There’s a new book out by James Davison Hunter, a Christian sociologist at the University of Virginia, called To Change the World. It’s addressed to Evangelical Christians, even though it is published by Oxford University Press. It makes two main points that may make it controversial.

First, Hunter says that you don’t change the world one person at a time. You change the world by changing cultures, cultural institutions like universities, and cultural values. This is because cultures mold persons. He’s not saying that changing persons isn’t important. Persons have eternal significance and cultural institutions don’t. He just means that we change cultures in order to change persons. Changing culture is a strategy toward changing persons. His second point is that changing culture politically is a mistake. The Religious Right has recently shown it to be counter-productive.

InterVarsity has always been about changing persons. But recently it’s realized it can also be about changing the university. Hence, Faculty Ministry’s theme of Renewing the Source. This is part of a general awareness among Evangelicals that culture is turning against religion. We used to have a lot of discussion of “worldview,” but now it’s “culture” that is in every other book title. Worldview now seems sort of abstract and philosophical, while culture seems more substantive and mentally basic. So there is T. J Moore’s Culture Matters, Andy Crouch’s Culture Making, Roger Scruton’s Culture Counts, D. A. Carson’s Christ and Culture Revisited, etc. This is an interest that goes back to Francis Schaeffer books of the 1970s for Evangelicals, and to H. Richard Niebuhr’s classic Christ and Culture in 1951.

So InterVarsity won’t be losing interest in individuals, but it’s also asking how to affect the university. That is almost too big an idea to get our heads around. It’s kind of staggering. We need to break it down, and see if we can get a handle on such a big project. What exactly is the vision that IV staff would want to communicate to faculty, graduate students, and even some brighter undergrads? For they will depend on you for such a vision.

1. What do we want for universities?
2. Who can accomplish this?
3. How can they do it?
4. What are their chances?

First, what do we want for universities?

We might dream about making universities Christian. But what would that mean? There are Christian colleges that pay a lot of attention to relating faith and learning in some way. That’s a continuing concern and puzzle for them. For even if everyone in them is Christian, what makes their activities or their scholarship Christian?

You don’t work in religious colleges primarily. You work in tax-supported universities. And faculty can’t preach to their students. Or they can’t preach religion anyway. Our problem is that they may preach secularism. There are several forms this can take. For example, they may preach (a) scientism (that only science can generate true statements), (b) cultural relativism (that truth is relative to particular social structures), © multiculturalism (ditto), or (d) a hermeneutics of suspicion, or critical theory, or postmodernism (that reason is a disguise for power, and therefore questionable at best). It helps to be able to spot these various forms of secularism and be able to name them. But I’m not suggesting that we need to master the arguments against them. I will mention some secular thinkers who have attacked them recently!

There is a better way to counter these forms of secularism than argument. Andy Crouch makes the important point that you don’t change culture by criticism. You don’t do it by refuting errors. You change culture by creating alternative culture. And we’ll get to my idea about creating alternative culture later.

Right now, we’re asking what we want for universities. We can’t make them Christian, because they’re about ideas and Christianity goes beyond ideas. We just want them to be more open; open to Christian perspectives. We want a more level field, where Christian values can be expressed and heard. Where religious and non-religious ideas can be in dialogue.

Now what do I mean by Christian ideas or perspectives or viewpoints or values? I don’t mean doctrines. I mean things like:

• the dignity of the individual,
• the human difference from the rest of nature,
• responsibility to nature,
• responsibility to future generations,
• sharing knowledge, rather than keeping it secret,
• sharing power, rather than thinking we’re in a Darwinian struggle against each other.

So, I mean:

• the idea of atonement, rather than the Christian doctrine of the atonement,
• the idea of creation, rather than our doctrine of creation,
• the concept of sin, or the sense of sin, rather than the doctrine of sin,
• the idea of conversion, rather than our doctrine of conversion.

Maybe all these just sound like common sense to you. Who doesn’t believe in the worth of each individual or the human difference from the rest of nature? Naturalism, that’s who. Those two do not make sense within Naturalism, or in some other cultures. They are only “common sense” in a Christian cultural tradition, or in Western culture, as we say. You find this out when you visit other cultures. Academics need to re-discover where their basic ideas come from. Even if they try to resist them, they are so deeply embedded in their assumptions and their language that they won’t succeed.

Something exciting is happening right now in this regard. Some secular thinkers are realizing that we need to recover an older cultural tradition. Let me give you three examples. Jürgen Habermas, Europe’s most famous political philosopher, has recently published several essays on how democratic politics absolutely depend on Jewish and Christian religious ideas. In Dialectics of Secularization (pp.44f) he lists the following ideas as dependent on religion: justification, autonomy, responsibility, new beginning, emancipation, embodiment, individuality, internalization, fellowship, fulfillment, and the dignity of the individual. If you thought these were simple or self-evident, you’d be wrong. But obviously, scientism, relativism, and deconstruction will have a hard time dismissing these ideas.

Another important development is the recent attack by some secular thinkers on what is called “the research ideal.” Anthony Kronman, in Education’s End, and Louis Menand, in The Marketplace of Ideas, question the effects of the research ideal in deforming the humanities. It elevates research over teaching, fragments reality, depersonalizes persons, cuts the university off from society. Research universities don’t talk about wisdom, appreciation, or life. Obviously, universities had no idea how much it was giving up when it tried to eliminate religion. And obviously, they haven’t succeeded in eliminating religion.

A third development is the collapse of the fact/value dichotomy. Hilary Putnam’s book is titled The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy. That claim, that you can’t derive values from facts was the main justification behind the secularization of universities in the 1920s and 30s. Universities were supposed to be all about knowledge, not morals. It’s now being admitted that you can’t study economics, for example, without taking the human good into account. Wealth doesn’t just mean money, it means well-being, which presupposes human values.

Even secular thinkers are having second thoughts about university secularization. We’ve begun seeing secular thinkers criticize the so-called New Atheists like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Steven Pinker. Guys like Thomas Nagel, Stanley Fish, and Louis Menand are not religious, but they are embarrassed by the sloppy thinking of these writers. (Even Christopher Hitchens has recently turned his scorn against the other scoffers, like Al Franken, Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart.)

So, to sum up this part of the talk, what we want for the university is that it be open to a wider range of ideas, including religious ones. And we’ve seen that this is beginning. It needs to be encouraged by Christians as well as secularists. We want a university that is secular only in the sense of being neutral (not ruled by religion). That’s different from being secularist, which rules religion out.

Maybe you’re disappointed that we can’t actually preach the gospel in a university course. Certainly you could describe the gospel, if the subject came up naturally in a course. And you could explain its attractions. But universities are not churches. They are not for making converts, but for learning and considering things, for later life.

How can they do it?

We’ll come back later to our second point, about who should be involved in changing the university because I want to hurry on to the way to offer an alternative culture. Remember, we said that creating culture was the way to change culture, rather than just criticizing existing assumptions. My suggestion is that we create a cultural alternative by raising questions about the human good.

Three things are good about bringing up the matter of the human good:

1. Everyone will agree on the importance of the human good. It won’t seem out of place in a university.
2. Everything in the university relates in some way to the human good. We wouldn’t even include veterinary medicine if it didn’t benefit us in some way.
3. Any discussion of the human good will eventually get into the question of ultimate value. Ultimate good is what is good without qualification. (Ultimate meaning farthest, absolute, final, standing alone.)

You should know Paul Tillich’s definition of religion as one’s “ultimate concern.” Still an important definition. All discussions of value can be pushed into the question of ultimate value. In practice, this means that all participants have to reveal their religious standpoint, whether they thought they had one or not. That would be a revealing exercise.

So, I think that the way to open the university to religious input is to raise questions about the human good. You could just ask, what does that position imply about human nature? Ask it gently. You won’t even have to keep repeating it. Eventually, your discussions will begin to involve religious concepts, and maybe even religious beliefs.

Faculty can do this. Grad students can do it. Even undergraduates can, without being offensive. The question should not seem out of place. And it doesn’t require us to come up with brilliant comments of our own. We don’t have to win arguments. There don’t have to be arguments. Other students can tell whether the teacher’s off-the-cuff answers are adequate or not. And maybe that teacher will begin to think about the question in a more serious way. All we want to do is get the question out there, so people can discover their own assumptions or beliefs.
This concern for the human good could especially affect professional education. All professional education serves some idea of the human good. Law, nursing, agriculture, public administration, business, psychology, public relations, journalism, education, you name it. They all assume things about humans that they probably need to consider more fully. That’s how these programs can become more than just job training.

Besides raising the issue of the human good, there is one other easy thing we can do to get religious ideas into the discussion. That is by dropping names of important Christian thinkers. Everybody drops names. Professors do. Grad students do little else. There are important Christian philosophers like Charles Taylor and Alastair MacIntyre, important Christian sociologists like Peter Berger and Rodney Stark, important Christians in criminology, legal philosophy, bioethics. You, as staff, don’t need to know the names. But encourage Christian faculty and grad students to promote any outstanding Christian scholars they know, and to share those names with each other. In the arts, too, there are Christian writers, composers, artists who are actually leaders, winning Nobel Prizes. People should be reminded of these.

What are the chances this will work?

You may think that academics are so self-assured, so full of themselves, that they’re impossible to deal with. Some of them are. But most of them have become more insecure recently. This is where being as old as I am is an advantage. I’ve seen fifty years of steady decline in university prestige. Here’s a list of some things that academics could worry about.
a) collapse of Modernization theory, which was a main rationale for universities in the 1950s,
b) criticism of Enlightenment rationalism, by Foucault et al.,
c) diversity and multiculturalism, which have complicated the university’s mission,
d) religion in our politics,
e) religion in our foreign relations,
f) the news media’s decline in seriousness,
g) lack of university leadership (political, social, cultural, scientific),
h) falling funding for universities,
i) corporate management of universities,
j) growth of professional education,
k) internet populism,
l) online universities,
m) discussion of whether going to college is “necessary” anymore.

It seems to me that one reason faculty pick on religion is that secularity is their last badge of superiority, amid all this wreckage. There are now many secular critics of the secular university. They are not obscure figures. Most of them are from the Ivy League. They used to blame outside forces in American society. More recently they blame the university itself. Stanley Fish blames political correctness. We have seen that Kronman and Menand blame the research ideal itself. There may be the possibility to make common cause with some of these secular voices.

Maybe universities don’t feel they are in crisis. Maybe they are just settling for a more marginal position in American society. But the church still needs universities. Of course, the church invented universities in the first place, around 1100, as the first institutions to combine teaching and intellectual advance. The church has a stake in learning about history, languages, psychology, economics, agriculture, education, medicine, philosophy, neuroscience and so on, because the church is also about the human good. Nobody wants all these questions to be settled by politicians and lobbyists. The university should be a place where society can discuss our problems, before we reach the point of political decision.

Who can accomplish this?

So now we can go back to our second question. Who can change university culture? Not legislators, obviously. Administrators? I would hate to have to overcome their reluctance, their assumptions and their parameters. They only need to see that hiring, tenure, and promotion aren’t biased against religious views. The change needs to come from people who have a stake in the issues and can argue them convincingly. That means faculty and graduate students. The people you’re in contact with.

How can you encourage grads and faculty? I would suggest three things that I think academics would appreciate.

1. Mention the critiques of the secular university. Mine, for instance, and Anthony Kronman’s. Encourage them to realize that universities are more socially vulnerable than they were even 20 ago. So there may be an opportunity for new views. The fact that even Jewish scholars are critical of the secular university is an interesting sign, since as a minority they used to welcome secularization, and helped to secularize the academy.
2. Help Christians get connected with each other across the country. Grad students need to know about the Emerging Scholars Network. Faculty need to know about conferences and associations that are for them. Both need to know about important websites, periodicals, books. These are not only important for their content, but seeing the authors would indicate where one could find like-minded people.
3. Suggest this theme of the human good. It’s just a preliminary to Christian witness, but a necessary preparation. It will help discover the Christian assumptions of Western thought. And, it should make our witness a lot more meaningful.

C. John Sommerville is most recently the author of The Decline of the Secular University (Oxford , 2006). Two more books will soon be appearing on related subjects, from Baylor University Press and Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishers. He is Professor Emeritus of English History at the University of Florida, but his interests have also included the history of the media (How the News Makes Us Dumb) and of attitudes toward children (The Rise and Fall of Childhood). His nine books and 30-some articles are on a wide variety of topics. After doing graduate work at the University of Iowa, Sommerville began his teaching in the Western Civilization program at Stanford University, before moving to a permanent position at the University of Florida. A Member of the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton and Senior Fellow at Harvard’s Center for the Study of World Religions, he also recently contributed to the Pew Younger Scholars’ Mentoring Program.

Email photo credit: Cornell University Library Photostream.