For more than fifty years, an enduring criticism of American higher education has been that it offers students a smorgasbord of courses and choices without coherence, interconnection, or relevance to the deeper purposes of life.
How this fragmentation came about is the topic of this essay. American higher education went through a major transformation that began in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and received new momentum during the late 1960s. One result is the incoherent curriculum. This essay, “From Christian Gentleman to Bewildered Seeker” by Russell K. Nieli, tells how it happened.
The author of the above essay is Russell K. Nieli, Princeton University.
This article is a research note addressing various theoretical and methodological issues in the measurement and analysis of religiosity and secularism and their relationship to quantifiable measures of social health in advanced and prosperous democracies. Particular attention is given to crossnational frameworks for studying religiosity and secularism as well as to the conceptualization and statistical analysis of these notions for research design. Various procedural suggestions regarding the use of comparative frameworks are presented to assist in the development and implementation of future studies gauging the impact of worldview commitments upon societal wellbeing.
The authors of the above article are Gerson Moreno-Riaño, Mark Caleb Smith, and Thomas Mach, Cedarville University.
In this paper I compare Paul and Muhammad, placing them side-by-side in Jerusalem and Mecca, in the Diaspora and on the caravan routes, with the objective of providing a more complete picture to explain the rise of universalistic monotheism. In so doing, it is my intention to add to the studies that have been produced on the social origins of Christianity and Islam. The question I raise is the following: What accounts for the dismantling of the old pagan pluralistic cults of the Roman Empire, and the tribal paganism of Arabia, followed by the emergence of a much more abstract monotheism? I argue that there are strong sociological reasons for this sequence of events in both contexts, and that a comparative study of Paul and Muhammad is a useful means of discovering them.
The author of the above article is Khaldoun Samman, Macalester College.
Although religion has been viewed as playing an important role in the maintenance of moral order, the most recent analysis of variation in homicide rates among nations argues that homicide is facilitated by high levels of religiosity (Paul). That analysis, however, was based on scatter-plots for eighteen “prosperous nations” and focused primarily on the United States compared to “secular” nations. Because there are numerous dimensions to religiosity and a variety of alternative explanations of homicide rates, a more complex analysis is required before more definitive conclusions can be reached. This study attempts such an analysis for a much larger sample of nations and tests Durkheim’s hypotheses that religious passion, as a variable characteristic of nations, is a positive correlate of homicide rates. A multiple regression analysis reveals a complex relationship with some dimensions of religiosity encouraging homicide and other dimensions discouraging it. The relationships found not only survive controls for variables proposed in prior research, but also suggest major modifications to theories focusing on economic variables as characteristics of nations.
The author of the above article is Gary F. Jensen, Vanderbilt University.
When antebellum anti-Mormons took up their pens to thwart the Mormon “menace,” they not only rehearsed various critiques of Mormonism, they participated in a larger conversation about the place of religion in the nation and the ways citizens might separate “real” religion from the religiously inauthentic. While Protestants of the period assumed “objective” descriptions of various religious groups might calm a vexed post-disestablishment religious scene, their incorporation of a long-standing polemical strategy that sought to expose religious impostors illuminated an array of conflicting attachments and various cultural tensions that attended the new republic’s “free market” in churches.
The author of the above article is J. Spencer Fluhman, Brigham Young University.
In a recent defence of what he calls “study by religion,” Robert Ensign suggests that alleged divine revelations represent public forms of knowledge, which should not be excluded from the
academy. But at least according to two major Christian thinkers, namely Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin, revelation is received by an act of faith, which rests on evidence that is personrelative and therefore not open to public scrutiny. If religious studies is to remain a public discipline, whose arguments may be evaluated by believers and non-believers alike, it should maintain its defeasible but not yet defeated presumption of naturalism.
The author of the above article is Gregory W. Dawes, University of Otago, New Zealand.
In a recent paper, Greg Dawes has argued for what he calls the “presumption of naturalism” in religious studies, and by implication in academia in general. He argues that theological
assumptions may not be brought into academic study to the extent that they are not grounded in publicly accessible knowledge. Here I argue that Christians can and must bring their theological assumptions with them into public academia. I will try to show that Dawes’ proposal entails a denial of certain elements of Christian thought, and that his methodology thus fails to be neutral, as well as having other noticeable problems.
The author of the above article is Glenn Peoples, University of Otago, New Zealand.
A common account of the history of American higher education runs as follows. In their early years, America’s colleges and universities served religious ends. Harvard, founded in 1636, had been started to train ministers, and although by the early nineteenth century some college and university professors could be found advancing the cause of science, their primary mandate remained that of instructing students in the classics and teaching them lessons in theology and moral philosophy that would prepare them for the business of citizenship and life. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, however, an “academic revolution” occurred. Especially at elite institutions, professors began thinking of themselves as scientists and scholars whose major task was to seek out truth, not propagate religious dogma. Under pressure from industry and the state to produce scientific breakthroughs that would result in technological progress and social reform, professors reconfigured themselves as researchers who specialized in their subject areas, published their findings, trained graduate students, established their own criteria for evaluating academic work, and demanded the freedom to pursue truth whether or not it offended religious or political authorities. Academic freedom was institutionalized, many schools severed ties to religious denominations, and reforms started at the top soon trickled down. In the mid-twentieth century, additional changes took place as enrollments skyrocketed and students and faculty members from a variety of ethnic, religious, and class backgrounds entered the system. Seeking legitimacy, these new entrants to the academic arena shielded themselves from prejudice and attack by further embracing universalistic ideals of science and eschewing religious value commitments. The secularization of American higher education, almost complete, had only to await the mass hiring into the ranks of the faculty of participants in the social movements of the 1960s – leftists who were deeply suspicious of religion in general and Christianity in particular. As a result of this process, or so the story goes, academe has now become, in the words of historian George Marsden, “a haven largely freed from religious perspectives.”
In broad brush stroke this story is not wrong, but, like most unilinear accounts of social change, it ignores many points of historical ambiguity, tension, and conflict, while encouraging us to substitute assumptions about social reality for systematic empirical investigation. At a moment when sociologists of religion are busy reassessing secularization theory in general – the thesis, subscribed to by all the founders of the discipline, that modernity inevitably brings with it a decline in the power of religion to shape people’s public and private lives – it is worth reconsidering as well the
secularization of American higher education. This short essay takes a step in this direction by answering a straightforward question: How religious, if at all, are America’s college and university professors? To gain traction on the matter, we analyze data from a nationally-representative survey carried out earlier this year of professors in all fields and types of higher education institutions. Although the focus of the survey was professors’
political attitudes, we included a number of standard measures of religiosity as well. We find that, on the whole, professors are indeed less religious than other Americans. However, there is substantial variation in religiosity from discipline to discipline and across types of institutions, and it is hardly the case that the professorial landscape is characterized by an absence of religion. The essay begins with an overview of our
methodology, moves on to summarize key findings, and concludes by considering implications for future research. In the short space we have here, we can offer only an exploratory analysis of our data, but we think that even the descriptive statistics are interesting.
The authors of the above paper are Neil Gross, Harvard University, and Solon Simmons, George Mason University.
I’ve always thought that the doctrine of justification is the crux of the Lutheran/Catholic controversy. If the Roman church has been in error on this point, to the extent of condemning the true understanding of the basis of our righteousness before God, then the Reformation was fully justified. Conversely, if Rome has not been in error, if her position can be charitably interpreted as a faithful exposition of the gospel and her condemnations
(at Trent) as the rejection of genuine errors, then the Reformation, which destroyed the visible unity of the Church and broke ancient bonds of fellowship, was wholly unjustified. All other issues are secondary: sola Scriptura, the role of the papacy, purgatory, the veneration and invocation of the saints, and so on. Even if Rome has been wrong about these things, these errors are simply not weighty enough to justify the division of the Church.
This re-thinking of the issue of justification has been a long process, begun nearly thirty years ago, when I was an undergraduate student. This reflection was intensified in recent years by the Joint Declaration on Justification, issued by Lutheran and Roman Catholic theologians in 1999, in which it was argued that the two churches are in agreement on the essential points of this doctrine. In my view, the Joint Declaration is incorrect, and a significant difference remains in the two understandings of justification, but the difference is much more subtle than is generally recognized by Lutherans.
I used to be confident that the teachings of Paul in Romans, Galatians and Ephesians made it quite clear that the Roman position on justification was fundamentally wrong. I’ve come to have serious doubts about this, however, based in part on a reinterpretation of Paul’s writings, and partly on a better understanding of exactly what the Roman church teaches. In addition, I’ve come to the conclusion that the Lutheran position on justification is an unstable one, incorporating a fatal self-contradiction.
The author of the above essay is Robert Koons, University of Texas.
Large-scale surveys show dramatic declines in religiosity in favor of secularization in the developed democracies. Popular acceptance of evolutionary science correlates negatively with levels of religiosity, and the United States is the only prosperous nation where the majority absolutely believes in a creator and evolutionary science is unpopular. Abundant data is available on rates of societal dysfunction and health in the first world. Cross-national comparisons of highly differing rates of religiosity and societal conditions form a mass epidemiological experiment that can be used to test whether high rates of belief in and worship of a creator are necessary for high levels of social health. Data correlations show that in almost all regards the highly secular democracies consistently enjoy low rates of societal dysfunction, while pro-religious and anti-evolution America performs poorly.
The author of the above article is Gregory S. Paul.
Until the presidency of George W Bush and September 11, 2001 there was not a great deal of public interest in the place of religion in the contemporary world. True, Samuel Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilizations’ thesis had excited some interest in a possible conflict between the West and Islam. In general, however, with declining church membership and attendance in most Western countries it was assumed that the developed world, with America the only major exception, was slowly, but inexorably, on the road to complete secularity. This meant that discussion of religion tended to focus on such matters as the decline of Christianity, the possibility of female and gay priests and ‘moral’ issues such as abortion.
The author of the above essay is Gregory Melleuish, University of Wollongong.
The intensification of anti-Semitism in the Arab world over the last years and its reappearance in parts of Europe have occasioned a number of thoughtful reflections on the nature and consequences of this phenomenon, but also some misleading analyses based on doubtful premises. It is widely assumed, for example, that anti-Semitism is a form of racism or ethnic xenophobia. This is a legacy of the post-World War II period, when revelations about the horrifying scope of Hitler’s “final solution” caused widespread revulsion against all manifestations of group hatred. Since then, racism, in whatever guise it appears, has been identified as the evil to be fought.
The author of the above article is author and historian Paul Johnson.
This study evaluates the association of religiousness with the growth parameters characterizing changes in self-rated health during adulthood (ages 20-94 years). Even after controlling for health behaviors, social support/social activity, and four of the Big Five, women who were highly religious in 1940 had higher mean self-rated health throughout their lifespan, slower rates of linear decline, and less pronounced cascades than did less religious
women. For men, the associations of religiousness with the growth parameters underlying self-rated health were negligible. Results indicate that the association of religiousness with women’s self-rated health may persist after controlling for mundane mediators and that the association of religiousness and self-rated health is not an artifact of the association between religiousness and the Big Five.
The authors of the above essay are Michael E. McCullough and Jean-Philippe Laurenceau, University of Miami.
The Daily Telegraph presents an article from Niall Ferguson Heaven knows how we'll rekindle our religion, but I believe we must. Ferguson, a materialist, is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University. You can read the article here.
In a recent paper, Greg Dawes has argued for what he calls the “presumption of naturalism” in religious studies, and by implication in academia in general. He argues that theological assumptions may not be brought into academic study to the extent that they are not grounded in publicly accessible knowledge. Here I argue that Christians can and must bring their theological assumptions with them into public academia. I will try to show that Dawes’ proposal entails a denial of certain elements of Christian thought, and that his methodology thus fails to be neutral, as well as having other noticeable problems.
The author of the above essay is Glenn Peoples, University of Otago, New Zealand.
The “resurgence” of Paganism in Western Europe has occasioned a response to western Christianity that has presumably neglected the environment, exerted male dominance, demythologized the world and exalted reason above creativity. This essay will discuss some factors that have contributed to this resurgence and paganism’s critique of western Christianity. Then, utilizing Lesslie Newbigin and Paul Hiebert it will make suggestions for a missiological agenda to encounter Paganism. This study represents initial research for understanding the growth of Paganism. Further research is currently ongoing.
The author of the above essay is Michael Cooper, assistant professor of Christian Ministries in the School of Biblical and Religious Studies at Trinity International University.
Western society, far from being secular, is increasingly religious. While Christianity has been in decline, the emergence of new religious movements suggests the continued search for a religious identity. Paganism is but one of the avenues in this search and represents a postmodern response to the apparent lapse in western Christianity. It is essential for the engagement of different religious views to first understand those views. This study
represents initial research in understanding Paganism phenomenologically. Further research is currently ongoing.
The author of the above articles is Michael Cooper, assistant professor of Christian Ministries in the School of Biblical and Religious Studies at Trinity International University.
In the inerrancy controversy that shook the Southern Baptist Convention beginning in 1979, Southern Baptists divided over what it meant to be a Baptist. When Southern Baptist leaders polarized amid the conservative effort to make belief in inerrancy a condition of denominational service, their posture toward the inerrancy initiative derived in large measure from their understanding of Baptist identity. Conservatives believed that moderates
had departed from the Baptist tradition and moderates felt the same way about conservatives. Each party in the conflict claimed to be true Baptists and claimed the imprimatur of Baptist tradition.
The author of the above articles is Gregory A. Wills, Professor of Church History and Director of the Center for the Study of the Southern Baptist Convention at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
When antebellum anti-Mormons took up their pens to thwart the Mormon "menace," they not only rehearsed various critiques of Mormonism, they participated in a larger conversation about the place of religion in the nation and the ways citizens might separate "real" religion from the religiously inauthentic. While Protestants of the period assumed "objective" descriptions of various religious groups might calm a vexed post-disestablishment religious scene, their incorporation of a long-standing polemical strategy that sought to expose religious impostors illuminated an array of conflicting attachments and various cultural tensions that attended the new republic's "free market" in churches.
The author of the above articles is J. Spencer Fluhman, Brigham Young University.
"When people talk about Protestantism, it's about evangelicalism and Pentecostalism," says Diana Butler Bass, a senior researcher at the Virginia Theological Seminary. "Most people think mainline Protestant churches are dead." Director of the Project on Congregations of Intentional Practice, a three-year study of 50 churches across the country that's scheduled to end in 2006, Bass set out to find whether the stereotype is true—or whether, as she puts it, there's "a new kind of mainline congregation developing in the United States that's moderate to liberal theologically, taking traditional Christian practices seriously, and is experiencing an unnoticed vitality."
The above is from a June 2005 U.S. News & World Report article written by Linda Kulman.
Ten years after the publication of The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, I remain largely unrepentant about the book’s historical arguments, its assessment of evangelical strengths and weaknesses, and its indictment of evangelical intellectual efforts, though I have changed my mind on a few matters. Some readers have rightly pointed out that what I described as a singularly evangelical problem is certainly related to the general intellectual difficulties of an advertisement-driven, image-preoccupied, television-saturated, frenetically hustling consumer society, and that the reason evangelicals suffer from intellectual weakness is that American culture as a whole suffers from intellectual weakness. Another helpful criticism is that the book lumps together fundamentalists, Pentecostals, and holiness advocates as culprits in the stagnation of evangelical thinking and that it ignores certain mitigating circumstances and worthy exceptions that one could cite from each of these sub-traditions.
The author of the above article is Mark Noll, professor of History at Wheaton College.
For some, the ongoing skirmishes between traditionalists and reformists over evangelical boundaries might seem to be a sign of life in a movement questing for an identity after Billy Graham and Carl F.H. Henry. For both sides of the divide, however, the issues raised by “post-conservative” proposals represent
a challenge to the uneasy consensus of the postwar movement. For reformists, the postconservative proposals are true to the heritage of evangelical theology as a movement initiated for the reformation of American fundamentalism. And yet, recent developments reveal that the evangelical left may be pushing evangelical theology away from the theological consensus around the centrality of the Kingdom of God that the founders of evangelicalism sought to establish, and saw developed into a full-blown consensus by the end of the century. And, in so doing, post-conservative proposals represent an ironic
regression to the doctrinal reductionism of twentieth-century fundamentalism.
The author of the above paper is Russell D. Moore, Assistant Professor of Christian Theology, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
The Soul of a Nation
Much of what is good about civil religion, and much of what is dangerous about it, even at its best, is summed up by the ambiguity of the image of cross-shaped girders raised from Ground Zero. Wilfred McClay argues that a proper American civil religion balances and blends religious zeal with patriotism, thereby preventing the dominance of one over the other.
When measured by new converts and recent increases in church attendance, Christianity seems to be doing pretty well in America. But the numbers conceal the reality. Clifford Orwin examines the quasi-relativism of mainline Protestantism and the intellectual poverty of evangelicalism in America, as well as their unfortunate implications.
The December issue of First Things has an excellent article detailing the two cases on religion that will come before the United States Supreme Court in 2004. In addition, the November issue of First Things, has an excellent article dealing with Nazism and the Catholic Church.
There has been a recent rash of newsweekly magazine articles dealing with religion. In the November 10 issue, Newsweek had a cover story on Faith and Healing. The author of that piece, Claudia Kalb, hosted a live chat on MSNBC, where she answered questions about the article. The December 8 issue of Newsweek has an article about Women of the Bible.
The December 8 issue of U.S. News has a cover story on The New Evangelicals.
Neil Swidey writing in The Boston Globe talks about the rapid evangelical growth at New England's liberal college campuses.
James Hitchcock writes:
Through much of its history America has been assumed to be a religious nation, and indeed a good deal of the time a Christian nation. God has been invoked with great regularity by public officials, by politicians seeking to become public officials, on money, and in many other contexts. If much of this religiosity has been superficial and even sometimes hypocritical, it has nonetheless expressed the aspirations of probably the vast majority of Americans over the past two centuries.
You can read Hitchcock's article Competing Ethical Systemshere.
Challenging the view that the reference to "God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, like the similar references to the "Creator" in the Declaration of Independence, is permissible only if they are of merely historical interest, John Eastman argues in the brief filed in the Pledge of Allegiance case on behalf of The Claremont Institute's Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence that the public acknowledgement of God was viewed by the founders as an essential component of the civic virtue necessary to sustain free government.
A new brief (pdf) was filed on December 19, 2003, before the Supreme Court of the United States by John C. Eastman, Edwin C. Meese III, and Philip J. Griego.
