Smith has made a fine contribution to the burgeoning body of scholarly studies of religion and higher education in the United States, as well as to the growing consensus against the conclusion that secularization is an accurate depiction of developments in American colleges and universities over the last 150 years or so. And in the process of studying the origins and early years of the Illinois Industrial University (later the University of Illinois), Smith manages to push back the beginnings of the Social Gospel two decades before the 1880s, and finds rural, rather than urban, working class roots for this form of progressive American Christian theology.

Concerning the Social Gospel, Smith carefully analyzes the Christian rhetoric of those who advocated practical, mechanical, and agricultural education, especially that of Rev. Jonathan Baldwin Turner, a “missionary educator and Yale University graduate” (7), who developed in the 1860s what Smith argues was perhaps the first Social Gospel theme: “that agricultural and mechanical education would result in a divinely ordained blessing for the larger society, an outpouring of God's Kingdom on earth which J. B. Turner conceived of as labor's millennium” (164). Turner's energy and powerful arguments helped move the Morrill Act forward and convince legislators in other states to found their own land-grant universities.

Although one might think that the land-grant universities would be the most secular of American institutions of higher learning, Smith's careful research indicates just how steeped in popular moderate Protestant Evangelicalism the Illinois Industrial University and early University of Illinois were. He analyzes the major public speeches of Illinois Industrial University's first and highly effective regent, John M. Gregory, also a clergyman. He also examines the liturgical and religious aspects of major ceremonies at Illinois Industrial University, such as Inauguration Day, the dedication of new buildings, and daily and Sunday chapel services on campus, as well as student religious views and activities on campus. Gregory sought, according to Smith, to “create ideal human beings through the attainment of Christian culture. This meant, among other qualities, character formation, gentility, military and domestic prowess, and abstinence from liquor, tobacco, and idle amusements” (164). As the first leader of Illinois Industrial University, which opened in 1868, Gregory stood between two eras in American higher education—the first, the era of the self-consciously Christian academy, presided over by a clergyman, and requiring theological study, moral education, and chapel attendance; and the second, the era of the large, public research university, which began to highlight Christian service over devotion, and over time encouraged student religious activity within voluntary extra-curricular organizations and various kinds of campus ministries unconnected to the university in any formal way.

This is an important resource for historians of higher education, religion on college campuses, the farmer-labor movement, and the Social Gospel. The bibliography alone is worth the price of the book.