The University Gets Religion: Religious Studies in American Higher Education

Christian Century, August 2, 2000 by Leigh E. Schmidt

The University Gets Religion: Religious Studies in American Higher Education.

By D. G. Hart. Johns Hopkins University Press, 321 pp., $38.00.

IT IS HARD by now not to be a little jaded about laments over the university's loss of religious perspectives and Christian groundings. That D. G. Hart takes the opposite tack is bracing: The modern American university, he argues, has had altogether too much religion, especially of the muddled liberal Protestant kind. His case in point is the way liberal Protestants helped build over the course of the past century the lackluster enterprise of religious studies.

Hart, who teaches church history at Westminster Theological Seminary and who cut his scholarly teeth working on the antimodernist tough J. Gresham Machen, has little patience with modern liberal projects of any kind. The attempt to make the study of religion palatable to the wider research university--to its scientific, pluralistic, progressive and civic-minded ethos--strikes Hart as an inescapably Faustian bargain for Christianity. The consistent failure of liberal Protestants to foreground the tension between Christian particularity and post-Enlightenment ways of objectifying religion is to Hart, as it would have been to Machen, a mind-boggling mistake. The end result inevitably seems to be, in historian George Marsden's biting phrase, "liberal Protestantism without Protestantism."

Hart's historical brief against religious studies begins with an unmasking of its ancestry. Far from having a pure "intellectual pedigree" reaching back to the philosophes, the discipline has a much more immediately progressive Protestant lineage, Hart contends. He tries to demystify the field's myth of origins by cutting it off from skeptical Enlightenment forbears and revealing its tenaciously Protestant underpinnings. That Protestant past, Hart rightly points out, has become an embarrassment to many in current religious studies circles, who are moving as rapidly as possible away from a seminary-bound past and who desire more credible intellectual bloodlines. Hart rather enjoys watching the spectacle of their embarrassment and does all he can to add to it. He leaves those who want to run away from the discipline's Protestant past no place to hide.

One problem with this demystification is that Hart construes the production of the study of religion in American culture in relatively narrow, institutional terms. He deftly shows how a number of Protestant ministers and educators laid the groundwork for the emergence of the American Academy of Religion (1964), now the largest and most prominent professional society for scholars of religion. Those Protestant foundations consisted of various campus ministries, Bible chairs, schools of religion and organizations such as the Religious Education Association (1903) and the National Association of Biblical Instructors (1909). Yet these ecumenical Protestant efforts, as Hart well knows, were thoroughly imbued with Enlightenment assumptions about freedom, progress, universality and republicanism. Pointing to them hardly breaks the Enlightenment genealogy for the modern study of religion.

The close, institutional focus on these American Protestant versions of studying religion also underestimates the importance of more suspicious, freethinking variants--a vital lineage stretching from Jefferson, Adams and Paine through Fanny Wright and Robert Owen to H. L. Mencken to Van Harvey. Whether in learned correspondence, public lectures, barbed exposes or scholarly tomes, that line of inquiry was important for the development of the critical study of religion in the U.S. It is certainly far more than a convenient myth of origins for status-conscious academics who prefer now to venerate Hume and Feuerbach as ancestors rather than, say, Schleiermacher. That said, Hart nonetheless does an excellent job of showing the formidable role of establishment-minded Protestantism in the making of religious studies in the first half of the 20th century.

At one point Hart actually calls 20th-century liberal Protestant theology a "mirage" (again the shade of Machen rises up). In taking this stern Reformed

measure of religious studies and its American Protestant past, Hart closes off much of the complexity of this history. While he patiently reconstructs the ambitions of such educators as William Rainey Harper, Charles Foster Kent and George F. Thomas, he does so to show the short-sightedness of their assumptions: namely, the largely unexamined equation of studying religion with the advancement of scientific knowledge, the flourishing of a democratic nation, and the emancipation of the churches from sectarian dogmatism.

These liberal Protestant lives, in Hart's hands, seem flat and unreflective. There is none of the spiritual anguish of William James's Varieties of Religious Experience, none of the self-critical questioning of Reinhold Niebuhr's Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic, none of the visionary thrust of Rufus Jones's sundry studies of mysticism.