Why the Academy Needs Christians

The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship

By George M. Marsden

Oxford University Press

119 pp.; $22

It is sometimes hard to know exactly what we mean by the modifier Christian, particularly when we apply it to our work. Does it indicate merely that one happens to be a professing Christian? Or does the word Christian necessarily imply a distinctive approach to one’s work? And if so, should that distinctive approach alter the substance of what one does–or just the manner in which one does it? Christians must subject all aspects of their lives, including their work lives, to the lordship of Christ. But it is not always obvious how that requirement is best obeyed, no matter what work one does.

The problem is particularly elusive for those of us in the business of academic scholarship. A Christian plumber manifests his faith through painstaking attention to his craft and customers; he need not consider whether his faith should dictate the methods used to unclog your drain. One could approach the problem of “Christian scholarship” in a similar way. In this view, Christian scholars strive to be consummate professionals, who honor God by their example and thereby lead colleagues and students to wonder about the faith motivating such exemplary labors.

But, although this is surely sound advice, it would seem that the rightful claims of Christian scholarship are far more extensive. All scholarly writing relies upon, and in turn reinforces, certain suppositions about the nature and meaning of the phenomena being studied. It should make a very big difference if one believes what Christians believe; and that difference should entail more than just being a dedicated teacher. Indeed, Christian scholars would seem to have a clear mandate to follow the lead of Romans 12:2 and demonstrate that the renewing of our minds can transform our vision of the world.

Alas, as George Marsden points out in this provocative and valuable book, they rarely make good on this obligation. Instead, most Christian scholars learn early on to “keep quiet about their faith as the price of full acceptance” in the scholarly community–an unstated commitment to self-censorship that extends to every facet of academic life, from graduate training to hiring, tenuring, promotion, and access to publication venues.

Building on an analysis begun in his acclaimed 1994 study The Soul of the American University (Oxford University Press), Marsden argues that the banishment of Christian perspectives from the contemporary academy represents an unwarranted constraint upon free intellectual inquiry. Why, he asks, are the perspectives of believing Christians not accounted a legitimate part of the “diversity” we all now celebrate? Or is the otherwise commendable ideal of “diversity” the cover for a new uniformity–a dogma of naturalism that views Christianity with particular hostility?

Marsden would like to persuade his mainstream colleagues that there is no longer any good reason, in a post-Enlightened era, to privilege the “nonsectarianism” of secularism–or, indeed, to regard it as especially nonsectarian. Here Marsden effectively deploys multiculturalism and postmodernism against the very antireligious position their proponents generally embrace. If we all agree that scholarship is unavoidably “situated” in various ways (according to race, gender, class, sexual orientation, etc.), and if we all agree that every scholar operates on the basis of certain nondemonstrable beliefs, then what grounds can there be for discriminating against the expression of religious perspectives, so long as the scholars who do so play by the pragmatic rules, wait their turn, and do not hog the stage?

So, then, what distinctive contributions might a Christian perspective offer? Though Marsden’s statements in these matters are more suggestive than definitive, they give us a glimpse of what he is talking about. Christianity “sacralizes” the intellectual life by infusing it with a seriousness it has largely lost in secularist hands. Because Christianity’s holism affirms the comprehensive order of the world, it becomes a critique of, and reproach to, our tendencies toward reductionism and fragmentation. Its insistence upon our God-ordained limitations is a powerful counter to humanity’s arrogant pride.

The doctrine of creation grounds the moral law in God’s unchanging nature and thereby restores a plausible basis for moral judgments that many secularists find themselves unable to make. The doctrine of incarnation honors the natural world by opening and connecting it to the spiritual realm. And the doctrine of original sin accounts for a universal perversity in human behavior that would otherwise seem inexplicable.

All well and good, if rather general and unspecific. But there are some troubling assumptions buried in the recommendations Marsden puts forward. To begin with, I am strongly inclined to doubt his assumption that postmodern assertions about the Enlightenment’s bankruptcy now command general assent among academics. One need only think, for example, of the widespread Schadenfreude engendered by Alan Sokal’s spoof of postmodern rhetoric to be convinced that there is an intense and growing hostility to postmodernism in the academy. When Marsden suggests that academics can no longer reject Christianity as “unscientific” without also rejecting postmodernism, he may be making an argument that is less challenging than he thinks. The reigning mindset of the mainstream academy remains overwhelmingly secular-positivist.

Then there is the related strategy of claiming that Christian scholars, like African Americans, women, gays, and other marginalized groups, deserve to be permitted a distinct “voice” as part of the pluralism of a decentered academy. One can well understand the temptation to employ the language of identity politics in order to benefit Christian scholars at a time when that language commands respect in the academy. But such arguments are unlikely to carry the day if for no other reason than that (as Marsden himself points out) most advocates of “diversity” are committed secularists with little interest in intellectual diversity. And even if such arguments were tactically successful, they advance a troubling vision of the academy as hopelessly, permanently, and systemically fragmented. Christian scholars, in this view, would win their place at the table by classifying themselves as just another particularism in the vast, noisy dining hall of particularists. In this day and age, what could be less outrageous?

A very different vista, however, is suggested by the bracing sentence with which Marsden begins his book: “Contemporary university culture is hollow at its core.” Surely this is the most urgent problem we face; and surely Christianity has much to say about it. Despite his use of the “diversity” argument, then, Marsden also seems at times to be conjuring something resembling John Henry Newman’s formative and theologically grounded conception of higher education. For Newman, the firm possession of a theological center was the precondition of there being any coherent organization of knowledge at all. The modern university has abandoned this ideal, and despite the academy’s growing resemblance to Babel, even Marsden is not advocating a Protestant restoration. But what, then, can Christian scholarship do about the hollow core?

So there are tensions in Marsden’s argument. On the one hand, he wants to accord Christians a permanent minority status in a pluralistic academy that, he contends, no longer has any reason to fear Christian coercion–indeed, has far more to fear from the coercive dogma of “established unbelief.” On the other hand, he wants to hold up Christian scholarship as a model for the reintegration of knowledge and reunification of a disintegrating modern university. Are these positions entirely compatible? Marsden is rightly contemptuous of the fatuous idea that an infusion of “values” separated from a comprehensive world-view would make any difference in the present state of affairs. But he is also careful to express such thoughts in “non-imperial” ways, not wanting to ignite fears of a resurgent Christian hegemony. Instead, he offers high praise for the liberal academy, and for the place of the religious scholar in it, challenging Stanley Fish’s typically flippant contention that religious people “should not want to enter the marketplace of ideas, but [rather] to shut it down,” since they are presumably already in possession of the Truth.

And indeed, Fish is dead wrong, at least insofar as he is talking about a genuine, deeply meditated Christianity. For the freedom to make choices is part of what it means to be made in the image of God. The Christian faith teaches that God desires not only that we seek the truth, but that we choose to embrace it; and it is his will that we be provided the opportunity to make that choice–and perhaps to make it wrongly. In the same way, God desires to receive our uncoerced, heartfelt love and our voluntary obedience, rather than to program us to live in robotic holiness and fealty.

These tensions in Marsden’s argument, then, are tensions inherent in the “betweenness” of the Christian life itself, which sustains the promise of wholeness even as it accepts the reality of brokenness. That fact may be a powerful reason to defend the modern university, despite all its hollowness, chaos, and waste, as a place where Christians can choose to be salt–though, as always, they must count the cost in doing so. But that requirement always applies, at every time, in every situation. Today’s scholars at least have the advantage of having made a choice. The “established” Protestantism that dominated earlier universities substituted the comforts of cultural Christianity for the need to make that choice–freely, courageously, counterculturally–and thereby inhibited the development of a vigorous and self-consciously Christian scholarship. As Marsden makes clear, today we face a very different set of problems–and a very different set of opportunities.

Wilfred M. McClay teaches history at Tulane University in New Orleans and is the author of The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America (University of North Carolina Press).

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