The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship

Christian Century, July 2, 1997 by Glann Tinder

By George M. Marsden. Oxford University Press, 142 pp., $22.00.

It is time to face the fact, long suppressed in the highest intellectual circles, that a religiously diverse culture will be an intellectually richer culture. It is time to recognize that scholars and institutions who take the intellectual dimensions of their faith seriously can be responsible and creative participants in the highest levels of academic discourse. With this statement, George Marsden pretty well sums up his main argument: Christian scholars should cease being Christian merely in private, as though their faith were no more than a hobby, unrelated to their scholarly pursuits. They should integrate faith and intellect, thus becoming whole in their minds. Rather than being scholars who just happen to be Christians, they should be Christian scholars. And the academic community should accept them as such, just as it accepts scholars committed to secular ideologies such as feminism or Marxism. Marsden aims, above all, at breaking down the antireligious bias he sees in present-day universities and colleges.

Marsden's argument involves three claims. The first concerns the reigning ethos in 20th-century American universities, an ethos which Marsden calls "a virtual establishment of nonbelief." Scholars who are Christians are trained by the dominant academic culture to keep quiet about their faith as the price of full acceptance in the academic community. As a consequence, "something very much like `secular humanism' is informally established as much as Christianity was in the 10th century." Marsden would readily grant that there are exceptions, such as Calvin College, where he once taught, or the University of Notre Dame, where he teaches now. But these only prove the rule, which is a surprisingly inflexible and widely prevalent insistence that faith and learning be kept apart.

Marsden's second claim is that this rule is unfair. Universities often make a considerable show of "celebrating diversity, but Christians are not welcome to stand under the diversity umbrella. Feminists, Freudians, Nietzscheans, Heideggerians and many others are admitted to the scholarly community without question, but not Christians. All that can reasonably be demanded of Christians is that they obey the established rules of scholarly discourse, and Christians are perfectly willing to do this. Although their Christian orientation is based on faith, their conduct of intellectual disputation can be and normally is as rational as that of any other scholars.

Marsden notes how ironic it is that Christians are rigorously judged against the standard of rational objectivity at a time when the very possibility of rational objectivity--as an inheritance of the Enlightenment--is under widespread attack.

Marsden's final and perhaps most important claim is that the world of scholarship, far from being somehow threatened or impoverished by the presence of Christians in its midst, would be enriched. Faith makes a difference to whatever scholarship it inspires and sustains, although the difference in no way compromises intellectual integrity, as the secularists who govern our universities seem to fear. The Christian faith may, for example, alert scholars to subjects worthy of investigation; thus (my example, not Marsden's) a great deal of empirical research into the influence of religious beliefs on political behavior is being conducted by Christian political scientists. In many cases these scholars can understand the beliefs they are investigating better than those who have never, so to speak, been inside them. Further, religious faith may prompt a scholar to ask questions that another scholar might neglect--concerning nuclear war, for example, or medical ethics.

In addition to orienting scholarly research in directions that might otherwise be ignored, Christian faith may provide useful hypotheses. For example, Christianity presupposes a more pessimistic view of human nature than is held by many people. This view may provide a useful framework for investigating areas of human behavior, such as politics, in which typical behavior is worse than behavior anticipated by more optimistic views. One of the most helpful hypotheses set forth in our time (again, my example) is Reinhold Niebuhr's concept of "original sin."

If Christian or other religious commitments make differences of this kind in the conduct of scholarly inquiry, the scholarly community makes itself poorer by its ban on religious expression. Marsden's plea to secular scholars is not simply "Be fair!" but also "Consider your own best interests!" These interests dictate that scholars listen to every reasonable voice and rule out no argument unheard.

Marsden's position is well founded. I wonder whether there is a single Christian in American academic life today who would deny "the virtual establishment of nonbelief." While there are openly professed Christians in American universities (n few of them well-known scholars and in prestigious universities), professing one's Christian faith in an academic setting is not an easy undertaking. Recently I found myself advising a Christian graduate student in a renowned university who was facing interviews for faculty positions not to go out of his way to make his Christian faith known. A Christian acquaintance on that university's faculty fully concurred.