StateChurch: Bringing Religion to Public Higher Education (original) (raw)
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THE PLACE OF RELIGION IN THE UNIVERSITY AND IN AMERICAN PUBLIC LIFE
IN THIS ARTICLE, I offer reflections on the role and place of religion in the American public university and in the greater civil society. To render this large topic more manageable, I briefly develop four models designed to help us think about religion in civil society, and I then apply these models to a particular sphere of civil society, namely, the public university. By public university, I refer to any university or college that is nonsectarian. By role and place of religion, I refer both to the academic study of religion in the university and to lived religion, broadly defined. As I develop each model, it will be clear which usage of religion is being employed. The diversity of models necessitates different notions of religion.
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Rejecting the Obama Administration’s argument that the First Amendment requires identical treatment for religious organizations and secular organizations, the Supreme Court held such a “result is hard to square with the text of the First Amendment itself, which gives special solicitude to the rights of religious organizations.” (Hosanna-Tabor, 565 U.S. at 189). This “special solicitude” guarantees religious freedom from the government in all aspects of society, but particularly on public university campuses. At a minimum, religious expression and religious organizations must have equal rights with secular expression and secular organizations. In some instances, religious expression and religious expression may have greater rights. The Court’s 2020 decisions in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, and Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru, reinforce and expand the “special solicitude” of religion. Indeed, Espinoza and Our Lady have profound implications for student re...
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This article is about religious life and its relationship to public higher education in America. As a way of addressing the fraught relations among religion, the state, moral values, and the university, the article takes a reading of Immanuel Kant’s The Conflict of the Faculties and the writings of contemporary social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. It uses the synthesis of Kant’s and Haidt’s ideas as the foundation for a partial historical reassessment, the ultimate goal of which is the re-enfranchisement of religious Americans into the nation’s public higher education system.
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While attending college, religious participation tends to decline among American students, but evidence of changes in religious belief is less clear. On the bases of both secularization theory and the moral communities thesis, we used multi-level modeling techniques to test whether institutional diversity predicts changes in student belief at Christian institutions. Results suggest that declines in absolutism were associated with increasing religious and political diversity, and religious diversity amplified the effects of academic tenure. Political diversity, however, explained the effects of religious diversity in combined models, suggesting that challenging political discourse may be more important for changes in religious belief than diversity of religious worldviews in the context of Christian higher education in the United States.
The Tensions and Advantages of Religiously Affiliated Colleges and Universities
This paper was presented for the Oxford Round Table at Harris Manchester College, Oxford University, UK, on August 1, 2006. An earlier form of the paper was presented at a colloquium of the Center for Theology at Lenoir-Rhyne College in Hickory, NC, on February 2, 2006. The following is from the "Abstract": The disengagement of church-related schools from their founding religious traditions over the last century has often led, ironically, to the exclusion of specifically Christian values in the name of secular pluralism. A common sentiment today is that religious affiliations are not only anachronistic, but also incompatible with free inquiry. Against this, I want to argue that: (1) there is no value-free education without some sort of historical bias. A university does not become a more authentic university by shedding its religious affiliation, but a different kind of university. (2) Pluralism does not mean becoming nondescript and homogeneous, like everybody else. Pluralism is about differences and robust assertions of one’s distinctive background and beliefs, which enrich society and education. (3) Religiously affiliated universities have several advantages, such as their sense of identity, tradition, the unity of truth, and offer unique resources for defending the freedom of liberal education against market driven consumerism and other external threats to its integrity.
The fear among those committed to Christian higher education has been variously named: the declension thesis, the slippery slope to secularization, the loss of Chris-tian identity. Michael S. Hamilton provides an example of how such fear generates alarmist rhetoric: One moment of relaxed vigilance—one twitch or stumble in a secular direction—and down slides the college into the tar pits of apostasy. The only thing left of its former faith would be a stately chapel building—a fossilized artifact of the college's Christian past. The process started with Harvard—once the pride of Puritanism—and has since claimed almost every once-Christian college. 1 Hamilton's clarion call for refocused vigilance against secularization certainly has as one impetus the publication over the last fifteen years of a number of cogently argued books that document the loss of Christian distinctiveness in American higher education. Commenting on these books, Mark Noll notes that "although they mo...