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

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

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

Secularism in the Liberal Arts: Good Sense

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

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

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

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

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

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

Secularism in the Liberal Arts: Bad Sense

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

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

Secularism in the Liberal Arts: Ugly Sense

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

Secularism and Hospitable Halls

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Soul-making

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

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

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

Careless steps

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

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

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

Where Virtue calm with careless step may stray,

And dancing to the moonlight Roundelay

The Wizard Passions weave a holy Spell.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The ruling Muslim-inflected Justice and Development Party (known by its Turkish acronym AKP) made a deal this week with the nationalist MHP in parliament to secure enough votes to eliminate the ban. The ban had been imposed after the 1980 coup by a secularist military suspicious of political symbols, although only fully implemented in the late 1990s. Now that the ban has been lifted in the name of religious freedom and freedom of expression, it remains to be seen whether those principles will be applied to other communities in Turkey, such as religious minorities and the Kurds.

In earlier decades, students tended to come from secular, urban backgrounds, so covering on campus was not an issue. These days, students are often second- and third-generation offspring of rural migrants. Their fashionable and eclectic styles of veiling would be unrecognizable to their mothers: a red OpArt headscarf paired with red high-top sneakers; see-through navy gauze with a jeans pant-suit; dayglo sandals and a multicolored net draped over a dark cap.

The electoral success of the AKP, now the majority government, and the economic growth of pious businesses since the neoliberal economic reforms of the 1980s have made the notion of ‘covering as empowering’ legitimate and possible. Until now, though, at the gates of the university, as in government offices, the scarf had to disappear. Some intrepid pious students coped by stepping into a booth or changing room by the university gates and – like superheroes– emerged wearing string caps or even wigs to circumvent the ban. Many others, though, were shut out from professional development and careers that require a university degree. It is instructive to those of us who instinctively see Islam as a barrier to women to see a Muslim government pushing through reforms that have given women greater rights and protections under the law and now access to education denied them by secularists.

Wearing a headscarf is anathema to the rigidly secular lifestyle envisioned in the early twentieth century by Turkey’s revered founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, and guarded today by the Turkish state – the military, judiciary, educational institutions and their supporters that are now facing off against the lifting of the university headscarf ban by the Muslim-dominated government and its nationalist allies in parliament. There is also a sizable element of the population, mostly women, who fear that their secular lifestyles will be endangered on the presumption that what is allowed now will be required later. It is already galling to many that their prime minister’s wife covers her head in the signature tightly wrapped headscarf and to see the covered wife of Turkey’s president, Abdullah Gül, occupying the presidential palace. Because of Gül’s wife’s headscarf, she is forbidden by law to accompany her husband at official functions, creating continual protocol dilemmas for the government.

This past week thousands of anti-headscarf activists demonstrated in the streets and gathered at Ataturk’s tomb, warning that the presence of women with covered heads on campus will be the camel’s nose in the tent, the next step in the Islamicization of Turkish society. Before long, they argue, the headscarf will be allowed everywhere, girls will be pressured to conform and Turkey will become Malaysia.

Presidents and rectors of universities have come out against lifting the ban, arguing that it would lead universities away from rationality and reason. One rector went so far as to say he couldn’t be sure of treating covered students the same as other students if the ban were lifted. In response, thousands of university professors have signed petitions supporting the right of students to cover their heads, arguing that universities should be places where different beliefs, ideas and lifestyles should be freely expressed.

Not even recent revelations about state-sponsored gangs involved in assassinations and coup plots has raised public wrangling and outrage to this level. That is because battle lines are drawn not only between pious and secular Turkish Muslims, but between the dying old system and the new. The urban-based secularist elites who were in charge of Turkey’s direction and image for most of the twentieth century have lost ground as elections brought to power the pious majority, people who had formerly populated the countryside and lower-class squatter settlements, but are now reaching for a share of Turkey’s wealth and power. These many Turkish citizens may no longer be ignored as country bumpkins with headscarves. They are driving SUVs to the presidential palace. Many find this threatening and fear, perhaps with some justification, that a political party with no viable opposition is dangerous not only because it is Muslim, but because it cannot be stopped.

The Justice and Development Party has been aligning Turkey’s laws and institutions with those of the European Union, with an eye to membership, and has commissioned a new constitution that enshrines parliamentary democracy and human and individual rights. These innovations by their very nature undermine Turkey’s authoritarian institutions that in the eyes of many are the only safeguard of a secular lifestyle.

Some are questioning, however, whether the reforms spearheaded by AKP are meant to broaden only freedom of Muslim religious expression in Turkey, not freedom of expression for anyone else. Now that the headscarf ban has been lifted at universities, will the government turn to righting other wrongs or will it push on to lift the ban in schools and government offices? Will the impetus for reform of the constitution be blunted once the headscarf ban is lifted? There have been worrying indications of declining government commitment to the rights of non-Muslim groups in Turkey.

Those pushing for an end to the ban on restricting a Muslim woman’s right to education have been notably absent from demonstrations and discussions demanding rights for Turkey’s religious and ethnic minorities. Few covered women attended the eight-thousand strong demonstration in Istanbul on January 19 commemorating the one-year anniversary of Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink’s murder by ultranationalists. Demonstrators called for justice. The trial of his killer and his accomplices has been marred by coverups, lost evidence, and harrassment of Dink’s family in the courtroom. The year before, a hundred thousand people accompanied his coffin to his funeral. The lack of representation from the pious community was striking. Hrant Dink was murdered because he was Christian Armenian and he wrote about about the killings of Armenians in 1915.

The AKP needed the votes of the nationalist, anti-minority MHP in parliament to lift a ban on headscarves. In return, AKP has announced that it is backing down from its minorities bill that would have, among other things, returned property and assets that had been confiscated from Christian, Jewish and other minority religious groups by the state. Since early in the Republic, minority religious foundations and their buildings and other assets were taken over by the government and these minorities were forbidden from repairing their remaining buildings or adding to them.

This reform is crucial for Turkey’s EU membership bid. The fact that AKP is willing to give it up in return for MHP support on the headscarf vote seems to indicate what many have feared – that AKP reforms are designed to support Muslim religious rights, but does not extend to broader religious tolerance and freedom of expression.

Protesting Dink’s murder and the lack of a proper trial for his killers, like the right of churches and synagogues to regain and repair their properties, are issues of religious tolerance and freedom of speech worthy of attention by those who claim to support elimination of the headscarf ban in the name of religious tolerance and freedom of expression. So are support for Kurdish language rights and open discussion of the killings of Armenians in 1915. In all of these issues, the government has made overtures, but failed to fully put its weight behind the necessary reforms.

Perhaps it is simply too many taboos to break all at once. The secularist military and judiciary, the university rectors and a sizable part of the population are against one or all of these reforms. As a result of a creeping, xenophobic nationalism, many Turks believe minorities (Armenians, Greek Christians, Jews and Kurds) are a Fifth column for a Europe out to weaken the Turkish nation or to divide it as they did after WWI. Liberal democratic laws exist in order to protect groups and individuals against the intolerant forces of society. But how does an elected government create such laws in the face of powerful and often intolerant special interests?

By allowing headscarves in universities, Turkey is making a leap of faith that democracy will guarantee tolerance. It is an experiment some are unwilling to countenance because they believe AKP’s democratic reforms are self-serving. The resounding din on both sides about encroaching Islam and endangered secularism has drowned out much-needed debate about the principles of democracy and the role of tolerance.