SACRED AND SECULAR TENSIONS

IN HIGHER EDUCATION

Both sacred and secular worldviews have long held a place in US higher
education, although nonreligious perspectives have been privileged in most
institutions in the modern era. Sacred and Secular Tensions in Higher Education
illustrates the importance of cultivating multiple worldviews at public, private,
and faith-based colleges and universities in the interest of academic freedom,
and intellectual and moral dialogue.

Contributors to this edited collection argue that sacred perspectives are as integral
to contemporary higher education in the United States as the more dominant
secular perspectives. The debates and issues addressed in this book attempt to
rebalance the dialogue and place an emphasis on pluralism, rather than declare
victory of one paradigm over the other. Student affairs administrators, higher
education and religious studies faculty, and campus ministers and chaplains will
benefit from better understanding the interplay of these sometimes competing
and sometimes complementary ideas on campus, and the impact of the debate
on the lives of faculty, students, and staff.

Dr. Michael D. Waggoner is Professor of Higher Education at the University

of Northern Iowa and Editor of the peer-reviewed journal, Religion & Education
(www.informaworld.com/urel).
SACRED AND SECULAR
TENSIONS IN HIGHER
EDUCATION
Connecting Parallel Universities

Edited by Michael D. Waggoner

First published 2011
by Routledge
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Simultaneously published in the UK

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Sacred and secular tensions in higher education : connecting parallel universities /
[edited by] Michael D. Waggoner.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Education, Higher—Aims and objectives—United States. 2. Universities and
colleges—United States—Religion. 3. Religious pluralism—United States.
I. Waggoner, Michael.
LB2324.S23 2011
378’.01—dc22
2010039711

ISBN13: 978-0-415-88755-7 (hbk)

ISBN13: 978-0-415-88756-4 (pbk)
ISBN13: 978-0-203-83383-4 (ebk)

Typeset in Bembo and Stone Sans

by EvS Communication Networx, Inc.
Printed and bound in the United States of America on acid-free paper
by Walsworth Publishing Company, Marceline, MO
CONTENTS

List of Figures and Tables vii

Permissions ix
Preface xi

1 Sacred and Secular Tensions in Contemporary Higher Education 1

Michael D. Waggoner

2 Taking the Tournament of Worldviews Seriously in Education:

Why Teaching about Religion Is Not Enough 18
Perry L. Glanzer

3 Teaching Spirituality in Public Higher Education 35

C. Carney Strange and Judy L. Rogers

4 Understanding the “Interior” Life of Faculty: How Important Is

Spirituality? 49
Jennifer A. Lindholm and Helen S. Astin

5 Inviting Atheists to the Table: A Modest Proposal for Higher

Education 72
Robert J. Nash

6 Jesus, the Enlightenment, and Teaching World History:

The Struggles of an Evangelical Scholar 92
Ralph E. Lentz
vi Contents

7 Evangelicals on Campus: An Exploration of Culture, Faith, and

College Life 108
Alyssa N. Bryant

8 Exploring Religious Pluralism in Higher Education: Nonmajority

Religious Perspectives among Entering First-Year College Students 134
Alyssa N. Bryant

9 Spirituality and Religion: Through the Eyes of the “Hidden

Educators” 155
Christy Moran Craft

10 University Student Affairs Staff and Their Spiritual Discussions

with Students 171
Jill A. Burchell, Jenny J. Lee, and Sara M. Olson

11 Addressing the Identity–Relevance Dilemma: Religious

Particularity and Pluralism at Presbyterian Church-Related
Colleges 185
Robert C. Spach

12 Exploring Spiritual Engagement at Secular Knox College 204

Louisa Sue Hulett

Afterword: Connecting Parallel Universities 238

Michael D. Waggoner

Contributors 246
Index 249
LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES

Figures
3.1 Dimensions and approaches to teaching religion and spirituality 37
3.2 Roles in teaching religion and spirituality 41
4.1 Percentages of high and low scorers on spirituality who have high
scores on each of six scales 57

Tables
4.1 Gender Differences in Spirituality (Percent Who Score “High”) 54
4.2 Demographic Characteristics and Spirituality (Percent Who Score
“High”) 54
4.3 Professional Characteristics and Spirituality (Percent Who Score
“High”) 56
4.4 Self-Described Religiousness Among Faculty Who Score “High”
On Spirituality (percentages) 57
4.5 Correlates of Spirituality (Simple Correlations and Standardized
Coefficients) 58
4.6 Correlates of Spirituality (Unstandardized Coefficients) 59
4.A Variable Defi nitions and Coding Schemes 69
8.1 Demographic Characteristics and Self-Perceptions 139
8.2 Religious Engagement and Spiritual Practice 141
8.3 Attitudes and Values 143
8.4 Spiritual Beliefs and Perspectives: General 144
8.5 Ultimate Spiritual Quest 146
viii List of Figures and Tables

8.6 Current Views about Spiritual/Religious Matters 146

8.7 Spiritual Beliefs and Perspectives: Pluralistic Emphasis and
Scientific Skepticism 147
8.8 Experiencing Spiritual Struggles 149
10.1 Interview Questions 175
10.2 Demographic Information 176
12.1 Selected Frequency Tables 223
12.2 Cross Tabs 227
PERMISSIONS

Perry L. Glanzer, “Taking the Tournament of Worldviews Seriously in Educa-

tion: Why Teaching about Religion Is Not Enough,” Religion & Education 31,
no. 1 (Spring 2004): 1–19. Taylor & Francis, Ltd., http://www.informaworld.
com. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Carney Strange and Judy Rogers, “Teaching Spirituality in Public Higher

Education,” Religion & Education 30, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 24–39. Taylor &
Francis, Ltd., http://www.informaworld.com. Reprinted by permission of the
publisher.

Jennifer A. Lindholm and Helen S. Astin, “Understanding the ‘Interior’ Life of

Faculty: How Important is Spirituality?” Religion & Education 33, no. 2 (Spring
2006): 64–87. Taylor & Francis, Ltd., http://www.informaworld.com.
Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Robert J. Nash, “Inviting Atheists to the Table: A Modest Proposal for Higher
Education,” Religion & Education 30, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 1–23. Taylor & Fran-
cis, Ltd., http://www.informaworld.com. Reprinted by permission of the
publisher.

Ralph E. Lentz II, “Jesus, the Enlightenment, and Teaching World His-
tory: The Struggles of an Evangelical Scholar,”  Religion & Education 32, no.
2 (Fall 2005): 46–64. Taylor & Francis, Ltd., http://www.informaworld.com.
Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
x Permissions

Alyssa N. Bryant, “Evangelicals on Campus: An Exploration of Culture, Faith,

and College Life,” Religion & Education 32, no. 2 (Fall 2005): 1–30. Taylor &
Francis, Ltd., http://www.informaworld.com. Reprinted by permission of the
publisher.

Alyssa N. Bryant, “Exploring Religious Pluralism in Higher Education: Non-

Majority Religious Perspectives among Entering First-Year College Students,”
Religion & Education 33, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 1–25. Taylor & Francis, Ltd.,
http://www.informaworld.com. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Christy Moran Craft, “Spirituality and Religion: Through the Eyes of the
‘Hidden Educators,’” Religion & Education 30, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 40–58. Tay-
lor & Francis, Ltd., http://www.informaworld.com. Reprinted by permission
of the publisher.

Jill Burchell, Jenny J. Lee, and Sara Olson, “University Student Affairs Staff
and Their Spiritual Discussions with Students,” Religion & Education 37, no. 2
(Summer 2010): 114–28. Taylor & Francis, Ltd., http://www.informaworld.
com. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Robert C. Spach, “Addressing the Identity-Relevance Dilemma: Religious

Particularity and Pluralism at Presbyterian Church-Related Colleges,” Religion
& Education 34, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 55–76.

L. Sue Hulett, “Exploring Spiritual Engagement at Secular Knox College,”

Religion & Education 37, no. 3 (Fall 2010): 245–268.
PREFACE

Secular and religious–spiritual worldviews pervade contemporary higher edu-

cation in the United States, manifesting themselves in and out of the classroom,
and vying for primacy as the interpretive construct for making meaning in the
lives of faculty, students, and staff. Everyone committed to the higher educa-
tion enterprise—from liberal arts to technical specialty, formal instruction to
cocurricular life, public and private—can recognize and understand the paral-
lel operation and influence of these sometimes competing and complementary
ideas.
This book illustrates that secular and religious–spiritual perspectives are
forcefully at work in the academy; and, in the interest of academic freedom,
healthy dialogue in a learning community, and holistic development of stu-
dents, higher education institutions can cultivate intellectual and cultural envi-
ronments that enable comity, if not synergy among competing perspectives.

Plan of the Book

In the opening chapter, I outline, in broad strokes, the major historical circum-
stances that bring us to our current opportunity to connect “parallel universi-
ties” and identify key areas within higher education that are most strategic for
exploiting this opportunity. The chapters that follow illustrate the dimensions
of the challenges and opportunities with the major “blind spots” introduced in
chapter 1: faculty, curriculum, students, and student affairs professionals.
Chapters 2 and 3 address a strategic issue in the academy regarding religion
and spirituality; that is, how can we even talk about these things in a higher
education setting? In chapter 2, Perry Glanzer makes a case for the impor-
tance of teaching about the formation of worldview and its critique, and the
xii Preface

ramifications of worldview for individual thought and social action. While he

acknowledges that it is important to openly address religion as a component
of culture and individual belief, Glanzer argues for the broader conception
of worldview that would enable perspectives, including those not religiously
based, to become part of the discussion. The contribution of Carney Strange
and Judy Rogers in chapter 3 complements Glanzer’s ideas. They offer frame-
works for teaching about religion and spirituality in a public university context
that proceed from personal and pedagogical concerns rather than the more
typical starting point of “legal and ethical parameters of this domain.”1
Sharon Daloz Parks once suggested the importance of the faculty’s leader-
ship in affecting college student development in the area of religion and spiri-
tuality when she said “every professor is potentially a spiritual guide and every
syllabus a confession of faith.”2 If we take this idea seriously, we must better
understand faculty members’ tensions in dealing with issues of spirituality and
religion in the academy. The next three chapters approach this from different
perspectives.
In chapter 4, Jennifer Lindholm and Helen Astin explicate the interior life
of faculty, attempting to answer the question: How important is spirituality to
them? They report the fi ndings from a national study of faculty that describes
the personal and professional correlates of spirituality within this group. Chap-
ters 5 and 6 provide divergent examples of two perspectives represented within
the faculty, staff, and students that could enrich worldview discussions in the
academy: atheism and evangelical Christianity. Though these could be accom-
modated by Glanzer’s “worldview” approach and Strange and Rogers’s frame-
works, neither are warmly welcome on many campuses. In chapter 5, Robert
Nash proposes “Inviting atheists to the table.” Nash notes that most venues in
the United States are at best chilly if not hostile to godless perspectives and
argues for a more generous religious pluralism that allows a wider range of
voices. He goes on to make a case for an atheist perspective as part of an enriched
conversational environment that need not be threatening to more dominant
mainstream perspectives. Ralph Lentz, in chapter 6, represents another point
on the continuum. His stance as an evangelical Christian poses challenges to
his teaching in a public university setting. Lentz explains his wrestling with the
truth claims of his faith tradition and their relationship to the secular ethos in
which he works. In the process he examines the unquestioned “dominance of
Enlightenment-Positivism in the Academy.”3
These tensions run in parallel among college students. In the next two chap-
ters, Alyssa Bryant examines how this plays out in two major segments of the
student population: evangelical Christians and nonmajority religious groups.
Due, in part, to national politics, the profi le of evangelical Christians on cam-
pus has increased this past decade. Their presence and influence in higher edu-
cation, though present from Harvard’s beginning, has grown since the 1980s.
In chapter 7, Bryant outlines this development. She goes on to report fi nd-
 Preface xiii

ings from a case study that illuminates the culture of campus evangelicals. As
evangelicals claimed greater attention in recent years, quieter yet significant
developments were taking place among nonmajority religious groups on cam-
pus. In chapter 8, Bryant reports fi ndings from the national study, Spirituality
in Higher Education (2003), from UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute
with respect to spiritual practices and beliefs of nonmajority religious groups.
In one of the first studies of its kind, we can begin to see the tensions inherent
in opportunities and challenges presented by the increasing religious pluralism
on US campuses.
In addition to faculty and students, a third major segment of the campus
community also experiences the tensions of mediating religious and secu-
lar ideas: student affairs professionals—the “hidden educators.” In chapter 9,
Christy Moran Craft reports on a study of student affairs administrators as they
encounter issues of religion and spirituality in the out-of-classroom curricu-
lum. Chapter 10 continues the discussion of student affairs with Burchell, Lee,
and Olson’s study of student affairs staff ’s experiences of dealing with students
about spirituality issues.
The next two chapters feature institutional case studies that illustrate dif-
ferent manifestations of the sacred–secular tensions discussed by the authors to
this point. The fi rst case provided by Robert C. Spach in chapter 11 explores
how church-related colleges “embody their Christian identity meaningfully in
a context where Christianity is but one among the diverse religious and nonre-
ligious perspectives represented on campus.”4 The circumstances of the second
case are quite different. In chapter 12, L. Sue Hulett discusses the tensions
percolating within Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. Like so many other
colleges, Knox moved away from its church affi liation over the years to become
more intentionally secular. Now, with irony experienced by many small col-
leges that followed similar paths, it is actively considering how to address reli-
gion and spirituality in response to varied student interest. Hulett describes
student attitudes and fi nds the tension of an environment at once chilly toward
conservative and Christian expression, yet one that seeks to encourage funda-
mental questioning of their assumptions, values, and beliefs.
I conclude with an Afterword reflecting on the themes elaborated through-
out the book, noting encouraging signs of more open engagement through-
out higher education, current “border skirmishes” where tensions seem to be
manifesting themselves, and recommendations for next steps.
Michael D. Waggoner

Notes
1 Strange and Rogers, p. 47.
2 Parks, S. D. The Critical Years: Young Adults and the Search for Meaning, Faith, and Commitment
(New York: HarperCollins, 1986), 134.
xiv Preface

3 Lentz, p. 105.
4 Spach, p. 186.

Reference
Spirituality in Higher Education. (2003). UCLA Higher Education Research Institute. Retrieved from
http://spirituality.ucla.edu/docs/reports/Spiritual_Life_College_Students_Full_Report.
pdf
1
SACRED AND SECULAR
TENSIONS IN CONTEMPORARY
HIGHER EDUCATION
Michael D. Waggoner

Economics and religion were the foundation of the European colonization of

the New World. Most often religion played a supporting role, sanctifying the
work of the explorers in the conquest of new lands. In selected cases, however,
the drive for religious liberty was the leading impetus for those who sought
a home in uncharted territory. In every such case, this ideal of free religious
expression was tested by how Christians treated each other, not to mention the
indigenous populations they encountered.
Those who see any reduction of Christian influence as negative may view the
more than four hundred-year evolution of religious liberty in North American
culture and the law only in terms of what has been lost. It may also be seen,
however, as the progress of democratic values in an increasingly pluralist society
with Christian privilege being moderated so other faith traditions are granted
a place and a voice. We argue that e pluribus unum is best served by a society
where each voice, religious and nonreligious, may contend for a hearing; that
social, cultural norms must support even-handed evaluation of arguments; and
that higher education has a major role to play in this process if, to use Warren
Nord’s phrase, it is “taking religion seriously.”1 Given the individual and group
dynamics within the academy, these goals are far more ambitious than at fi rst
they may sound.
Since its inception with the founding of Harvard College in 1636, higher
education in the United States, both public and private, has been of more than
one mind about the place of religion on its campuses. Established as a school for
training clergy, with a clerical governing board, within decades Harvard began
diversifying its curriculum and replacing clergy board members with colonials
with broader interests—an early sign of the impending competition for the
soul of the university.2 Through the colonial period and into the early decades
2 Michael D. Waggoner

of nationhood many faculty and consequently students encountered the “new”

higher criticism developed by European scholars that challenged traditional
understandings of biblical texts, and some Christian tenets. Colonial collegians
also became increasingly enamored of the success and promise of modern
science and technology. These intellectual, social, and cultural developments
triggered challenges to their religiously based worldview with the result that
some became distracted from or disenchanted with religious explanations that
began to seem less complete or compelling than the new thinking.
In public colleges and universities, believers abandoned religion, sought to
reconcile their beliefs with ideas emerging from science and philosophy, or
compartmentalized their personal beliefs and their academic work. All of these
approaches continue to be represented in contemporary public and private
higher education. Those who did not wish to accommodate their beliefs sought
what they perceived to be the more receptive venues of private, religiously
affi liated colleges where religion was venerated and accorded a leading role
in interpreting experience, including academic work. These places were not,
however, without confl ict regarding religion; tests for orthodoxy and the
permissible exploration of ideas were and remain in contention. No institutions
were or are exclusively secular or sacred. Each institution, whether public or
private, functions as a “parallel university,” hosting an evolving competition of
animating ideas and values, each with its own rituals, honored texts, creeds,
and dogma. It is the argument of this essay that this blended environment
remains the case today, but is increasingly fluid and potentially volatile.
The attention given to religion of late in various quarters of society
represents not so much a resurgence of religion as an increasingly sophisticated
awareness of this longstanding cultural phenomenon, the explication of which
is generating energy in numerous fields. What we are seeing as one result
is a more open acknowledgment of the part that religion, and its corollary,
spirituality, may play in individual life and the larger society. What we have is
an ongoing “tournament of worldviews,” to use Perry Glanzer’s phrase.3
The monolithic specter of the secular devouring the religious is an
oversimplified trope. The proliferation of work on the secular in recent
years points to the inadequacy of such a simple characterization.4 We follow
Charles Taylor’s argument that secular ideology is neither the subtraction of
religion from the public square, nor the decline of personal religious belief and
practice, which is assumed to be a result of modernity5 —two representations
generally associated with the “secularization thesis.”6 Rather, we argue for an
interpretation of the heightened attention to religion in contemporary higher
education in terms of Taylor’s conceptualization of the secular: “a move from a
society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one
in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not
the easiest to embrace.” 7 Within this conceptualization, the traditional notions
of secularization may still be entertained, but now must be considered within a
larger, more sophisticated context.
 Sacred and Secular Tensions in Contemporary Higher Education 3

An opportunity is presented by this conception of the secular and the widely

acknowledged current interest in religion within the academy. Rather than
seeing the current focus on religion on campus as an attempt to reclaim or
redeem a discarded past from a secular threat, it can and should be seen as
part of an evolving dialogue that dates from humankind’s earliest ruminations.
Neither religious nor secular assertions should occupy a place of preeminence
by default; they must contend for respect as viable ideas. What could have been
perceived as drift, disengagement, or disenchantment—all resulting in a “failure
to engage” the place of religious ideas in the public academy—may now be seen
as a continuing evolutionary development of ideas. The remainder of this essay
charts elements in the landscape of higher education that contributed to this
failure to engage and include the “balkanization” of religion, shifting bases of
authority, individualism as an article of faith, challenges to cultural authorities
that arose in the 1960s, civil religion, and the development of multiple blind
spots in the academy.

The Balkanization of Religion on Campus

The current landscape of religion in higher education consists of a scattering
of enclaves organized around each group’s common ideas with scant or highly
selective interest or energy for broader affi liation or connection. The net result
is balkanized religion on campus: a collection of interested parties with limited
reach and effectiveness. Traditional Christian denominational (“mainline”)
campus ministry operations continue, though shadows of their 1960s selves. A
variety of nondenominational, primarily evangelical Christian organizations
are at work meeting in residence halls or available public spaces on and off
campus. Selected local churches mount outreach efforts to draw students off
campus to settings perhaps more familiar and nostalgic of earlier adolescent
family time. Minority religious groups ( Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and others)
meet on and off campus usually in much smaller groups than their Christian
evangelical counterparts. There are occasional institutionally based councils of
campus ministry organizations to be found, though not all parties participate
due to differences in belief. Institutional officials in student affairs divisions
may or may not have some connection with these groups; much depends upon
the personal motivation of administrative staff. The academic study of religion,
formalized into academic departments since the mid-twentieth century, for
the most part represents the public institutions’ official attention to this area,
though perhaps only half of public colleges and universities even have such
departments. Other disciplines, such as social work and history among others
address these issues because they touch upon their fields.
The fragmentation of religion and spirituality in the academy mirrors
intellectual and social trends of the last century. On the academic side,
compartmentalization of knowledge accelerated with the increased
formalization of disciplinary knowledge in the later nineteenth century. This
4 Michael D. Waggoner

can be seen in the rise of professional associations around this time, which
resulted in proliferating enclaves of knowledge, interests, and perspectives, each
developing its own standards and peer review processes for quality control.
Legal developments in the early 1960s, particularly the 1963 Supreme Court
decision in Abington School District v. Schempp, contributed directly to these
trends. Initially, this decision was known for its decision to remove reading of
the Christian Bible from the public schools in keeping with the establishment
clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution. Elsewhere in the decision,
though, lay a passage suggesting that while it is not appropriate to teach for
religion (in a devotional or religious formation sense), schools may teach about
religion (in an academic sense)

Nothing we have said here indicates that such study of the Bible or reli-
gion, when presented objectively as part of a secular program of educa-
tion, may not be affected consistently with the First Amendment.8

It was some years before this section was seized upon and used as a rationale
for teaching about religion in public education.9 Many colleges and universities,
particularly private institutions, had theology departments, but this Court
decision enabled, if not directly encouraged public institutions to form
departments for the academic study of religion.10
On the cocurricular side, in loco parentis, the time honored role of institutions
operating “in place of parents,” which was prevalent through the mid-
twentieth century, gradually gave way to more laissez-faire student oversight
driven increasingly by institutional legal responsibilities. In the area of religion,
public institutions moved away from formal sponsorship of religious activities
to simply providing space as they would for any other student organization. As
late as the 1970s, some public colleges and universities had nonacademic staff
members with titles such as Coordinator of Religious Affairs. Both academic
and cocurricular arenas reflected an important shift in bases of authority that
set the stage for our current circumstance.

Shifting Bases of Authority

At the founding of Western universities over one thousand years ago, the
prevailing worldviews were grounded in religious ideas. Ruegg argued that
“…the essential outlines of an academic ethic…form the following seven values
which in the Middle Ages legitimated, in religious terms, the amor sciendi and
the university which was its institutional form.” Of these seven values, three
were grounded in religious fi rst principles: (1) a rational world order created
by God and accessible by human reason; (2) an understanding, grounded in
ancient and Judeo-Christian thought, of humans as imperfect beings with the
resultant limitations of intellect that engendered humility and self-criticism;
and (3) freedom of scientific and scholarly research and teaching grounded in
 Sacred and Secular Tensions in Contemporary Higher Education 5

a respect for the individual formed in the image of God and reflective of the
macrocosm.11 The university teacher “should … be above reproach, in his life
and his morality…. He was supposed to practice all the Christian virtues….”12
This way of knowing guided the development of knowledge and society
well into the seventeenth century, when the work of modern science began
to challenge religion’s explanations of the physical world. Galileo, whom
Stephen Hawking among others calls the “father of modern science,” met
severe criticism from the Catholic Church in the early seventeenth century for
championing the Copernican idea of heliocentrism. More than two hundred
years later, Darwin faced similar challenges from religious critics despite his
attempt to explain his fi ndings within a theological framework, albeit one
that was an alternative to the prevailing orthodoxy. Notwithstanding religious
critics or the destructive bent to which some scientific advances were turned,
the idea of unlimited progress through the advance of science has persisted
and contributed to quality of life improvements in health and advances in
technology, agriculture, and industry.
US higher education, under significant influence from the nineteenth
century German research enterprise, became the predominant engine of science
and technology, and the embodiment of the idea of progress during the early
twentieth century. This period of history brought, concurrently, the advances
in basic science of general relativity and quantum physics and the detrimental
effects of applied science and technology seen in urbanization and modern
warfare. For some, these developments called into question both the idea of
progress and the unquestioned trustworthiness of science as the leading guide
for human development. Though religion still suffered from the stigma of failing
many of the challenges of modern science, it offered to some an alternative, if
not complementary way of knowing when compared to the newly apparent
and unintended consequences of science. This awareness and resulting desire
for a more unified way of knowing were coupled with the challenge of general
relativity and quantum physics to what seemed like the more coherent universe
of Newton. This unease was abetted by an underlying anti-intellectualism in
the United States that spawned reactionary responses.13 But it also emboldened
some more conciliatory voices to explore ways of knowing that incorporated
modern science while acknowledging other dimensions of experience. Such
an example noted above with respect to Charles Darwin’s attempt at a defense
of his ideas by integrating them with religion extends into present debates
exemplified by Stephen Gould’s argument for the respective magisteria of
science and religion.14
The debate continues between those asserting a value-free, objective approach
to a single knowable reality and those arguing for an interpreted environment
that acknowledges context, culture, and perspective. The university remains
a major agent of discovery, technological development, and the liberal arts in
our society, and because both ways of knowing are contending for a place
6 Michael D. Waggoner

in the future of higher education, it is important to understand the current

phenomenon of religion and spirituality in higher education and its potential
impact upon the development of knowledge and, consequently, contemporary
life.
The idea that multiple perspectives may claim validity remains a challenging
idea to many. Charles Taylor’s concept of the secular explicates the sources and
ramifications of these ideas.15 The challenge to positivism’s grip on epistemology
and the growing legitimacy of interpretivism is empowering multiple groups
to claim equal validity for their own perspective with that of others. This trend
toward relativizing bases of authority produces challenges and benefits. On
the challenging side, one need only note the shrill voices and polarization of
contemporary politics. On the beneficial side, we can see the evolution toward
equality of previously marginalized or underrepresented people within our
larger body politic.16 This trend toward relativizing bases of authority plays into
the hands of the American proclivity for individualism so well documented
from the earliest days of the United States to more recent commentators.

Individualism as an Article of Faith

The birth of the United States occurred in a social and intellectual milieu
in the West in which a move toward the worth of an individual quickened
out of the demise of the ancien régime.17 The pursuit of religious liberty as a
founding impetus of the American colonies, in which it carried the inherent
Christian value of the individual, matured into the press for a social contract
more broadly conceived.
The resulting American proclivity for individualism was fi rst and most
famously noted by Alexis de Tocqueville in his classic Democracy in America
where he observed the potentially isolating, deleterious effects of this tendency.

Individualism is a calm and considered feeling which disposes each citi-

zen to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows and withdraw into the
circle of family and friends; with this little society formed to his taste, he
gladly leaves the greater society to look after itself.18

Bellah and colleagues began with de Tocqueville in their 1986 critique of

American individualism, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in
American Life, elaborating modern developments that support the tendencies
observed by de Tocqueville.19 More recently Robert D. Putnam added his
comments on the ramifications of individualism in his Bowling Alone: The
Collapse and Revival of American Community and found the emergence of a more
optimistic trend.20
Americans’ idea of the common good has long been shaped by their
perception of the preeminent worth of the individual. Charles Taylor identified
the sources of this idea in the recognition of individual identity that emerged
 Sacred and Secular Tensions in Contemporary Higher Education 7

from the collapse of the social hierarchies in eighteenth century Europe. This
recognition led to the assumption of equal worth and respect and gave rise to
the competing politics of equal dignity and those of difference, the discourse
between which continues to clarify the relationship of the individual to the
collective.21 This emphasis on the individual achieved legitimating expression in
the founding documents of the United States: the Declaration of Independence,
the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.
Bellah saw American individualism expressed in utilitarian and expressive
forms. The former assumes that in a “society where each vigorously pursued
his own interest, the social good would automatically emerge.” With the latter
“the ultimate use of the American’s independence was to cultivate and express
the self and explore its vast social and cosmic identity.” In either form the worth
of the individual self as fundamental to the ethos of the American way of life,
particularly understood in the larger context illuminated by Charles Taylor
referenced above, must be acknowledged in any contextual critique of religion
in US higher education.
McIntyre and Taylor argue elsewhere that with the understanding of the
expressive self, we must return to a broader conception of moral philosophy
than has evolved in modern life. Alasdair McIntyre’s thesis in After Virtue
states that “…the language and appearances of morality persist even though
the integral substance of morality has to a large degree been fragmented and
then in part destroyed.” 22 Charles Taylor argues that “…moral philosophy
has tended to focus on what it is right to do rather than on what it is good to
be, on defi ning the content of obligation rather than the nature of the good
life.”23
Taken with other environmental conditions, particularly when mixed with
proprietary religious belief, individualism can be a potent force for resistance
and change. Contemporary politics and social life is rife with examples of
enabling and empowering individual expression, but many college campuses
are increasingly being criticized as hostile to the full spectrum of expression. 24
Conservatives feel unwelcome, if not disenfranchised, and religious ideas
(from evangelical to atheist) are not seriously admitted to discourse. But other
trends from the twentieth century contributed to today’s complicated public
milieu regarding the individual and religion—the challenge to cultural
authorities and the increasing presence and awareness of non-Western
religious traditions.

Challenges to Cultural Authorities in the 1960s

With respect to the place of religion in higher education, several important
features of the contemporary cultural landscape derive from developments
in the United States that had their origin in the 1960s. During that period,
cultural authorities were challenged in terms of race, gender, the Vietnam
8 Michael D. Waggoner

war, and religion, creating a seismic shift in norms that governed social
conventions—a number of which continue to be contested today. The
movement for racial equality quickened during the 1960s under the leadership
of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and President Lyndon Johnson, resulting
in groundbreaking civil rights legislation that challenged long established
White privilege. Women’s rights gained momentum during this time under the
banner of the women’s liberation movement and challenged male domination
of power and influence in society. Violence in politics, on campuses, and in
war challenged democracy’s much vaunted claim to peaceful decision making:
the assassinations of President John Kennedy and his brother Robert and those
of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X; the violent protests on college and
university campuses; the riots in Watts and Detroit, the Democratic Party
convention in Chicago, and the Vietnam war. This war not only diverted
national resources away from competing concerns for poverty in the United
States (Great Society and War on Poverty programs), but further undermined
the authority of intellectuals in society by becoming identified as a technocratic
war, that is, a war waged by intellectuals who found themselves in power
rather than a generals’ war.25
The arena of religion saw cultural challenges in theology at large and
emanating from the US Supreme Court. The Vatican Council convened by Pope
John XXIII issued liberalizing reforms in Roman Catholicism that challenged
the traditionally conservative church. The “death of God” movement, though
originating some one hundred years earlier in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche,
gained popularity during the 1960s, and brought another challenge to religion’s
authority. And while the US Supreme Court issued decisions that disallowed
Bible reading and prayer in public schools, those same decisions opened the
way to teaching about religion in a nonsectarian manner in public educational
institutions from elementary through higher education.26
Another more oblique, but important development in religion came in the
form of the Immigration Act of 1965, which enabled a new wave of immigrants
to settle in the United States. They differed from earlier groups in that while
immigration continued from Europe, greater numbers of immigrants came
from Asia and the Middle East. While earlier immigrants were predominantly
Roman Catholic and Protestant Christians, these newcomers brought primarily
non-Western faith traditions. Gradually, mosques and temples appeared,
challenging the architectural and ideological landscape.27 New resources for
spiritual development were introduced into the heretofore predominantly
Christian culture: transcendental meditation, yoga, Eastern mysticism, and
other practices that later came to be known collectively as New Age. Though
they remain in the minority, their increasing presence represents another
challenge to the dominant Christian influence.
 Sacred and Secular Tensions in Contemporary Higher Education 9

American Civil Religion

During the 1960s, sociologist Robert N. Bellah wrote what was to become
a landmark essay that named a phenomenon that was yet another powerful
competitor on the spiritual landscape of the United States—civil religion.
Bellah drew upon Rousseau’s idea of civil religion developed in his 1762 Social
Contract: that a nation would be well served by promulgating a purely civic faith
with a few tenets aimed at making good citizens. Such a “faith” would provide
a metaphysical underpinning for the state, its practices, and institutions.28
Rousseau’s elements of civil religion include: (1) existence of God, (2) the
life to come, (3) the reward of virtue and the punishment of vice, and (4)
the exclusion of religious intolerance. Bellah used several key moments in
US history to argue that there occurred a sacralization of major values into
an American civic faith: Washington’s Farewell address, Benjamin Franklin’s
autobiography, the establishment of Thanksgiving Day, the Civil War, John F.
Kennedy’s inaugural address and “Great Frontier,” and Lyndon Johnson’s Great
Society.29 One might add President Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America”
metaphor as an example of “the life to come.” We cannot adequately elaborate
Bellah’s argument here, but we acknowledge the presence of an American civil
religion as a worldview contestant in the higher education environment.

Blind Spots
Taken together, these conditions—balkanized religious experience, shifting
bases of authority, pervasive individualism, challenges to cultural authorities
coalescing in and emanating from the 1960s, and an emergent civil religion—
have contributed to a milieu of proliferating and competing perspectives with
no common process for publicly adjudicating their respective claims. One
result in the institutions of US higher education has been the development of
blind spots with respect to religion and spirituality in several of its important
constituent groups. Among those discussed in this essay are faculty, curriculum,
students, and student affairs staff.

Faculty
There are multiple points of entry to such a discussion of blind spots in academe.
We begin with faculty because they shape the development and transmission
of knowledge from which flows the curriculum and in turn becomes the
academic context in which students are principally engaged. The cocurricular
environment, argued by some as equally important to holistic college student
development, will be discussed later.
Contemporary college and university faculty, with the possible exception
of religious studies scholars, generally keep their personal ideas about religion
10 Michael D. Waggoner

and spirituality to themselves. This can be attributable to one or more of the

following conditions: (1) the historic tendency toward privately held belief that
intensified since the Protestant Reformation; (2) the persistent philosophical
influence of positivism that separates personal values from disciplinary content
and research; (3) an institutional and professional reward and incentive system
that through signals from peers and administration channels faculty effort
into tacitly approved areas of inquiry (religion and spirituality historically
not being among them outside of the fields of theology or religious studies);
(4) a genuine antipathy for religion that results in intentional ridicule and
disparagement of the value of these topics as subjects of serious academic pursuit
(again notwithstanding the fields of theology or religious studies); (5) narrow
preparation in graduate school that focuses only on disciplinary knowledge and
research methods, not ancillary work such as how to teach, or college student
development theory (intellectual, psychosocial development within religious–
spiritual concerns), or working with student affairs professionals who see as
their mission holistic student development; and (6) misunderstandings about
the treatment of the subjects of religion and spirituality under provisions of
the US Constitution. The cumulative effect of these conditions is that many
faculty either do not see or do not value religion or spirituality as a legitimate
dimension of experience and therefore deem it as not pertinent in promulgating
knowledge in their fields.

Curriculum
The evolution of the faculty DNA with respect to this blind spot regarding
religion carried over into instruction through the formation of courses of study.
The centrifugal pressures of specialization and fragmentation of knowledge
resulted in ever increasing fields of study. Faculty codified the knowledge of these
disciplines and subspecialties into norms, each with its own language, methods,
and criteria for quality and value. And, these areas of study seemed less and less
concerned to form interconnections with other emerging disciplines except
insofar as to distinguish themselves from each other. These disciplinary norms
created powerful socializing forces that tended to perpetuate and entrench
disciplinary parameters in students, some of whom eventually continued the
process as the next generation of scholars.
One of the more notable results of this trend when taken with others from the
opening discussion of larger social forces, was the creation of religious studies as
a discipline, marking off territory from existing theology departments. Whereas
theology departments proceeded from religious assumptions that aimed to
promulgate a faith tradition, the religious studies field emerged as a discipline
that sought to bring a more disinterested social scientific approach to the study
of religion. The origins of this approach date back to the European research
centers that influenced US scholars beginning in the eighteenth century. The
 Sacred and Secular Tensions in Contemporary Higher Education 11

formalization of this trend, however, is a fairly recent phenomenon as illustrated

by the 1949 formation of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, with
its own scholarly journal, and the creation of religious studies departments
across the United States in the wake of the US Supreme Court decision in
1963 that allowed teaching about rather than for religion in public education
institutions. It was that same year that the American Academy of Religion was
born out of a group of scholars that had been meeting since 1909 under various
names related to biblical study.30
Developments in two seemingly unrelated areas contributed to an
increasingly chaotic curricular landscape and a difficulty in communicating
across disciplines about issues pertaining to religion: liberal arts education
and professional accreditation bodies. With a greater number of fields of
knowledge came faculty claims that an educated person must understand his
or her corner of the universe of knowledge. This in turn produced contention
over what should be studied by all students in common before proceeding to
more specialized majors. A number of reports and experiments may be found
along the historical landscape of US higher education. The Yale Report of
1828 famously attempted to defend the classical curriculum against the already
apparent evidences of knowledge proliferation.31 Shock waves were felt through
the system when Stanford University’s fabled liberal arts curriculum underwent
a revision to expand beyond parochial Western interests. As recently as 2006–
2007, Harvard issued a report that argued the necessity of reinstating religion in
the curriculum, only to withdraw it after lengthy discussion.32 The content of
the liberal arts curriculum is under constant debate with the intent of achieving
a coherent view, at least on the campus where it is offered. The expansion of
fields of study continues to complicate this, and in the process, the place of the
study of religion remains debatable. Professional education was also touched by
these curricular trends.
The appearance of regional and national accrediting bodies seemed a natural
consequence of disciplinary proliferation that had professionalized several fields,
such as law, medicine, business, and education. Transinstitutional decisions
needed to be made regarding what to include in a field of professional study,
what standards must be met with regard to those subjects, and how well those
standards were met. The press to meet those standards led to a conformity that
discouraged experimentation outside of standardized content. One result was
that matters pertaining to religion and spirituality were mostly relegated to the
religious studies or theology departments. One such example of a curricular
blind spot may be found in PK-12 educator preparation programs. There is
little evidence of widespread attention to religion in these programs aside from
attention to legal limitations.33 This is a particularly important area because
it is an “upstream” influence; that is, teacher and administrator preparation
faculty affect aspiring teachers and administrators who in turn go into the
nation’s schools and influence generations of students. The same may be said
12 Michael D. Waggoner

for school counselor and psychologist preparation programs. Each of these

program areas deals with accreditation agencies, each of which has its own
litany of requirements. Yet, with the evidence of the US population’s interest
in religion, it seems incumbent upon these professional preparation programs to
systematically address how religion and spirituality figure in the lives of those
they serve.
Another, perhaps unintended, outcome of the centrifugal specialization of
knowledge was to marginalize interdisciplinary research. The professional and
institutional systemic reward and incentive norms of faculty discussed earlier
discouraged activity outside one’s discipline. Religious studies scholars were
often complicit in this since they were also busy creating a separate discipline.
Research across disciplines was an arena that would later prove to be fertile
ground for work on the relationship of religion to other aspects of society
and culture, but until relatively recently, little attention was paid to it. The
picture is exponentially complicated when students are added to this mix of
independent faculty jealously guarding proliferating curricula.

Students
Contemporary college students are an important orienting nexus in any
discussion of religion, spirituality, and higher education. Regardless of whether
one accepts the premise of blind spots that exist for faculty or within curricula,
students perennially engage the topics of religion and spirituality as part of
the rite of passage of emerging adulthood. This is a period that extends for
approximately 12 years from 18 to 30—it is not prolonged adolescence. It has
its own distinctive characteristics that have been evolving over four decades as
a result of larger social forces, among which are an expanding higher education
system; willingness of families to extend fi nancial support for a longer period;
and changes in the economic climate.34 For the most part, research shows that
current students within this range, who are referred to as “Millennials” because
they were born in 1980 and began coming of age in 2000, are markedly
different from previous generations on some measures and remarkably similar
on others.35
Twenty-five percent of Millennials are unaffi liated with any particular faith
tradition, compared to 20 percent of Generation X and 13 percent of Baby
Boomers at comparable points in their lives. They attend services and pray less
than their elders and report that religion is less important in their lives.36 There
is, however, a considerable diversity amongst emerging adults. Christian Smith’s
research reports these following categories among this population: Committed
Traditionalists (15%); Selective adherents (30%); Religiously indifferent
(25%); Spiritually open (15%); and Irreligious (10%).37 Furthermore, current
students’ worldview illustrates what one scholar called the “triumph of liberal
protestantism”38 where, despite the decline in mainline church attendance, the
 Sacred and Secular Tensions in Contemporary Higher Education 13

values espoused by these churches have come into the mainstream thinking
of this generation: “individualism, pluralism, emancipation, tolerance, free
critical inquiry, and the authority of human experience.”39A major result,
foreshadowed earlier in this essay, is a new group of emerging adults who are
ahistorical independent agents who choose values, beliefs, and experiences that
maximize their interests on grounds that they select.
Consider these students within the 12-year emerging adulthood span of
experimental and often volatile experiences that may occur as they encounter
new ideas, relationships, and work. Then consider that by Smith’s report
anywhere from 55 to 85% of them may be “in play” with respect to their
ideas about religion and spirituality. These conditions raise the stakes for all
those with an interest in the Millennials having an informed understanding
of religion and spirituality as these ideas relate to the rest of their lives. It also
underscores the importance of mentoring relationships as potential facilitators
of meaning making on college and university campuses.40 The comparative
research done regarding Millennials and previous generations shows religion
and spirituality issues are becoming more important to Baby Boomers as they
age. Inasmuch as many of the senior professoriate are of this latter cohort,
the disparity of interest in these topics between the two groups, added to the
inherent formal, power laden evaluative relationship between teacher and
student, may discourage addressing these issues outside of the religious studies
classroom. This leaves the field open to campus ministry groups, local churches,
synagogues, and mosques, and the largely unrecognized potential of that body
of higher education professionals—student affairs staff.

Student Affairs
Within the area of college life known as the cocurriculum are individuals
involved with the considerable part of student life that takes place outside the
classroom. Residence halls, student activities, and career and academic advising
among several other areas provide venues and occasions for reflection on
ideas that germinate during emerging adulthood. For the most part, trained
professional staff rather than faculty oversee these areas. Their training, in
addition to local institutional orientation, comes from masters’ and doctoral
training programs in student affairs and higher education.41 The organization
of the curriculum and experiences in student affairs masters’ programs is
guided by extensive standards and guidelines developed over 30 years by the
Council for the Advancement of Academic Standards in Higher Education
(www.cas.org). The organization’s well-developed self-assessment materials,
although it is not a formal accreditation group, along with the requirement
that programs participate in self-assessment as a condition of being linked to
the national program directory website of the American College Personnel
Association, effectively ensures awareness of and adherence to these standards
14 Michael D. Waggoner

and guidelines. There are newly revised and well-developed standards and
guidelines for campus religious and spiritual programs in the recent revisions of
the CAS Standards. The guidelines for masters’ preparation programs include
“spiritual development” among the topics to be addressed within student
development theory, and “religion” among the many potential characteristics
of college students to be studied. The extent to which these are covered in the
curriculum varies widely according to local inclination of faculty teaching in
these programs.
It is said that what residential college students experience outside the
classroom contributes as much to their overall development as their in-class
experiences.42 As a consequence, the education of student affairs professionals
represents an opportunity to prepare potentially key actors who may fi nd
themselves in the path of students’ spiritual and religious identity development.
Good work has begun in this field, however; journals and conferences have
examined these issues. Still, anecdotal evidence suggests widespread feelings of
underpreparedness among student affairs staff to deal with student concerns in
this area, suggesting another blind spot with the academy.

Individualism Reprised
Let us return to our individualist tendencies a moment in light of the foregoing
discussion of blind spots. If we acknowledge our tendency toward individualism
and Bellah’s “lifestyle enclaves,” we can see that other aspects of our culture
have exacerbated this tendency. The personalization now possible through
media and technology can contribute to a greater insularity of our enclaves.
Employing information fi lters available to us though various media, we can take
in the version of news we like (or not at all) and entertain ourselves or interact
only with those with whom we choose through special interest arenas (e.g.,
Facebook, MySpace, Twitter), blogs, and chat rooms. Technology can intensify
and reinforce our cohesiveness. Lack of a broader common culture, space, and
occasion for interaction fosters our growing insularity, potentially becoming
the seedbed for polarization of groups and the often resulting incivility that
plagues attempts at civic dialogue.
This technologically reinforced hyperindividualism feeds into the
balkanization of religion in our society and carries over into our public
institutions of higher education. The resulting blind spots regarding religion
and spirituality among the constituent groups within higher education have
left them without common knowledge, language, or process skills to address
the issues that are arising. The next 11 chapters of the book illustrate several
of the problems identified in this essay. A concluding Afterword lays out some
promising developments that address these problems as well as a discussion of
what still needs to be accomplished to connect these parallel universities.
 Sacred and Secular Tensions in Contemporary Higher Education 15

Notes
1 Warren A. Nord has produced three important books since the mid-1990s that address the
treatment of religion in education: Religion and American Education: Rethinking a National
Dilemma (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); (with Charles C. Haynes)
Taking Religion Seriously Across the Curriculum (Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision
and Curriculum Development, 1998); and Does God Make a Difference? Taking Religion
Seriously in Our Schools and Universities (Cambridge, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010).
2 G. M. Marsden, “The Soul of the American University: An Historical Overview,” in The
Secularization of the Academy, eds. G. M. Marsden and B. J. Longfield (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1992); G. M. Marsden, The Soul of the American University (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1994), 9–45.
3 P. Glanzer, “Taking the Tournament of Worldviews Seriously in Education: Why Teaching
About Religion is Not Enough,” Religion & Education 31 (2004, Spring): 1–19.
4 The influence of the secular has been increasingly debated in the past decade. While it
is not possible to recount the major arguments here, let alone the nuances, I do want to
highlight particularly significant contributions to the ongoing discussion. Most notable is
Charles Taylor’s 2007 nearly 900-page opus A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), winner of the 2007 Templeton Prize. In 2010,
Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and Craig Calhoun edited an important vol-
ume, Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2010), analyzing and debating aspects of Taylor’s argument with contributions from several
distinguished scholars including Robert Bellah and Jose Casanova. New York’s New School
sponsored a conference in 2009 on “The Religious Secular Divide,” the papers from which
were published in a special issue of Social Research 76(4) (Winter 2009). The Social Science
Research Council sponsors a blog called the Immanent Frame (http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/).
This venue has continuing interactions on these subjects with prominent scholars, including
all those named above, and Jürgen Habermas on his postsecular thesis. Within that con-
text, Jose Casanova offered a concise and helpful defi nition of terms important for anyone
working with these issues (http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2007/10/25/secular-secularizations-
secularisms/). Casanova has long worked in this area and his work should be consulted.
No discussion of the secular is complete without attention to the work of Talal Asad in
Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, and Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2003). As with the edited volume produced following Taylor’s A Secular Age, David
Scott and Charles Hirschkind edited a volume Talal Asad and His Interlocutors (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University, 2006) explicating and extending Asad’s ideas. And fi nally for purposes
of this note, Philip S. Gorski and Ates Altimordu published “After Secularization?” in the
2008 Annual Review of Sociology (34: 55–85), which offers a comprehensive review of the
debate from the sociological perspective.
5 Taylor, A Secular Age.
6 Warner, VanAntwerpern, and Calhoun, Varieties of Secularism, 8.
7 Taylor, A Secular Age, 3.
8 Abington School District v. Schempp 374 U.S. 203 (1963).
9 The National Council for Religion in Public Education was formed in 1971 to encourage
constitutionally appropriate teaching about religion, including production of high quality
materials, which became legally permissible in the wake of Abington School District v.
Schempp. See C. Kniker, “National Council for Religion in Public Education,” in The
Praeger Handbook of Religion and Education in the United States, eds. J. C. Carper and T. C.
Hunt, 2 vols. (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2009), 326–328.
10 D. G. Hart, The University Gets Religion: Religious Studies in American Higher Education
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).
11 W. Ruegg, “Themes,” in A History of the University in Europe, vol. 1, Universities in the Middle
16 Michael D. Waggoner

Ages, ed. H. De Ridder-Symoens (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992),

32–33.
12 R. Verger, “Teachers,” in A History of the University in Europe, vol. 1, Universities in the Middle
Ages, H. De Ridder-Symoens (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 163.
13 Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage, 1962).
14 S. J. Gould, Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion and the Fullness of Life (New York: Random
House, 2003). As a continuing measure of the currency of this idea, the American Academy
of Religion’s 2011 annual meeting theme is “Science and Religion.”
15 Taylor, A Secular Age.
16 C. Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition,
eds. C. Taylor and A. Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 25–74.
17 Ibid.
18 A. de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, cited in Habits of the Heart: Individualism and
Commitment in American Life, eds. R.N. Bellah et al., 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1996), 37.
19 R. N. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, 2nd ed.
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
20 R. D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 2000).
21 Taylor, “Politics of Recognition,” 22; Alasdair McIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, IN:
Notre Dame University Press, 1984), 5.
23 C. Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press), 3.
24 G. A. Tobin, A. K. Weinberg, and J. Ferer, The Uncivil University (New York: Rowan and
Littlefield, 2009).
25 R. Lora, America in the 60s: Cultural Authorities in Transition (New York: Wiley, 1974).
26 Abington School District v. Schempp.
27 Diana Eck, Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Banaris (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1993).
28 R. N. Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedulus, 134(4) (Fall 2005); C. L. Bankston
III and S. J. Caldas, Public Education: America’s Civil Religion (New York: Teacher’s College
Press, 2009); Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, http://www.constitution.org/jjr/
socon.htm
29 Bellah, “Civil Religion.”
30 History of the American Academy of Religion. http://www.aarweb.org/About_AAR/History/
default.asp; D. G. Hart, The University Gets Religion: Religious Studies in American Higher Edu-
cation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).
31 F. Rudolph, The American College and University (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990).
32 Chronicle of Higher Education, “Harvard Panel Proposes Requiring the Study of Religion and
American History” (October 13, 2006, http://chronicle.com/article/New-Plan-to-Over-
haul-Harvard/119214/); “Harvard Drops Religion Requirement” ( January 5, 2007, http://
chronicle.com/article/Harvard-Drops-Religion/119598/).
33 One good example in this connection is a chapter on “Religion” in a book used in many
teacher preparation programs, L. S. Taylor and C. R. Whittaker, Bridging Multiple Worlds:
Case Studies of Diverse Educational Communities (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2003).
34 C. Smith, Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2009).
35 Pew Center Report, Religion among the Millennials, http://pewforum.org/docs/?DocID=510
36 Ibid.
37 Smith, Souls in Transition, “Committed traditionalists … embrace a strong religious faith…
beliefs they can reasonably well articulate and which they actively practice…. Selective
adherents … believe and perform certain aspects of their religious traditions but neglect and
ignore others…. Religiously indifferent … neither care to practice religion nor oppose it….
 Sacred and Secular Tensions in Contemporary Higher Education 17

Spiritually open…not committed to a religious faith but nonetheless receptive to and at least
mildly interested in some spiritual or religious matters…. Religiously disconnected … little
or no exposure or connection to religious people, ideas, or organizations…. Irreligious …
hold … skeptical attitudes about and [make] critical arguments against religion generally,
rejecting the idea of personal faith” (294).
38 N. J. Demerath, “Cultural Victory and Organizational Defeat in the Paradoxical Decline of
Liberal Protestantism,” Journal of the Scientifi c Study of Religion 34, no. 4 (1995): 458–69.
39 Smith, Souls in Transition, 288.
40 S. D. Parks, Big Questions, Worthy Dreams: Mentoring Young Adults in Their Search for Meaning,
Purpose, and Faith (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000).
41 A master’s degree in this field is increasingly required in order to compete for positions
nationally.
42 For arguments and evidence supporting this claim, see the following: A. Astin, What Matters
in College: Four Critical Years Revisited (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997); A. W. Chickering
and L. Reisser, Education and Identity, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Wiley, 1993); G. Kuh, J.
Kinzie, J. Schuh, and E. Whitt, Student Success in College: Creating Conditions that Matter
(San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005); E. T. Pascarella and P. T. Terenzini, How College Affects
Students: A Third Decade of Research (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005); V. Tinto, Leaving
College: Rethinking the Causes and Cures of Student Attrition (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1994).