of selfish materialism. If we lose that struggle, judging from present events abroad, scholarship as well as religion will disappear.”5
The statement was typical of the public philosophy of many universities of the time. Spokespersons could routinely identify Christianity with the very future of civilization and with what separated the United States from totalitarianism. Nonetheless, at a university, especially a university that served a
free nation, these teachings could not be taught by indoctrination and were accepted only by “a thinking body, freely.”
On such grounds, Yale claimed to score well. Yale was reputed to be more religious than many universities, and Seymour had in the same address called for “the maintenance and upbuilding of the Christian religion as a vital part of the university life.”6 Not only did it have a strong religious heritage, a divinity school, a university chapel, and campus religious programs, but its undergraduate program could also point to its large religion department and to many influential faculty who were strongly pro-Christian.
Buckley presented a formidable case that none of these amounted to much and that a Yale education was more likely to shatter a person’s commitment to Christianity than to fortify it. The most popular religion course, taught by the university chaplain, was popular because it was easy. Moreover, the professor, despite his personal religious faith, made a concerted effort to teach about Christianity, rather than to teach Christianity. The next most popular course, taught by T. M. Greene, a philosopher of religion, though explicitly Christian, was a course in “ethics, not religion.” By this Buckley meant that it did not do anything to affirm the essentials of traditional Christianity, such as belief in God and in “ ‘Jesus Christ as Divine Lord and Saviour.’ ”7
Another well-attended religion course was taught by a man who told his students he was “80% atheist and 20% agnostic.” A few other courses were taught by avowed Christians, in Buckley’s sense, but were not well attended. In fact, religion, although an option to fulfill some core requirements, enrolled less than 10% of Yale students in any given year; its influence thus would not have been pervasive, even if it had been laudable.
Turning from the low Christian influence in religion courses, Buckley documented strong anti-Christian influences in the rest of the curriculum. He did note a few exceptions. A course in European intellectual history and another course in Shakespeare each had avowed Christian perspectives. Professor Robert Calhoun of the Divinity School occasionally taught an undergraduate course on the history of philosophy but kept most of his religious views to himself. Church historian Kenneth Latourette was openly a traditional Christian, but his undergraduate courses were not popular.
Such influences were more than offset by others. In the History Department was a “vigorously atheistic . . . professional debunker . . . who has little mercy on either God, or on those who believe in Him.” Two of the leading figures in the Philosophy Department, Brand Blanshard and Paul Weiss, were, respectively, “an earnest and expansive atheist” and “a confirmed debunker of the
Christian religion.” In the social sciences, where disbelief in God seemed almost a faculty prerequisite, one of the most cynical reputedly declared that “a cleric today is the modern counterpart of the witch doctor” and suggested to Jesuits that they could convert the world overnight if they could “submit the wine to a chemical analysis after consecration and then see if you’ve gotten hemoglobin out of grape juice.”
Noting that most of the texts used in the university were either hostile or indifferent to religion, Buckley summarized the problem at Yale and elsewhere as the triumph of “relativism, pragmatism and utilitarianism,” in the spirit of philosopher John Dewey. “There is surely not a department at Yale,” Buckley observed, “that is uncontaminated with the absolute that there are no absolutes, no intrinsic rights, no ultimate truths.”8
Defenders of Yale invariably dismissed any anti-Christian influences in the curriculum as defensible as matters of academic freedom and pointed to the extracurricular religious influences at the university. Catholics had the St. Thomas More Club, Jews had the Hillel Foundation, and Baptists, Methodists, Congregationalists, Lutherans, and Episcopalians had campus ministries, but by far the most important campus organization was Dwight Hall, headquarters of the Yale University Christian Association. This venerable institution began in 1881 as the Yale YMCA when both Yale and the Y were strongly evangelical institutions and still carried considerable social prestige. It sponsored religious retreats, book clubs, and considerable social work in New Haven.
Buckley insisted, however, that “the religious influence of Dwight Hall is in no way commensurate with its general importance on campus.” Much of its work was not distinctly Christian, and Christianity seemed to be regarded by the association as an option (as it would have been at YMCAS generally by this time). In 1949 the editors of Dwight Hall’s magazine, Et Veritas, stated that they “choose the Christian” philosophy as a matter of “personal conviction” rather than editorial policy. Editors in succeeding years were not even Christian, one being an “avowed agnostic.” The Yale Christian Association attitude that Christianity was purely a matter of preference, said Buckley, turned Christianity into “ ‘my most favorite way of living.’ ”9 Buckley’s point was that the extracurricular religion promoted at Yale was so bland that, except in rare instances, it had little chance of counteracting the combination of indifference and hostility toward religion displayed in the curriculum and by many professors.
Identifying this problem was easier than proposing a plausible cure. Buckley attacked the ideology of modern universities at a vulnerable point, subtitling his polemic “The Superstitions of Academic Freedom.” Academic freedom, he argued, could not be the sacred absolute its proponents were claiming. Universities already ruled out any number of teachings, such as extreme racism. So the question was not whether there were limits on what might be taught, but only what those limits were. The problem remained, however, of how to change those limits.
Buckley’s proposed solution was the most heretical part of his essay. Applying principles of free enterprise, he reasoned that if Yale’s principal supporters were its alumni and if the alumni were predominantly traditionally Christian and conservative economically, it would be reasonable for alumni to withhold their support until Yale was providing the product they desired. This was a variation on his point about academic freedom. Since Buckley surmised that alumni pressure already limited what might be taught at a university, he was asking only for the more rigorous application of an existing principle.
The idea of substantive external control of universities was, of course, anathema to most educators. McGeorge Bundy dismissed it as simply alien, intimating that Buckley’s views reflected “the pronounced and wellrecognized difference between Protestant and Catholic views of education in America.” The Protestant cultural establishment still cultivated the long-standing view that Catholicism was associated with absolutism while Protestantism had brought the world democracy and freedom.10 Some Catholic complicity with fascism during the World War II era had reinforced this view. Freedom of academic institutions from direct control of either church or state was one of the things many educated Americans saw themselves fighting for in the war. As Randolph Crump Miller, a liberal Christian educator, put it, “This is more than an attack on Yale; it is an attack on all liberal education. It is not a plea for more religion, but for a religion of external authority.”11
Buckley’s Catholicism was critical to the debate.12 Though mainline Protestant leaders frequently condemned Catholic authoritarianism, they also often made special efforts to be tolerant of individual Catholics, especially if they were willing to act like tolerant Protestants. Buckley, however, saw jarring contradictions in the two religious worlds. From his ardent Catholic perspective he could see traits that establishment Protestants took
for granted. From his more rigorous religious viewpoint, their easy tolerance of unbelief seemed naive, if not hypocritical.
From the inside the claims that Yale was still Christian did not appear hypocritical at all. Mainline Protestantism could genuinely be considered to be flourishing at mid-century and to be holding its own on college campuses. In response to Buckley the standing “Committee on Religious Life and Study” at Yale offered a candid but optimistic internal assessment. Despite religious indifference and “a very active secularism,” which celebrated “objectivity” and attempted to exclude value judgments of any sort, Yale was maintaining “a Christian atmosphere which has been accepted as traditional through many college generations.” “Students,” the committee argued, “are not antagonistic to religion.” Even though they were “ ‘ecclesiastically illiterate,’ ” the committee had been assured that “they believe in God and in the moral and ethical teachings of Christ.” Moreover, “they are eager for service which is in the broad sense Christian.”13
William Buckley and the Yale establishment differed so widely regarding the Christian character of Yale because they were using vastly different definitions of Christianity. Buckley was measuring the religion at Yale against something like traditional Catholicism. Much of the Protestant establishment, on the other hand, was talking about Christianity as “service,” “morality,” or “high values in living,” which was more or less equivalent to faith in God or “religion” and for which formal religious observance was desirable but not absolutely necessary.14
So throughout the first half of the twentieth century, despite some obvious decline of Christianity in public life, mainline Protestant religion15 could plausibly be said to be holding its own, even in the universities. World War II, in fact, had sparked a widespread religious revival. In the 1950s college students were still as likely as the rest of the population to be members of churches and to express religious beliefs.16 What was not always taken into account in assessing this religious interest, although it was debated among the theologians, was that the low-voltage religion in many of the churches and on the campuses often did little more than impart a warm glow to the best moral ideals of the culture at large. So the disappearance of explicit Christian influences in public culture might be imminent, but at the same time it was possible with the broadened definition of religion to see the situation as the spread of religious enlightenment. Protestantism, also known as “religion,” could face the future with confidence.
In response to the furor created by Buckley’s book, Yale’s president A. Whitney Griswold appointed a committee of distinguished alumni, chaired by the Rev. Henry Sloane Coffin, ’97, to review the charges. Not surprisingly, the committee gave Yale a clean bill of health. As to the accusation that Yale was encouraging irreligion or atheism, it was flatly “without foundation.” While the committee did not mention Christianity, it affirmed that “there is, today, more than ever, widespread realization that religion alone can give meaning and purpose to modern life.” Students particularly needed the wholeness and sense of direction that religion provided. “It is by faith that man sees all things working together in the light of God and gives himself to work with them. To supply such light and truth Yale was at birth dedicated, and to this high aim the University continues.” In fact, said the committee, “religious life at Yale is deeper and richer than it has been in many years.”17
Prologue II
Henry Sloane Coffin’s Yale (1897)
The Rev. Henry Sloane Coffin, ’97, who chaired the blue-ribbon committee that in 1952 answered William F. Buckley Jr. with the categorical conclusion that “religious life at Yale is deeper and richer than it has been in many years,” could recall more distant student days when Yale’s religious life was deeper and richer still. Coffin was a renowned preacher, was the president of Union Theological Seminary in New York City (he had once been a leading candidate for the Yale presidency), and had done as much as anyone to shepherd mainline Protestantism from evangelicalism to theological modernism.1 At Yale he had first come to prominence in his senior year as president of the Yale Christian Association, or Dwight Hall.
To be president of Dwight Hall was reputedly to be only a little lower on the campus scale of being than football captain.2 This status was remarkable, particularly because Yale was known at the time for the “the professional spirit in . . . athletics,” which cynics contrasted with “the amateur spirit . . . in Yale scholarship.”3 Yale was one of the first campuses to make football into a major religion. Yet this was also an era of “manly” Christianity, when many of the brightest and the best were revitalizing campus Christianity as a first step toward transforming the nation and the world. The Dwight Hall presidency was particularly significant since Yale was a training ground for American elite leadership and the Yale Christian Association was the largest of the burgeoning YMCAs where the campus renewals typically centered. The Yale Christian Association prided itself on being the “conservator of democracy” where “the millionaire and the man who is making his way through college [are] working side by side.”4 Fervent evangelical religion, while far from universal in its influence on Yale students,5 was, nonetheless, the dominant religious force and was eminently respectable. Henry Coffin was duly elected to Yale’s preeminent secret society, Skull and Bones, and rumor had it that the leaderships of the two powerful organizations were closely linked.6
