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.

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.

In our latest off the cuff feature, several scholars respond to the news that the proportion of historians who specialize in religion continues to climb, and to reflect on both the causes and the significance of of this distinct, and now confirmed, trend in historical studies.

Our respondents are:

Jon Butler, Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and Howard R. Lamar Professor of American Studies, History, and Religious Studies, Yale University

David A. Hollinger, Preston Hotchkis Professor of American History, University of California – Berkeley

John Schmalzbauer, Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Blanche Gorman Strong Chair in Protestant Studies; Missouri State University

Jonathan Sheehan, Associate Professor of History, University of California – Berkeley

Grant Wacker, Professor of Christian History and Director of Graduate Studies in Religion, Duke Divinity School

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Jon Butler, Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and Howard R. Lamar Professor of American Studies, History, and Religious Studies, Yale University

I do believe that the increased attention to religion comes primarily from the obvious inadequacy of the secularization thesis to explain world history since 1945 or, at least, since 1970. Events in the middle east, from the long-standing argument about the founding of Israel to the Iran-Iraq war to the rise of the Taliban to the now several American military ventures there and the political effects of an expanding radical Islamic terrorism, then to American politics since the Civil Rights movement and its conservative “Christian” sequel, all suggest the centrality of religion in making modern events, at least in the United States and many, if not all, areas of the world.

True, not everyone regards the religion found in these events truly “religious,” by this or that conceptualization.  And some scholars doubt the meaning of the term “religion” altogether, at least beyond its alleged invention, or reinvention, in the 19th and 20th centuries.  But activists who flaunt religion in these matters regard their motivations as primarily religious, and as a result, much debate circulating around the term and phenomenon of “religion” needs historical and contemporary explanation, including explanations from scholars who see religion as a stalking horse for other motivations and forces.

The modern debate, in turn, encourages other historians to cast farther back to the “moments of transition” between modern and pre-modern societies (the points at which religion seems to have ebbed)—in the West usually taken to be the 18th and 19th centuries–and then even farther back when the contested character of religious expression needs as much explanation as does its reputed ubiquity.

This renewed interest builds, of course, on long and remarkably well sustained traditions in intellectual history that have almost always treated religion seriously, as well as the rise (and now apparent slow fall) of both European and American social history that also found religion a central force in shaping, say, early modern Europe (think, for example, of Natalie Zemon Davis’s work—one could name many, many more).  And there are terrific books on modern intellectual and theological matters in the 20th-century U.S., such as Richard Fox’s biography of Reinhold Niebuhr and Patrick Allitt’s Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics, 1950-1985—again, one could name many, many more.

And if I could be self-serving for a moment, Yale’s Pew Program in American History, funded with $5 million in grants from the Pew Charitable Trusts between 1993-2003, helped a bit with U.S. history.  Co-directed by myself and my colleague Harry Stout, it subsidized Ph.D. students from more than 50 institutions writing dissertations in all areas of U.S. history in which religion played some significant role in the subject, as well as new assistant professors from around the country writing first books in U.S. history with some significant religious dimension.  Fellowships went to more than 250 individuals, and their books and articles have helped ascertain religion’s role in American history, whether positive, negative, or indifferent.  Similarly, the Young Scholars Program at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis funded by the Lilly Endowment has conducted a year-long set of seminars for 10-12 new assistant professors each year since 1991, all focusing on ways to comprehend how religion has interfaced with American culture since the colonial period.

The idea, of course, is to avoid the “jack-in-the-box” approach to religion, in which historians and contemporary scholars find themselves confronting phenomena for which they have few historical explanations and, perhaps, impoverished means of understanding even without history.

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David A. Hollinger, Preston Hotchkis Professor of American History, University of California – Berkeley

Religion is too important to be left in the hands of people who believe in it. Finally, historians are coming to grips with this simple truth. Why this has happened and with what effects may differ from period to period, continent to continent, and religion to religion. Here, I will comment on this transformation as visible in the field I know the best, 20th century United States history.

The careful and sustained study of Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism in this particular field has been carried out primarily by scholars who profess some version of the faith they study. This has produced some wonderful work, and I am not suggesting that belief is a barrier to successful scholarship. But this religious demography of scholarship does narrow the inventory of perspectives brought to the field, and once in place it is self-reinforcing: it can create the impression that religious history belongs mostly to the religious, and that historians of a more secular orientation will compromise their secularity by getting involved at all. The current increase of interest in religion on the part of scholars in this field follows in large part from the breaking of the connection between belief and the object of study. Just as we have lots of studies of Nazis by people who have no sympathy for Nazism—to use an extreme example to make the point—so, too, can we have studies of Presbyterians by people who have no commitment to Presbyterianism and may indeed find its influence on American life to be more pernicious than not.

Having argued in workshops and symposia over the course of many years that religion needs to be studied more extensively (see, for instance, the Journal of American History, September 2003), I found that a major obstacle was fear on the part of my colleagues that they would be taken by others to have bought into all that God and Jesus stuff. Nonsense, was my response; there is room for all honest scholars. What turned the tide? Not my argumentation, which long fell on deaf ears. I suspect the big thing has been the increased role that publicly displayed religious faith has played in American politics during recent elections. Religion is harder to ignore if it keeps coming back and hitting you again and again. Thanks, Sarah Palin (and Rick Warren, and Rev. Wright, and yes, even Barack Obama).

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John Schmalzbauer, Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Blanche Gorman Strong Chair in Protestant Studies, Missouri State University

This week’s report on the “religious revival” among American historians should not be viewed in isolation. Far from being unique to the historical profession, it is the latest in a series of religious comeback stories.  Since the 1980s, articles on the return of religion have appeared in a dozen disciplines, including art, English, philosophy, music, political science, social work, medicine, history, and sociology.

Such articles often assume a familiar narrative structure: Once upon a time, secular academia had little interest in the sacred, except in neglected subfields on the periphery of the major disciplines and in the religious ghetto of church-related higher education. Near the dawn of the millennium, events at home and abroad conspired to bring religion to the attention of the academic guild.

Usually such articles mention the rise of the religious right, the influence of global Islam, the fall of the Soviet Union, the advent of post-modernism, and the events of September 11, 2001. They often conclude by questioning the utility of the secularization thesis, replacing the decline-of-religion storyline with a story of religion’s resilience.

I know because I have written such an article.  Together with historian Kathleen Mahoney, I am co-authoring a book on the return of religion in American higher education. Our research has led me to accept the basic outlines of the religion comeback story, not just in history but across the disciplines. The “religious revival” in the American Historical Association runs parallel to similar developments in the American Political Science Association, the American Philosophical Association, and many other scholarly organizations. Renewed attention to religion is reflected in the profusion of centers and institutes, religion-oriented scholarly associations, journals of religion and fill-in-the-blank, and generous philanthropic foundations (at least until the current recession).

Just because a narrative conforms to a standard plotline doesn’t make it false. It may mean that the storytellers are responding to similar events.

And yet, it is important not to exaggerate.  Like much of the scholarship on the secularization of the academy, narratives of religion’s return are given to overstatement. Those invested in the religion business are often tempted to overplay their hand. This is a particular danger for scholars who are themselves religious.

According to the American Historical Association survey, just 7.7 percent of historians expressed an interest in religion. In other disciplines, the proportion is even smaller. If there is a comeback of religion (and I believe there is), it is limited in its size and scope.

Those tempted by triumphalism should remember that we have been here before. In the years following World War II, many spoke of an academic revival. Writing in the New York Times Magazine, the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr cautioned against reading too much into such developments, noting that “our own commitments and sympathies, whether for or against particular movements, color our judgments and tip the scales in which we weigh the evidence.” In evaluating the AHA survey, we would do well to heed his warning.

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Jonathan Sheehan, Associate Professor of History, University of California – Berkeley

Historians have always studied religion, it seems to me. Certainly this is true in my field of early modern European history. Social historians of the previous generations—in, say, the 1970s, when only 1.4% of historians identified religion as a specialization, according to the study—spent much time and labor trying to understand the relationships between religious phenomena and social change. In fact, the great era of Reformation studies precisely maps onto the low period of claimed interest in things religious.

So what seems most interesting about these findings is not that we are attending to religion with renewed zeal. Rather, it is the eagerness of historians (myself included) to hitch ourselves to the religion train, to declare ourselves historians of religion, rather than historians who happen to study religious events, people, or phenomena.

Two data points stand out, in this regard. First, that religion topped culture as the area of prime interest. Second, that the area with the most dramatic decline in the past few decades has been that of social history.

In part, this is a story of historiographical transformations. Cultural history made huge inroads against social history in the 1980s and 90s, but now has receded into a general background in historical studies, less controversial and less cutting edge than it was twenty years ago.

It is also a story of changing intellectual commitments, however. Religion, which had before appeared as just one feature of a wider cultural and social landscape, has now become an autonomous subject with its own rules and transformations. This has brought great advances to its study: historians are less and less willing simply to convert religion into a epiphenomenon of other forces, social, political, economic, and so on.

But there is a more problematic side too. In an era of apparent desecularization, the thesis of religious autonomy—that religion is a durable feature of the human being, modern and not—has never seemed more attractive. Whether it is 9/11 or modern evangelical politics, world circumstances lure us into believing in belief. They lure us into believing that, beyond the social, political, and cultural, there is a certain something, an area of faith, that stands apart. But of course, this is exactly what religions have always said about themselves. If historians don’t want to do the work of religion, then I think we have to reserve judgment on the thesis of religious autonomy. Take up religion, but take it up lightly.

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Grant Wacker, Professor of Christian History and Director of Graduate Studies in Religion, Duke Divinity School

The mounting interest in American religious history in graduate history programs stems from at least three sources. The most obvious is the growing visibility of religion in the nation’s public life. Though religion always had served as a powerful force in the nation’s affairs, in the past fifty years—from the charged 1960 election forward—religious people started to vote in such predictable ways that the mainstream media began to pay them serious attention. In addition, to many thoughtful—and some not so thoughtful—observers, the emergence of the Christian Right in the 1970s and the religious forces behind 9/11 seemed especially conspicuous and alarming.

A second factor is the stubborn resilience of religion in the face of secularizing pressures. Notable examples include the proliferation of mega-churches, the insurgence of populist denominations such as the Assemblies of God, the Latter-day Saints, and the Southern Baptists, and the post-World War II influence of three world-historical religious leaders: Martin Luther King Jr., Billy Graham, and Pope John Paul II.  Mega-churches won attention for the simple reason that 10 churches with 2,000 members were more visible than 100 churches with 200 members. The populist denominations’ growth coincided with the simultaneous decline of the mainline bodies. While the former trend did not come at the expense of the latter (it represented different fertility and retention rates, not switching), to the media and many ordinary observers those developments signaled the aggressive swelling of religious strength. Finally, it would be hard to find any other period of U.S. history that witnessed three leaders who captured the hearts and minds of millions of Americans as King, Graham, and John Paul did.

A third factor, largely invisible to the media, but probably the most important of all, was the emergence in the last third of the century of more than a score of historians and historically minded sociologists of religion of singular distinction. Though they received their training in a variety of programs—history, religion, sociology, English, or American Studies—all adhered to rigorous historical method. Some publicly identified themselves with a specific religious tradition, some carefully avoided the topic, and some made a point to declare themselves personally non-religious. Yet they repeatedly garnered the most prestigious awards the profession had to offer. With such mentors showing the way, it is little wonder that a rising generation of historians would find religion a compelling field of study.

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Johns, Jasper (b. 1930) © VAGA, NY

Flags. 1968. Lithograph, printed in color, irreg composition: 34 5/8 x 25 7/8″; irreg sheet: 34 5/8 x 25 7/8″. Gift of the Celeste and Armand Bartos Foundation. (291.1968)

Location: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A.

Photo Credit: Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY (ART193346)

Slowly, some humanists are recovering from a professionally sanctioned amnesia about the original mission and scope of our field.  The current enterprise of the humanities began as the core curriculum of the first modern university, established by the Humboldt brothers in Berlin in 1810, to prepare republican citizens. For the first time in European history, future professionals would have to interpret the dangerously unstable and exciting world that followed from the French Revolution. They studied history, languages, and philosophy as disciplines that acknowledge cultural differences and that suggest the power of art to achieve freedom through imagination and through disinterested pleasure. Today, humanists continue to interpret arts and culture in classrooms, scholarly publications, and in institutions devoted to conserving and promoting creative practices.  But the founding mission of civic education is shrouded under the assumption that art is inconsistent with practical concerns. Universities and art schools teach us to worry whenever instrumentality is mentioned, for fear that questions of usefulness will vitiate the free and disinterested quality of aesthetic experience.

For a while, Franklin Delano Roosevelt lifted that pall of concern about the concrete effects of art, through his massive WPA program of national recovery that built roads, schools, and also supported artists from a range of modalities and ideological persuasions. Too little is known about their work in light of the recovery, as if their art was discounted for collaborating with government programs.  But now is the time for a revision of artistic contributions to democratic and economic development, for factoring in the constructive work that creative arts do in reframing paradigms and in breaking bad habits. Formalist art theory, in opposition to instrumentalism, underlines the defamiliarizing quality of good prose, poems, and paintings. For formalists, art doesn’t promote programs; instead it interrupts expectations. In doing so, art revives the perception of people and things we had learned to overlook.  It rekindles a love for the world. Without art, Victor Shklovsky writes in “Art as Technique,” “life is reckoned as nothing. Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war….And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life.”

In this spirit of freedom from anaesthetizing habit we can, and urgently should, take up the torn threads that tie humanism up with civic education. We humanists can join artists as cultural agents who promote creativity and interpretation as resources for social development. The objective is not a partisan victory but the formation of “thick” civic subjects who are alive to the world and exercise the free judgment that we learn, as Kant taught us, through developing a disinterested enjoyment of beauty. Democracy depends on sturdy and resourceful citizens able to engage more than one point of view and to wrest rights and resources from limited assets. In other words, non-authoritarian government counts on creativity to loosen conventional thought and free up the space where conflicts are negotiated, before they reach a brink of either despair or aggression.

Aesthetic education, Friedrich Schiller explained to the Humboldt brothers who turned the advice into an academic institution, is a necessary part of civic development. Schiller’s program for modern citizenship is The Aesthetic Education of Man (1759). He wrote the Letters to open dead-ends in politics through art that wrests freedom from contradiction.  Sentimental, tormented art like Schiller’s, unlike Goethe’s naïve genius, can be taught; it thrives in the very distance from nature where poets have freedom to maneuver. Freedom’s dependence on self-consciousness, and the promise of a new spontaneity based on reflection, became the themes of Schiller’s pedagogy. It turned Kant’s lessons about the differences between beauty and the sublime, love and respect, nature and artistic genius, into a progression of before and after aesthetic education. Yet the sometimes delayed social effects of an aesthetic education can rush skeptics to conclude that one thing has little to do with another. But hasty conclusions misprise the gradual process of subject formation.

While defensive humanists worry about subjecting art to practical uses, I used to worry about the ethical dimension of the work we do. Sometimes I’d get so sore from the everyday ethical barbs that interrupt a literature teacher’s chain of thought that thinking would get derailed from aesthetic questions to questioning why these mattered. The times that haunted me most were when graduate students would wonder out loud why—when the world was so urgently in need of practical contributions—they should write a dissertation about this or that genre, or motif, or formal property of literature. They did not doubt that preparing for a teaching career in the arts is an enormous pleasure and also a privilege.  But what good does it do in the world? What direct or indirect outcomes could justify the resources of time and money, the intellectual passions that can replace sleep at night, the dedication to writing books that (by my hardly admirable example) can trump even a mother’s attention to her children?  Can we, in good faith, counsel students to pursue humanistic careers when they sense that the same barbs that bother us will prick their own conscience if they are lucky enough to land a job?

Yes, we can, I’m relieved to say, now that President Obama has refreshed the memory of FDR’s creative years along with hopes for increased attention to arts education. Among the inspirations have been Schiller, Hannah Arendt’s lectures on Kant’s aesthetics, Antonio Gramsci, Antanas Mockus, Augusto Boal, and countless other cultural agents. Teaching about art and training a disposition to engage and admire creativity can make their contributions visible in ways that turn lessons into opportunities (read: obligations) to work constructively in the world. I’ll say why, very briefly.

At the beginning of her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, Arendt jokes that of course he never wrote in that genre.  He didn’t have to, because he wrote indirectly, on aesthetics, as the most certain way to get to politics. For one thing, with the French Revolution as a backdrop for his 1790 Critique of Judgment, indirection was prudent for a cautious man.  But caution and care also encouraged Kant to build a theory of the public sphere from the buy-in of individual citizens.  This was not an appeal to the “general will” that Arendt recoils from in the French and in the Bolshevik revolutions, but a foundation in particular subjectivity that could be trained toward agreement with other subjects through exercising the faculty of judgment. Judgment is an innate faculty, like reason and imagination, but one that went almost undetected or flaccid from under-use during long centuries of pre-modern authoritarianism. Subjects of a king, devotees of a church, serfs, slaves, and students of classical curricula don’t need to exercise judgment because they don’t make choices.  But the intellectual freedom that the Enlightenment defends makes choice possible and therefore an obligation. For the first time in Western history, Arendt says, common people need to develop their faculty of judgment.  And the training program is none other than aesthetic education. Because they are free from interest, subjective observations regarding beauty and the sublime depend on a faculty that has nothing to do with reason, or morality, or any pre-established concept of right or wrong, good or bad. An aesthetic judgment is a second order response to pleasure or displeasure: after we register the immediate feeling, we judge if the feeling is free of interest; in that case we imagine that others might share the same pleasure because it does not depend on concerns that may affect us differentially.  Through aesthetic judgment, subjectivity makes a bridge to other subjects and promotes a shared sense of freely acknowledged value. This “common sense,” Kant’s clever resignification of everyday wisdom in every man, is enabled through aesthetics and becomes the foundation for a public sphere.

Kant kept free of too much involvement; he preferred to observe, not to engage with the world. His student Friedrich Schiller would insist that aesthetics demands hands-on achievement of form, not only the judgment of existing objects. The modern subject is an agent in creating a cultural and political environment, so that arts education was practically a redundant and urgent project for Schiller. In ways that I only intuit and hope to develop soon, Schiller is an inspiration for Antonio Gramsci, a fellow traveler of the cultural agents I most admire.

Take Antanas Mockus, for example. In 1995, the newly elected mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, proposed a bold program of “Cultural Agency.” Simply stated, he put culture to work in a city so violent and corrupt for over a decade that it was the one place in the Americas banned to tourists by airport advisories. What could be done in a place so troubled that investments of money and force would have magnified, not mitigated, the disaster?  If civic spirit had worn so thin it would not sustain a body politic that could take fiscal cures or demand security, the first prescription was to revive the spirit through art, antics, and accountability. First a philosopher and then a public servant, Mayor Mockus made theory yield practices that would themselves yield more reflection. He sidestepped conventional sites of struggle that stayed stuck between fear and opportunism. Like Gramsci, Mockus refused to wait for better conditions and instead promoted a “passive revolution” through the power of culture. Gramsci’s response to unbeatable odds makes him something of a patron saint for cultural agency. Using culture as the wedge to open up necessary civil conditions for decent politics and economic growth, workers would get beyond economistic deadlocks and move toward the goal of emancipation.

For Mockus, civility was goal enough, and getting there became an experiment that mixed fun with function (imagine combining Schiller’s playful education for self-made subjects with Kant’s appeal to inter-subjective judgment inspired by aesthetics).  For example, the municipality’s inspired staff hired pantomime artists to make spectacles of good and bad performances at traffic lights. Suddenly, skeptical subjects became an interactive public of spectators.  The mayor’s team printed thousands of laminated cards with a green thumb-up on one side and red thumb-down on the other, for drivers to flash in judgment of their fellows.  Vaccination against violence was one city-wide performance-therapy against the “epidemic” that had become a cliché for aggression. Arts programs in schools, rock concerts in parks, a monthly “ciclovía” that closed streets to traffic and opened them to bikers and walkers have, among other civic games and alongside rigorous educational programs, helped to revive the metropolis.

Citizens soon paid their taxes, often above what they owed in order to support a particular library, or park, or senior program. Between 1993 and 2003, the end of Mockus’s second term, one stunning indicator of change is the rate of homicide, reduced by sixty-five percent. Today, Bogotá feels the strain of migrants who flee zones of conflict for this newfound haven. As they overload the city’s systems, planners suggest that migration might slow down if cultural agency stepped up in still troubled areas of the country.

Throughout the Americas, culture is a vehicle for agency.  Photographers are teaching visual literacy and whetting young appetites for other arts and sciences. In theater, improvisations foster collaboration and find dramatic outlets for frustration while rehearsing roles that rise to daunting challenges.  Without the “Teatro campesino,” César Chávez could not have organized the United Farm Workers’ Union. Perhaps the most far-reaching case is Augusto Boal’s “Theater of the Oppressed.” The multiplier effect of his lessons in listening to disadvantaged social actors and encouraging them to take the stage resulted, for example, in his two-term election to the City Council of Rio de Janeiro.  There, he promoted legislation suggested by audiences and actors in marginal neighborhoods; thirteen laws passed, and several were adopted at the national level. Alongside these artist-activists are many others. Musicians, dancers, poets, painters, of the past and at present, do not yet figure as subjects of many academic studies, but they might inspire the kind of creative reflection that amounts to a civic contribution.

In Bogotá, no one asks what “cultural agency” means.  The concept resonates with a variety of public practices that link creativity with social contributions. But elsewhere the term can beg definition. Maybe this shows a lack of activity, but I suspect that activity is almost everywhere. What we lack instead is perspective on the family resemblances among a variety of repertoires and remixes. Recognizing these resemblances, promoting replication of artful interventions can be on our professional agendas as humanists through at least two standard professional approaches to the arts: we highlight particular creative practices, and we give those practices a theoretical spin.

The first value added by humanists follows from simply noting and commenting on examples of arts that build society. Drawing attention to undervalued creative practices offers them as models to inspire variations and choices for research projects.  Research begins by locating or formulating a topic; we choose which text, phenomenon, or practice, which perspective or approach, merits extended consideration in a scholarly essay. Allow me to mention my own choice as a literary critic. Instead of focusing on popular cultural studies topics such as violence, necrophilia, consumerism, or abuse of human rights, I chose to focus a book and course on “Bilingual Aesthetics” to reframe bilingualism, from the barely tolerated transitional condition of minorities and immigrants, to an intellectual and emotional advance over monolingualism.

Cultural agency is an invitation to notice “felicitous” engagements as well as frustrating performances. And since the approach privileges the surprise of ingenious responses to difficult challenges, it can sustain the attention of humanists trained to value art for producing uncommon effects.  Alongside the end-game of critique, humanist agents can play the gambit of reflecting on an inexhaustible range of creative moves and on their immediate or delayed effects. In the end, results will be important, as talented administrators like Mockus maintain. He developed innovative, often indirect, measures for changing attitudes of youth and mature citizens, before and after experimenting with particular cultural programs. Among his fans, artists and teachers may be cured of an allergy to numbers.

I, for one, was also cured of sleepless worries about what art has to do with ethics and social development.  With FDR as an exemplary leader and model for new civic investments in the arts, I know that new investments along with more attention to interpretation will channel the power of arts from mere contestation to engagement.  Alongside that engagement young humanists can pursue a passion for literature, hopeful that their faculty of free judgment and their creative engagement with their own students will amount to the bricks and the mortar to rebuild a strong civil society.

[See David Kyuman Kim's introduction to "These things are old," a conversation about Obama, civic virtues and the common good at The Immanent Frame]

Johns, Jasper (b. 1930) © VAGA, NY

Flags. 1968. Lithograph, printed in color, irreg composition: 34 5/8 x 25 7/8″; irreg sheet: 34 5/8 x 25 7/8″. Gift of the Celeste and Armand Bartos Foundation. (291.1968)

Location: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A.

Photo Credit: Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY (ART193346)

The power of rising expectations, of imagination unleashed, of hope for something better than the politics of division and war and fear—all of it is in the air and on the move. Combined with serious and abiding global crises—economic, financial, military, environmental—it announces a unique moment to re-imagine and reignite a push toward fundamental change. It’s a moment to shed some of the burdens and baggage of the past, a time to reach beyond the walls and entanglements we know too well, a time to restore the basic propositions and values of a more authentic, vibrant, and participatory democracy.

When Obama intoned, “This is our moment. This is our time…Yes we can,” we needed to ask, of course, “yes, we can…what?”

For me, the answer involves returning to my roots as an antiwar organizer and civil rights activist, my roots as a teacher who believes that schools and classrooms, at their best, are powered by the engines of enlightenment and freedom. The promise of education is always tied up with the radical proposition that we can change our lives right now, today, and that together we can change the world.  It is a promise with particular resonance and urgency in a democratic society, for democracy assumes the necessity of continual and dynamic revitalization, and demands, then, regeneration as its lifeblood.

Unfortunately, the dominant frames, controlling discourses, and common metaphors that have powerfully shaped our choices and set the terms and limits of our discussion about schools and reform for so long are narrowing and constraining. In the contested space of schools and education reform, and in this particular moment, educators, parents, theorists, and citizens should press to change the dominant discourse of education, a controlling metaphor that posits education as a commodity rather than a right and a journey, and imagines schools as little factories cranking out products. The metaphor leads rather easily to imagining school closings and privatizing the public space as natural, relentless standardized testing as sensible—this is, after all, what the true-believers call “reform.” Michelle Rhee, CEO of Washington D.C. schools (it’s a business, remember), warranted a cover story in Time in early December, called “How to Fix America’s Schools.” The pivotal paragraph praised her for making more changes in a year and a half on the job than other school leaders, “even reform-minded ones,” make in five: closing 21 schools (15 percent of the total), and firing 100 central office personnel, 270 teachers, and 36 principals. These are all policy moves that are held, on faith, to stand for improvement.  Not a word on kids’ learning or engagement with school, not even a nod at evidence that might connect these moves with student progress, not a mention of getting greater resources into this starving system, nor parent involvement, and so on.  But of course evidence is always the enemy of dogma, and this is faith-based, fact-free school policy at its purest.

In this metaphoric straightjacket, school learning becomes a commodity traded at the market like boots or hammers. Unlike boots or hammers, the value of which is inherently satisfying and understood directly, the value and use of school learning is elusive and indirect—hence, students are asked to accept its unspecified worth on faith and must always be motivated and rewarded externally. The value of school learning, we’re assured, has been calculated precisely by wise and accomplished people, and these masters know better than anyone what’s best for the kids and for the world. The payoff is way down the line, but it’s surely there, somewhere, over the rainbow. “Take this medicine,” students are told repeatedly, day after tedious day, “It’s good for you.” Refuse the bitter pill, and go stand in the corner—where all the other losers are assembled.

Schools serve society; society is reflected in its schools. And in the modern world we see some differences as well as interesting similarities and noteworthy overlapping goals across systems. School leaders in fascist Germany or communist Albania or medieval Saudi Arabia or apartheid South Africa, for example, all agreed that students should behave well, stay away from drugs and crime, and master the subject matters, so those things don’t differentiate a democratic education from any other—we all want the kids to do well. Practically all schools want their students to study hard and do their homework. Furthermore, schools in the old Soviet Union and fascist Germany produced some excellent scientists and athletes and musicians and so on. They also produced obedience and conformity, moral blindness and easy agreement, obtuse patriotism and a willingness to follow orders right into the furnaces. In a democracy one would expect something different—and this takes us back to first principles: democracy is based on a common faith in the value of every human being, and that means that what the wisest and most privileged parents want for their kid is exactly what the community wants for all of its children.

Our schools too often teach indifference, emotional and intellectual dependency, provisional self-esteem, and the need to submit to certified authority. What, after all, are the lessons of report cards, grades, and the endless batteries of tests that play the part of autopsies rather than diagnostics? Don’t trust yourself; seek approval from your betters. And what is the point of the established schedule and the set fifty-minute periods, the uniform desks all in a row, the exhaustive use of time with no room to breath and certainly no space to dream or wonder or wander or drift or reflect or imagine or just be bored? You are not important and unique; be only malleable and productive in terms established by a higher authority.

The school-as-factory metaphor is more than an outdated image; worse, it is a model that betrays the central demands of democracy. Those of us who want to work for a more robust and participatory democracy must struggle against this metaphor and reaffirm the basic proposition that in a democracy life is geared toward and powered by a particularly precious and fragile ideal: every human being is of infinite and incalculable value, each the one and only who will ever tread the earth, each a unique intellectual, emotional, physical, spiritual, moral, and creative force; each born free and equal in dignity and rights, each endowed with reason and conscience, each deserving, then, a community of solidarity, a sense of brotherhood and sisterhood, recognition and respect. This core value is the heart of the matter, and it must express itself explicitly and implicitly in education as in every other aspect of associative living.

A democracy, theoretically at least, would build schools to fit children, not the other way around. We would not bend and break children until they fit as cogs in a mindlessly menacing machine, automatons without the ability to think clearly or feel deeply. We would resist—because we do not want the schools to train a nation of sheep—the forceful imposition of standardized ways of seeing and knowing. In a robust and functional democracy we would expect schools to reflect the principle that the fullest development of all is the necessary condition for the full development of each, and conversely, the fullest development of each is necessary for the full development of all.

This expectation has huge implications for educational policy: racial segregation is wrong, class separation unjust, disparate funding immoral. There is no justification in a democracy for casting students out of school, none for categorical thinking in terms of potential or performance. There is no rationale for the existence of a well-funded school for wealthy white kids and a dilapidated, poorly-resourced school for poor immigrant kids or the descendants of an enslaved people. That reality—this savage inequality—offends the foundational idea that each person is equal, and reflects instead the reactionary idea that some of us are more deserving and more valuable than others. It expresses, as well, a simple but cruel message we send to children through our social policy and priorities: Choose the Right Parents! If you choose parents with money, access, social connection, and privilege, your choices and your chances will expand; if not, sorry, you’re on your own.

The democratic injunction has big implications for curriculum and teaching as well, for what is taught and how. We want our students to be able to think for themselves in a democracy, to make judgments based on evidence and argument, to develop minds of their own.  We want them to ask fundamental questions—who in the world am I?  How in the world did I get here, and where in the world am I going?  What in the world are my choices?  How in the world shall I proceed?—and to pursue the answers wherever they might take them.  We refuse obedience and conformity in favor of teaching initiative, courage, imagination, creativity, and more. These qualities cannot be delivered in top-down ways, but must be modeled and nourished, encouraged and defended.

Democratic teaching encourages students to develop the capacity to name the world for themselves, to identify the obstacles to their full humanity, and the courage to act upon whatever the known demands.  This kind of education is characteristically eye-popping and mind-blowing—always about opening doors and opening minds as students forge their own pathways into a wider, shared world. We must invite students to ask serious questions: What’s the evidence? How do we know? Whose viewpoint is privileged and whose is left out? What are the alternatives, the connections, the resistance, the patterns, the causes? Where are things headed? Why? Who cares?

Teaching and organizing—at their best—are each powered by a common faith: when I knock on the door of a stranger in a public housing project, when I look out at my students, I assume the full humanity of each. I see hopes and dreams, aspirations and needs, experiences and intentions that must somehow be accounted for and valued.  I encounter citizens, not consumers, unruly sparks of meaning-making energy, not a mess of deficits. This is the evidence of things not seen, the starting point for teachers and organizers in any democratic society.

We should focus our collective efforts on schooling for a participatory democracy, on the production of fully developed human beings who are capable of controlling and transforming their own lives, citizens who can participate fully in our shared public life. Such a democracy requires that people actually make the decisions that affect their lives; such a democracy requires dialogue—each one speaking with the hope of being heard, and each one listening with the possibility of being changed. Such a democracy requires a democratic school that would be generously supported, abundant with resources and materials of all kinds; it would be small, numbering no more than a few hundred students. In this school, participatory democracy could be enacted, practiced, and embodied; it would be a workshop for discovery and surprise, a laboratory for inquiry and experimentation. And the curriculum would unfold in endless pursuit of an inexhaustible question: what knowledge and experience is of most value?

Education is where we decide whether we love the world enough to invite young people in as full participants and constructors and creators, and whether we love our children enough to give them the tools not only to participate but to change all that they find before them. Educators, students, and citizens might press now for an education worthy of a democracy, including an end to sorting people into winners and losers through expensive standardized tests which act as pseudo-scientific forms of surveillance, an end to starving schools of needed resources and then blaming teachers and their unions for dismal outcomes, and an end to “savage inequalities” and the rapidly accumulating “educational debt,” the resources due to communities historically segregated, under-funded and under-served.  All children and youth in a democracy, regardless of background or economic circumstance, deserve full access to richly-resourced classrooms led by caring, thoughtful, fully-qualified and generously compensated teachers.

This is our ongoing expression of and commitment to free inquiry and participation, access and equity, thought and independent judgment, and full recognition of the humanity of each in the company of all. The struggle continues.

[Editor's note: Portions of this essay appeared at the Huffington Post, and an extended version appears in the latest issue of the Harvard Educational Review.]

[See David Kyuman Kim's introduction to "These things are old," a conversation about Obama, civic virtues and the common good at The Immanent Frame]

The commentary surrounding Governor Sarah Palin’s creationism smacks of the same sort of pubescent snort. Indeed, the most cited Palin creationist factoid is a farce, an embarrassment to those who want to protect the methodological scrutiny of science. “God made dinosaurs 4,000 years ago as ultimately flawed creatures, lizards of Satan,” wrote one Internet blogger, satirizing Palin’s imagined fundamentalism. Not long after, many of America’s brightest cultural critics (and, of course, Matt Damon) began using the unverified “dinosaurs” motif as a comic embellishment. This is despite the fact that Palin had said little about creationism, or dinosaurs, other than what reporters borrowed from a 2006 Anchorage Daily News article. In that article, Palin presented a flagrantly nonpartisan position toward the subject. “My dad did talk a lot about his theories of evolution,” she said. “He would show us fossils and say, ‘How old do you think these are?’” When asked for her personal views on evolution, Palin said, “I believe we have a creator.” According to Alaskan reporter Tom Kizzia, Palin would not say whether her belief also allowed her to accept the theory of evolution as fact, saying instead that she thought both creationism and evolution should be taught in school. “Teach both,” she said in a televised debate. “You know, don’t be afraid of information. Healthy debate is so important, and it’s so valuable in our schools. I am a proponent of teaching both.”

This pose of pedagogical equitability is, of course, a recognizable rally to those in the creation-science movement. But with such limited information, such inadequate first-person testimonial, we can say little, as analysts and observers, about the precise nature of Palin’s Christian faith and correlating evolutionary imagination. “I’m not going to pretend,” continued Palin in 2006, “I know how all this came to be.” Such relatable humility before divinity has been Palin’s main theological articulation thus far. That, plus her taste for martial metaphor, is all the RNC has allowed her to exhibit. Otherwise, she is mere suppositional window dressing, the zealot without yet ostensible zealotry.

But we’ll go after the subject anyway, deriving from scratchy YouTube clips complex preacher postulates and theological profiles. We do this because that’s what we do, squeezing from a single strawberry the dream of a full jar of blatherskite jam. For many academics, this is the precise reason participation in public intellectual work is so problematic, since it tugs one into that problematic process of pressing against nothing (shards of observation in the Anchorage Daily News, for example) for the deadline of something (anything, any thing at all). Yet the appearance of popular epistemologies in the public sphere tugs at academic attention, offering as they do moments of diluted intellectual commentary. To take another example: springtime observers of Senator Barack Obama’s campaign may recall the controversy surrounding his pastor and, in particular, the sense that beneath the veneer of genial Obama lay the raging heart of an Afrocentrist. This impression derived largely from secondhand tirades by Jeremiah Wright, former Senior Pastor of the Trinity United Church of Christ (TUCC) in Chicago. Jeremiah Wright’s recorded race pride reintroduced Afrocentric discourse into the heart of the presidential contest, begging voters to wonder wildly about an epistemological system that seemed (from media representation) at best comically archaic and, at worst, violently provocative. As historians have explained, Afrocentrism is a continuous thread within African American popular and academic histories, with origins in the eighteenth century continuing well into the twenty-first, and including proponents from Olaudah Equiano to Cheikh Anta Diop, George Washington Williams to Asa Hilliard. What binds this long chain of (sometimes) folk narrative and (sometimes) careful historicizing is a commitment to reply, insistently, to Eurocentric outlines of civilization and progress. “The Afrocentric tradition,” wrote Wilson Jeremiah Moses in his 1998 study Afrotopia, “is related to utopian ideas of progress because it promises a glorious destiny for African people.”

The parallels between these two discourses—Afrocentrism and creationism—are not limited to the comedy they supply, nor to the censoriousness they inspire. Both Afrocentrism and creationism emerged from benighted populations seeking alternatives to ideas propagated by the modern (white) research (atheist) university. Both literatures developed heavy historiographies using discourses of reason, evidence, and analysis that mimicked selections from the scientific and historical processes which were being refined (and still debated) in those aforementioned universities. And both Afrocentrism and creationism were unabashed about the social ideologies which their research was to serve: uplift of the race among all oppression, uplift of God’s people among all creatures, great and Simian. Although “creationism” and “Afrocentricism” suggest concepts easily distilled into bullet point ideologies, their animating despair and disgust with white historiography and atheist science have produced wide-ranging and diffuse print cultures, infusing many local knowledge communities with new chronologies, debatable theories of civilization, and clever reworkings of postmodern epistemology.

My college teacher would call these ideologies myths, and would encourage us to seek the rituals concocted to enact (recreate and confirm) the substance of their binary oppositions and fantastical creatures. For our political leaders, a key rite of passage has become an interrogation of how thoroughly their myths, their “worldview” (to borrow from Palin’s language) affects and infuses their legislative actions. Barack Obama was forced to wrestle, publicly, with whether the myths of his pastor were evident in his aspirant political rituals. I remain uncertain as to whether this onslaught, and the sacrificial takedown of Wright, brought dignity or embarrassment to the history of ideas. It seems dangerous argumentative waters to imagine candidates must make transparent all their functioning myths, all their enduring premises. I say this because the correlation between what we believe and what we do (what we govern) has yet to be intellectually demonstrated as coherent or demonstrably consistent, across the political spectrum.

Nonetheless, there was Barack Obama, speaking on March 18, 2008 of his “former” pastor’s “distorted views.” Speaking, too, about the role of race in his own identity formation, in his own political consciousness, and in the history of his nation he wanted very much to lead. Obama’s speech on race was his counter-narrative to the Afrotopias of his forefathers. It was also his to explain how Wright’s Afrocentrism could not be deleted from the record. “To simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.”

There is something to be said for that command performance, for the candidates forced into a position where they must show themselves as thinkers, as believers, as members of social movements often inexplicable to those outside and estranged from the disappointment and alienation which congeals those enclaves. After all, that is the executive expectation set before their runs toward elected office. Now creationism makes a brief shadowy show, still unsubstantiated, mocked and feared by those flailing in the vagaries of Dover, Pennsylvania and the Institute for Creation Research. Sarah Palin owes it to her constituents, and to her critics, to account for this accounting, for the ways she reconciled her science teacher father and Pentecostal pastor. If she cannot make an argument as to what role her beliefs play in her framing of the world, in her imagination of the American (scientific, political, and evolutionary) possibility, then she will have not only demonstrated definitively (with verifiable evidence) that she should not be the vice president of anything, but also that banning her, from universities or intellectual exposure, does nobody—not her, not creationists, and not the religions that produce it—any sort of intellectual good.

Later, University of California and other top schools began refusing to give incoming students credit for high school science courses that taught Intelligent Design. An association of Christian schools was not quiet, took their concerns to the courts, and brought a lawsuit against the University of California higher education system. The growing controversy over the role of religion in higher education led me to ask how top university scientists think they ought to respond to religiously based challenges to science.

I continued to raise this question as I crisscrossed the country over the past three years, completing 275 personal interviews with natural and social scientists at our nation’s top institutions of higher education. These interviews were a follow-up to a survey conducted with 1,646 scientists about their religious and spiritual beliefs and practices. I found that many scientists are not as anti-religion as volumes like evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion might lead us to believe.

Indeed there were the expected atheists and agnostics. Yet, a surprising number of those who teach the sciences at the nation’s top universities are also part of a religious tradition (about 50%). These scientists approach religion and spirituality in diverse ways-ways often different from the faith found among the general public.

Surprisingly the majority of scientists (over 65%) are interested in matters of spirituality. And although some—following in the footsteps of Dawkins and other outspoken scientists—appear nearly hostile to religion, the majority of scientists at these top schools are simply confused about how they should deal with students who raise religious objections to science.

Part of this conundrum stems from what I began to call a secret spirituality, where scientists with faith feel uneasy talking about this aspect of their lives because of the perception that everyone around them is irreligious. On a plurality of occasions I found a science professor who was involved in a house of worship or interested in matters of spirituality yet was sure there was no one else in her department concerned about such pursuits. I would interview the colleague of such a religious scientist only to find out that she too was religious, also sure she would be laughed at by those in her department if others were to find out. While the majority of scientists are not religious, there is unexpectedly more openness to religious practice and ideas among scientists than even scientists themselves suspect.

To be sure, among all the scientists I interviewed, religious and non-religious alike, there was not one who thought Intelligent Design should be taught alongside evolution in a biology classroom. Yet, some had come up with creative ways to be what I call boundary pioneers, those who successfully negotiate the tensions between science and religion while keeping the integrity of both.

For example, a chemist routinely points her students to a website by a religious scientist who talks about how he maintains his faith while doing research that shows that the earth is billions of years old. Such efforts by scientists are made in order to transmit science more effectively to their religious students.

Many of the scientists I talked with thought that more still needs to be done to address the public’s lack of scientific understanding. Some thought these efforts could start within science curricula, with attempts to address issues related to public science directly.

One such example is a course on science and society taught by Phil Hockberger and Richard Miller to Northwestern University graduate students in biology. Among other topics, the course provides a brief overview of the historical debates between religion and science, the lives of religious and non-religious scientists, public challenges to science, and how to discuss science with a believing American public.

Over sixty Northwestern University graduate students attended an event where Hockberger presented findings from my study about levels of religiosity among academic scientists, showing the interest in these issues among students pursuing advanced degrees. The next day I led a roundtable discussion with some of the students who attended the lecture, during which we talked about topics like: why religion persists given what we know about science, various ways that religion might have an influence on science ethics, how to translate science to a largely religious American public, and a host of other issues.

Courses like this one would be a popular addition to social and natural science curricula in undergraduate and graduate classrooms.

Astronomer Carl Sagan wrote in a 1989 article for Parade Magazine that, “Ignorance of science threatens our economic well-being, national security, and the democratic process. We must do better.”

America’s elite universities are the central places where our future societal leaders learn-either implicitly or explicitly-how to think about the connection between religion and science. The thought scientists give to engaging the students in their classrooms about matters of public science-particularly the connection between science and religion-may be the backbone of how scientists engage with the broader public outside the university.

[For more from Elaine Howard Ecklund on Religion and Spirituality among University Scientists, visit the SSRC's essay forum on the Religious Engagements of American Undergraduates, and a related online guide, intended as an overview for college faculty and administrators.]

The SSRC is not alone in its renewed attention to the sacred. At the 2007 Modern Language Association, Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age generated “the most discussion and sales by far,” according to officials at the Harvard University Press booth. Taking up the first two pages of Harvard’s Fall 2007 catalogue, Taylor’s book is part a succession of high profile religion books, including Mark Lilla’s The Stillborn God and Michael Lindsay’s Faith in the Halls of Power. Earlier in 2007, a stack of Lindsay’s books occupied the most prominent spot in the Oxford University Press exhibit at the American Sociological Association meeting.

I have watched these developments with more than a little curiosity, for together with historian Kathleen Mahoney, I am completing a book on the return of religion in American higher education. This book originated as an evaluation of Lilly Endowment’s $15.6 million religion and higher education initiative. In our 2000 report, we concluded that Lilly’s efforts were part of a much larger movement to revitalize religion in the academy, noting that “increased interest in religion, spirituality, and religious activity throughout the academy, coupled with substantive efforts by Protestant and Catholic colleges to strengthen their religious identities, comprise one of the most striking trends in the recent history of American higher education.”

Since the year 2000 the evidence for our thesis has steadily mounted, as high-profile scholars have joined the movement for a post-secular academy. In 2004 UCLA’s Alexander Astin wrote that “spirituality deserves a central place in liberal education.” The following year Stanley Fish predicted that religion “would succeed high theory and the triumvirate of race, gender, and class as the center of intellectual energy in the academy.”

The book we are finishing focuses on three areas where religion has enjoyed renewed vitality: scholarship (faith and knowledge), sponsorship (church-related colleges), and student life (spirituality and campus life). A section of the chapter on spirituality and student life is available as part of the SSRC’s web forum on “The Religious Engagements of American Undergraduates.” The SSRC has also released our working paper on “Religion and Knowledge in the Post-Secular Academy,” a longer version of which will be a chapter in the book. A condensed version of this chapter will appear in the Winter 2008 issue of the American Sociological Association journal Contexts, and is currently available online. The theme of the issue (which also includes a contribution from sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund) is “Religion Returns to Campus.” As Kathleen Mahoney and I complete our book manuscript, we welcome your thoughts on the place of religion in the American academy.