The role religion played in American higher education has been the subject of considerable study, but my memory of the standard historical trope of thirty-five years ago (when I was new to the field) seemed summed up by the phrase “the secularization thesis.” Briefly, this meant that the early colleges were dominated by religion (essentially a pan-Protestantism) but institutions became increasingly secular in the “age of the university.” This secularization was largely attributed to the research emphasis of faculty who, it was argued, found it difficult to reconcile the pursuit of science with a faith-based life. Evidence of secularization included the elimination of compulsory chapel for students and the need for presidents to be ministers. Fortunately, recent scholarship has offered a much more nuanced and thoughtful portrait of the role religion played in institutions and the people who inhabited them. It is within this realm of scholarship that Andrea Turpin's A New Moral Vision makes significant contributions.

Other scholars, such as George Marsden (The Soul of the American University, 1996), Julie Rubin (The Making of the Modern University, 1996), and Jeffrey Bouman (NonSectarian, Not Secular, 2004) (and for full disclosure, an article, “The University of the Poor,” I co-authored with Bouman in 2004) depicted how expressions of Christianity were vital in late nineteenth-century higher education but in a different, less doctrinaire form than earlier eras. Turpin describes this movement cogently on the book's first page as this “‘disestablishment’ [shifted the] conversion-oriented evangelical Protestant doctrine from its favored place within most institutions. … In its stead, many American intellectuals embraced a more liberal ‘modernist’ Protestant theology, which prioritized ethics, and they accordingly changed their approach to communicating religious values on campus” (p. 1). In her well-researched and engagingly written book, Turpin examines five pairs of institutions to provide rich details of how this shift occurred in multiple settings.

Turpin seamlessly weaves the larger histories of higher education and later nineteenth-century Protestantism with gender norms, which she argues were critical to the changes she goes on to elucidate. The detail she provides comes from in-depth looks at ten institutions. Her first pair include an early women's college, Mount Holyoke, and Oberlin as an early example of coeducation. She then examines elite, all-male institutions, Harvard and Princeton, and their coordinates, Radcliffe and Evelyn. Her fourth pair are eastern independent women's colleges Wellesley and Bryn Mawr and finally two coeducational state universities, Michigan and California. She justifies her institution choices with well-documented, oft-told histories to demonstrate that previous scholarship omitted the gendered-lens and, therefore, overlooked the key determinant in how and why religious expression changed.

One important contribution of Turpin's work is that she provides both a new framework and language to describe the shift caused by the disestablishment she defines. She states that the more evangelical Protestantism emphasized “people's ‘vertical’ relationship with God” whereas the modernists stressed a “‘horizontal’ relationship with one another” (p. 17). It is within the framework of the “horizontal,” relationship-oriented expressions of religion that “gender ideals became intimately intertwined with student religious and moral formation” (p. 17).

As the title suggests, Turpin's primary theses are, first, that gender dynamics drove change in several directions, including religion. Second, she argues that the changes in religious expression on campus played out in ways that did not transform gender norms but reinforced them instead—especially for the largely white, elite students who attended the ten institutions she studied. She states that higher education leaders, struggling both with the influx of women and the shifting approach to religion, came upon a solution. Instead of encouraging a more egalitarian system where men and women contributed equally in horizontal Christianity for social betterment in college and after, the leaders reoriented the moral messages they sent to students in gender-specific directions. In large part, the students complied.

The bulk of the work is then the careful depiction of how the gendered moral messages played out. For example in the antebellum United States, Oberlin and Mount Holyoke encouraged women's religious activism, but “female graduates generally elected religious or social reform work in areas that expanded but did not burst women's sphere” (p. 87).

Her discussion of Princeton is an example of how gender dynamics influenced both the push toward university status and a decrease in the vertical expressions of religion. When Woodrow Wilson was at the helm, he strongly held that men and women should play different roles in society, whereby Turpin quips, “In classic Progressive form, Wilson added that such division of labor produced the ‘efficiency’ necessary to the nation's success” (p. 130). Thus, Wilson and other Princeton leaders conveyed to students the need for a particularly masculine form of character development. Turpin then argues that this precise focus on “masculine character development,” which was in line with the “Muscular Christianity” popular among elite, white Protestant men, was an attempt to seek donations for university building. She further argues that Princeton's focus on Muscular Christianity moved it away from the more explicitly religious forms of moral character building. In addition, the rather short-lived coordinate to Princeton, Evelyn College, also had a very gendered vision. It did not seek to be Princeton's clone in everything but the sex of the students. Instead, it was formed “to help women exercise what Evelyn's leaders believed to be their particular form of social influence” (p. 124).

Of singular interest was her detailed description of the influence in students’ lives of both the Young Men's and the Young Women's Christian Associations. These were the organizations that often provided the structure for students to do their “good” works. For almost thirty pages, she depicts how students interacted with the Ys at men's, women's, coordinate, and coeducational institutions. For example, she illustrates how the YMCAs for Harvard and Princeton moved to a horizontal, Muscular Christianity, even a bit ahead of the universities themselves, reinforcing the gendered lessons on campus. As she succinctly notes, “Students would hear the message that moral formation ought to differ for men and women” (p. 254). When students at the University of Michigan separated into two groups, the mission statements were clear. The YMCA promoted “aggressive Christian work, especially by and for college men” while the YWCA wanted to “develop strong Christian womanhood among the woman [sic] students of the University” (p. 257).

Turpin argues her two primary theses effectively, supported by copious amounts of archival data. My only quibbles with the work are small. In her broad sweeps of higher education history, there are times when consulting key secondary sources might have nuanced her account. Also, she asserts that the modern reader might find her conclusion—that the results of the shifts she describes resulted in such gender-stereotyped outcomes—perhaps unexpected. I did not. That turn-of-century colleges prepared students in ways consistent with social and gender norms was not really surprising. However, these are minor concerns. Overall, this an important work that makes a significant contribution to the literature.