This post was written by Randy Newman on December 15, 2006
All of John Sommerville’s The Decline of the Secular University, is tremendously valuable for Christian academicians. But perhaps the substantive heart of this concise book is the section highlighting the university’s struggle with religion. Chapter 4, “Trouble Eliminating Religion” and Chapter 5, “Trouble Judging Religions,” dare to penetrate past the surface of today’s almost thoughtless dismissal of religion on secular campuses. Three conclusions bear consideration.
First, by way of definition, Sommerville counters what he calls, “the habit of seeing religion as a collection of doctrines,� and asks us to see it as, “a whole perspective or way of thinking.� This leads to an important conclusion, “that we recognize the quasi-religious nature of what we like most about the university ideal.� (p. 47)
He is simply appealing to a sense of consistency. “Advocating that the university open itself to religious voices is bound to seem alarming. But this might make less difference than we think, since we maintain so many religious assumptions.� (p. 48)
I think this is such an important point for challenging the status quo in academia. A set of naturalist blinders has been on for so long that to suggest the very religiosity of the secular mindset seems, at first, to be absurd. But this is an important starting point for a discussion that must get “unstuck� if we’re to see the university move forward. This line of pre-evangelism is essential.
Secondly, he argues that religion, as he has defined it, is not the enemy of diversity and tolerance but, ironically, their champion. As many others have seen (e.g. Stanley Fish) the increased student demand for courses from a religious perspective and the secular university’s embarrassing intolerance of religion combine for either a recipe for disaster or a new openness that honest academicians should welcome. He beefs up his point with the historical observation that secularists have not always been so close-minded as they have become in recent times.
Thirdly, a rare perspective indeed, is his willingness to unmask the secularists’ marginalization of religion as immature and anti-academic. Many professors abandoned the faith of their childhood in their childhood and have concluded that faith is childish. This is an unfair straw man and Sommerville models a gracious way of exposing this fallacious reasoning.
My highlighter got the greatest workout on page 58, where he imagined a very different picture.
“…try to imagine a scenario in which the public knew that universities were respectful of religious thinkers. It might then be familiar with the names of theologians like Niebuhr, Tillich, Tracy, and Urs von Balthasar, and perhaps even with ideas they were associated with. Churches themselves would take the intellectual dimension of their faith more seriously….American society might have more intellectual substance, if children did not have to wait so long to be challenged to think.�
Sadly, he muses, “This may be one area of American life in which university intellectuals are offering leadership, in convincing us that religion has no intellectual dimension.�
I’ll share one more set of observations in my next blog, the end of this series. But there is much more worth envisioning and pursuing on the mere 144 pages of this important book.
Part 1 Part 2 Part 4
|
