In 1921, an apocryphal letter was reprinted in dozens of fundamentalist Protestant newsletters. Purportedly a note to “Mother” from a college student, the letter said, “My soul is a starving skeleton; … my faith is as unstable as water… . I wish that I had never seen a college.” The letter did not have to be real to articulate a prominent theme among conservative Protestants of the 1920s. In their eyes, America’s colleges had betrayed them, turning away from their role as custodians of traditional evangelical Protestant faith. Colleges, from the perspective of these fundamentalist critics, instead had become hotbeds of every modern -ism, from atheism and communism to feminism and hedonism.
Conservative evangelical Protestants have not been the only ones to notice a change in the nature of American higher education. Historians have long noted the dramatic shift in the central purposes of leading institutions. From their beginnings as training centers for ministers, many prominent US colleges by the twentieth century had shifted into their recognizably modern role as research universities, guided not by any single religious dogma but rather by the goals of academic freedom and an unfettered pursuit of knowledge. Yet, as leading historian James W. Fraser notes in the opening of this invaluable book, the process has been both messy and complicated, a story of “secularization, but …” (p. ix).
As Fraser describes, there is no doubt about the big-picture secularization that has taken place over the past two centuries. Consider one of Fraser’s case studies, Randolph-Macon College in Virginia. The school was founded in 1832 by ambitious Methodist ministers with the explicit goal of training, in the words of the first president, “an able ministry” (p. 11). At Randolph-Macon and most other colleges in the era, Fraser notes, “religion was at the very center of college life” (p. 33). By 1964, in contrast, President Clark Kerr of the University of California famously—and only partly jokingly—defined the modern “multiversity” in entirely secular terms, as “a series of individual faculty entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance over parking” (p. 178).
Historians such as George M. Marsden, in The Soul of the American University Revisited (2021); Julie A. Reuben, in The Making of the Modern University (1996); and Jon H. Roberts and James Turner, in The Sacred and the Secular University (2000), have shown both the power and the limitations of the secularization thesis. By the late twentieth century, there is no doubt that evangelical Protestantism had been disestablished as the de facto religion of leading institutions. Yet, also by that time, the American higher education landscape had come to include schools like Dordt College, which declared in 1958 its vision: “Every expression of personality and culture will be dominated by the spirit and rule of the Word of God” (p. 228). Or, as Fraser includes in the book’s afterword, there is the even more powerful example of Baylor University, which had by 2021 achieved Research 1 status in the Carnegie Classifications while continuing to emphasize its “foundational Christian mission” (p. 306).
With so much institutional religion still in place in American higher education, how can we possibly think of the main story as one of “secularization”?
Fraser offers a powerful new answer to this question, and the key to his success lies in asking new questions. Instead of wondering why and how universities became secular, Fraser asks more productively: What role has religion played in higher education? How has that role changed over time? By way of answer, Fraser identifies three key themes.
First, Fraser traces the career of college chaplaincy. Beginning in the early twentieth century, public institutions joined private ones in hosting chaplains for student religious life. The institutional role of these chaplains varied: At some institutions, they were paid by religious denominations, while at others, they were employed directly by the university. In the early twentieth century, chaplains from various Protestant denominations were joined by Catholic and Jewish chaplains. Understanding the uncertainties of the role is fundamental to understanding the larger uncertainties of religion’s changing role in higher education. As Fraser notes, “College chaplains represented both: a new resilience of religious energy in an institution that was growing less religious, and a way in which a long-term trend toward the marginalization of religion continued” (p. 76). By the end of the twentieth century, mainline Protestant denominations had grown wary of the value of chaplaincy. Yet in the twenty-first, universities had come to include a much broader array of chaplains, with some institutions hiring Hindu chaplains. Princeton, for example, hired its first Hindu full-time chaplain in 2009 (p. 266).
Fraser also looks at the continuing uncertainties about the role of the academic study of religion. In the early nineteenth century, colleges tended to combine religious knowledge and religious devotion. The capstone of most college experiences was a class taught by the college president in “Moral Philosophy.” The goal of such a course, Fraser explains, was to show students “that Christian religious faith was a necessary and correct way of understanding all other knowledge” (p. 9). By the late twentieth century, the goals of religious studies had become as disparate as the religious identities of colleges themselves. Top institutions now had thriving departments of religious studies. One such school, the University of California at Santa Barbara, had twenty-six faculty members in 2021, students at both the graduate and undergraduate level, and programs in the studies of Buddhism, Sikh studies, Islamic studies, and Catholic studies. The goal of this flourishing twenty-first-century academic study of religion was to understand religion, not to teach students how to be religious (p. 282). Yet often students had other ideas, Fraser points out, seeing their religious studies as both academic and devotional.
The third theme Fraser traces through time is that of student voluntary associations. Starting in the late nineteenth century, Protestant groups such as the YMCA and YWCA were active on campuses, providing both a social outlet and a broadly Christian religious outlook for students. By the late twentieth century, those groups had lost their prominence, but they had been replaced by a variety of student-led groups. Conservative evangelical Protestant students were active in organizations such as InterVarsity and Cru (formerly Campus Crusade). Catholic students had Newman Centers. For Jewish students, there were organizations such as Hillel and Chabad. As Fraser notes, today’s universities include recognized student groups from seemingly every religion. Just as with the complicated stories of chaplaincy and academic religious studies, Fraser’s focus on the complex world of student religious organizations pays off. He is able to demonstrate the seeming paradox of thriving religious life on officially secularizing campuses.
At least as important as Fraser’s careful and insightful focus on these three durable themes is his inclusion of various case studies of many different types of institutions. As Charles Dorn showed so powerfully in his book For the Common Good (2017), American higher education has never been any one thing, but rather a disparate array of institutions. By examining dozens of different schools, Fraser is able to demonstrate that American higher education has offered not one secularization story, but as many different stories as there are institutions.
It is a risky approach, because telling so many different tales tends to jerk the reader back and forth in time. However, in the hands of a talented historian such as Fraser, it pays off magnificently. Fraser’s ability to demonstrate the complicated themes throughout the entire world of American higher education, while also showing that the exceptions are, in fact, the rule, makes this book required reading for anyone interested in the history of American religion or American higher education.
