Nonetheless, the view that students should “park” their religious identities outside the classroom is widespread in academia. Moreover, it is commonly held by those who presumably have thought most about the topic of religion and the liberal arts, namely, my colleagues in the field of religious studies. Suspending religious identity in the classroom is the price paid to admit the rigorous academic study of religion into the liberal arts. In this view, the religious studies classroom is exceptional and distinctive insofar as: (1) religion is engaged in a disciplined, critical manner; and (2) this critical manner serves as a defense against religious dogmatism and confessional battles by excluding students’ personal religious identities and experiences. While I think (1) is correct, I have come to believe that the exclusion prescribed by (2) is unnecessarily restrictive, and that critical inquiry does not require it. By means of the various skills and virtues of public engagement, the critical and “protected” space of the religious studies classroom—indeed, any classroom setting—can be maintained while also permitting expression of a student’s religious identity insofar as such expression is an attempt to contribute to the intellectual inquiry into the topic at hand.

It is worthwhile to pause and ask why so many educators are committed to the suspension of religious identity in the classroom. After all, educators ordinarily encourage their students to bring to their studies a deep engagement with the material—that is, to bring their perspectives, experiences, commitments, and passions to the topics and issues at hand. But what about students’ religious commitments and perspectives? Why are these seen as a special case? Why ask students to bracket off religious beliefs from the stock of all their other beliefs, especially given the epistemological and psychological implausibility of achieving such bracketing? To some extent, students can express their religious perspectives by other means, including covert ones. Yet from an educational point of view, do we want our students to suppress the actual reasons (in this case, the religious reasons) that tacitly support their perspectives in the classroom? Can we justify placing this particular burden on students with religious perspectives?

One way to address these questions is to reflect on the various notions and practices of secularism, for these exert power and shape contemporary liberal arts education. These notions and practices have developed organically over time, and we risk much if we simply dismiss or accept them in toto. If we want to move beyond a flatfooted, “liberal” exclusion approach and develop a more judicious response to the question of religion in higher education, we should identify which aspects of secularism to let go of and which to keep—for surely some aspects should be kept. This central task—adjudicating what to keep and what to forgo—entails naming the good, the bad, and the ugly senses of this key term, secularism.

Secularism in the Liberal Arts: Good Sense

At non-sectarian liberal arts colleges, secularism in the good sense is characterized by two ideal features or constraints: 1) when participating in the shared intellectual inquiry of the classroom, one does not assume that others necessarily share one’s religious perspectives or perspectives on religion; and 2) one does not treat religious perspectives as a special case, subject to either special exclusion or special privilege.

The first feature or constraint amounts to an acknowledgment that we live in a pluralistic society and that we therefore should not assume that everyone shares our perspectives, whether those perspectives be religious or anti-religious (on this feature of secularism, see Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition). The second constraint acknowledges that students are free to bring to liberal arts intellectual inquiry whatever perspectives they deem appropriate, provided that they do so in such a way as to honor the first constraint. A premise here is that all voices are to be heard and none are initially to be treated as special, subject to exclusion or privilege. (I add the qualifier initially to indicate that over time a particularly insightful voice can gain authority and hence in some sense be deemed “special,” that is, especially knowledgeable and helpful; conversely, a consistently unreasonable or foolish voice can eventually be deemed poorly informed or worse.) Religious perspectives, then, are treated just like any other perspective—such as, for example, that of Marxism, American pragmatism, secular humanism, or hedonism.

When a perspective, religious or otherwise, is offered in the ideal liberal arts course, students listen and speak—and read and write—in a distinct manner that acknowledges the features, or constraints, of secularism. This distinctive manner entails, among other things, the principle of non-privileging and the principle of focused attention. The first principle pertains primarily to the speaker; the second, to the listener. The speaker, understanding that no assumptions can be made about the comprehensive views of her fellow classmates, will not privilege her own speech, which is to say, she will not expect all to deem it self-evidently true and without need of justification. Rather, she will attempt to offer arguments and reasons in such a way that will garner some support from, or will appeal to, diverse classmates. Due to no fault of her own or her classmates, she may not be successful. Persuasion, even when advancing good ideas, is not guaranteed, because “public reason,” or an overlapping consensus, does not always favor every good perspective or idea. Nonetheless, there is an imperative that she attempt to engage meaningfully with potentially diverse classmates.

Secularism in the good sense, then, admits but does not privilege religious perspectives or reasons in liberal arts education. In practice, this principle of non-privileging often amounts to a constraint on the interlocutor offering the religious reason or perspective. The principle of focused attention, in contrast, applies primarily to the listeners. When religious reasons are offered in the classroom or in texts, listeners ought to focus on the particular issue at hand and avoid introducing negative global judgments on religion in general or on a particular religion associated with the offered religious reason. This is not a form of religious apologetics, but an acknowledgment that global judgments on religion are rarely productive or satisfying. This principle of focused attention safeguards against dismissing or deriding an interlocutor simply on the basis of his or her religious identity. This principle represents one way to welcome and critically appropriate insights from varied voices while at the same time minimizing unnecessary conflict and discord.

Both principles are supported by and belong to a larger set of skills and virtues associated with excellence in the practice of democratic public engagement. Such virtues include, but are not limited to, attentiveness, discretion, humility, sensitivity to audience, courage, honesty, and judgment (for an excellent discussion on democratic virtues in public engagement, see, again, Stout, Democracy and Tradition.) Religious perspectives in the liberal arts do not uniquely or especially suggest the need for public engagement virtues. These skills and virtues would dissuade one from dogmatically throwing one’s beliefs in the faces of others. But here, the vice and the corresponding virtue do not necessarily run along religious versus nonreligious lines. A non-religious Marxist, feminist, or environmentalist may be as likely to fail to exhibit the appropriate virtues as, say, a Christian or a Buddhist. Secularism in the good sense puts a high premium on public engagement skills and virtues, for these sustain and protect inclusive and civil, yet agonistic, public inquiry and debate.

The First Amendment is a legal expression of a central cultural aspiration of secularism in the good sense, namely, that citizens be treated with dignity and respect regardless of their religious perspectives and their perspectives on religion. To treat a fellow citizen with dignity and respect requires, among other things, that one assume (at least initially) that the citizen, whether religious or non-religious, is reasonable and deserves a “hearing.” This broad cultural affirmation of free and diverse speech and practice, including religious and atheistic expressions, is central to secularism in the good sense and should pervade liberal arts education.

Secularism in the Liberal Arts: Bad Sense

Secularism in the bad sense is characterized by three positions: it holds that: 1) religion is a discrete, sui generis phenomenon; 2) religion is not self-critical or open to critique and exchange (because, it is held, religion is necessarily either radically subjective or based on dogmatic authority, or both); and 3) religious students can and should accept the exclusion approach, that is, they should keep their religion out of the classroom. Together, these three positions presuppose a narrow, parochial view of religion that is unconvincing in the face of actual, lived religion. Generally speaking and for better or worse: 1) religions are culturally complex institutions that cannot be separated easily or radically from other institutions, whether they be moral, aesthetic, economic, or political; 2) religions are dynamic and change in response to and in dialogue with individuals, communities, events, and developments both within and outside a given religious tradition; and 3) religions commonly shape a pervasive aspect of a person’s identity, an aspect that both informs and is informed by other aspects of one’s identity, including one’s various beliefs, ideals, authorities, attitudes, and practices—all of which are embedded in and respond to local, national, and global sociohistorical and physical circumstances.

The good and useful ways that religion can be generalized undermine the narrow, parochial way that religion is understood by secularism in the bad sense. Secularism in the bad sense fails to be self-reflective and to investigate the ways in which it operates with (and thereby helps to create) a concept of religion that has little resemblance to actual lived religion. Secularism in the bad sense, then, has fashioned a notion of religion that often has little relation to how most religion is lived, and higher education, in turn, is prone to normalize this fanciful view of religion.

Secularism in the Liberal Arts: Ugly Sense

It is one thing to attempt to exclude religion for the sake of, say, a pact of non-aggression with “science” or for the sake of “critical inquiry” in the classroom; it is another thing, however, to aggressively promote the view that religion is a destructive, superstitious relic of the past that has no place in the modern or postmodern world. Secularism, in this view, is the advanced state of humans enlightened and freed from the shackles of religion. Secularism is the essence of modernity; religion is an anomaly within it—the antithesis of enlightened humanity. This is the ugly sense of secularism.

Secularism and Hospitable Halls

In “The American Scholar,” Emerson argued that American colleges do best when they surpass convention and “gather from far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls, and, by the concentrated fires, set the hearts of their youth on fire.” Liberal arts education risks dousing the fire when it embraces inhospitable secularism. The hospitable halls of the liberal arts, in contrast, encourage those virtues that contribute to and arise from dynamic, inclusive communities of learning. They support an intellectual and critical arena for discussing religion, among other topics that may centrally pertain to a student’s identity, commitments, and ideals. The members of communities of learning need to possess and develop skills for appropriately expressing their convictions and perspectives, listening to those of others, and allowing their own convictions and perspectives to be challenged. They need to learn how to offer and ask for reasons with intellectual and social skillfulness. Broadly speaking, this would entail having students become both more and less at home in the world: more at home, insofar as students gain confidence in their own voice and in their knowledge of and commitment to the communities and world around them; less at home in the world, insofar as students’ presuppositions and perspectives are challenged, and students become open to discovery, change, and wonder. Let the liberal arts, then, be liberal, that is, inclusive and generous in its offerings.

In order to organize and oversee issues and opportunities for religious expression and spiritual reflection within a secular context, a number of research universities have established an Office of Religious Life (ORL) or its equivalent on campus. Additionally, several universities, such as Stanford University, Princeton University, Emory University, and the University of Southern California (USC), have instituted the position of “dean of religious life” to replace the traditional university chaplain position. The designation of “dean of religious life” signifies that the position exists within the academic mainstream of the university, and it ensures that those who occupy the position have both spiritual and scholarly professional backgrounds.

Accordingly, deans of religious life and ORLs have a broad spectrum of core responsibilities across the university that involve both the spiritual and the scholarly, such as: providing pastoral care and spiritual counseling for the university community; overseeing student religious groups and campus religious directors; delivering invocations and benedictions at ceremonial events; enforcing the university religious holiday policy; supporting religious accommodations for students, faculty, and staff; producing public events and programs across disciplines and domains; promoting interfaith engagement and religious literacy; developing community outreach and service initiatives; and teaching and lecturing in different university contexts.

As both the dean of religious life at USC and a constitutional law scholar, my conception of secularism mirrors that of both the working group and the US Constitution. Just as it is helpful for universities to think through constitutional aspects of federalism within the context of university governance, it can also be instructive for universities to follow a constitutional approach to secularism within a multifaith university environment. Contrary to popular opinion, the First Amendment does not mandate a “wall of separation” between religion and the state but, rather, prohibits the state from establishing or endorsing one religious tradition over another. According to First Amendment jurisprudence, it is possible for the state to engage with religion in a non-preferential, non-proselytizing capacity and still be considered “secular” in a constitutional context.

Establishing an ORL is a creative solution for universities to engage with religion on campus through a non-denominational approach that is consistent with the principles of the Establishment and Free Exercise clauses of the First Amendment. ORLs do not establish any specific religion as their baseline; rather, they work with all the religious traditions represented on campus in order to provide a supportive environment for the free exercise of religion. At USC, the ORL certifies and oversees more than ninety student religious groups and forty campus religious directors, which collectively represent a remarkable geo-religious diversity. By operating in a truly multifaith context, ORLs do not endorse or promote any religious tradition over another, and therefore remain true to the constitutional spirit of secularism.

ORLs are deeply invested in interfaith engagement and community service, and will often convene student leaders and groups in order to increase religious literacy and promote interfaith dialogue. The modern research university remains a unique and powerful location for engagement and reconciliation, and ORLs, through their various programs and events, have the remarkable opportunity to encourage students to think about how their faith can be part of a solution to the world’s great crises. Through interfaith advocacy and programming, ORLs directly engage with the dilemma that, as the working group’s report puts it, “faculty and students alike were perplexed by how to substantively engage with and learn from deep commitments different from their own.”

Another new development that challenges educators to reconceive the secular is the emergent voice of those who self-identify as spiritual but not religious (SBNR). By recognizing the rise of a self-identifying SBNR community, the working group’s report echoes the findings of UCLA’s “Spirituality in Higher Education” research project. In diverse demographics across the country, and especially amongst the current millennial generation of university students, there is an increasing awareness of spirituality, in addition or as opposed to religion, and this manifests on campus in different ways.

For many, spirituality refers to the introspective search prompted by the ultimate questions of meaning, purpose, and identity. This desire to engage with the ultimate questions impacts and inspires faculty and students alike, and ORLs play a significant role in facilitating such conversations and encounters. At USC, the ORL has reoriented itself around “meaning” as opposed to “God” so that it may be relevant to the entire university community and not just those who self-identity as religious. Additionally, USC’s ORL has launched a new spirituality initiative, which explores the ultimate questions through the lenses of sports, service, and the arts.

For the last ten years, the USC ORL has hosted a monthly speaker series entitled “What Matters to Me and Why” (WMMW), which is a national program found at ORLs across the country. WMMW features faculty and staff discussing choices made, difficulties encountered, and commitments solidified in their lives’ journeys. Based on the success of the WMMW model, USC’s ORL recently initiated two other speakers series – “The Soul of Medicine” and the “The Spirit of the Law” – which feature medical and legal professionals discussing how they find meaning and purpose in their careers, how they connect the personal and the professional in their lives, and how they use their degrees in creative and innovative ways. Through programs such as these, university communities are proactively engaged in conversations focused on how the ultimate questions impact the lives of faculty, students, and staff.

Whereas the working group focuses primarily on issues of secularism and the liberal arts within a classroom setting, ORLs grapple with these challenges outside the classroom. Indeed, many of the transformational moments of a student’s university experience happen outside the classroom – through student groups, athletic and social organizations, travel abroad opportunities, community service, and other forms of extracurricular engagement – and ORLs have the opportunity to engender “out of the classroom” experiences that connect their constituent groups directly with the ultimate questions of meaning, purpose, and identity.

As educators reconceive the secular in the liberal arts context, they should think deeply about the interplay of spirituality and scholarship on campus, and the unique opportunities that colleges and universities offer for community service, interfaith dialogue, and religious reconciliation. In thinking through the role that administrators play in framing and shaping these issues, ORLs and their equivalents provide an important case study for how religious expression might engage with critical thinking in a secular, liberal arts context.

The question matters because historically liberal arts colleges have liked to think of themselves as places where students can ask the big questions (hereafter BQs): “What is the meaning of my life?” “How do I understand death?” “Does evil exist?” “What are my obligations to my neighbor, my country, my world?” And finally, “How might my education—in whatever field I study—help me assimilate these questions?” The authors were struck, they report, by how discussions of the secular re-invigorated these BQs, and one in particular: what is an education for, anyway?

Kahn and his co-investigators come out in favor of a sensible distinction between secular and secularist. To be a secularist is to want to rid a pedagogical space of religious commitments; to be secular is, to quote Jeffrey Stout, to recognize a condition in which participants cannot “take for granted that their interlocutors are making the same religious assumptions they are.” This is the condition that Charles Taylor refers to as “fragilization,” and it is quite close to his general account, in A Secular Age, of the secular as our often implicit knowledge that, under the shared conditions of modernity, we often bump into people whom we respect and yet who do not share our own deepest commitments. (Whether there was ever a time when we could assume that our interlocutors were making the “same religious assumptions” we were is of course another question.)

If “the secular” in this sense is indeed the condition of our intellectual life together, what should we do about it? How can we thin the ranks of narrowly ideological secularists and develop more epistemically-generous “seculars”? Here is the beginning of an answer: “When the authority of knowledge is less important than the things that can be done with knowledge,” the authors write, “the secular becomes a discussion between religious and non-religious citizens who are acutely aware that the demands of secularized democratic life require an extraordinary balance between cherishing one’s own convictions and holding to the awareness that these same cherished convictions are contestable and that they may at times act as a bludgeon against other democratic citizens.”

Call me naive, but this just looks like good pedagogy to me. Most of us who teach for a living lay down a few ground rules—basically: talk, but also listen, and don’t be an asshole—and then try to model for our students the reflexivity that we all internalized somewhere along the way in our own educations. We try to get them to articulate not just what they think, but why they think it. What does their knowledge reveal, and what does it obscure? Are there other possibilities? If there are, do they matter? If the other fellow is right, or even just different and interesting, then what? Teaching students to take these questions to heart is our job. Does anybody really subscribe to the notion that teaching should “arrogat[e] authoritative forms of knowledge”? I doubt it. Of course, if the topic is quantum mechanics, then there are right answers and wrong answers, and it’s important to be able to spot the difference. If the topic is the history of science, by contrast, then the wrong answers might be as interesting as the right ones. In practice, this is not a very difficult distinction to keep track of.  So Kahn et. al.’s category of “secularist” here, like its supposed corollary “enlightenment reason,” seems something of a straw person.

In any case, Kahn and his colleagues discover a more subtle and interesting problem: “What appeared glaringly conspicuous to us is the lack, across academic fields, of adequate models and examples of constructive exchange between conflicting deep commitments.” Here, the theory/practice problem reasserts itself. Kahn and his colleagues channel William Connolly’s accounts of deep contestability, but it is easier to say that we should simultaneously cherish our convictions and acknowledge their contestability than it is to actually do it.

I think this is also what James K. A. Smith is after when he writes, over at his blog, that Kahn’s “model still refuses to think about education as formation. It’s willing to make room for a variety of “views” and “perspectives” to help students ask ‘the big questions’—giving them lots of options to consider.” But this is still quite different from the task of forming a person, a “thick task … that constitutes inculcation in a tradition, habituation to a particular vision of the good.”

Wittgensteinian “form of life” arguments of this sort have gotten a certain amount of traction in recent years, and for good reason. Smith, in a nice little twist, is in fact suggesting that his own unabashedly sectarian approach is truer to the secular ideal proffered by Connolly, Kahn, and Stout than is their own pluralism. Just asking the BQs, or even exploring them historically and culturally, isn’t enough: it still tends to flatten out into liberal tolerance. I think that Smith wants his students to be able to say: “well, yes, we understand that our view on this BQ is ‘contestable’ and we can even imagine how our view might look from somewhere else, but we’re arguing from a comprehensive vision of the good that, for a whole host of reasons, we’re pretty sure is right. That’s how we do things around here.”

Smith is picking up on one weakness of Connolly’s account in Why I Am Not a Secularist: it’s long on recommendations, but it doesn’t really provide a robust-enough account of the subjectivity required for putting those recommendations into practice. (For an account of Connolly’s shortcomings on this point, see my essay “After the Secular: The Subject of Romanticism.”) We could put the disagreement like this: Does multidimensional pluralism derive from a comprehensive vision of the good (Smith’s position)? Or can multidimensional pluralism itself be a comprehensive vision of the good (Connolly’s position)? And if it’s the latter, could the account of how we foster multidimensional pluralism be thickened enough to avoid the charge that it is reducible finally to some version of tolerance and anodyne respect for “difference”?

This matters for two reasons. First, most of us don’t teach at sectarian institutions, so we need an account that builds in competing definitions of the good at the ground level. And second, most of us also don’t teach at elite secular liberal arts colleges, so we need an account that “pluralizes” Kahn and his colleague’s somewhat rarified sense of what happens in the classroom. I want to address both of these needs by describing two pedagogies that derive from the romantic-era writers. (As I’ve suggested elsewhere on this site, the romantics offer remarkable resources for thinking through the problematics of the secular.) One I’ll call “Soul-Making,” and the other, “Careless Steps.”

Soul-making

The phrase comes from a famous passage in John Keats’s letters, this one written in 1819 to his brother and sister-in-law. It’s a long and rambling (and grammatically irregular) passage, but here is the gist:

Call the world if you Please “The vale of Soul-making” Then you will find out the use of the world … Soul as distinguished from an Intelligence-There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions—but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself. . . . how then are Souls to be made? How then are these sparks which are God to have identity given them—so as ever to possess a bliss peculiar to each ones individual existence? How, but by the medium of a world like this? . . . I can scarcely express what I but dimly perceive—and yet I think I perceive it—that you may judge the more clearly I will put it in the most homely form possible—I will call the world a School instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read—I will call the human heart the horn Book used in that School—and I will call the Child able to read, the Soul made from that school and its hornbook. Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul! A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways! . . . —As various as the Lives of Men are–so various become their souls. . . .

Note, first, that this is a deliberately post-Christian vision: Keats calls the idea that “we are to be redeemed by a certain arbitrary interposition of God and taken to Heaven” a “little circumscribe[d] straightened notion!” And note, second, that it assays something like a multidimensional pluralism: identities or souls “possess a bliss peculiar to each ones individual existence.” But note, third, that Keats is also trying to figure out how that pluralism comes into existence. Multidimensional pluralism is not a fact of life, nor is difference to be celebrated simply for itself; Keats thinks that we begin merely as “intelligences,” sparks of potential. As such, we are not that interesting, and not really worth taking seriously. The whole point of the world is to take those intelligences and turn them into something; the world is a classroom, and its pedagogical method is to make us “feel and suffer” until we have become the souls that we would not otherwise be. There’s a bit of stoicism in there, but there’s also a commitment to transformation that draws its energy from (post-) Christianity. As a result, it cuts considerably deeper than, for example, Stout’s rather obvious acknowledgement that we cannot take for granted that our interlocutors share our religious presuppositions; at the same time, it begins to address, from a non-sectarian perspective, Smith’s focus on character formation. Soul-making is character formation, but uncoupled from the comprehensive theory of the good to which Smith wants to wed it.

Careless steps

At the good but underfunded and underappreciated state university where I teach, Kahn and his colleagues’ description of the undergraduate classroom as a place that “promote[s] education as a way for students to consider larger questions of meaning and value” seems an almost unattainable goal. My brightest students are, I am sure, as bright as theirs are. But, almost to a person, they are also out of time. Far too many of them work virtually full-time jobs, and they often take an overload of classes so that they can graduate in 3 years. Many live at home to save on expenses or to help care for younger siblings; commuting to campus in the New Jersey traffic, and squeezing their classes in between everything else they have to do, too often they arrive late, frazzled, happy just to get there and have most of the reading done. Larger questions of meaning and value? Sorry: they don’t have time for that stuff.

Really great teaching can overcome some of this general harriedness, some of the time. And like many, I have my moments. But it also seems to me that I’m combating forces over which I have little control: the obsessive marketing and branding of the academy, the casualization of academic labor, what Randy Martin calls the “financialization” of everyday life, and the juggernaut of economic neoliberalism: all these are pressures that transcend the classroom and the university, and they combine to make the BQs luxuries rather than necessities, the kind of thing that only a few students, on a few leafy campuses, have the privilege of debating. The rest of the world careens down a path increasingly dominated by outcomes and assessments: if it can’t be measured, it doesn’t count. (For my own further thoughts along these lines, see my essay “The Demands of the Day.”)

So while I wholeheartedly endorse Kahn et. al.’s call to put the BQs back at the center, this requires more than drawing a careful distinction between secularism and the secular.  Lately I’ve been thinking that my main job in the classroom is to create a space in which something unexpected can happen. I’m inspired by a project of the young Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who in 1794 planned to leave England and start a radically egalitarian experiment in communal living in the wilderness of Pennsylvania. For this crazy scheme Coleridge coined the word “Pantisocracy,” or “all-governing society.” In a letter to his friend Robert Southey about his efforts to drum up support for the plan, Coleridge writes that he “preached Pantisocracy . . . with so much success that two great huge Fellows, of Butcher like appearance, danced about the room in enthusiastic agitations.” Coleridge linked Pantisocracy to bodily movement again in a modest poem written the same summer, in which America appears as a place

Where Virtue calm with careless step may stray,

And dancing to the moonlight Roundelay

The Wizard Passions weave a holy Spell.

Both passages used verbal invention to link a political project with unscripted movement. The “careless steps” in the poem are, among other things, a reference to practices of land management in eighteenth-century England, whose picturesque enclosures, ditches, and hedges make it impossible to move freely across a landscape. Coleridge’s sense of Pantisocracy as a rhetorical exercise with radical possibilities, something to be preached, poeticized, and invented, makes it a pedagogical exercise that rewards straying, stepping out of line, moving in enchantment and agitation. Those “great huge fellows” dancing around the room are figures for the kind of political subjectivity that might, under the right conditions, come into being simply through the power of words.

What does this have to do with secularism? If Talal Asad is right and secularity is about many things other than “religion”—a point that Kahn and his colleagues don’t seem quite to have grasped—then branding, casualization, financialization, and neoliberalism are all ways in which secularism reshapes our experience of time and of embodiment. The “empty, homogenous” time of modernity that Benjamin described has now been filled to the brim: in a world of metrics and measures, no one ever has enough time; we are all too burdened with what Coleridge calls “care.” If we really want the BQs to come back in all their richness, then we may have to recapture a different, non-secular relationship to temporality. Coleridge’s pantisocracy project suggests that we begin by considering the possibilities of carelessness. And if a secular body is in some sense an inexperienced body unable to dance with “Wizard passions” because it can no longer hear the music, then a non-secular body might be one that has been re-tuned to such sensory possibilities. Who among us wouldn’t want our students to dance?

I assume that the students referred to are predominantly Christian. If that is the case, because American culture remains to a large extent Christian, in many tangible and intangible ways, and, since there are other institutions on campus in which students can gather to express and probe their confessional beliefs, I fail to see the great harm done to them if they feel they must keep their confessional identity out of the classroom, or, at the very least, that that identity needs to be channeled into a common language. It might in fact be a very good thing for Christian students to understand, à la Kierkegaard, that having a passionate commitment is not the same as being part of a mainstream or even of a minority, but requires honing the ability to resist cultural trends and to stand on one’s own. One might retort that they are young and impressionable and may not have that ability yet. But they are not blank slates, and they have already, to a large degree, been formed.

The problem as I see it is not that students in the liberal arts are somehow forbidden to argue their religious views but that, whether they are religious or secular, they do not get sufficient exposure to religious texts. These texts contain many strange and interesting things—often surprising to religious and unreligious students alike. They uncover possibilities of being human. But in order for these possibilities to emerge, they need to be approached in a secular spirit. That is, their specifically theological language needs to be translated into a conceptual language through which people can imagine a given possibility without a prior or subsequent adherence to it as the absolute truth. This act of translating is, in fact, what great philosophers of religion in every tradition have done. Pascal, for instance, manages to paint a picture of sin and grace in many Pensées without using these words, except in choice places. All he has to do is point to the infinite ways in which we are wretched. Only in a second movement does he explain this wretchedness as a consequence of original sin. Original sin becomes a possibility for understanding the human condition, one not necessitating adherence to dogma. Similarly, if one reads Franz Rosenzweig on Messianic hope, it ceases, in his language, to be “belief” and becomes an urge to insert one’s own activity into the flow of time in a way that brings about the transformation of the world. The problem for him becomes not believing or lack of believing but how one can do this without causing more harm than good. We who study these texts, students and teachers alike, need to find our own language when speaking about theirs. So the secular, the process of bringing into the times, and into a world that is not already divided along the religious/secular lines we know, has religious resonances. The commitment of the humanities, “nothing human is foreign to me,” should lead to a kind of transcendence of time and space. It is fleeting, but it is one way of making concrete the oneness of the world, which somewhere in our religious traditions remains a central hope.

This sounds awkwardly old-fashioned, and maybe even dangerously religious, I know. If it does, it might be because to be secular in the academy has come to mean looking through religious claims as if they were transparent, in order to reach underlying causes. The latest such explanation seems to be biology, but political and economic forces or psychological motivations will do just as well. This way of engaging with the documents also envisages one world, since these forces presumably operate on everyone without exception, but there is often an exception—an important exception, since the adherent of this view has seen through and presumably been freed of the illusions of the people depicted in the religious documents. It is this attitude of seeing through religion rather than taking religious claims as possibilities that, I assume, prompts the question “what would campus life look like if these secularists assumptions were dropped?” The problem is that these secularist assumptions are passionate commitments. They cannot be discarded at will. If the secularization thesis really is on its way out, professors should have already started to train students in a way of entering into texts that makes much more central the art of sympathetic understanding, including understanding the great theorists of causes. Sympathetic understanding is not just passively accepting what is being said. It is straining to bring something to life, by finding the right language, situating this something in a larger context and, having done so, asking questions about its merits. A whole metaphysic undergirds sympathetic understanding, and my claim is that it does more to break down the religious/secular divide than arguments from first principles, which can never be decided, and which create, at best, a window dressing for tolerance.

If our first task, as I see it, is to recover this metaphysic, then closely allied with it is finding a way of articulating opposition to a pervasive current trend. Rather than naming it, I will toss out three examples. The first involves a candidate for a job in another department who reported that in teaching a course in ethics, she was taught to stop before the end of every class so that students could evaluate in written form what had been clear and what unclear in her presentation. She reported great success, as she was able to clarify in a subsequent session the concepts that had not come across the first time. This seems a model of efficiency, and yet it gives one pause, especially when it is seen in the context of the pervasive culture of measuring everything in sight. Recently, The New York Times reported an increase across the country in clickers that students are obligated to use every fifteen minutes, as described in one class, in response to a question the professor is asking. The answers are tallied and then a conversation begins, once the student knows he or she is not an outlier. Again, what should be wrong with this? In large classes, it seems a way to keep students attentive and engaged. Yet the whole experience of time changes. Homogeneous clock time is imposed as the only time. Clock time might be inevitable on an assembly line, but teaching and learning depend on a notion of time in which one moment does not resemble the next. The desire to learn awakens at one moment for one and at another for someone else; connections are made at one moment for one and at another for someone else; and internalization and appropriation happen over many uneven moments in the course of a lifetime. Of course, we expect students to write papers and take exams on our schedule and not theirs, but usually there are swaths of time in between, in which something uncontrolled has a chance to happen. The mania for immediate results makes of learning something that has lost its secret. How do we articulate that secret, or at least not forget that it is there?

The appointment of Cathleen P. Black as the next Chancellor of the New York City public school system echoes the same fascination for measurement on another level. She is well known as an efficient manager at Hearst Magazines. The appointee neither went to public schools herself nor has any experience in the classroom or in school administration at any level. The latest news is that a compromise was worked out so that her immediate subordinate would have such experience. Her qualifications for the job appear to be her success in making various magazines profitable and her tough-minded attitude toward staff. She made her goals clear and got results. In the early 1970s, Ivan Illich published a book, Deschooling Society, in which he claimed that the school in the West was a kind of church, whose hidden curriculum reenacted the rituals and myths of capitalism, not through actively preaching it but in its striving for measurable results. He no doubt wrote it expecting people to vehemently deny it. Now, forty years later, who needs to hide it? If someone protests, surely she is a socialist.

It seems in bad taste to sound a moralistic note like this. One is always reminded at this point that no educational institution can survive without financial investment and that one’s own salary depends on it. But isn’t the task of the liberal arts, while remaining aware of the economic realities that are the conditions of its own practice, also to strive to articulate a human world in which certain kinds of profits, whether measured in rising test scores or in their eventual use in competing with China, are shown to be inadequate to educational efficiency itself? It appears, for instance, that the government of Iran has imposed a ban on the Western humanities in its universities. This would indicate that the humanities are efficient in quite a different way from the measured results currently prescribed. Is not the true secular mission of the liberal arts to remain alien to what Alisdair MacIntyre, in After Virtue, called the “metaphysical belief in managerial expertise,” and to remain wedded instead to that other efficiency, recognized by the government of Iran in its very act of banning? In this mission, both “secular” and religious” need to join forces against the religion of our times.

I will be eager to learn how Kahn et al.’s conversations unfold. Having visited forty American campuses during the past three years, I observed some twenty campuses on which theological questions were welcomed as part of the liberal education process. This happened, moreover, not to appease denominational sponsors or meddling bishops, nor because these campuses were religiously homogeneous and devout (a few were, most were not), but because they received sizable, multi-year grants from the Lilly Endowment, Inc., to launch programs of their own design that nurtured the theological exploration of vocation among students, faculty, and staff (known as Programs for the Theological Exploration of Vocation, or PTEV, and implemented on 88 church-related campuses between 2000-2007). Often, these theological explorations took place in classrooms, where faculty encountered many students eager to engage questions of meaning and purpose. Intellectually curious and religiously devout students were of course the first to participate, but their enthusiasm rapidly spread to a wider array of student types, as did instructors’ enthusiasm to their colleagues. So desirous were PTEV campuses to keep these vocational conversations going that several campus presidents organized through the Council of Independent Colleges a Network for Vocation in Undergraduate Education (or NetVUE) in 2008. Despite its launch during the Great Recession, NetVUE now boasts 146 dues-paying college and university affiliates and sponsors a variety of conferences so that participants can learn to continue and improve this theologically informed conversation.

Intrigued by what I observed during my evaluation visits to PTEV campuses, I began to insert questions of purpose and meaning into my own classes—asking senior seminar students, whose looming task is to “make a life,” whether making that life a meaningful one was a valuable question, and if so, what its answer involved. The response was overwhelming: students tore into readings, writing assignments, class discussions, oral presentations, and even group projects with a palpable energy that amazed me. And yes, religious students framed their answers religiously, environmentally passionate students framed them ecologically, feminist students framed them using the language of feminism, and all found the experience both affirming and liberating (which they told me directly and confirmed through anonymous course evaluations). In hindsight, I realized that these senior students had long learned to communicate to diverse listeners in every other space on campus; all I had done was signal that it was safe to bring all of their identities into the classroom, and it seemed as if I had opened the floodgates.

Since others have well documented the academic revival of the study of religion (for instance, see John Schmalzbauer and Kathleen A. Mahoney’s “American Scholars Return to Studying Religion,” David Smilde and Matthew May’s SSRC Working Paper “The Emerging Strong Program in the Sociology of Religion,” and D. Michael Lindsay’s “Evangelicalism Rebounds in Academe”), and since one can readily visit a host of campuses to witness diverse course offerings on religion (and no shortage of students enrolled in them), I will not embellish these signs of conversational ripening further. Instead, I will underscore Kahn et al.’s acknowledgment that these signs of ripening occur in a larger context, in which hostility to deep religious commitments “remain[s] the norm,” and where the conversation that Kahn et al. propose will require “extraordinary balance” from faculty and students alike. There are plenty of faculty who, despite holding the Doctor of Philosophy degree, missed the postmodern memo. They will laugh when Kahn et al. announce the rejection of an “Enlightenment conception of universal reason,” and they will sputter angrily when they hear that religious discourse should be welcomed in the classroom. Few faculty have the time to follow contemporary philosophical discussions of secular life, nor are faculty views on these matters exclusively rational. So, I caution Kahn et al. to not expect too much from their guest lectures and discussions.

What might Kahn et al.’ s conversations accomplish, then? Well, they will certainly draw faculty who have already made their beds in the postmodern camp, faculty with deep religious commitments, and faculty generally interested in matters of pedagogy and liberal education. But even these faculty members will chafe at the thought of granting classroom time to religiously exclusivist discourse. How would an instructor manage a classroom where all students feel both safe and free to express deep identities—including exclusivist ones? Kahn et al.’s essay does not indicate as much. One potential solution, which I observed among my senior seminar students, lies in the use of what conflict resolution counselors and diplomatic negotiators call “I-Language.” My senior students, with three years’ experience in talking to diverse others, had learned this I-language as a way of expressing particularistic statements in pluralistic settings: “I come from an orthodox Jewish background, in which family life is an utmost priority,” said one student, explaining her decision to marry soon and postpone graduate school. She and her classmates were intelligent and reflexive seniors who had learned to talk civilly with each other well before entering my seminar—sparing me the matter of managing awkward or hurtful classroom discourse. I would not attempt this again without first training students in the use of I-language, however, and I will need to sort out how I will handle students who refuse to frame exclusivist statements in this way. Yet, I fully intend to add I-language training to my classes when I return to the classroom, for I am convinced that transformative education can only occur when deep identities are engaged.

Which brings me to this: any educator who wishes to see the liberal arts revitalized must modulate this wish against two powerful realities. The first is a popular epistemology that leaves American citizens widely distrustful of all knowledge claims, as I discuss in my article“Wake Up and Smell the New Epistemology,” in The Chronicle Review [sub. req.]. The second is the instrumentalism with which the overwhelming majority (I estimate 4 out of 5) of college students approach their education—as a means to an occupational end, and absolutely not as a time for reflexivity and transformation (I discuss this in my first book, The First Year Out: Understanding American Teens After High School). The first implies that instructors need to earn the right to teach, by inductively leading students from data to patterns to theory, by respecting students as the arbiters of knowledge that they have become, and by approaching the classroom as public intellectuals. The second implies that even in a best case scenario, efforts to draw in students fully will be resisted by most, and welcomed by 1 out of 5 students. Given the wider cultural forces at work, we need to be realists about what any pedagogy can accomplish. Most college students are profoundly individualist in their normative frameworks, as Christian Smith and Patricia Snell’s comprehensive study of emerging adults demonstrates. Efforts to engage most students’ deeper identities will hit a traction-less “whatever-ism” that will frustrate educators if they do not anticipate it.

How, then, should educators passionate about a transformative liberal arts education proceed? My point is not that we should abandon hope but that we should set achievable goals for transformative education among our students. Quite frankly, it is the rare classroom and rare campus that has even 20 percent of its students deeply engaged in their education. But there are 20 percent eager for such an education, if we approach them properly. Who are they? They are chiefly of three types: rebels, the future intelligentsia, and reforming activists. (I develop this typology in a book I am currently writing about my evaluation of PTEV, tentatively titled Changing on Purpose: When Students and Professors Find their Callings.) True rebels are rare on campuses these days, and the future intelligentsia consists of those one-in-a-hundred students in whom we delight and who become our future colleagues. It is the middle type, the reforming activists, who comprise the lion’s share of this 20 percent. Though their passions do not reside in academic disciplines, their passions can be tapped to motivate deep engagement with academic work. And here’s good news for Kahn et al.: most of these reforming activists are religiously motivated, so they will be drawn into transformative education when their deep religious commitments find an appropriate welcome in the classroom.

Kahn et al. are thus onto something with significant potential, as long as they can successfully navigate their efforts around the cautions I describe above. Secularization’s dominance may be eroding, but its effect on the privatization of religious belief remains robust. Freeing ourselves and our students from privatization’s iron cage may, as ironic as it may seem, be the very thing that extends a transformative liberal arts education beyond the very few to a critical mass, the influence of which we would be foolish to underestimate.

So as to avoid other-worldliness, on the one hand, and tyranny and barbarism, on the other, the secularist entreats us to own up to what we all secretly know already: there is no transcendence grounding the temporal flux, no world of Forms outside Plato’s cave. All we have are the shadows on the wall, and it is our task to arrange ourselves as harmoniously as possible in relation to them.

Of course, the critiques of this secularist perspective are manifold. Through the work of Connolly, Talal Asad, Saba Mahmood, and Janet Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini, to name a few, we have learned that the secularist cave is neither the universal nor the neutral playing field that it pretends to be. Just like whiteness and maleness, secularism claims to speak for the whole world by effacing the particularities of its genesis—specifically, Protestantism, colonialism, and capitalism. One could write full-length books undertaking any of these critiques, but for the purpose of this forum, I would like to bring another perspective briefly into focus, primarily because it does not get quite as much attention in discussions of secularism among religious studies scholars, anthropologists, and political theorists.

This position is the one advanced by the increasingly political Christian theological circle known as Radical Orthodoxy (RO), and it goes more or less like this: secular political theory is doomed from the outset because it cuts itself off from any outside—that is to say, any order of things that is truly different from the ordinary order of things. Christianity offers the only viable socio-political configuration for two reasons: first, it alone is truly universal; and second, it alone offers a truly peaceful vision of the world. I will not discuss the issue of RO’s claims to universality here; rather, I refer the reader to the critiques I have offered here and here. More important for the moment is RO’s conviction that Christianity guarantees peace because Christianity ontologizes peace; that is to say, Christianity tells a story that grounds our being-together in a fundamental harmony with other beings and our creator.  This horizontal and vertical harmony is tied up and secured by means of the doctrine of the Trinity, which draws difference into loving identity without canceling out the differences it relates. So, it’s peace all the way down, and anything less than peace is a denial of the way things actually are.

The problem with secular political theory from RO’s standpoint is that it starts the story too late. Rather than grounding our being in a fundamental harmony and then accounting for our fall into violence and greed, secular political theory assumes violence and greed from the outset. Hobbes, Weber, Mill, and, to a certain extent, Rousseau—all of these thinkers begin from an irreducibly agonistic state and then devise ways of managing the violence they’ve enshrined in the first place. In short, secular political and social theories are hopelessly lodged in violence because they assume that the way things look “down here” is the way things fundamentally are. Secularism, in other words, divorces the shadows in the cave from their sunlit originals, abandoning us to a parodic world of simulacra simulating nothing, with all of us taking meaningless bets on which shadows might prance across the wall next.

Now, I must confess, part of me finds this critique quite convincing—not because I am wedded to a Platonic metaphysic, but because it seems to me that secular political theory, insofar as it assumes the inescapability of violence, cuts itself off from what Derridean shorthand would call the possibility of the impossible. By insisting that this is all there is, the secularist position forecloses the emergence of anything other than this. Since people are violent, we must manage violence with violence as responsibly as possible—any other option is just foolish. What troubles me is that by sticking to what is probable and practical, secularism misses that which from our perspective seems impossible—say, peace, justice, compassion for all sentient beings, swords into plowshares. . . . These sorts of promises, it seems to me, are only held by something like transcendence—even if only the possibility of transcendence—the possibility that things might genuinely be otherwise.

Sympathetic as I am to the Radically Orthodox critique, however, I do not at all agree with their solution, which is, in short, to make the whole world Christian (specifically, high Anglo-Catholic) insofar as the whole world already is, at bottom, high Anglo-Catholic. To be sure, one massive stumbling block for me is the neo-imperialism at work in this insistence on Christian universalism. But there is a theological problem too—namely, the demand for transcendence, coupled with the claim to know what that transcendence looks like. This is a problem because, to risk a tautology, transcendence is not transcendence if it doesn’t transcend—if it just confirms our vision of the way the world really is. If transcendence were genuinely to transcend, it seems to me that it would not ground our political convictions so much as unground them, for the sake of reconfiguring the political terrain itself. To deny this discomfiting truth and attempt to lay claim to transcendence would be to confirm the secularist’s justifiable fear of theocratic tyranny and barbarism. But, again, to cut off transcendence is to close off the space of something genuinely new.

So as far as I can see, the question becomes not whether we’re “for” transcendence or “against” it, but how we might conceive of transcendence differently. Rather than confining it to some static realm outside the world, to which a privileged few have access, how might we think of a transcendence that opens dynamically through the world, surprising and unsettling us each time? How, in other words, might we rethink the topography of the cave?

Now, the source I find most helpful and most frustrating for re-thinking this infamous allegory is Martin Heidegger. In his two interpretations of Plato’s cave—one in a 1931 lecture series on Plato and the other in an essay written in 1947, after Freiburg University’s denazification committee had forbidden him to speak in public—Heidegger’s great insight is that truth does not reside in the brilliance of the Forms, but rather in the transitions from the cave to the sunlight, and from the sunlight back down to the cave. This is to say that truth and shadow open through one another, or to push Heidegger a bit further than he allows himself to go, the cave and the sunlight are not two separate spaces at all. They are, rather, different modes of seeing the same world. (I discuss this point at length in Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe.) The sunlight opens through the cave. I think this is a fair extension of Heidegger because it echoes one of the central claims of Being and Time, which is that authenticity is not some realm set apart from the everyday—it is merely a modified way of apprehending everydayness itself. The true, the authentic, the space of freedom is folded into and only emerges by means of the ordinary, untrue, and unfree state of things.

So, where are we? Weren’t we talking about secularism? We will recall that the Euro-American secularist construes “the religious” as an escapist or tyrannical privilege of the space outside the cave over the cave itself. As a remedy, she offers the space inside the cave as the only space there is, leaving us, as far as I’m concerned, cut off from anything that truly differs from the rather intolerable way things are. The pseudo-Heideggerian interpretation I have offered here weaves itself somewhere between the religious other-world and the secular this-one, not only refusing to privilege either over the other, but, more radically, reading them as thoroughly interwoven. So, if the religious standpoint lodges itself in the extraordinary as such, and the secular perspective roots us in the ordinary as such, I am pressing here for some way of seeing the extraordinary in and through the ordinary.

To remain a bit longer with Heidegger, there is a name for this attentiveness to the extraordinary in and through the ordinary. Plato called it thaumazein, a word most often rendered in English as “wonder.” In his reading of Plato’s Theaetetus, which claims wonder as the origin of all philosophy, Heidegger explains that unlike curiosity, amazement, or stupefaction, wonder (Erstaunen) wonders not at the extraordinary as such, but rather, at the strangeness of the everyday. As Heidegger puts it, “precisely the most usual whose usualness goes so far that it is not even known or noticed in its usualness—this most usual itself becomes in and for wonder what is most unusual.”

So, if the “religious” standpoint loses itself in some other world, and the “secular” accepts this one too uncritically, wonder’s relentless between looks for what’s shocking about the ordinary. This shock can give way to all sorts of different value judgments—wonder might expose the ordinary as suddenly beautiful, or inexplicable, or as thoroughly unacceptable. Thus its political promise: wonder neither allows us to claim access to a fixed order no one else can see nor to remain content tinkering with a patently broken set of ethico-political configurations. Rather, to put it in totally ordinary terms, wonder reveals that the way things are need not be the way things are. And it could be just this sort of denaturalization that might allow us to begin to think the secular—otherwise.

There’s nothing like a Great Recession to set off a storm of conversation about the nature of liberal arts education. Sites such as The Chronicle of Higher Education’s and The New York Times’ have conducted vigorous and multifaceted debates about whether students can afford to “indulge” in a “non-vocational” undergraduate education: an education where students prioritize what interests them in the here-and-now, regardless of whether these interests can obviously be “monetized” (as the phrase goes) immediately upon graduation. Varied defenders, such as David Brooks, Martha Nussbaum, and Michael Roth, emphasize the palpable and practical value of a liberal arts education, urging us to think more critically about how a broad and searching education can indeed yield immediate and obvious effects—economic, social, and political—even if these do not come with direct-deposit six figure bonuses.

To these defenses of liberal arts education, we would like to add our own voices. Between 2006-2009, with the support of the Teagle Foundation, four self-identifying secular liberal arts campuses—Bucknell University and Macalester, Vassar, and Williams Colleges—engaged in a project, “Secularity and the Liberal Arts,” that tried to get at the purpose and nature of liberal arts education by asking what it means for a liberal arts campus to unabashedly call its practices “secular.” Is there a way, we wondered, that by spending some time thinking critically and honestly about this crucial term—one that ostensibly governs our practices—we might get a better handle on the nature of liberal arts education?

From the start, this project was motivated by the tremendous reevaluation that the notion of the “secular” has undergone over the last two decades. It is now well acknowledged that the American academy, at least from the standpoint of theory, has been in a full-blown period of recovery from the dominance of the secularization thesis. One of the remarkable things about this conversation has been the tremendous variety of theorists—of different political and religious convictions—who have come to agree on one thing: that it is both philosophically incoherent and phenomenologically inaccurate to posit a secular scrubbed free of religion and committed to a neutral and rational public discourse. On this, Stanley Hauerwas, Jeff Stout, William Connolly, Wendy Brown, John Milbank, Saba Mahmood, and Charles Taylor (to name just a few) all unite.

Our “Secularity and the Liberal Arts” group wondered whether, or how, these theoretical moves had made their way onto our campuses.  Did the practices and ways of liberal arts life reflect the theoretical work that has been done of late on the secular? We suspected that life on liberal arts campuses, both in and out of class, did not reflect this profound eclipse of the secularization thesis. Our institutions have long valued a notion of the secular that limits and restricts religious expression in order, ostensibly, to promote tolerance and critical thought, to sustain democratic institutions, and to foster civic engagement. We suspected that our campuses’ underlying commitments to critical thought, tolerance, and political engagement were actually creating a public discourse that carefully polices the types of rhetoric and reasons allowed into play. Time and again, our reading group conversations as well as the qualitative research we conducted confirmed that students and faculty feel compelled to drop their religious commitments in many public spaces on campus: certainly at the classroom door, but also in places ostensibly more “private,” such as dorm life, and even in casual conversation. Indeed, at the start we encountered stiff resistance to the very idea that these discursive boundaries might be policed less rigorously; many faculty members and students have grown comfortable with hard-line—if under-articulated—secularist assumptions, which restrict the free airing of religoius commitments. After all, our colleagues reminded us, such assumptions are historically responsible for more good than bad—say, a great deal of intellectual freedom and iconoclasm—and remain, if flawed, the best available model. Did we not recognize our campuses’ secular self-identification as a hard-won accomplishment? What had changed, some of our colleagues wanted to know, that this accomplishment now needs to be challenged?

At the same time, religious groups also resisted our work because they felt that any conversation about the secular represented the promotion of a staunch secularism. For them, the very word was horribly tainted (think, for example, of Pope Benedict’s use of the term), and these religionists could not see any way that talking about the secular might prove helpful to them. Did we not see, then, following George Marsden et al., that the academy has successfully established secularism as its norm, and that it is not likely to give up this ground?

If, at first, asking questions about both the strengths and limits of our secular assumptions elicited anxious responses from secularists and religionists alike, over time we built trust by focusing on student learning. We wanted to consider whether these types of uncritical assumptions about the secular were stripping some students and faculty of fundamental aspects of their identities—in particular, their religious identities. We were moved to ask, what would campus life—both in and out of class—look like if these secularist assumptions were dropped? (For an account of the project in toto, see the group’s White Paper as well as “Varieties of Secular Experience,” a November 2008 conference headlined by Princeton Professor Jeffrey Stout’s keynote address, “Secular not Secularist,” and Swarthmore College President Rebecca Chopp’s lecture, “Secularity, Meaning and the Liberal Arts.”)

For liberal arts colleges, the stakes of this question are important. The mission of liberal arts education is not simply the conveyance of certain bodies of information or technical skills that are useful in a market economy. Liberal arts colleges understand themselves as places that promote education as a way for students to consider larger questions of meaning and value. Liberal arts colleges are places where students are not thought naïve to ask so-called big questions: “What is the meaning of my life?” “How do I understand death?” “Does evil exist?” “What are my obligations to my neighbor, my country, my world?” And finally, “How might my education—in whatever field I study—help me assimilate these questions?” We were struck by the way that considerations of the secular had the profound effect of renewing discussions of what might be called the deeper purposes of liberal arts education. Talk about the secular in general quickly turned into much more specific talk about what liberal arts colleges are for and how they are to serve their purposes.

Is a liberal arts education no longer secular when it allows this sort of deep commitment into public view and discussion? That depends on what is meant by the secular. What our project calls for is a revalued concept of the secular and secularity. The notion of secularity that emerges from “Secularity and the Liberal Arts” rejects the Enlightenment conception of universal reason and the idea that religion is a discourse that should be subject to special rules restricting its expression. Rather, it encourages the expression of views guided or governed by religious commitments. To be sure, liberal arts colleges are not going to pick up the mantle of any particular set of religious commitments. Nevertheless, under this version of the secular, it is reasonable to be religious. In short, the notion of secularity that emerges from our project is at odds with secularism conventionally or commonly understood.

Our notion of the secular has been heavily influenced by Stout’s understanding of secularization as the emergence of a discursive condition in which “the tendency of the people participating [is not] to relinquish their religious beliefs or to refrain from employing them as reasons,” but in which, rather, “participants [. . .] are not in a position to take for granted that their interlocutors are making the same religious assumptions they are.” On these terms, secular institutions such as liberal arts campuses would excel at anticipating and navigating differences among their citizens. What Stout means by “secular, not secularist,” we suggest, is just this. A secularist seeks to rid democratically and pedagogically orientated spaces (e.g., campuses and classrooms) of religious commitments in the pursuit of arrogating authoritative  forms of knowledge. Someone who possesses a revauled understanding of the secular as a discursive condition and practice seeks knowledge that helps us, as Stanley Hauerwas describes, “to act wisely in a context of conflict, ambiguity, and change.” When the authority of knowledge is less important than the things that can be done with knowledge (i.e., explicate its logic, argue with it, follow its implications, explore motivations for holding it, and reflect on how it shapes moral formation), the secular becomes a discussion between religious and non-religious citizens who are acutely aware that the demands of secularized democratic life require an extraordinary balance between cherishing one’s own convictions and holding to the awareness that these same cherished convictions are contestable, and that they may at times act as a bludgeon against other democratic citizens. A further type of knowledge emerges in this secular: a self-critical consideration of how one’s own commitments might be heard by citizens with differing ones, a knowledge required for acting compassionately, civilly, and democratically.

The result of our work led us to the following claims: When a liberal arts education is framed in terms of questions about life’s purposes, students express an unmistakable pent-up desire to introduce deep commitments, including religious ones, into public arenas, including the classroom. In turn, liberal arts colleges work best and allow students to become who they are when students are afforded the room to search and interrogate their commitments—especially their religious commitments—in public ways. The fear and, as the social scientific work of the group found, the reality is that liberal arts colleges are failing this mission insofar as students and faculty feel that when they step onto liberal arts campuses they have to bracket or repress just the sort of deep commitments, religious or otherwise, that might be crucial to addressing these sorts of questions.

What we also found, however, is that students and faculty are deeply unsure of how to express deep commitments more freely and fully. Confusion, uncertainty, and even hostility here remain the norm. What appeared glaringly conspicuous to us is the lack, across academic fields, of adequate models and examples of constructive exchange between conflicting deep commitments. Beyond flatly making room for the airing of these views (in the name of a notion of tolerance), faculty and students alike were perplexed by how to substantively engage with and learn from deep commitments different from their own.

One critical effect of this revalued notion of the secular is that it disrupts the dominant metaphor of “space” that is commonly used to talk about the secular. During the November 2008 conference, Bob Connor (whose essay, “The Right Time for Asking Big Questions” breathed life into many of our working groups) observed that spaces are conventionally referred to as secular (or not), and that when a space (such as a classroom) is normatively termed secular, it shuts down conversation that dwells upon deeper commitments. It seems clear to us that the space metaphor is tied to secularist tendencies; spaces are secular to the degree that they conform to a set of norms restricting free expression. But when the epistemological rules are relaxed, the metaphor changes. The secular becomes a type of conversation or discussion occurring in a wide range of venues. In other words, revaluing the secular turns the focus away from where certain discussions are allowed to happen (a secularist tendency) and, more substantively, toward the difficulties of the discussion itself.

Indeed, here is where work remains. With this revalued understanding of the secular—now properly understood as a set of discursive practices operating among differing a/theological perspectives—lots of questions remain. Our understanding of how to conduct these discursive practices is rudimentary at best; most of us lack the experience. Some of us worry that a more open-ended, free-wheeling notion of the secular creates a mess that we do not know how to clean up. Are our liberal arts institutions equipped to meet the demands of this notion of the secular? Have our institutions adequately reflected on questions about what a liberal arts education is for and how they are to best serve those purposes? More, are there limitations to this model of secular education? One of the stock criticisms of secularism is that it doesn’t understand the ways in which it wields power. We thus also need to think critically about the ways in which our suggested secular traffics in power. The tendency is to think that, because our understanding of the secular is more democratic than secularism (in that it invites more views into play), it is somehow innocent of “sins” or problems. This seems unlikely. In the end, all of us remain confident that these natural questions and concerns should not hold us back from proceeding and seeking (in our own small way) to reshape the truncated discursive practices that currently define the practice of liberal arts education on most liberal arts campuses.

Thus, the next steps in our program: Last fall, we four members of “Secularity and the Liberal Arts” felt a great desire to take the conversation, its readings, and our distinctive point of view to other liberal arts colleges and universities. With continued support from the Teagle Foundation, we developed a one-day workshop, “Reconceiving the Secular and the Liberal Arts,” to take on the road, as it were, to other liberal arts colleges and universities.  The workshop would introduce our revised secular ideal and begin to interrogate what this ideal might mean for the practice of liberal arts education. Like the first introductions of race, class, gender, sexuality, and culture as aspects of student learning, we insisted that redefining secularity as a flexible ideal and diverse set of practices would help campuses better reflect their increasingly cosmopolitan character.

Judging from the response to our call for applications, it seems that liberal arts campuses are ready for and deeply interested in this conversation. We received fifteen applications from a remarkably diverse set of institutions. Some were religiously affiliated, some were not; they hailed from all corners of the country and ranged from large universities to small colleges. The point is that there seems to be a strong demand in our modern moment to address this set of questions about the role and place of religion in the ostensibly public life of liberal arts education. More, given the diverse set of schools that responded to our workshop, there is clearly a demand for a conversation that challenges conventional notions of the secular. Schools with historically different ways of structuring the secular and the religious are eager to reach out to each other.

During the fall of 2010, we will visit seven of these institutions to conduct our workshop. We’ve invited four more members of our original “Secularity and the Liberal Arts” project and divided ourselves into teams of two, each comprising one faculty member and one religious life representative, to conduct these learning-based conversations on reconceiving the secular and the liberal arts.

We cannot emphasize enough the notion of “learning” here. We will travel to these campuses pretty confident about how we have come to revamp the secular, but we are genuinely uncertain and seeking to learn how this notion of the secular will play out in different liberal arts settings. We feel like we’ve cleared the brush away enough that having this new conversation about the secular is possible. But how this conversation will go and what it will lead to as yet remain unknown.

To us, “Secularity and the Liberal Arts” and the response to our current workshop, “Reconceiving the Secular and the Liberal Arts,” uncover vacant and fertile ground for a conversation about religion and the secular other than the rancorous and well-worn debate between “wall of separation” secularists and political theologians—largely Christian ones—who want to turn America into a theocratic state. Unlike these antagonists, we don’t offer one set of substantive norms for being an American citizen. Believe in religion, small-government, taxes, same-sex marriage, or not. The goal of our project is to develop better models of how citizens in a democracy can engage with their counterparts despite deep and abiding differences. Our final conceit, in other words, is this: Reconceiving the secular can lead to reconceiving the practices of citizenry. That these conversations are beginning to happen in thoughtful and inventive ways on liberal arts campuses only speaks to the enduring practical value of liberal arts education.