Institutional histories as a genre have an often deserved reputation as accumulations of information situated in a self-congratulatory narrative. Jeanne Halgren Kilde, well known for her work on religious architecture, has here produced a refreshing exception in her history of Macalester College. Macalester, which still maintains a Presbyterian affiliation, is typical of most of the many denominational colleges founded in the wave of optimistic Protestant expansionism in the nineteenth century but, like all, has its own unique story. Kilde tells this story engagingly and ably and, perhaps not surprisingly, devotes particular attention to its religious dimensions.

Macalester owes its existence to Edward D. Neill, a mid-nineteenth century Presbyterian missionary to the Twin Cities region who had a vision of a college that was at once Protestant Christian and nonsectarian. (Interestingly, Neill later joined the Reformed Episcopal Church as a vehicle for this ecumenical vision.) Because of, or despite, his at times eccentric leadership, the school grew into a respectable and stable institution whose mission began to shift with the theological tides of the era from a training program for clergy into one emphasizing a religiously nurtured educated laity. By the early twentieth century, Macalester embodied what Kilde calls a postmillennial “militant evangelicalism with a progressive bent” (104). In addition to serving the local community, students began to enter the foreign mission field, adumbrating what would become a distinctive internationalist emphasis within the Macalester ethos.

A distinctive particularity of Macalester's history was the prominence of the Wallace family. James Wallace was a rather tradition-minded religion faculty member who served as president at the turn of the twentieth century. Even more influential was his son, DeWitt Wallace, whose vast wealth from the Reader's Digest was for decades the primary financing that helped turn Macalester into a nationally ranked liberal arts college—at the cost of the exercise of an unhealthy dominance over internal affairs by the wealthiest of donors. By the late 1960s, however, the religious and political conservatism represented by the Wallaces père et fils had yielded in shaping the institution's public image to a reputation for a student culture radicalized by drug use and political protest as well as racial turmoil. This notoriety eventually morphed into a reputation for liberal arts education of a high quality in a context of internationalism and community service.

In delineating the larger trajectory of Macalester's history, Kilde takes exception to the secularization model put forward by a number of historians (and critics) of American higher education, arguing instead for a more nuanced view of the evolving relationship of mainline Protestantism to its educational mission. In this interpretation, Macalester did not abandon its Presbyterian identity, but rather negotiated gradually a series of new understandings with its sponsoring denomination that constituted what Kilde calls “deevangelization.” By the early twenty-first century, Macalester still embodied its traditional core values of internationalism and service, but no longer in the explicit context of Protestant Christianity.

Although Kilde's work is thoroughly grounded in a variety of primary sources, it might have been enhanced by more verbal and pictorial attention to the built environment, which she has interpreted so well elsewhere. Given this minor caveat, Kilde has made an important and welcome contribution to the history of the relationship between higher education and Christianity in the United States that is sensitive to the ambiguities and nuances of the affinities between Protestantism and broader cultural themes.