Who stripped the public square and left it naked? That puts the matter a bit abruptly, but it is worth asking why religion lost its prominent place in American public discourse during the later decades of the twentieth century—and why the attempt to restore it has triggered a culture war among writers in the republic of letters.
The usual explanations—that secularization of public discourse necessarily results from increased pluralism in American society, or that it was the deliberate product of a determined faction on the Supreme Court—offer clues but remain inadequate. As recently as the 1950s, the pluralism of “Protestant-Catholic-Jew” was apt not to suppress attention to faith but to enhance its public voice. And in other areas of life, such as popular culture and cuisine, pluralism fostered engagement and emulation, not a retreat to the bland.
Meanwhile, blaming judges leaves unanswered the question of why they interpreted the Constitution in so secularist a manner. It underestimates the extent to which the decisions of the Warren Court reflected the common wisdom of their time, and it forces us to ask why those decisions succeeded in binding subsequent judges who are probably more friendly to religion.
In fact, I suggest, the secularization of the public square resulted from the prior secularization of the university. Of course, this itself had a variety of causes, but the academics’ decision that theology is not a branch of knowledge, merely an elaboration of belief, helped turn America away from a religiously informed public square.
The issue is as old as Cardinal Newman’s day. Several discourses in The Idea of the University are devoted to theology as “A Branch of Knowledge,” its bearing on other branches, and their bearing on it. In America, it seems to have been around the beginning of the twentieth century when theology was eclipsed in the curriculum of the nation’s leading universities, as they transformed themselves from Protestant seminaries into research institutions influenced by the German model. Darwinism in the natural sciences and pragmatism in the others made theology superfluous, the professors thought, and by mid-century the natural sciences were increasingly autonomous, while the humanities and social sciences were enamored of such thoroughly antitheological figures as Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud.
As George Marsden explains in his Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief, the full meaning of these curricular developments was hidden for a long time—not least from the universities’ alumni—by the continued, visible extracurricular religious life of the students: The Yale Christian Association, known as “Dwight Hall,” remained a center of student life, and in the 1920s both Harvard and Princeton constructed grand new chapels at the center of their campuses. Religious idealism of a generic sort was a regular object of appeal in addresses by university administrators, even as denominational idiosyncrasies dropped from the curriculum and study of the Bible was marginalized. Though theology was no longer treated as a field of knowledge, the old religious establishments persisted for more than fifty years.
But the shell cannot survive forever without the living organism, and in the 1960s the religious establishments collapsed as clergyman presidents, mandatory chapel, and even formal affiliation with the founding denomination disappeared. The crisis in the universities in those days may or may not have been precipitated by this collapse, but no one can deny the crisis revealed a vacuum of authority. Indeed, American universities today still live with that crisis.
My question, however, is not whether theology ought to be restored as the queen of the sciences, but whether she belongs among them at all. As a political scientist, I am particularly interested in what happens to the national polity when graduates of many universities—especially the oldest, wealthiest, and most prestigious—never saw theology as a serious field of knowledge and thus see religion as, if not an illusion, at most a form of mere belief.
One consequence is obvious: The equation of theology with belief has now been written into the law of the land. In the 2004 case Locke v. Davey, the Supreme Court upheld a state of Washington statute that denied theology students state scholarships that were available for vocational training in every other field. Only Justice Thomas in dissent distinguished “devotional theology” from theology in any other form, and that was to distinguish “the study of theology from a secular perspective.” Religion, it seemed to the Court, is all emotion or commitment, not thought, so the state can with reason exclude theological study from its support, even though it was admitted that, since the choice of what to study was made by mature individuals, there was no Establishment Clause objection to including theology if the state had so desired. That the word vocational is itself a term of religious origin seems to have occurred to the justices not at all.
Another consequence, as the controversy over intelligent design has revealed, is that society in general (and, here again, the judiciary in particular) seems incapable of imagining that rational doubts can be raised about Darwinism except by those whose reason has been clouded by religious belief. I know good, Christian scientists who are skeptical of the claims made by the proponents of intelligent design, and this journal has certainly been in the forefront of exploring its relation to theology—but these debates take place “off the radar screen” of the general press and apparently in a dimension beyond judicial notice. That science and religion are fundamentally at odds—or, rather, that the one is a matter of the mind and the other of the heart—seems a settled tenet of public debate.
Similarly, because theology is considered tied to emotion rather than to thought, the great moral controversies of our age proceed, not exactly without a theological voice, but with that voice heard only for its conclusions, not the reasoning that attained to them. Indeed, the conclusions are often thought suspect because their origin is presumed to be irrational. On campus, or at least on the faculty, the theological voice is absent or barely audible. One reason for the notorious uniformity of faculty sentiment on issues such as abortion and gay marriage is the banishment of modes of discourse that might produce a contrary conclusion. Students do not believe everything their professors tell them (thank God!), but they do tend to accept that the professors speak for rationality. Some obstinately hold to their faith, but they are made to feel obstinate for doing so.
Indeed, holding theology not to be a form of knowledge creates the entire way religion is approached in our culture. Religion can still make itself heard in the public square—but only by singing or shouting, not as a kind of reasoning. When philosophers, following John Rawls, speak of “public reason” as the test of what arguments and what positions are valid in public, they mean to subject public discourse to the censorship of the secular professoriate. They know, I think, that they will never actually suppress the voice of faith in everyday politics, but they mean to exclude it from the higher reaches of the law, from journalism and the media, from professional and corporate networks, and the like.
Is there a way out of this predicament? Not a political one, or at least not an immediate political one. Anyone who looks at the matter with an open mind will see, I think, that there is at least a kind of knowledge possessed by theologians. Many disciplines have a historical dimension—political theory and constitutional law, for just two examples—and it is becoming increasingly apparent to scholars that simply to understand authors who wrote in the past it is necessary to know something about the theology they took for granted.
From Renaissance art to Enlightenment political theory, every text is opaque to a reader who does not know at least the basics of Christianity. In the study of English literature, no overdose of critical literary theory can compensate for ignorance of the Bible. In the study of history, the age of Western discovery and expansion cannot be grasped apart from the story of its missionaries or the millennial struggle of Christianity with Islam. At the very least, knowledge of religion is needed as ancillary to many fields—and I think scholars appreciate that it is critical in understanding a religion to consider how the religion understands itself. Sociology of religion without theology will not do, as it ends up reiterating the worldview of sociology rather than letting its subject speak for itself.
Still, in my experience, the research program of scholars has not been the only cause of a reawakened interest in theology. Interest in religion is reawakening among students, and, unless they are browbeaten, the students are not satisfied with superficial answers from professors trying to cover their own ignorance of theological concerns. If only to be able to keep up with improved catechesis, professors trained during the apogee of secularism have had to retool to be taken seriously in the classroom.
Nor can they count on scoring easy points by expounding their worldly experience in contrast to their students’ narrow upbringing. Few undergraduates have been granted the luxury of an age of innocence; and when not hungry for affirmation of their misbehavior, they are eager to hear a voice of moral authority, and they are astonished when it comes confidently giving reasons, not just making assertions. The questions theology asks—about the nature of God, what can be known in revelation, how to live in the light of these things—are universal. Just to know how to formulate them as questions and where to look to weigh the most plausible answers is a kind of knowledge in itself.
None of this is to say that theology will return to its ancient pride of place. In different kinds of institutions it will have a different function, formative perhaps in resurgent denominational colleges, auxiliary in more-secular universities. Nor is it to say that the current array of religious-studies associations and their journals will satisfy the needs of which I have been speaking. I certainly do not expect anything like the old Protestant establishment to return to authority in the universities, for the current liberal establishment there is in some ways very much like the establishments it replaced.
There will be moments, I trust, for genuine academic leadership, but for now the urgent need is to restore the serious sense of mission among academics who study theology—for, in the long run, even goodwill and an aching desire for a certain kind of learning are no substitute for scholars doing the hard, even sacrificial academic work. Obstacles are already in place: scientists who are not open to understanding the philosophical basis of their own work, counselors and coordinators who disseminate strictly secular doctrines and practices, entrenched scholars whose whole careers have been based on a contrary premise. But a good, clean fight about what is true would itself reform a university culture reveling in cynicism.
James R. Stoner, Jr., is professor of political science at Louisiana State University.
Copyright (c) 2006 First Things (May 2006).
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