Bible Universities 8/13

Some requirements for students at one prominent American college:

"Everyone shall consider the main end of his life and studies to know God and Jesus Christ, which is eternal life."

"Everyone shall so exercise himself in reading the Scriptures twice a day that they are ready to give an account of their proficiency."

Sound like Jerry Falwell's Liberty University or Pat Robertson's Regent University? In fact these regulations (in modernized spellings) were established by Congregationalists soon after they founded Harvard in 1636.

At the nation's second campus, the College of William and Mary (1693), all teachers vowed assent to the Church of England's 39 Articles of Religion and all students learned the mother church's catechism.

Next came Congregationalist Yale (1701), where the president or a professor led prayers and Bible readings each morning and evening, and worship on Sundays, with student attendance mandatory.

Those schools were followed by other pre-Revolutionary institutions under church auspices: Princeton (Presbyterian, 1746), Brown (Baptist, 1764), Rutgers (Reformed Church, 1766) and Dartmouth (Congregational, 1773), alongside the multidenominational but Protestant University of Pennsylvania (1740) and Columbia (1754).

Most were Bible-believing schools inspired by revivalists, precursors of today's evangelical Protestants.

Yet in the 20th century these and other campuses came to embrace thorough secularism, even hostility toward traditional belief. That evolution is depicted in a classic history written a decade ago, still available in paperback and well worth attention: "The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief" (Oxford University Press).

Author George Marsden, winner of the $200,000 Grawemeyer Award in Religion for his subsequent biography of Jonathan Edwards, is a University of Notre Dame professor and past president of the American Society of Church History.

His "Soul" book sidesteps Roman Catholic and smaller Protestant colleges to focus on major universities that have dominated American intellectual life.

After the Civil War, the vast majority of U.S. campuses "were remarkably evangelical," Marsden reports, and most were led by clergymen who taught courses defending biblical Christianity. A century ago, almost all state universities conducted compulsory chapel services and some required Sunday church attendance. Chapels didn't become rare until after World War II when the WASP educational establishment eroded so rapidly that most people take today's campus secularism for granted.

The loosening of traditions resulted naturally from immigration by Roman Catholics and Jews. It seemed only fair to drop doctrinal limits in hiring teachers and admitting students.

In addition, Marsden recounts, the influential "mainline" Protestants favored mildly liberal religion that didn't resist full-blown secularism. Advocates of tolerance, he says, were anything but tolerant toward conservative Catholic and Protestant thinking, though it offered authentic intellectual contributions.

It's an extremely important and fascinating aspect of the American heritage.

After telling that tale, Marsden plunges beyond history to lament that non-belief has supplanted Christendom as the only acceptable academic perspective. Though religion departments abound, he says, they rarely uphold Christian traditions and often undermine them.

Religion isn't accepted within vital intellectual discourse but merely tolerated as a private activity, he writes. Even as a private matter, university diversity and nondiscrimination policies forced Christian clubs to wage lawsuits to maintain their right to limit leadership or membership to fellow believers.

If Americans mean what they say about diversity, Marsden argues, authentic, traditional religious viewpoints must be given a place within academic life as respectable as multiculturalism or feminism. He believes it's equally important to nurture private colleges that maintain unabashed religious viewpoints on scholarship and culture.